The web may be global but sovereign states still make up the rules

God is everywhere, at least according to those who believe in Him. So is the internet: it's global, ubiquitous and has according to its evangelists slipped the surly bonds of nation states. The trouble is that those who use it have to reside within legal jurisdictions.

And therein lies a big problem, one aspect of which surfaced last week, in Italy, where a judge handed out prison sentences to three senior US-based Google executives for "violating privacy" by allowing a video showing a handicapped Italian schoolboy being physically and verbally abused to be posted online.

This judgment provoked astonished indignation on the net, especially among American commentators. "Why," fumed Mike Butcher on TechCrunch, an influential technology blog, "did someone not explain to this idiot judge that the video was NOT uploaded by these Google executives?"

And, he went on: "Italy needs to get its act together and fast. I'm calling on Italian entrepreneurs, many of whom I know and respect, to get involved in this issue. At a time when European countries are weighed down by regulation and stupid rulings like this one, especially during a period of huge economic upheaval, it is not enough to stand by and watch travesties like this go by. Do the young people of Italy and the rest of Europe, so many of whom are huge enthusiasts of the web and the power it gives them to drag themselves up by their bootstraps without the need for state help, deserve to have decrepit judges decide their economic future?"

One can see why Butcher is annoyed. The video in question was made in May 2006 and posted on 8 September to Google Video the hosting service that Google closed after it bought YouTube. It reportedly showed a boy with Down's syndrome being beaten and insulted by bullies at a Turin school. On 7 November Google took it down "within hours" of being contacted by Italian police. But it had left it up for two whole months despite comments from viewers allegedly protesting about it.

Google points out that "none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video's existence until after it was removed". All of which is true, but doesn't quite get around the fact that, as senior executives, they are also responsible for what their company does, and are remunerated from the profits that it makes. YouTube may not yet be a big money-spinner for Google; but it isn't a non-for-profit venture either. And then there's that awkward matter of the two months it took to take down the video.

The company intends to appeal against the convictions, which makes sense on due-process grounds and also because the costs of doing what the judgment implies is necessary ie previewing every uploaded track before making it public would be huge. The Guardian's Charles Arthur has calculated that to review the 20 hours of video footage uploaded to YouTube every minute would require 3,600 people working eight-hour shifts, 365 days a year. That would blow a neat hole in even Google's astronomical profits.

Whatever the outcome, though, the legal spat is just the latest symptom of an underlying structural problem, namely the mismatch between the internet's global reach and the fact that we live in a world of sovereign states. Everywhere one looks one finds evidence of the tensions between the two systems: French judges forbidding Yahoo selling Nazi memorabilia on its auction site; German judges objecting to neo-Nazi discussions groups hosted in the US, where they are protected by the First Amendment; the Chinese government objecting to any mention of Falun Gong; British laws outlawing child porn sites; or the Iranian regime objecting to just about everything. Like climate change, the gap between what the internet can do and what local authorities will allow is a global problem requiring a global solution, which is why we're unlikely ever to solve it.

In the case of the Google Three, however, it's likely that they will be vindicated because even if the Italian appeal fails, there is always the possibility of recourse to the European Court in Strasbourg, which will take the view that European Union law, as currently drafted, appears to give hosting providers a safe harbour from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The downside of this, of course, is that Google will have to be much more responsive to complaints, which will make it much easier to have videos taken down because the prudent course will always be to "take down first and ask questions later".

The glory days of YouTube may be coming to an end. And Silvio Berlusconi remains at large.

The scientist and TV presenter tells us why it's important to check out the dark side of inventions first

Robert Winston, Professor of Science and Society and Emeritus Professor of Fertility Studies at Imperial College, London, is one of the best-known popularisers of science in this country and has a reputation for taking a provocative stance on many issues. His latest book, Bad Ideas? (Bantam Press) deals with the dark side of the inventions that have shaped human history, and when he arrives at the Observer offices, this 69-year old doctor, sometime TV presenter and Labour peer is on characteristically punchy form.

Your new book is described as "tracing the fascinating history of our attempts at self-improvement but also questioning their value". In other words: not every invention is a copper-bottomed good thing. What is the downside of our inventiveness?

The book tries to argue that every aspect of our inventiveness has a downside: that there's a dark side to every advance, and that's not generally recognised at the time.

Nearly all inventions are not recognised for their positive side either when they're made. So, for example, scientists didn't go out to design a CD machine: they designed a laser. But we got all sorts of things from a laser which we never remotely imagined, and we're still finding things for a laser to do. But a laser can be used as a weapon. Where a laser is being used to attempt nuclear fusion, it's in a facility designed to improve nuclear weapons.

A microchip, too, is something we wouldn't dream of being without, but it does bring unforeseen consequences in how we communicate, sometimes adversely in a democracy.

When a discovery is made, a scientist probably only sees the advantage in the small arena of his or her own interest. Is it your point that society finds other uses for that invention years later?

That's right, and [it's an] interesting thing about modern science very different from what happened before the industrial revolution. Before that, even people like James Watt, who were very focused, were generalists; they had a broad idea of what they were doing. In my lab now we have one person who's very interested in kinase in the cell, for instance, but perhaps won't see the relevance of that work in a bigger context. Science and scientists have tended to have to focus on more and more difficult and defined areas, and quite often we lose that big picture. The other point is [our] responsibility to society. The science I do has always been paid for by the tax-payer, and yet we scientists think of [it being] our science, and we tend to be rather precious about that. We have to be more responsive and recognise that the adverse affects of what we do have an effect on society as much as they do on us. Our ethical responsibility is something we need to think of afresh. Ethics is not routinely taught to science students except in medicine, and I think it should be.

You've mentioned that when you were chairing the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee one of the most interesting aspects of the work was the question of science and society and what limits society might impose on science. But at the moment what we're seeing is the opposite, where science is trying to impose limits on technology to limit climate change and coming under great pressure from society not to impose limits. How would you react to that?

I don't think you can impose limits on science because the very nature of homo sapiens is that he she is an inquisitive species. You can't control science. You have to control the effects of science. It's a very interesting question about climate change. I repeatedly refer to climate change in the book but I deliberately avoided making it a book about climate change because the issues I'm interested in are more generic. But, clearly, if we are to combat climate change then a key thing is to have society onside. Without that we've failed. We need to communicate much better with society, and not necessarily trust governments, which may have other agendas. We saw this very clearly at Copenhagen and Kyoto.

Is there the prospect that we never control technology and it wipes us out?

I'm not that pessimistic. Alec Broers, in his Reith Lecture some years ago, argued that technology would solve the problems that technology had created. I'm not sure I go along with him because we should look at the downside of the technology at the very beginning of developing it. But I do think, so far, in the history of mankind, we've continued to improve our lot using technology and we've managed to control the worst aspects of that. I think climate change will be another example of where we're able to do that. Geo-engineering is pretty fanciful stuff. Nonetheless, those technologies are developing so quickly in many universities it would be inexcusable not to take them seriously. I think that somewhere we'll hit the button.

What inventions do you feel most encompass your theme the idea of threat versus promise?

Big ones, I think. Big technologies like agriculture, which is perhaps the biggest of all because that really changed humankind. It made us much more vulnerable, and it made us live shorter to start with as well. In modern terms the technology of oil is fascinating because we understood early on that oil was not as simple or as useful as it might seem. In the early days of oil, when it was over-produced, it caused immediate economic chaos, for example in Texas. And then it became obvious in the Middle East a long time ago that it was a much bigger source of conflict than we'd given it credence for. And [it] probably still is. You could argue that Iraq and even Afghanistan are in some ways linked to our usage and dependence on oil.

I've avoided that, but I'm [also] pretty hard on medicine. Medicine, which I wouldn't be without, has also been a force for... less good. For example, if you look at our mishandling of the immune system, using antibiotics in children and avoiding infection, we've certainly increased the risk of asthma. And it may be that juvenile diabetes, for example, is [also] much more common as a result.

One of the other things that worries me is that there has been increasingly an impetus to diagnose, to make medicine a more scientific subject, forgetting the patient. I think there is a turnabout now in our medical schools where we are addressing that issue, but we have produced generations of doctors who can't (because of time constraints or bureaucracy) or won't (because of the way they've been taught) actually communicate very well with their patients, and communication is a fantastic healer.

So it's often a case of two steps forward, one step back?

The genome is a good example of a technological innovation which was bruited as being an extraordinary achievement but actually has achieved very little because we don't have anything like the power to implement what we might do with it. On a broader scale, as medicine becomes more complex, more expensive, we are failing to have mature debate about who's going to pay for it in the future... that's a worrying political issue. [You] can't really trust governments, can't trust politicians.

Has any invention been unambiguously good?

There are so many, it's hard to focus on one. I've been thinking of generic technologies which all have a downside. But I'd rather live now than at any time in the past.

The entrepreneur and innovator tells Simon Garfield about inspiration, determination and why he doesn't do email

Thirty years ago this month, Clive Sinclair launched a computer that he hoped would change the world. In the majority of cases it only changed the way people played primitive computer games, but it also turned a bespectacled, prematurely balding man into a hero for our times.

In those dark days before Windows 7 and the iPad, the Sinclair ZX80 represented the pinnacle of affordable domestic computing. It was a flat box without a screen or proper keyboard, it had the memory of a hamster and at the back of it was something that looked like a radiator grille but was actually a strip of plastic designed to look like a radiator grille. It promised it could do "quite literally anything, from playing chess to running a power station", which was good value for something costing 79.95 in kit form and 99.95 assembled, about one fifth of the price of other home computers.

Sir Clive, who was knighted for services to industry at the age of 43, will be 70 later this year. He lives in an apartment overlooking Trafalgar Square, and from his adjacent office he has a magnificent view of tourists and lions (recently he also had a view of people performing on Antony Gormley's fourth plinth, but that "got a bit boring really"). He was a household name before Sir Alan Sugar, and for a while was the unlikely future of modern electronics: a bright, hi-tech uncle rejuvenating British industry blighted by decay, unions and Thatcher.

Sinclair helped transform Cambridge into the computing capital of the world, a homegrown version of Silicon Valley and Taipei, and for a couple of brilliant years he made the bestselling computers in the world. And then the competition took him on, and his great machines went the way of the Spinning Jenny, and here he is in his carpet slippers nursing a heavy cold.

He says his recollections may be a little blurry, but he is clear on one thing. Before his other inventions made him poor, the ZX80 and its successor the ZX81 made him rich. "Oh my lord, yes," he says as he settles on a sofa. "Oh good God, yes. Very much so. I'm just speaking from memory here, but within two or three years we made 14m profit in a year. That would be a lot today."

He says that the ZX80 computer was named after the year it appeared, and because the letters sounded cool and futuristic. He is keen to credit the rest of his small team at Cambridge, not least Nine Tiles, the company that made the Basic operating software. But he is a little hazier about what the machine could actually do.

"We had several routines you could be doing within minutes," he says. "People could tap in a few keys and make the display do some strange things. All very exploratory. We had a little printer, and one guy, right at the start, came out with the program that generated hypothetical dinosaurs. It invented their names, and printed out their pictures, and it could go on doing this indefinitely. Then very soon a huge number of games came out and the whole thing exploded."

"Not literally?"

"No."

The ZX80 sold about 50,000 units, and the ZX81 which replaced it cost 69.95 and sold 250,000. The brochure promised that a child of 12 would soon be mastering "decimals, logs and trig", although the trig would have to be saved to a cassette recorder. The average 2GB laptop of today has 2,000,000 times more memory than that offered by Sinclair's first machines, although he is keen to stress that computing ability isn't everything. "Our machines were lean and efficient," he says. "The sad thing is that today's computers totally abuse their memory totally wasteful, you have to wait for the damn things to boot up, just appalling designs. Absolute mess! So dreadful it's heartbreaking."

Sinclair, who is not an especially tall man, has always been a great one for the smallness of things. He made those little pocket calculators, he made black digital watches, and also those pocket televisions on which the newsreader Kenneth Kendall looked like Angela Rippon. Later he would make the little C5 (1985), way ahead of the game in the quest for an electric car, so long as you didn't actually try to take it on the road.

He says the important thing about his computers was not only their ability to help with domestic chores (when WH Smith sold them it stressed you could "flummox your bank manager"), but also their capacity to expand the user's intellectual horizons. But it was the male hobbyists who had the most fun: adverts depict fathers programming train timetables with their sons while mum brought in the Victoria sponge.

Things really took off when the ZX became the Spectrum in 1982, and colour games such as Jet Set Willy became the second major activity in teenage bedrooms. Like the Chopper bike, these amusements are now retrospectively popular again, although Sinclair sees none of the rewards. When did other companies such as Atari and Commodore begin to catch up? "I don't think they did catch up. We never had any serious competition in the sense of making machines that were cost effective by comparison. The BBC machine Acorn was quite expensive, and only succeeded because the BBC put its name to it, which was quite outrageous. Then the IBM machine took over. Not because it was a good machine it was a completely appalling design, but it was IBM, so you know "

And what computer does he now use himself?

"I don't use a computer at all. The company does."

"So you don't do email?"

"No. I've got people to do it for me."

"If friends and family want to communicate?"

"They can do that. We've got a computer in the front office, but I get someone to do it for me."

"That seems odd to me. Why is that?"

"Sheer laziness I think. I can't be bothered."

"Do you not know how to operate it?"

"I do know how to, but I don't."

"Sorry to press, but it seems the simplest thing in the world to do your own emails."

"Well I find them annoying. I'd much prefer someone would telephone me if they want to communicate. No, it's not sheer laziness I just don't want to be distracted by the whole process. Nightmare."

When he's not not doing his emails, Sinclair occasionally appears in the tabloids pictured with a blonde former lapdancer 36 years his junior ("He's actually incredibly attractive to women," his intended, Angie Bowness, whom Sinclair met in Stringfellows, has said.). The rest of the time he continues in his attempt to reinvent the wheel. He walks across the corridor to his office, where one section is given over to the A-Bike, his miniature lightweight folding bicycle. He launched this in 2006, and it costs 199.99. He says it's selling well, and that he's just solved some manufacturing problems. I pull one out to sit on it.

"They're not necessarily working models," he says, "so I'd rather you didn't."

I ask him how it folds up. "I won't go into that now if you don't mind I'm not feeling too well."

I ask him what else he is working on.

"A little electric car."

"And what can you tell me about that?"

"Not much."

"When might it be viewable?"

"I hope within a year."

"Any resemblance to previous efforts?"

"No, it doesn't look like anything we've done before."

"But obviously all the big companies are doing their own electric cars."

"But they won't be doing what I'm doing, I'm sure. As usual I hope I'll sell lots of them. But who can tell?"

An invitation to find out about better sex is spreading virally around Twitter but only leads to identity theft and malware (updated x2, with video)

Thousands of Twitter users have seen their accounts hijacked after a viral phishing attack which sends out messages saying "this you??" or "hey, i've been having better sex and longer with this here" and other sex-related "direct" messages.

Among those who fell victim were the Press Complaints Commission and the BBC correspondent Nick Higham - and the Guardian's head of audio Matt Wells.

Update: other victims included Ed Miliband, the environment [not transport] minister.


Update 2: And First Direct, the bank, which hurried to assure people that "Only our Twitter account has been hacked" and that "no personal data has been compromised".

The purpose of the attack, which began early on Thursday morning, is initially to draw people to the sites that hijack the accounts, and possibly install malware able to steal passwords on the user's computer. Another purpose may be simple identity theft: because people often use the same passwords and usernames on multiple services, getting access to one service can provide access to others too.

But in the longer term, the purpose may be to put the infected sites into search engine results.

The web security company F-Secure suggests that "We think it could have something to do with some of the recent search engine deals that have been made. Yahoo announced that they'll begin to include Twitter's real-time feed into their search results and Facebook is now included in Google's search results. The bad guys can use social networking trust to enhance their SEO [search engine optimisation] attacks."

Even results from hot topics may lead to scams and infected sites, F-Secure warns: "Always be careful when searching for hot topics. This "sea world trainer killed" example is currently being used in SEO attacks and many results will lead directly to scamware." It adds: "We expect to see fresh phishing attacks against Facebook before too long."

The attack spreads from each compromised account by sending out a "direct message" to people who follow the user, or simply putting the message in their Twitter feed. Anyone who then clicks on the links - whose destination is hidden by the use of a "URL shortener", which provides a shortened version of the link so that people are unaware of where the link actually takes them - is then at risk of having their account and machine taken over.

Twitter users are advised to follow Twitter safety account, which provides advice when such scams are spreading.

Twitter's status blog last night warned

"While simply receiving this message does not mean your account is compromised, if you do click through and enter your username and password, you'll want to change your password. If you've received this type of spam from a friend, you may want to alert them to change their password."

Such "phishing attacks" are increasingly common on both Twitter, where URL shortening - usually required to make standard URLs fit into the 140-character limit of the service - makes it harder to guard against dangerous links.

Account-shortening services such as bit.ly can block dangerous links, but only after they are alerted to them. The other option is to inspect the link before clicking on it - which the Twitter web page and Tweetdeck, a cross-platform program, do allow.

Spam and phishing attacks are a continual problem for Twitter, which is comparatively easy to join.

Graham Cluley of Sophos has posted a video showing how the hack is done to anyone incautious enough to click on the link. The site hosting the attack that Cluley points to is kevanshome.org, which is hosted in China; and the front page of the site is an exact copy of News Corporation's MySpace even down to the copyright notice.

Why singer Imogen Heap wants to make electricity out of horse manure

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
I was going to say Macs, but everyone says that, so I'm going to go into geek mode. I have these wireless wrist microphones that I wear on stage they are throat mics that I've adapted. The audio gets picked up and goes into my computer. What's great about them is that I can wander about on stage and grab any instrument like the wine glasses I use and the mics are in the perfect position to pick up the sound. They've completely transformed me on stage.

When was the last time you used them?
I did a show in London last week, and the really cool thing was that I did an experiment where I asked the audience what key and tempo they wanted, and improvised this piece of music. I mixed and uploaded it that night, and people can buy it at my website all the proceeds go to charity.

What additional features would you add if you could?
I'd like some sensors that would detect whatever instrument I picked up. Each instrument would have a code that would switch my pre-amp compressor to the correct setting for that instrument.

Do you think they will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
I don't think they'll be obsolete, but parts of them will be such as the battery pack. Maybe in 10 years the energy from your body will be enough to power the mics.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
When it comes to computers and software, the most irritating thing is companies not being fluid and open, so software doesn't work with competitors' machines. It just slows progress.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
I have a love and hate affair with my iPhone at the moment. I have a lot of apps that conflict with each other and sometimes cause it to crash.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Don't take it out on the machines when something doesn't work it's not their fault.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
Definitely leaning towards the nerdy.What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I would say it's probably my 8-core Power Mac. I use it on my live tour it's really really fast, I love it. But I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the new iPad I wish it had a camera in it, though.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I very rarely buy CDs, and to be honest is an issue with space. But there's also the convenience of downloading. I do buy DVDs at Christmas time, I bought hundreds and hundreds of pounds worth of things for friends and family. Giving an MP3 file is just not the same.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I think it's a great idea. Pretty much already your computer is your butler being your calendar and organiser and such but if there was something that could follow you around and make you cups of tea, I'd be very up for that. But I'd like to design my own.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
What I'd really, really love is fuel cell technology that converts horse manure into energy for your home. That would be something I'd love to invest in.

Singer Imogen Heap (www.imogenheap.com)is on tour in Europe. She plays London's Albert Hall on 5 November.

Xbox 360/PS3/PC; 39.99; cert 16+; DICE/EA

Swedish developer DICE's Battlefield games may lack the glamorous image of rivals such as Call Of Duty, but they are hugely popular among the military first-person game cognoscenti.

The Bad Company sub-franchise represents DICE's attempt to add a credible single-player experience to a primarily online series of games, and the second instalment arrives, with impeccable timing, just as we've extracted every last ounce of enjoyment from Modern Warfare 2. Creditably, the only area in which Bad Company 2 demonstrably loses out to its much-hyped rival is visual polish although it is still a mighty fine looking game, with particularly impressive particle effects allowing realistic desert dust-storms and the like. And it has two elements which Modern Warfare 2 lacks: destructible scenery, and a great stock of military vehicles into which you can jump and cause instant mayhem.

The four-man Bad Company team is back and ready with more wisecracking dialogue than ever (including some sly digs at Modern Warfare 2), and there's a decent storyline involving an apocalyptic weapon which sees you traversing jungles, deserts and even icy Andes peaks (on which you will freeze unless you either duck indoors or judiciously light fires by chucking grenades at piles of wood). There's an admirable amount of variety you must pilot tanks, boats, armed jeeps and quad-bikes, and man fixed guns in helicopters. But perhaps the most impressive aspect of the game is the much-improved destruction engine, which is startlingly realistic. If you're stuck, you just blast stuff to smithereens with a rocket launcher, but if you fail to take out RPG-wielding enemies, they will blow away your cover.

Online, Bad Company 2 emphatically has the tools to challenge Modern Warfare 2's hegemony the much-loved objective-based Rush and domination-based Conquest modes are back, allowing two teams of 12 players (who can be medics, soldiers, engineers or recon specialists) to slug it out, levelling up both skills and weaponry. The huge maps are exemplary, and the new Squad Deathmatch mode pits four teams of four players against each other, while Squad Rush puts two four-player teams into tighter maps. The main joy of playing Battlefield online the freedom to jump into your favourite vehicle and fight in your preferred manner rather than one dictated by the game has been lovingly preserved.

Compared to Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has skulked into the fray well below the radar, but committed fans of military first-person shooters will find it in no way inferior gameplay-wise. If you see yourself as a true, hardcore gamer, you'll be needing a copy.

Rating: 4/5

HTML5 isn't a standard yet, but the key question is: who is going to get their way with it?

Picture by Stevendepolo at Flickr. CC-BY licenced.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn't have an easy manner in the flesh; there isn't the relaxed manner of a politician, whose careers depends on putting people at their ease. Instead, Berners-Lee has a darting, urgent manner. And his career has turned out to be one which ends up putting people at their unease: look around at what the web has done to the world, and the huge upheaval it's caused, and that's Berners-Lee, magnified.

Now he's turned his gaze to the Gordian Knot that is the HTML5 specification.

For this we need to backtrack a bit, and see where things have gotten to since the last time I wrote about Apple/Flash/HTML5 at the start of February.

The question then was, if Apple is not going to have Flash on the iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch because it implements HTML5's handling of video, via H.264, embedded directly in web pages via the Canvas API is Adobe's technology going to find a home in HTML5?

Since then sooo much has happened. Let's unload some links:

The Flashmobileblog looks at battery performance of Flash Player on Google's (sorta flashy) Nexus One:

"Bloggers from Daring Fireball and Macgasm have spent a little more time than expected studying the battery indicators, as opposed to the incredible advancements in web browsing for mobile phones, netbooks and tablets. "

Umm, perhaps: it depends on whether you think battery life is more important than being able to see that awesome Flash opening page for that restaurant.

An Adobe engineer said that the next version Flash will be so much better on Mac OSX, honest.

Simon St Laurent wrote, over at O'Reilly, about "the widening HTML5 chasm". (He's a former worker on the World Wide Web Consortium (aka W3C), where Berners-Lee has of course toiled for longer than one would have thought humanly possible.) He reckoned that discordant interests would leave HTML5 damaged and its credibility weakened.

And then the Free Software Foundation urged Google to kill Flash by open-sourcing its video codecs and pushing them out to YouTube users - meaning "The world would have a new free format unencumbered by software patents."

No response from Google which announced that it's dropping Gears support, so it can concentrate on HTML5 support in the Chrome browser.

Jason Garrett-Glaser, the primary x264 developer and an ffmpeg developer, noted (in a long post about Flash, Adobe, and performance) that Adobe has made two critical mistakes: first, assuming Linux and Apple's OSX didn't matter (turned out lots of important developers are there) and secondly, attacking free software:

"Practically all the websites on the internet use free software solutions on their servers not merely limited to LAMP-like stacks. Youtube, Facebook, Hulu, and Vimeo all use ffmpeg and x264. Adobe's H.264 encoder in Flash Media Encoder is so utterly awful that it is far worse than ffmpeg's H.263 or Theora; they're practically assuming users will go use x264 instead. For actual server software, the free software Red5 is extraordinarily popular for RTMP-based systems. And yet, despite all this, Adobe served a Cease&Desist order to servers hosting RTMPdump, claiming (absurdly) that it violated the DMCA due to allowing users to save video streams to their hard disk. RTMPdump didn't die, of course, and it was just one program, but this attack lingered in the minds of developers worldwide. It made clear to them that Adobe was no friend of free software."

There's plenty more in the post it's basically your essential backgrounder on the technical and financial obstacles to HTML5 video.

The key question is: who's going to get their way with HTML5? The companies who want to keep the kitchen sink in? Or those which want it to be a more flexible format which might also be able to displace some rather comfortable organisations that are doing fine with things as they are? Adobe, it turned out, seemed to be trying to slow things down a little. It was accused of trying to put HTML5 "on hold". It strongly denied it. Others said it was using "procedural bullshit".

Then Berners-Lee weighed in with a post on the W3 mailing list. First he noted the history:

"Some in the community have raised questions recently about whether some work products of the HTML Working Group are within the scope of the Group's charter. Specifically in question were the HTML Canvas 2D API, and the HTML Microdata and HTML+RDFa Working Drafts."

(Translation: Adobe seems to have been trying to slow things down on at least one of these points.)

And then he pushes:

"I agree with the WG [working group] chairs that these items -- data and canvas are reasonable areas of work for the group. It is appropriate for the group to publish documents in this area."

Chop! And that's it. There goes the Gordian Knot. With that simple message, Berners-Lee has probably created a fresh set of headaches for Adobe - but it means that we can also look forward to a web with open standards, rather than proprietary ones, and where commercial interests don't get to push it around.

The upshot: HTML5, as a standard, may still be some years off. But the fact that there's so much interest in it, and that browsers Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome are already starting to incorporate parts of its specification now means that in some parts of the web, the latest sites will work really well. The advantage there goes both to the sites and to the users of those browsers. (Remember too that Firefox is the most widely-chosen browser in the world.)

So Adobe really does have a problem now. It will be very interesting to see how it reacts, and how it keeps Flash moving forward over the next ten years. At the very least, it might want to take some advice from x.264's Garrett-Glaser: be open, don't ignore platforms, work on performance.

And where will Berners-Lee pop up next? Ah following his success in getting data.gov.uk to happen, he's now focussing on UK local authorities. If you work in one, you have been warned

It's been a tough year for Palm. The company is betting everything on its new handsets, the Pre and the Pixi - but with sales not doing as well as expected, the company issued a profit warning yesterday.

To explain what was happening, chairman and chief executive Jon Rubinstein sent out a memo to the company's staff.

As is typical with these things, it was largely stuffed with corporate speak and coded messages - so I've come up with this handy paragraph-by-paragraph translation that might help explain what Palm thinks is going on.

Team,

Hey guys! Whatever I say, don't forget we're in this together.

This morning we announced preliminary results for our 2010 third quarter. Since the quarter has not yet closed, it is too soon to offer exact numbers, but we stated that we expect to report revenues for Q3 between $300 and $320 million.

We're not selling as many phones as we thought we would: sales were flat despite the fact that we started selling handsets with Verizon - America's second-biggest phone network (with 91m users) - in January.

We were expecting sales to go up. They didn't. This could be awkward.

We also announced that we expect our revenue for this fiscal year to fall below the guidance we gave to Wall Street, which ranged from $1.6 to $1.8 billion.

Given how sales have gone over so far, we'd probably need to double our sales in the next three months to satisfy our original targets. Let's be honest, that's not happening, is it?

As we mentioned in our press release, our softer than expected performance is due to slower than expected customer adoption of our products, which in turn has prompted our U.S. carrier partners to put additional orders on hold for the time being.

People aren't buying enough of our phones. And networks don't want to order phones that people aren't buying.

On a positive note, we expect to exit the quarter with over $500 million in cash on our balance sheet. We're scheduled to announce our full financial results in March.

(Before we go on, I'm going to sugar the pill. Over the past year or two we've been burning through our cash reserves like crazy - having some money in the bank buys us some more time. That's awesome news!)

I realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March.

Yes, it sucks - but the pain you feel today is nothing compared to the pain you would have felt if we'd suddenly announced in a few weeks that we'd missed our targets by 30%.

In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales.

We've been trying to work out what's gone wrong...

Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales.

...and we've decided it was Verizon's fault.

To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products.

In fact, we think they've done such a bad job that we're trying to school them so that they actually know what our products do. Plus, we gave it a cool name that implies we're taking action!

Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations all getting the word out about Palm.

Not many people know we exist - but when they know we exist, we sell a few more handsets. That's got to be positive, right?

All of these efforts are examples of how we are working to accelerate adoption and grow distribution of webOS. In the next few weeks, your management will work with you to make sure your priorities are laser-focused, primarily on helping to increase sales, improve product quality and differentiate the Palm product experience.

We need to get better at a few things - largely the "making things" part, and then the "selling things" part. Perhaps some of you haven't been as focused as you need to be (yeah, I'm talking to you).

Our goals are taking longer than expected to achieve, but I am still confident that our talented team has what it takes to get the job done.

I'm not firing anyone... yet.

We'll schedule an all-hands meeting after our earnings announcement in March, and I'll be happy to answer your questions.

Give me a few weeks to prepare before asking me anything.

Go team!!!

jon

I secretly watch lots of cheerleader movies.

Every time you go online you increase your carbon footprint. Is it possible to be a green surfer?

Somewhere in California (and soon to be in India and possibly Iceland) there are vast tracts of hulking warehouses containing thousands of energy-guzzling servers it's farming, but not as depicted in The Archers.

Server farms provide the network to transmit websites. They are powered by electricity, predominantly from coal-fired power stations. Add in the energy required to make your PC in the first place and computing is responsible for 1bn tonnes of CO₂ each year more emissions than aviation. In pollution terms, using t'internet could be your equivalent of an Arkwright mill at full throttle during the Industrial Revolution.

Last month some headlines suggested that a Google search generated 7g of CO₂ the same as making a cup of tea. This left the eco-minded home worker in a real quandary: I chose the cup of tea. Later Google corrected this to 0.2g per search. But still, it all adds up.

The latest research suggests that you create 20mg of CO₂ per second per visit to a website. The more whistles and bells on the site the higher this gets up to 300mg of CO₂ per second for one with video content. Running an avatar in Second Life uses more electricity than a live person in Brazil. Ask yourself: is this watt necessary?

Employ a spam filter, too. In 2008 an estimated 62 trillion spam emails were sent globally, creating the same greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1m passenger cars.

I know what you're thinking: what's wrong with a reference book? Well, US academics remind us that driving a mile and back to the library produces 100 times more greenhouse gas emissions than a web search. Remaining ignorant is carbon free.

Matthew Key, who runs Telefonica O2 Europe, said he had not seen a mass exodus of British customers lured on to rival networks by the iPhone.

O2 sold more iPhones in the UK than Orange in the run-up to Christmas, according to boss Matthew Key, despite the hype surrounding Orange's success in ending O2's two-year exclusive hold on the Apple device.

On Thursday, Orange announced it sold 222,000 iPhones in the last quarter of 2009, having only had the handset since mid-November.

The iPhone helped the company, owned by France Telecom, persuade more people to sign up to long-term contracts than it has ever managed in a fourth quarter before. Vodafone and Tesco Mobile are also now selling the iPhone to their customers.

But Matthew Key, who runs Telefonica O2 Europe, said he had not seen a mass exodus of British customers lured on to rival networks by the iPhone.

"I cannot tell you a specific number but [what] I can tell you is we sold more iPhones than Orange in the fourth quarter we did more than 222,000," he said, after O2 announced its fourth-quarter results. "We are seeing absolutely no evidence of customers leaving us to go back to Orange or Vodafone who had previously come to us from them to buy an iPhone."

In the last three months of 2009, O2 added 338,455 new users, taking its customer base to 21.3 million and retaining its position as the UK's largest network. Of those new users, 235,486 signed up to long-term contracts.

Its performance in terms of new customer numbers, however, was the worst of the four major UK networks. In the same period, Orange gained 404,000, T-Mobile 571,000 and Vodafone 410,000.

The industry's fourth-quarter figures, however, raise the question of whether someone has lost customers or there is double-counting, because it is very unlikely that 1.7 million people picked up a mobile phone for the first time just before Christmas.

Key reckons some players not, he stressed O2 have been throwing very cheap pre-pay deals at customers and distorting the market. It raises the prospect of a repeat of the so-called "box-breaking" that hit the industry a few years ago.

Box-breaking occurs when a mobile phone company subsidises an attractive handset for pre-pay users. People buy the handset, throw away the operator's Sim card and either have the handset unlocked so that they can use it with their existing Sim card effectively getting a cheap handset upgrade or sell it, often overseas.

On paper it looks like the operator has made a sale but over time it becomes obvious that the buyer is not using their network and effectively they have wasted the handset subsidy.

"I look at the net customer additions in quarter four and logically it cannot make sense," admitted Key. "We suspect that some of the other operators have driven business that has been about driving customer numbers in the short term, but actually in the medium term that customer will not spend any money with them."

Activity streams have become central to many social networking websites - so what happens now that Facebook has patented the idea?

Facebook caused a bit of a stir when introduced its 'news feed' back in 2006, which many suggested was a stalker's charter. But the dust soon settled down and now the feed - that list of things your friends have done recently - is basically the centre of most people's Facebook usage.

Now, however, the company is courting controversy again, after it emerged it has patented the news feed concept itself - potentially putting it into conflict with dozens of other social networking sites.

Nick O'Neill of All Facebook who first discovered the award, called it a "huge deal" and he's not wrong.

According to the application itself - submitted in August 2006 and ascribed to eight Facebook employees including Mark Zuckerberg - it covers a system that's become very familiar to us: a stream of information about the activities of our friends, contacts and links to relevant pieces of data.

"In some embodiments, the method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items.

The method further includes limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further includes displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers.

Here's a diagram from the application that shows the system they're talking about.

Now, ignoring the stilted legalese, that seems to be a pretty good description of the feed: an algorithm that generates a stream of your activities, your friends' activities and other information drawn from that database of actions.

I don't use Facebook very much, but looking at my News Feed it would seem to cover most of what's in there: a series of status messages from various friends and contacts, some links shared by colleagues, my cousin getting tagged in a photo and an old flatmate of mine posting a photo from the NME Awards.

But I wonder whether Facebook really inventing anything here that hadn't already been demonstrated before. After all, Twitter - which uses some of the same ideas - was launched in July 2006, while Flickr had already been trialling a similar system for keeping you updated about activity on the site for a couple of years.

Facebook's application was filed on August 11 of 2006, a few weeks before it launched on the site but after those rival services were already doing some similar things.

And then, on top of the questions about whether Facebook invented the news feed (and the eternal question about software patents existing at all) there is the question of what owning the patent means.

Facebook may choose to use this as a defensive strategy - protection in case anybody else tries to sue them for copying ideas - but it also now owns an idea that is extremely commonplace online, not least in rival services like MySpace and Google Buzz.

I suspect we may be hearing more of this.

Social networking is often seen as frivolous, but Jonathan Akwue told the Like Minds conference in Exeter of how it has actually saved lives

At the Like Minds social media conference in Exeter, Jonathan Akwue of Digital Public told how social networking was helping deliver services to teens and mothers.

In a social media conference with many people listening while tapping away on laptops or mobile phones, Akwue started with a slightly controversial point:

Digital technology does not always make our lives better

Showing a picture of an ATM, he asked: "We used to queue inside of banks. Why do we now queue outside?" For people who haven't embraced the internet or technology, they might be doing it for logical reasons. Akwue said:

When people don't use digital technology, it might be because it wasn't designed for them.

He talked about how his company designed a couple of schemes to connect with "people completely disconnected from the mainstream" including youth who needed emergency contraception after unprotected sex and at-risk parents. He cast the challenge as: "How do you connect with people who don't want to know you?"

For the first project, they wanted to know if they could use social media to reduce the rate of teenage pregnancies. They believed they needed to create a service for teens that was delivered where they were. Many teens who needed emergency contraception wouldn't use phone counselling, but they were connecting online. Working with NHS Direct and Bebo, they used web chats to counsel teens who needed emergency contraception. The chats lasted an average of 12 minutes, he said, providing teens with needed information.

In terms of developing ideas for such projects, he said: "Don't create. Curate." Working with Netmums.com, they found that occasionally on the forums, a mum would say that she was going to kill herself. "They would say things like, 'I'm such a useless mother, my kids will be better off,'" he said, and the mums meant it. The other mums would provide support, but they knew it wasn't enough. Mums on the forums suggested they create a 'drop-in clinic' that provided counselling on the site.

"It was a group of mums that came up with that idea. We just facilitated it. Proud to say it wasn't my idea," Akwue said.

Twitter is not just about what people had for breakfast, he said. "You can use this to change people's lives, to save people's lives."

The ThinkPad X100e has both good and bad points, depending on whether you see it as an overpriced netbook or a cut-price ThinkPad business notebook

The IBM ThinkPad became the industry's premier notebook brand after the launch of the 700T in 1992, and its distinctive black styling and red TrackPoint became a noticeable part of business travel. ThinkPads were never cheap, but they were very durable, had outstanding keyboards, and you could get support and spare parts almost anywhere. Prices came down after China's Lenovo took over IBM's PC division, but the brand has managed to retain most of its value.

I've been carrying ThinkPads everywhere for more than a decade, so I was delighted to see the Lenovo ThinkPad X100e when it appeared at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. It was almost love at first sight. After using one (Type 2876), I'm less impressed, and my views might have tipped too far the other way.

The main problem with the X100e is trying to decide what it is. To most people, including me, it looks like the first professional netbook. To Lenovo, however, it's the entry level model in the ThinkPad X notebook range. To a netbook buyer, the 445 price looks too expensive. To a ThinkPad buyer, the X100e is less than half the price of an X201 ( 982) and it looks like a bargain. As a ThinkPad buyer who is shopping for a netbook, I'm torn between both views.

The X100e is certainly a good machine. It's better made than the average netbook, and has a very good 11.6in AntiGlare screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. The ThinkPad credentials are sustained by the 2GB of memory, ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics and 32-bit Windows 7 Professional operating system. For comparison, a cheap netbook would get you 1GB of memory, slow Intel integrated graphics and Windows 7 Starter or XP. Now you know where your money goes.

Keyboards are critical for ThinkPad users, and again the X100e is hard to evaluate. By the normal standards of "isolated keyboards", it feels exceptional, with responsive keys having plenty of travel. By ThinkPad standards (240X, X31/X41/X61), it's relatively poor. In this case, of course, users also have different tastes.

The X100e has both a TrackPoint with two mouse buttons, and a multi-touch pad, with another two mouse buttons. If you're a long-time ThinkPad user, you get the same old controls. If you're a new-age mouse-padder, you also get the same old controls, but the duplication must add to the price.

But ultimately, what tips me against the X100e its 1.6GHz single-core AMD Neo NV-40 processor. It's at the very low end for a notebook chip, and doesn't offer much of a performance improvement over an Intel Atom. What you lose, alas, is battery life: the Neo consumes more power than it's worth.

Even with the six-cell battery sticking out of the back, the X100e lasts about half as long as a modern netbook around 3.5 hours of normal use. There's a cute utility that lets you turn down the CPU's power consumption, but this also degrades the performance.

For reference, the X100e scores 3.1 on the Windows Experience Index, which is down to the Neo processor. It scores 3.5 for graphics, 4.8 for gaming graphics, and 5.9 for the 250GB hard drive. If Lenovo shipped the X100e with a dual-core Atom N330 and Ion graphics, like the Asus 1201N, then it would be a really good mac hine. (Dual-core Neo X2 versions are coming, but that won't help battery life.) At the moment, however, it's a disappointment.

If you're a corporate buyer, the X100e will let you equip lots more staff with an ultraportable ThinkPad for a lot less cash. Most of them will be pleased with the keyboard, the screen, and general robustness, even if they'd rather have an X201. If you're looking for a cheap netbook with long battery life, this is not for you.

Pros: Robust; good keyboard and screen; Windows 7 Pro; it's a ThinkPad.

Cons: Poor performance by notebook PC standards; poor battery life by netbook standards.

Lenovo.com

The growth in iTunes tracks sold is encouraging - but if you consider what's driving it, the picture might not be so rosy

Steve Jobs will be pleased. Not only did it happen on his birthday, but the 10 billionth song sold through the iTunes Music Store was by one of his musical heroes, Johnny Cash; specifically, "Guess Things Happen That Way", which was bought by Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia, who receives a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

Jobs however was not moved to comment on the sale; instead that was left to Eddy Cue, the company's vice president of "internet services", who said: "We're grateful to all of our customers for helping us reach this amazing milestone. We're proud that iTunes has become the number one music retailer in the world, and selling 10 billion songs is truly staggering."

Certainly it is - but how quickly will the next 10 billion roll around? Looking at the best-selling songs indicates that they have all come from the past couple of years.

There's another question too: is the number of sales of songs keeping step with the number of iPods, given that it's the iPod that is reckoned to be the driver of sales?

Certainly the data (recorded on Wikipedia) suggests that sales keep growing.

But iPod sales are growing too - and no matter what replacement period you think there is (as per our story of last November), you can't see exponential growth in sales of songs compared to the number of iPods out there. People who have iPods don't seem to buy more and more and more songs in the sort of replacement that they did for CDs replacing vinyl (understandably, as CDs are digital, just like iTunes tracks, and you can rip them).

In fact, they seem to track each other fairly closely - so that with sensible estimates of between 100m and 150m iPods actually in use (because although Steve Jobs did say at the iPad launch that 250m iPods have been sold, not all of those are still working, you can be sure), you have to think that music sales are only weakly tracking iPod sales.

The graph above shows how the number of songs sold per day has taken off. (Note: we've had to interpolate for the 7bn and 9bn figures, because Apple never announced them. But given the linear shape of the graph we felt it was fair to use a linear interpolation for them, as they fit other numbers that have been provided.)

Then there's more bad news: iPod sales fell year-on-year in the most recent Christmas quarter. So if it's iPod sales driving iTunes sales, then the signs already point towards an eventual flattening. Even now, the graph seems to show straight-line growth.

It is surely twilight of the (dumb) iPods - for the iPhone and iPod Touch are still doing well, and the iPad looks like it could do well too. But they'll never be the rocket that gets lit under the sales of downloaded music.

So it's a great day for Louie Sulcer, but for the music industry generally, this is only worth one cheer. Salvation, if it exists, will still have to be found elsewhere.

The issue of copyright is a global nightmare for anyone interested in digital preservation

Historians 100 years hence will have an abundance of source material about how ordinary lives were lived during the 21st century thanks to the unprecedented way we leave traces through websites, email, Twitter and social networks such as Facebook.

Well, that's the theory. In practice, most of this living history will be discarded in digital dustbins unless something is done about it. We are often told that, thanks to startling improvements in technology, all our personal memories will soon be able to be stored on something the size of a sugar cube. But the granules that make up that sugar cube are widely scattered and difficult if not impossible to recover.

It is reckoned that the average life expectancy of a website is less than 75 days and that at least 10% of UK websites are lost or replaced with new material every six months. These figures come from a statement by the British Library at yesterday's launch of the UK Web Archive, which will guarantee access in perpetuity to thousands of hand-picked UK websites some of which might otherwise have faced oblivion.

They include Antony Gormley's Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth Project. This involved 2,400 participants, and the live stream by Sky Arts would no longer have existed online from next month had the BL not taken over responsibility for it. Other projects to be preserved for posterity include a record of the Credit Crunch and the 2010 general election.

The BL is doing a marvellous job of preserving key historical events, but what it covers is only a tiny part about 6,000 sites so far of the nation's digital memory. Even doing that has proved hugely time-consuming because the BL's small staff has to seek permission every time it takes a copy of anything. This is because of the UK's archaic copyright laws, which will hopefully be partially corrected in the digital bill now going through parliament. Fewer than 25% of the bodies approached by the BL for permissions even bothered to reply.

The issue of copyright is a global nightmare for anyone interested in digital preservation. The problems that Google has encountered in its utterly praiseworthy quest to digitise the world's books are nothing compared to the problems of preserving documentary films where the multiple permissions needed for each one from commercial interests will, as Lawrence Lessig brilliantly describes in the New Republic, lead to a situation where " the vast majority of documentary films from the 20th century will be forever buried in a lawyer's thicket inaccessible (legally) because of a set of permissions built into these films at their creation".

Even if these legal problems could be solved which they won't, because the influence of corporate lobbyists on copyright law is forever tightening there are still others. Digital files degrade much faster than paper files and have to be upgraded, sometimes as frequently as every 10 years. No one has yet found the digital equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, still intact after well over 2,000 years. You only have to peer into your own digital history to see what a digital black hole looks like. Practically everything I did with my BBC B, Sinclair Spectrum and even Psion computers is lost forever in a jungle of changed formats, obsolete floppy disks and losses from data that was not backed up. But that is nothing to what is happening now. Young people may, or more likely may not, worry that things they say on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter may come back to haunt them but the bigger worry is that in the longer term it won't be there at all as digital dynasties rise and fall. Outpourings on Twitter provide an amazing record of people are doing and even thinking, but they are already history before the end of the day. Does anyone seriously think they will still be there a century hence?

There are some estimable bodies preserving archives that include snapshots of the whole web, such as the wonderful not-for-profit Archive.org which will require funding in perpetuity to match its archival ambitions but it admits that no comprehensive archives of television or radio programs exist. Its sister organisation is the Wayback Machine where you can see, for instance, what the AltaVista search engine looked like in 1996 before Google came over the horizon. But as for someone in the distant future trying to recapture our photo albums scattered among sites such as Flickr.com or Picasa or wherever, long after the subscriptions have run out or the companies sold on, forget it.

It is sometimes argued that if copyright law is standing in the way of a universal archive then maybe the world's collective memories should be placed into some kind of escrow account, not to be opened until copyrights have been sorted out or expired. This sounds plausible, but it would act against the worthy principles espoused by the British Library and others that as much as is humanly possible should not just be available but available now.

twitter.com/vickeegan

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.

Ofcom is inviting UK consumers to contribute to research into real-life broadband speeds in a project run by the Sam Knows website

Ofcom, the UK's communications regulator, is looking for volunteers to help test fixed-line broadband speeds. The research is being conducted by the Sam Knows website, which has developed a "White Box" that sits in the consumer's home and monitors the performance of the broadband connection.

Earlier tests led to the publication of a report, Ofcom UK Broadband Speeds 2009, and the project will now continue until 2012.

The first results with 1,600 connections confirmed what users already know: actual broadband speeds are significantly lower than the "headline speeds" advertised by internet service providers (ISPs). According to Ofcom, the "the average 'up to' headline speed in April 2009 was 7.1 Mbps, but we found the average broadband speed was actually 4.1 Mbps."

Ofcom adds: "Our consumer research has shown that speeds are the single biggest cause of dissatisfaction in relation to broadband."

Users can sign up at Sam Knows.

Participants get to see the data from their White Box, but apart from that, it's just a matter of being helpful. There's no guarantee your internet connection will get faster.

A convertible? In snow? Is Andrew Anthony brave enough to put the top down?

Just as a dog is not only for Christmas, so is a convertible not only for summer. This is a point that's well worth considering should you find yourself about to hand over 80 big ones for a topless car. It's one thing to think it a bold and adventurous move on some deathlessly hot day in July. But what about in December when it's snowing?

Well, in December it was snowing and I was driving a convertible. It was a bit like finding yourself in Newcastle town centre on a midwinter night dressed only in a micro skirt and a bra top. I imagine.

Actually, that's not strictly true because, of course, I kept the top up. But as the top belonged to a Jaguar XKR, this was not any great hardship. In fact it felt quite snug under the canvas. The very least that can be said about the heating is that, like the car itself, it's not slow to get going.

But a Jag is not about heat. It's about cool. There is a generation to which, alas, I belong whose introduction to the concept of i ndigenous cool came courtesy of the long, slender curves of the E-Type Jag. And for those of that particular vintage, a romance attaches to the Jaguar marque that no amount of foreign ownership changes can fully remove.

But equally, doubts about Jaguar's reliability also remain from the period when it was a British company. In other words, it's a car that's loved because of its heritage, but owing to its heritage, not loved enough to buy. The Jag is the mistress of sports cars sexy, fun, capricious but its admirers tend to marry Porsches.

With each new model comes the promise that this time it's different. But for some reason, the buying public can't seem to make that ultimate commitment of removing chequebook from trouser pocket.

What's the problem? The XKR may not possess the iconic appeal of, say, the E-Type, but it's sleek and handsome. It's true that the back seats are pointless in terms of anyone other than a small pet actually sitting in them, but that's the way with four-seat sports cars. Sorry, I mean grand tourers a distinction without a great deal of difference.

It is, though, a dream to drive: effortless, powerful, but never flashy or overwrought. The five-litre engine purrs like a well-fed, erm, jaguar. It looks good, it sounds good and, by golly, it is good.

But is it a classic? On the negative side, the dashboard lacks the kind of transcendent style that eases the mind away from the price tag. Nonetheless it is a very fine car that doesn't make a performance of its performance. Not a statement so much as an understatement. For that reason, and not the snow, I kept the top up.

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.

Don't forget to ...

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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

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.

Are CGI envisionings of a killer whale attack, Brown's alleged bullying and what goes on in the male brain the future of news?

First there was the animation of Tiger Woods's car crash, which went viral. Then came the video showing a perhaps exaggerated version of Gordon Brown's alleged bullying. Western journalists have been forced to take notice of animated news.

While these clips have been treated with bemusement rather, one would hope, than being viewed as factual records of events is there a future for animations as serious news?

Chinese media mogul Jimmy Lai was always good for shaking things up. First, the critic of the Chinese government took the Hong Kong and Taiwan publishing market by storm by introducing Apple Daily, a newspaper that combines political and business reporting with colourful tabloid sensationalism and extensive graphics. Now, his company Next Media is transferring this style to the moving image, and has plans to export it to western media.

Founded in November, Next Media Animation's YouTube channel offers more than 1,000 videos, some of them focusing on western news such as the bullying allegations against Brown or the recent killer whale attack in Sea World in Florida.

But the new style faces a lot of opposition. Taiwan's National Communications Commission recently rejected Lai's application for a television licence, citing the salacious nature of the animations, according to CNN.

We have found some of the most interesting examples of the genre. Is animated news blurring the border between fact and fiction? Or are levels of media literacy advanced enough to recognise that the animations are not intended to be taken all that seriously?

1. Killer whale attack
No video footage of the killer whale attacking a trainer, just some human witnesses? No problem, animate it.

2. Gordon Brown animation in Hong Kong Of PM apparently abusing and hitting staff Crossing a line? Here Next Media Animation visualises Brown's "volcanic rages" in a way that was not reported.

3. Appledaily (Action news) Showdown at NBC
Instead of using copyrighted material, produce it yourself! Here Apple Daily sums up the battle between the US show masters Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien.

4. Female curves and male brains
What effects do the curves of Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce or Shakira have on the male brain? Watch a typical Next Media animation to get the answer.

5. The Tiger Woods car crash (CPU Animation)
Next Media's video mixes real pictures of the Woods crash scene with an animated fight and accident.

What do you think of these animated news clips? Do they go too far, or are they something we'll just have to get used to in the future? Please have your say below.

Related articles:
The news will be animated (and then televised)
Gordon Brown bullying claims, the CGI version

Film director Christopher Smith devours new gadgets but he won't download films as he's a sucker for DVDs

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
The thing that changed my life, and improved my life, was originally my video [player]. That idea of being able to rent movies genuinely changed me, I think. All of my filmgoing when I was a kid was watching videos. The most modern thing: I love my Sky+. I love the idea that I can use my iPhone and record stuff and having it waiting for me in a big bank. And I don't record movies I record rubbish.

When was the last time you used the Sky+ box, and what for?
I used it the other day to record My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding for my wife.

What additional features would you add if you could?
I wouldn't change a thing, I just love it. I think it's perfect as it is.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
No, I think it will just be better in 10 years' time. You'll be able to get any [programme] you want, at any time.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
If you can imagine it, and you haven't got it yet, it's because you're paying for the development stage that annoys me.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
No, I don't think so.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
I'm the wrong person to ask that. If I'm given a gadget, I'm bored of it very soon.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
I would say I'm somewhere between the two.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
The new telly that Danny Dyer made me get!

Mac or PC, and why?
Macs, because they're just beautiful. I don't get virus software I don't get why we have to have that. PCs are vile.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download?
I do. DVDs I still buy. I don't want to download I'm not against the principle, but I want a box, I want a cover, I want to put it on the shelf.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
Anything that can clean that means I can pay for it and get the credit for having done the cleaning is good. But saying that, I would rather pay some BODY that some THING to do something, because I believe that people should be paid.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
A time machine that's all I can think of that would be interesting.

Christopher Smith is the director of Creep and Severance. His most recent film, Triangle, is out on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday, 1 March

Beware of a false Twitter login page and an investments scam using the details of authorised firms to sell shares

Two scam warnings emerged this week: one aimed at social networkers, and another at would-be investors.

Twitter users were warned to look out for a phishing scam which sends tweeters a message saying "This you????" followed by a link. Curious recipients who click on the link are taken to a fake Twitter login page, where scammers are waiting to get their details. On the plus side, this allays any fears that you have been caught on camera doing something embarrassing, but at the expense of giving away your password and email address which could well be details you use to access accounts elsewhere. Your account can also be hacked into and used to send phishing messages to your contacts.

Security expert Graham Cluley has a video on his blog warning about the attack.

It's not the first scam attempted on Twitter users and is unlikely to be the last. So how can you avoid falling victim?

If you get a message that seems this impersonal then don't click on the link.

If you want to log in to your account, go straight to Twitter.com, don't use a login page from a link.

Make sure you use a different password for Twitter than for other sites (particularly those where you make financial transactions).

Separately, the Financial Services Authority has warned about a new investments scam where overseas fraudsters use the names, registration numbers and addresses of FSA-authorised firms and individuals to sell shares in one case a company's website was cloned and a false email address and phone number added.

Hand over your cash and in return you will get shares that are non-tradable, overpriced or even non-existent. And if the firm goes bust or disappears you will not be covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

The FSA says would-be share buyers should be wary of any unsolicited call or email from a firm of which they are not a customer. It recommends the following steps:

Ask for the contact details of the person calling you;

Check the firm or individual's status on the FSA register; and

Call the firm back on the switchboard number provided on the FSA register to make sure that the call came from the legitimate authorised firm.

Anybody who has been contacted by a suspicious firm or has any doubts should report the encounter as soon as possible by calling the FSA on 0300 500 5000 or reporting it online.

If you spot something you think might be a scam, please let us know and we'll look into it. Email money.editor@guardianunlimited.co.uk

Software company had forced closure of Cryptome website for publishing guide that explains how to access millions of pieces of private data

Microsoft has been forced to backtrack after it closed down a whistleblowing website after it published a leaked version of the company's "spy guide".

The American software giant took action on Wednesday against the Cryptome website - which has been running since 1996 - for publishing a copy of the Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook, a document explaining how law enforcement officials can access millions of people's private information online.

The site, which hosts thousands documents relating to free speech and surveillance, said that it was within its rights to hold a copy of the handbook - but under Microsoft said the publication infringed its copyright and lodged a complaint with Cryptome's web hosting company, Network Solutions.

Under America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Network Solutions shut down the website entirely - a move that caused uproar among civil liberties campaigners, and led Microsoft to withdraw its complaint so that Cryptome could go back online.

According to an email from Evan Cox, a legal counsel for Microsoft, the company did not intend to close the site - just remove the document in question.

"While Microsoft has a good faith belief that the distribution of the file that was made available at that address infringes Microsoft's copyrights, it was not Microsoft's intention that the takedown request result in the disablement of web access to the entire cryptome.org website."

The move was greeted as a victory by Cryptome and its supporters, with proprietor John Young saying he was considering taking the company to court for what using copyright law to enforce what he called "draconian shutdowns".

"We think all lawful spying arrangements should be made public," he said. "Microsoft should join the others who openly described the procedures, and just may be do if there is a public demand for it."

The return of the website does little to eradicate the controversy around the handbook itself, which Young described as "repugnant" for encouraging the authorities to snoop on people's private information.

The 22-page document lists the sort of information that Microsoft holds on its users, and gives law enforcement officers tips on how to easily access and use that data.

The document lists the sorts of data it can provide, including photographs, contact lists and internet addresses all stored by users of Microsoft services like Windows Live, Xbox Live and MSN Messenger.

It even suggests that law enforcement officials request much more information than they need, and lays out example subpoenas to enable them to get the data more easily.

Cryptome has been a thorn in the side of the authorities and many companies for years, since Young launched the site to keep tabs on various aspects of surveillance and cryptography.

Similar to the Wikileaks website - which had to shut down temporarily due to a lack of funds - Cryptome says it "welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance but not limited to those."

In the past organisations including the Recording Industry Association of America have tried - and failed - to get the site taken down, and it also hosts documents similar to Microsoft's from companies like Facebook and Yahoo.

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.

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."

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.

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."