One of the most contentious parts of the controversial digital economy bill was voted down by the House of Lords last night only to be replaced by a clause that campaigners say is even more draconian.

The Liberal Democrats forced through a surprise amendment to the bill's notorious clause 17 on Wednesday in a move that dealt a defeat to the government but troubled critics, who suggest it will have the opposite effect that its creators intend.

Instead of sweeping new powers that threatened sweeping alterations to British copyright law, the Lib Dems added a clause that gives extra oversight to the high court.

The new proposal which was passed in the House of Lords by 165 votes to 140 gives a high court judge the right to issue an injunction against a website accused of hosting a "substantial" amount of copyright infringing material, potentially forcing the entire site offline.

Putting forward the amendment, Lib Dem peer Lord Clement-Jones said that it would placate concerns over the so-called "three strikes" rule which could see those accused of sharing files illegally online having their internet connections cut off and added that it was a "more proportionate, specific and appropriate" way to approach infringement than the previous proposals made by the government.

"I believe this is going to send a powerful message to our creative industries that we value what they do, that we want to protect what they do, that we do not believe in censoring the internet but we are responding to genuine concerns," he said.

But instead of making the proposed system more transparent and accountable, critics say it will simply leave it open to abuse.

"This would open the door to a massive imbalance of power in favour of large copyright holding companies," said Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group. "Individuals and small businesses would be open to massive 'copyright attacks' that could shut them down, just by the threat of action."

"This is exactly how libel law works today: suppressing free speech by the unwarranted threat of legal action. The expense and the threat are enough to create a 'chilling effect'."

In particular, there are concerns that the amendment could follow in the footsteps of America's controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been accused of encouraging companies to file bogus copyright claims to block material they dislike.

The high costs and dangers of dealing with copyright claims in court mean that many web hosts simply take down the material in question without checking whether the copyright case is legitimate even going as far as shutting down entire websites in some cases.

Just last week the well-known whistleblower website Cryptome was taken offline when Microsoft attempted to suppress the publication of its so-called "spy guide" by issuing a copyright claim under the DMCA.

When the site's service provider received Microsoft's request, it not only blocked the document in question but also effectively removed the entire Cryptome site from the web.

Microsoft eventually retracted its claim in order to let the site which had stayed online for years despite numerous run-ins with other companies and US government agencies go back online.

The new amendment could also have dire implications for websites like YouTube, where users can upload copyright-infringing material without the knowledge of the site's owners.

The video sharing site, which is owned by Google, is already subject to a $1bn lawsuit by US media giant Viacom but argues that it cannot screen every video that goes onto its site to check whether it infringes copyright. Given the large amounts of material hosted on the site, however, the whole thing could potentially be blocked by the high court.

Lilian Edwards, a cyberlaw expert at Sheffield University, said that the new proposals had some benefits but also had sweeping downsides.

"For the first time, Sony and the rest can now go to court and demand that every ISP in the UK blocks YouTube," she wrote.

"There will in reality be no, or few, court applications - just non-publicised notifications. This is essentially legislation for cover extralegal censorship for the benefit of entrenched private interests."

Such concerns mark only the latest controversy attached to the digital economy bill, which has caused upset since it was first proposed last year.

On Monday, Lord Puttnam said that the scheme was being rushed through parliament without sufficient scrutiny, and that legislators were subject to an "extraordinary degree of lobbying" from copyright holders.

The bill must pass through the House of Lords before it can be put before the Commons and turned into law. Reading continues in the Lords on Monday.

Senior security experts have criticised the west's approach to online threats, suggesting that not enough is being done to stem the growing tide of cyberattacks.

Michael Chertoff, a former secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security, said on Wednesday that current cybersecurity policies were a "recipe for disaster" that could inadvertently encourage a virtual attack equivalent to "the next Pearl Harbour".

Meanwhile former White House counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke said that officials continued to underestimate the sheer scale of hacking attacks taking place around the world.

"What's really happening is that every day we are really being attacked, either by the government or by criminal gangs - and there's very little difference between the two - from China and Russia," he said.

"Every major company in the United States and Europe, every major government institution, has been successfully penetrated. Terabytes, petabytes of data have been stolen and our firewalls don't stop it. The day to day espionage is eliminating our economic competitiveness."

The issue of online spying and cyberwarfare has become a hot topic in recent months, following reports of attacks on major institutions and military projects.

In January Google revealed that it, along with a number of leading American companies, had been subjected to a targeted attack over the internet, which investigators believe came from inside China.

The attack - apparently aimed at stealing proprietary information from Google as well as emails belonging to Chinese dissidents - led the internet giant to threaten to lift the censorship of its Chinese search engine in protest.

Speaking at the RSA computer security conference in San Francisco, Chertoff said that tracing the source of hacking strikes was still too difficult and that computer security was so complex that few felt able to tackle it.

"It's my belief that the solution seems so complicated to the average person, they can't really understand it and they feel disempowered and they ignore it," he said.

Clarke, who became notorious for his damning criticisms of George W Bush in the wake of the September 11 attacks, said that not only was tracing the source of cyberstrikes difficult but that the nature of online warfare was often lopsided.

"We know North Korea has engaged in cyberattacks on South Korea and the United States," he said. "They launched those attacks from China because they have so little connectivity in their own country. But to say you could have mutually assured destruction? There's nothing to attack in North Korea."

"When we went into Afghanistan in 2001, I asked the National Security Agency to provide a plan to attack also with cyberwar techniques. They came back to me and said 'what the shit are we going to attack?'."

Shortly before Christmas, the White House ended a six-month search to appoint a new cybersecurity adviser by bringing in a former Bush adviser, Howard Schmidt to coordinate America's responses to online attack.

Meanwhile in Britain, the government announced plans last summer to create a new centre aimed at blocking foreign hackers.

But Chertoff said action was too slow and often failed to come up with clear plans and ways to combat online dangers.

"We need a clear policy of retaliation, we need to say what the red lines are - what we do in this case or that case. Hard issues, and we may disagree, but we've got to start talking about this," he said.

'Mariposa' botnet, which infected 12.7m computers, run by 'normal people earning a lot of money', say police

Spanish investigators have arrested three alleged ringleaders of the so-called "Mariposa" botnet, which had infected and controlled up to 12.7m PCs, including more than 500 of the US Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks.

The PCs, running Microsoft Windows, were spread among 190 countries, and infected by a computer virus that allowed the ringleaders to steal credit card details and online banking credentials, as well as sensitive data from the hard drives of the machines.

The Spanish authorities worked with a number of private computer security companies, including Panda Security and Defense Intelligence, to track down the alleged controllers of the botnet, which seems to have been started in December 2008 and was first detected in May 2009. More arrests are expected in other countries.

The arrests are significant because the masterminds behind the biggest botnets are not often taken down. And the suspects are not the stereotypical genius programmers often associated with cybercrime. Instead, they had underworld contacts who helped them to build and operate the botnet, Cesar Lorenza, a captain with Spain's Guardia Civil, which is investigating the case, told the Associated Press.

Investigators are examining bank records and seized computers to determine how much money the criminals made.

"They're not like these people from the Russian mafia or Eastern European mafia who like to have sports cars and good watches and good suits. The most frightening thing is they are normal people who are earning a lot of money with cybercrime," Lorenza said.

The three suspects, who were not named, were described as Spanish citizens with no criminal records. They face up to six years in prison if convicted of hacking charges.

Spanish authorities identified them by their internet "handles" and their ages: "netkairo", 31; "jonyloleante", 30; and "ostiator", 25.

Botnets are networks of infected PCs that have been hijacked from their owners, often without their knowledge, and put into the control of criminals. Linked together, the machines supply an enormous amount of computing power to spammers, identity thieves, and internet attackers, who can mount "denial of service" attacks against companies or blackmail them by threatening to block them at crucial times.

The Mariposa botnet, which has been dismantled, was easily one of the world's biggest. Christopher Davis, CEO for Defence Intelligence, who first discovered the Mariposa botnet, said: "It would be easier for me to provide a list of the Fortune 1000 companies that weren't compromised, rather than the long list of those who were."

Davis said he noticed the infections when they appeared on networks of some of his firm's clients, including pharmaceutical companies and banks. But it was several months later before he realized the infections were part of something much bigger.

After seeing that some of the servers used to control computers in the botnet were located in Spain, Davis and researchers from the Georgia Tech Information Security Center joined with software firm Panda Security, which is headquartered in Bilbao, Spain.

Critically, one suspect made direct connections from his own computer seeking to reclaim control of his botnet after authorities took it down. Investigators were able to identify him based on that traffic, and were able to back up their claims with records from domains he registered where he would eventually host malicious content.

It turned out that the people behind the botnet its "runners" had infected computers by instant-messaging malicious links to contacts on infected computers. They also uploaded viruses onto removable thumb drives and through peer-to-peer networks. The program used to create the botnet was known as Mariposa, from the Spanish word for "butterfly."

"I don't think there's anything about this guy that makes him smarter than any of the other botnet guys, but the (Mariposa) software, it's very professional, it's very effective," said Pedro Bustamante, senior research adviser with Panda Security. "It came alive and started spreading and it got bigger than him."

But, he added: "Our preliminary analysis indicates that the botmasters did not have advanced hacking skills. This is very alarming because it proves how sophisticated and effective malware distribution software has become, empowering relatively unskilled cyber criminals to inflict major damage and financial loss."

While arrests of people accused of running smaller botnets are fairly common, the biggest botnet leaders are rarely caught. That's partly because it's easy for criminals to hide their identities by disguising the source of their internet traffic. Often, every computing resource they use is stolen.

For instance, there have been no arrests nor even any public idenfication of suspects in the spread of the Conficker worm, which was set up in November 2008 and infected between 3m and 12m Windows PCs, causing widespread fear that it could be used as a kind of internet super-weapon.

The Conficker botnet is still active, but is closely watched by security researchers. The infected computers have so far been used to make money in standard ways for such infected machines pumping out spam and spreading fake antivirus software.

New figures suggest Facebook's financials are healthier than expected - with the site on course to break a billion dollars of revenue by the end of the year

Yes - and perhaps even more than that, according to new figures.

New projections suggest that the company made as much as $635m in 2009 - around 15% higher than previously estimated - and could be on track to rise to around $1.1bn by the end of this year.

The numbers come from Inside Facebook, a favourite source of information for the site's army of advertisers and developers, and whose editor Justin Smith has given us his thoughts on a number of occasions.

Inside Facebook usually has fairly accurate data on the inner workings of the company's business - and this time it's suggesting that a number of crucial moves mean is more or less on target to continue its trend of doubling revenues each year.

But how is Facebook going to manage this incredible feat?

We've talked before about where Facebook's money comes from - and explored the somewhat surprising fact that it actually makes money at all, given the fact that many people see it as an unprofitable folly.

In fact, with more than 400m users and enormous amounts of activity, the site actually has its eggs in lots of baskets, including virtual goods, a deal with Microsoft and straightforward brand advertising. Logging in today I see ads for the movie 2012 and mobile phone network AT&T, for example.

That's all good, and brand ads have been doing pretty well for the company (not least because they can be incredibly targeted thanks to the vast amount of information Facebook users hand over, information which is valuable to advertisers).

According to Inside Facebook, though, the fastest growing part of the company's market is "performance advertising" - those companies that use ads in Facebook to drive the use of their own products, such as playing a virtual game like Farmville.

It's clear to me that 2010 is a make or break year for Facebook, with a chance for the company to really push forward and become a genuine force - despite a variety of ongoing controversies. The only question, if it's making more than a billion dollars a year will investors push harder to float on the stock market?

Aleks Krotoski, Bobbie Johnson and Charles Arthur dig into this week's top stories across the web, including the optimism that Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner has about the new web browser ballot that Microsoft is offering its users, the latest on the Italian scandal that's got Google's top brass in the dock and Twitter's nascent advertising-based business model that's starting to rise to the surface.

Special guest Elizabeth Varley, co-founder of forthcoming London coworking space TechHub offers her insight into the growing popularity of these new shared office facilities across the UK, and we hear from Andy McMillan, founder of Belfast's most recent coworking space, Core. There's some good information at coworking.pbworks.com.

All this, plus all the feedback from across the social web - including a run down of the people you'd like us to invite to our live Tech Weekly recording at the Science Museum on Tuesday 23 March. Add your suggestions below.

Don't forget to ...

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

Just makes this mighty media organisation tick? An exclusive extract from a new book about the company offers some insights

To visit Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, is to travel to another planet. The natives wander about in T-shirts and shorts, zipping past volleyball courts and organic-vegetable gardens while holding their open laptops at shoulder height, like waiters' trays. Those laptops are gifts from the company, as is free food, wi-fi-enabled commuter buses, healthcare, dry cleaning, gyms, massages and car washes, all designed to keep its employees happy and on campus. Engineers who make up half of the 20,000 employees are granted 20% of their time to work on any project that strikes their fancy. A non-engineer attending engineering meetings would be wise to come with a translator: participants may as well be speaking Swahili.

Even in a recession, Google's business grows. Its annual advertising revenue more than $21bn equates to the total amount spent on advertising across all American consumer magazines. And appropriately for a company with such mighty ambitions, instead of one CEO decision-maker, Google has three: co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin plus their CEO, Eric Schmidt. Inside the offices Schmidt is a rarity in that he usually wears a conservative white or pale-blue shirt, suit and tie. By contrast Page and Brin, like most of their colleagues, wear T-shirts, jeans and sneakers though Brin is partial to colourful Crocs.

The seeds for Google's success were planted by Page and Brin when they met as graduate students at Stanford in 1995. Each of their parents were scientists and both attended Montessori schools, where they were accustomed to making their own rules. They nurtured their Google search idea in their dorm rooms, downloading the entire web and all its links (their prototype search engine used these links to chart and connect not just an island of the web, but the entire ocean). They were, though, no more breathtakingly brilliant than their Stanford peers, according to one of their engineering professors, Dr Terry Winograd. But where Page and Brin stood out, he says, was in their boldness.

They spoke of changing the world, of making all of its information available to everyone. They would sneak into the loading dock where Stanford computers were delivered to boost the computing power of their search engine. They refused to make lots of quick money by selling their search idea to corporate suitors. Then they dropped out from university in 1998 and rented space in a Menlo Park garage, a hand-lettered sign on the door announcing "Google Worldwide Headquarters".

I started visiting the Google planet in 2007. The company did not welcome my idea for a book, and it took many months to win the company's cooperation. I first emailed Schmidt, whom I had previously interviewed, but he was cautious, saying Page and Brin were always reluctant to give any of their time to books or journalists. From the engineers' standpoint, time spent with writers is inefficient.

It took several trips to Silicon Valley and a torrent of emails to win tentative approval. Yet in the end, Google was extraordinarily cooperative: in all, Schmidt granted me 12 interviews over my two-and-a-half years researching the company. And I learned that Google's audaciousness stems from Page and Brin's assumption that the traditional media world is always inefficient. Their mission is to figure out how to eradicate these inefficiencies.

It did not take long for Google, born only 11 years ago, to stop calling itself a search engine and start referring to itself as a media company. Its aim, Schmidt told me in 2008, was to become the world's first $100bn media company twice the size of the then-largest, Disney. Little wonder that when the traditional, non-engineering led media companies finally woke up to the fact that their business model was imperilled by Google and the internet, it was very late in the day.

What is striking about Google's founders is their clarity. Before they started making money in late 2001, they were burning through a cool $25m that had been invested by two venture capital firms. Yet still they insisted on providing free meals and services to all Google employees, and rejected to the consternation of those venture capitalists a $3m offer from Visa for a regular ad on the uncluttered Google search page. Users would be offended, they said.

Page and Brin also rejected the idea that anyone should be allowed to pay to rank higher in the search results. They insisted that one way to build a team culture was for everyone to share an office. And they defied the conventional wisdom of the time, that portals like Yahoo! and AOL were thriving because they trapped visitors in their walled garden and could thus sell many more ads. What mattered, Page and Brin said, was building user trust. By making the average search take less than half a second and, unlike most portals, by not trying to trap users on Google content sites, they would win the public's trust. Build it right, they believed, and the people will come.

Media mogul Barry Diller remembers arranging to see the co-founders when they were still in their second-floor offices above a bicycle store in Palo Alto. As they talked, Diller was disconcerted to see that Page did not lift his head from the keyboard of his hand-held device, and that Brin arrived late on his Rollerblades.

"Is this boring?" Diller asked Page.

"No, I'm interested. I always do this."

"Well, you can't do this," said Diller. "Choose."

"I'll do this," said Page, not lifting his head.

At the time, Diller was insulted and conversed only with Brin. But with the passage of time, he came to think that, "more than most people, they were wildly self-possessed".

Brin, who is more sociable than Page, has his own quirks. He will often get lost in deep thought and forget about meetings. So focused is he on engineering and maths, he sometimes displays a fundamental innocence about how the world works. During one interview in a small conference room, down the hall from the second-floor glassed office he shares with Page, Brin playfully ribbed me for writing a book. "People don't buy books," he said. "You might as well put it online. [He meant: you might as well publish it for free.] You might make more money if you put it online; more people will read it and get excited about it."

There's little evidence that free books succeed, I replied. Stephen King tried it, and gave up the effort because he thought it was doomed. The usually voluble Brin grew quiet. If there were no advance from a publisher, I said, who would pay the writer's travel expenses? With no publisher, who would edit the book, and how would they get paid for their work? Who would pay lawyers to vet it? And who would hire people to market the book, so that all those potential online readers could discover it?

"I guess that's true," Brin acknowledged a little sheepishly, ready to change the subject.

But this exchange hinted at a truth about Brin and Page, and the company they have forged. Their starting predicate that the old ways of traditional media are inefficient and scream to be changed is one reason why Google has fundamentally misread the reaction of publishers and authors to its quest to digitise the 20m or so books ever published. While Google did reach agreement with a variety of libraries, including those of Harvard and Oxford universities, like good Montessori students Page and Brin did not first ask the permission of publishers and authors before digitising their copyrighted books backing off only after a lawsuit was filed.

Google was very clear about the value of digitising the world's books. Such clarity was reinforced by the engineering ethos that underpins the company, of wanting to measure and quantify everything. They measure the value of adverts by the number of clicks they attract. They measure the worth of YouTube, which they acquired in 2006, by the user traffic it generates. They hire engineers by relying heavily on their SAT scores. They rejected CEO candidates who lacked engineering degrees, finally hiring Schmidt in late 2001 because, like them, he had one. Their righteous corporate slogan "don't be evil" has the virtue of clarity, at least.

And then came China. When building its search engine business in the People's Republic, Google compromised by sanitising certain search results. Searchers seeking information about tanks in Tiananmen Square or the Dalai Lama could not find them. Google was making a corporate compromise in order to reach the largest consumer marketplace in the world. It may not have been "evil", but it surely wasn't "good".

The decision made Brin particularly uncomfortable. As a refugee from the former Soviet Union his parents fled when he was six because they were Jewish, and scientific opportunities were closed to them human rights was one area where he did not behave like a cold, calculating engineer.

When a resolution was introduced at the annual Google shareholder meeting in May 2008 to abandon China, the management voted it down. Schmidt, who is two decades older than Page and Brin, and often plays the role of grown-up, championed a "no" vote. But there was one management abstention: Brin.

Then, late last year, Google announced it was tired of compromising with China and might pull out. This position it was not a decision was championed by Brin, and this time Google's management spoke with one voice, for they had learned that the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents were being hacked into, presumably with the support of the government. Allow such behaviour to go unpunished, and Google risked subverting the user trust that had been at the core of its success.

Clearly, Google's push for "cloud computing", which asks users to entrust their personal data to Google servers, would be doomed without that trust. So the threat to leave China unless the government agreed to keep its hands off search results and personal data was as much a business as a personal decision.

Today, Google confronts challenges from governments across the world. Britain and the EU are concerned about privacy and monopoly. France is alarmed about how Google books might threaten the copyrights of its authors. The US and other governments are concerned about its size. The purist engineers' dream that Page and Brin began with that all the world's information can be placed at our fingertips, and universally shared is colliding with nations' beliefs and values that are far from universal.

Take what happened recently in an Italian courtroom, where three senior Google executives were found guilty of violating the privacy of a boy with Down's syndrome, after a video of him being taunted by teenagers was uploaded on to the Google Video site. The court said the video was "offensive to human dignity" which is what the Chinese or Iranian governments say about Google searches that yield results about a free Tibet or human rights violations. Although Google took down the video soon after complaints were lodged, the court acted as if these three executives a senior vice-president, the global privacy counsel, and a former Google Italy board member sit in a control room at Google Video's headquarters deciding which clips will appear. By contrast, Google regards itself as a postal service delivering information, and so should not be held accountable if a delivered "letter" is deemed hateful.

But again, because engineers cannot measure fears or xenophobia, Google has been slow to react. As Bill Gates and Microsoft learned when it was brought to trial for violating anti-trust laws a decade ago, governments are the 800lb gorilla much more formidable than a business competitor.

Google's engineering culture brings great virtue, but also a vice. The company often lacks an antenna for sensing how governments, companies and people will react to its constant innovations. YouTube, for example, is brilliantly engineered and hosts around 40% of internet videos yet it makes no money, because advertisers shy away from user-generated content that is unpredictable and might harm their "friendly" ads. As late as traditional media was to wake to Google, it too was late in understanding how advertisers think. In the past year, Google has paid to lure more professionally produced content on to YouTube, and is starting to charge for it. Traditional media, desperate to tap fresh sources of revenue, has suddenly found that Google may be a willing ally in charging for content after all.

No Google search can tell the future. If the public or its representatives come to believe that Google favours certain companies, monopolises knowledge, invades users' privacy, or is as guilty of hubris as were other corporate giants such as Microsoft and IBM, then it will be more vulnerable. If, on the other hand, Google maintains its deposit of public trust, continuing to put users first, and does not start to lumber like an elephant, it will be difficult to catch.

Pioneering technique used to track needs of earthquake survivors in hundreds of makeshift camps

Aid workers in Haiti are using Google Earth to track the needs of earthquake survivors in hundreds of makeshift camps, pioneering a technique which could be used in future emergencies.

Relief teams log on to Google Earth from camps and upload information about water, food, shelter and population movements, providing an instant snapshot, along with global positioning, of conditions on the ground.

The information is fed into www.cccmhaiti.info, with a link to maps of many of the 414 settlement camps and tent cities which host 600,000 people left homeless by the 12 January quake.

"The humanitarian agencies have some catching up to do when it comes to things like Skype and handheld email," said Alex Wynter, a Red Cross spokesman in Haiti. "But in the base camps, we're connected and disaster relief is going online."

Mapping experts started the project shortly after the magnitude 7.0 quake devastated Port-au-Prince and killed, according to the government, more than 230,000 people. They teamed up with civil engineers and Haitian geographers who knew local boundaries and street names.

Over a normal Google Earth screen of Haiti, blue spots show where Haitians have settled. Some are named by street, zone or landmark, and others are simply numbered as "IDP" internally displaced persons camps.

When a blue spot is clicked an information box appears giving a site's longitude and latitude, commune and estimated number of families and individuals. The details are updated regularly so that, in theory, charities and government officials can foresee aid shortfalls, and potential dangers such as landslides and floods.

"It is the first time a tool of such sophistication has been deployed in such short order by humanitarian actors after a major emergency," said Jean-Philippe Chauzy, a spokesman for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which teamed up with Google and the UN and humanitarian information body, iMMAP, on the project.

Aid workers hope it will speed a relief effort dogged by poor co-ordination between multiple charities, UN agencies and government efforts.

There are glitches in the new system, making navigation sometimes cumbersome. Information must be harmonised, said Brian Kelly, an IOM official involved in the project. "That's the next logical step."

The idea was to identify needs and to give policymakers and ordinary people a clearer view of relief efforts. "It gives you a quick snapshot: 'Hey, look, there's no water there,'" Kelly said.

"A lot of time and effort goes into logistics. If you don't know what's coming, where to take it, you are in trouble. We need to understand, not in month three but in week two, where people have moved and what their conditions are. This is going to cut through a lot of bureaucracy."

Google did not comment. A UN spokeswoman, Elisabeth Byrs, praised the company for delivering images so quickly after the earthquake, first by satellite and then enhanced by shots from the ground.

Aid agencies hope the maps will help identify refuges from the looming, rainy season, which is expected to bring floods and landslides.

Government commission says more needs to be done to help young people stay in rural areas

The lack of mobile phone reception and broadband coverage in rural areas has become the No 1 issue in dissuading young people from staying on in the countryside, the chair of the Commission for Rural Communities has said.

In a report to the prime minister, Stuart Burgess, the government's rural advocate, said that the long-term future of the countryside is in jeopardy because so many young people are being forced out of rural areas to find homes, jobs and support.

In what was described as a "snapshot" of the state of the countryside, Burgess found that almost 60% of urban areas are able to receive a cable-based broadband service, while in villages and hamlets this drops to 1.5%. The report said that lack of internet access was a major issue for children who live in rural areas. "With social networking such a feature of youth culture, lack of access can lead to frustration and exclusion."

The issue was one for both parents and children. In an interview with the Guardian, Burgess said that "the No 1 issue is broadband access and mobile phone networks for young people thinking of buying houses in rural areas. For children there's an expectation that they will be able to use the internet for homework. Yet we have seen schools' internet network close down at 4pm in rural areas and there's no internet at home." He called on the government to introduce a scheme nationally modelled on a successful pilot in remote Cumbria, which now has the highest penetration of broadband in any rural area in England. Burgess said that for adults phone reception was becoming essential and that he wanted mobile phone companies to treat the countryside as a foreign country allowing customers to "roam for a network to connect to. When you go abroad mobile phones roam for a network to connect to. Yet in rural areas, where you may only have one provider, if your phone is from another company you cannot access the signal."

The recession had thrown into sharp relief the historic advantages of towns in Britain. At the end of June 2009, 40% of 16- 24-year-olds in rural areas were unemployed or economically inactive, but the report pointed out that of the 573 Job Centre Plus outlets in England, only 23 are in more rural areas. "Government-approved training schemes, accessed largely through Job Centre Plus, are not a viable option in rural areas."

The report says that even recent government initiatives have been unequally distributed. Of the 3,000 Sure Start Children's Centres in England only 80 are in villages and hamlets and on average these each have to provide for 2,500 children, more than double the average for urban centres.

Signing up for that 'free' offer could actually end up costing you as scammers use Facebook and Twitter to tempt gadget seekers

It's a day for scams. Think you've been given the chance to sign up as an iPad tester via Facebook? No you haven't - it's a scam which actually signs you up to a premium rate mobile service, warns the security company Sophos.

"Facebook pages with names such as "iPad Researchers Wanted - Get An iPad Early And Keep It!" and "The Mega iPad Giveaway!" prey on the public's desire to own a free iPad," notes Sophos.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, has explained the scam on his blog.

Here's how it works. The scam pages typically take their intended victims through a three step process:
1) "Become a Fan" of the page; 2) "Invite your friends" to also become fans of the page, and take part in the "special promotion" [they might not stay your friends for that long afterwards - CA]; 3) "Claim" or "Apply" for your prize.

Some of the pages pretend to have thousands of positive comments from other Facebook users claiming that the offer is genuine, Sophos notes. And it's also running on Twitter - so beware there of people or accounts offering "Free Apple iPad!" or similar. (The key, among other points, is that Apple hasn't actually begun selling the iPad yet: it won't do that until April.)

When the victim applies for the prize they are typically taken to an online quiz, and their mobile phone number is requested so they can be sent the results.

"As if inviting all of your friends to participate in a scheme that you haven't properly investigated wasn't bad enough, the biggest mistake of all is to hand over your mobile phone number," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "You will be signed up for a premium rate service, costing you in the region of $10 every week, until you unsubscribe. The scammers who created the fake iPad Facebook pages are undoubtedly skimming off some of this money by bringing new unwitting subscribers to the cellphone service."

Cluley notes: "The good news is that after I alerted Facebook's security team about this page they disabled it very promptly. However, the bad news is that there are many other similar Facebook pages being created on the social network designed to scam unsuspecting users.

"Not all of them pretend to offer an iPad, so be on your guard for other scams too. The most important thing to remember is to not invite your friends to any Facebook page or application until you have thoroughly researched what it's about. Furthermore, you should never be tempted to hand over your mobile phone number to some daft internet quiz."

There's also a video showing how the scam works. The lesson: be wary. And stop wanting free stuff. There's always a price to pay.

Regulator warns that number range reserved for radiopagers is being used in new premium rate ripoff

Had a "missed call" recently from an 076 number? It wasn't - it was actually part of a new scam, warns PhonePayPlus, the premium phone number regulator.

A number of people have already fallen victim to the scam, judging by the whocallsme site, which aims to offer reverse lookups to landlines for calls apparently coming from non-geographical numbers.

The tale told by bacon98 at the site is quite typical: "No idea why I've called this number twice but it's not a normal mobile number as I've been charged 42.6p+vat per call & I don't know whose number it is!!!"

The structure of the scam is simple enough: the scammers buy up a range of numbers through a network operator, then use automated systems to make "ghost calls" to a huge range of numbers, never completing the call. You get a "call missed" message, call it back, and the network operator charges you the cost of the call - which, because it's ostensibly to a radiopager, costs very much more than a landline or even mobile call. Under the contract, which it thinks is legitimate (after all, perhaps someone set up a company which needed to call lots of radiopagers in a hurry), the network operator then passes a large cut of the proceeds on to the scammers - who soon after disappear with the loot. Then they pop up again a few weeks or months later running a similar scam.

PhonePayPlus, formerly known as Icstis, which regulates the 1bn premium call industry in the UK, warned today that it will take "swift action against the misuse of 076 numbers". Which would seem to be swift action against any use of 076 numbers to leave missed calls. Radiopagers, of course, can't make calls.

As PhonePayPlus explains, those numbers, reserved for radiopaging services, are not allowed to be used to provide a controlled premium rate service and generate revenue.

But, it says,

"Unfortunately, there is evidence that 076 numbers are being used for the same kind of "missed call" scams that have previously operated on the 070 number range. "

Colour us unsurprised: premium rate number scammers are unrelenting in their efforts to whirl up and down the phone number stack in search of niches they can exploit for profit.

PhonepayPlus says that it "successfully tackled 070 scams through prompt and effective enforcement action, reducing the number of complaints by 69% in the last quarter" and that it "will take a similarly robust approach to any scams operating on 076 numbers and will fulfil its duty to regulate any service that operates, or appears to operate, as a controlled premium rate service, regardless of whether the numbers involved are designated as premium rate in the Ofcom Numbering Plan."

Of course, as with all premium-rate number scams, questions have to be asked too about the network operators that provide the numbers to the scammers. If PhonePayPlus finds them in breach of practice, it can fine and/or ban them (and frequently has).

Paul Whiteing, chief executive of PhonepayPlus, said: "we will consider using our Emergency Procedure to shut down any service that is operating a "missed call" scam, pending a full investigation. We will have no tolerance for 076 scams that harm both consumers and damage the industry."

So is there an 076 number in your "missed calls" list? And did you call it back?

Games giant Activision has shaken up production of its best-selling Call of Duty franchise amid claims of insubordination from senior executives - marking the second major change at the publisher in under a month.

In a terse announcement on Tuesday, the company said that it would be creating a new unit to develop future titles in the series, potentially replacing games studio Infinity Ward, which it bought in 2003.

It also confirmed reports that Infinity Ward's most senior executives, Jason Ward and Vince Zampella, had left the company.

In a regulatory filing, Activision cited "breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward" and said that "this matter is expected to involve the departure of key personnel and litigation".

The company has refused to comment further on the issue, and has remained silent about reports that security staff were called into Infinity Ward's Californian headquarters on Monday.

The reshuffle took industry insiders by surprise, coming just months after the latest installment of Call of Duty - Modern Warfare 2 - became the biggest entertainment launch in history by making $310m on its first day.

Call of Duty - a 3D combat simulation spanning world war two and more modern conflicts - has been one of the most successful video game franchises in history, bringing in more than $3bn in sales since the first title came out in 2003.

The release last year of Modern Warfare 2, the latest instalment, was hailed as a major event and sold almost 1.8m copies in the UK in its first week alone. Such was the title's influence, that other publishers took the unprecedented step of pushing back their own releases until after Christmas in order to avoid being crushed.

Despite these successes, however, the game has not been without its critics. Modern Warfare 2, in particular, came in for scrutiny when it emerged that one mission allows players to join a gang of Russian terrorists as they attack an airport.

The leaking of footage led a string of protesters, including anti-games MP Keith Vaz, to say the game left them "shocked" and "concerned" about the levels of violence.

The abrupt decision to change control of Call of Duty is not the only sign of turmoil at the company, a gigantic games conglomerate formed by 2008's 10bn merger between Californian publisher Activision and the games unit of French media company Vivendi.

Last month the head of the company's Guitar Hero franchise, Dan Rosensweig, departed after less than a year in charge.

Reports of difficulties between senior executive have been circulating for some time, with West telling Official PlayStation Magazine last year that "we had to fight for everything" in developing new versions of the game.

Although replacing the producers of a major franchise marks a significant risk for Activision, industry analysts suggested the company may have been working to prevent future conflict.

"A greater risk would be whether or not the two heads end up taking more talent away [from Activision], or the whole team leaves," said Shawn Milne of Janney Capital Markets.

Playstation3 owners can safely reconnect to the PlayStation Network - but has Sony really fixed the problem that killed systems, or just let the clock roll over? (Updated)

Sony says it has fixed the problem that bugged "millions" (© Metro newspaper) of PS3 users. (Update: as Charax points out in the comments, Sony is saying that the problem is resolved not that it has fixed it.)

But it's not saying precisely what caused the problem - although all the signs point to defective software in a clock system.

On the official PS3 blog it says:

"We are aware that the internal clock functionality in the PS3 units other than the slim model, recognized the year 2010 as a leap year. Having the internal clock date change from February 29 to March 1 (both GMT), we have verified that the symptoms are now resolved and that users are able to use their PS3 normally. If the time displayed on the XMB is still incorrect, users are able to adjust time settings manually or via the internet. If we have new information, we will update you through the PlayStation.Blog or PlayStation.com."

Wait - the software thought that 2010 is a leap year? Truly that's some terrible software. Unsurprisingly, there are more than 100 comments on the post, though they mostly seem to be expressions of relief.

And for those who were worried that they'd lost trophies (as was happening yesterday), one commenter says "the local trophy collection is blanked for any disk game you started while this happened and you cannot synch (PSN games seem to be spared). Get a new one and the trophy list will be refreshed. If you already 100%'d a game your trophies still show up in the compare list so no worries."

So, basically, your trophies weren't wiped - the problem was that the clock fault meant the PS3 couldn't join the network and verify itself.

Yet it looks as though Sony might have fallen victim to a form of the 2010 bug - which early this year hit 30m German shoppers, because the systems they were using couldn't believe that there was ever going to be a year beyond 2009.

We await details of precisely how Sony is going to fix this - specifically, whether this problem will arise in 2012 (which is a leap year). Of course by 2014 we'll all be on PS4s... won't we?

In the meantime, is anyone finding that they can't get onto the PSNetwork, or that they have lost trophies?

Update: Ah, we wouldn't have believed it had actually happened if there weren't a Downfall video. Enjoy.

Taiwanese mobile-phone manufacturer backing Google's Android OS is accused of infringing 20 Apple patents

Apple is suing the Taiwanese handset maker HTC, alleging that it has infringed 20 patents relating to "the iPhone's user interface, underlying architecture and hardware".

Among the patents that Apple alleges have been infringed are a number relating to touchscreen interfaces for which the iPhone has become the best-known, though it was not the first, mobile device.

"We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it," said Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, in a statement. "We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

It is thought that a key element that triggered the lawsuit is that in February HTC released handsets which use "pinch-to-zoom" functionality resembling that of the iPhone.

Apple has filed the suit in the US courts in Delaware, Maryland, but also with the US International Trade Commission (ITC), which has the power to halt imports of products. That would stymie HTC and Google, whose free Android mobile operating system is built into a growing number of HTC phones, and has made significant inroads into the burgeoning smartphone market in recent months.

But the move was received with surprise in the technology community. "I don't fault Apple for acquiring patents. They have to, for defensive purposes, given the current laws," noted John Siracusa, a journalist at Ars Technica who has followed Apple closely for years. "But using them offensively sucks."

The use of the ITC could be key for Apple. A recent analysis found that where lawsuits are filed both with US district courts and the ITC, plaintiffs succeed in the latter more often than the former, by 58% to 35%. That means Apple is roughly 50% more likely to win the case with the ITC and so could block HTC imports of newer handsets.

HTC indicated that it was completely surprised by the case, and had not even received the formal complaint from Apple when the American company announced it publicly.

Apple has submitted more than 700 pages of exhibits relating to its patents to the court in Delaware, Maryland, where it is filing the case. It cites a number of handsets, including the Nexus One handset powered by Google's Android mobile operating system, and also other handsets which use Microsoft's Windows Mobile system. HTC has in the past been the largest manufacturer of Windows Mobile handsets although it has recently shifted its allegiance to Google's Android, which is free and has captured significant market share since being launched in 2008.

Apple has specified 10 patents in the Delaware filing, and a different 10 in the ITC filing.

The case is thought to be the first in which Apple has taken the first step in suing a rival mobile phone company. Although it has an ongoing patent dispute with Nokia, the Finnish mobile handset maker, the first move there was by Nokia. Apple has since countersued. The case is ongoing.

Chip-maker Frontier Silicon has shown a demo version of a new software system that provides one menu for both FM and DAB digital radio stations so users don't have to think about the technology, just the content they want

A new generation of radios could make it simpler for consumers to choose their station by name, regardless of whether it broadcasts on digital DAB or analogue FM or both. Listeners could then choose by content, without having to think about the different technologies used for broadcasting.

In a demo of the prototype at Frontier Silicon's office in London yesterday, an off-the-shelf Roberts EcoLogic 1 radio was upgraded via a chip swap, given a factory reset, and then set to scanning for stations. It picked up the local DAB stations first, then the FM stations, and sorted them into alphabetical order. After that, you could scroll through all the available stations on its single-line display. It was simple, and it worked, even on a low-end radio.

Update: Frontier Silicon's Pablo Fraile says:

"While scrolling the station list, our software makes full use of the two lines of text available in DAB radios: the top line shows the station name, while the bottom line shows the multiplex name ("BBC National DAB" in this case) or the FM frequency accordingly. Once the station is selected and playing, the bottom line can show the multiplex/frequency, or additional information as selected by the user - scrolling text, signal quality, time/date, etc."

The idea was originally floated in January by former media minister Si n Simon in a parliamentary debate on the future of radio. He said that "the current generation of DAB sets has tended to make that move [to a new platform] a rather sharp distinction," and that "future sets will simply have a list of station names" (UK government prepares for DAB+ and proposes a new EPG for radio). He added:

"We are already working with the industry on that system and encouraging its development and introduction as quickly as possible. That is a crucial difference that has not been widely promulgated or understood. It means that people can stay on FM and the new sets can service the same market."

While planning a "digital switchover", the government has no plans to turn off FM broadcasting. It plans to use it for local radio. Future UK radios will therefore need to be able to handle DAB and FM, and preferably the new standard DAB+.

Tony Moretta from Digital Radio UK said what I'd seen was a "proof of concept" demo, and that it didn't need additional hardware, so it didn't add cost. The system would now be refined by Frontier Silicon and the leading radio manufacturers, who were given the same demo last week at a Digital Radio Group meeting held by Intellect, the UK technology industry trade association.

"At the moment you've got a DAB mode and an FM mode, so manufacturers might want to add a 'mixed mode'," said Moretta. An alternative suggested by Frontier Silicon was to remove the band switch altogether. There were issues still to sort out, including what do with stations that appear more than once on FM. Should you just index the one with the strongest signal?

The finished software would be offered in Frontier Silicon chip sets, which are used in most digital radios.

Upgrading old sets would be hard, though some PC users could download the code and upgrade their DAB radios via the USB port, if fitted. Moretta did not think that most consumers would take this route, but it was something that needed to be addressed in the future. "What about over-the-air downloads like you do with a Freeview box? That's one of the things we're looking into," he said.

Moretta would also like digital radios sold in the UK to meet the WorldDMB's Profile 1 specification, which is supported by Frontier Silicon's Venice 7 chipset, announced in September.

The UK is still on DAB, and Moretta thinks France is going for DMB, while Germany ("with a few hiccups") and Italy will adopt DAB+. "So Profile 1 is a European standard in the sense that they're all going to be using systems supported in Profile 1," he said.

The idea isn't that people will take their radios around Europe, though a few car drivers will. The issue is that radio manufacturers need standards that work over wide geographical areas, so they don't have to build different sets for different countries. With that being the case, a software system prototyped in Cambridge could reach a very wide audience indeed.

Update: An expert reader pointed out that radio station naming wasn't always consistent. How would the software know that "Radio_1_" (as the station is called on FM) and "BBC Radio 1" (as it's called on DAB) are the same station? Tony Moretta says stations should be consistent, and "These are just some of the issues we need to work through as we develop it."

Google has added more Chrome features for Windows users as it gains market share in browsers while others appear to be losing ground

Google has released a new beta version of its Chrome browser, which is currently growing its market share, according to a usage-based tracker. The new features of this Windows-only version 4.1 include more advanced privacy controls, more control of things like cookies on a site-by-site basis, and what Google calls the "seamless integration of translation functionality". If you already have Chrome installed, the beta replaces the current version, though you may not notice much difference.

Chrome's "Under the Bonnet" section has tabs that let you (separately) block all images, JavaScript, plug-ins and pop-ups, though it's not particularly handy if you want to toggle those settings.

The Google Chrome blog post that introduced the beta has a video demo of the translation feature. Briefly, if you arrive at a page in a foreign language, Chrome just asks if you want it translated using Google Translate.

In the UK, Google says there are new extensions from TfL, TicketMaster, SeatWave, Heat, Empire, and others. Invisible Hand has one (not tried) that "searches for cheaper prices on products as you browse".

Chrome is doing pretty well, going by Net Applications' browser market share numbers for February 2010. Chrome use increased 0.4 percentage points to 5.6% while Firefox dipped 0.2 points to 24.2% and Safari slipped almost 0.1 to 4.45%. The numbers may well be arguable, but Firefox has now lost share three months in a row from a peak of 24.7% in November 2009. That's not a good trend. However, all of IE's rivals could benefit from the "browser choice screen" now being shown to many European users.

The BBC seems to have started using a Flash player verification service that stops the iPlayer from streaming for more than a minute or two to unauthorised media players, hitting users of the open source XBMC

The BBC has reportedly started using the SWF Verification routine -- aimed at protecting copyright content -- with its iPlayer streaming video service. It could be an attempt to stop third-party software from downloading videos, which usually only last for seven days. However, it has the side effect of dropping the video stream after one or two minutes when used with unauthorised players. This includes open source media players such as XBMC.

H-Online notes that: "Some open source plug-ins get around SWF verification by transparently dropping the stream, reopening it and seeking to where it was before the 'ping' came in, though this is potentially punishing on servers."

The BBC supported Linux (OpenSuSE and Ubuntu) and Mac OS X by creating a desktop version of the iPlayer that uses Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software. Windows users can also install it.

iPlayer content reaches a wide audience not just via PCs but through the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 games consoles and some mobile phones. But while the BBC aspires to universal access, it doesn't guarantee to deliver all its content to everyone in the UK (DAB radio coverage being particularly limited) let alone deliver it in the format that any particular group of users may choose for their own reasons.

However, as is often the case, the BBC's move may have unforeseen consequences. According to a report in The Register:

Reg reader, Tom Rouse, who alerted us to the SWF verification tweak to the iPlayer, wondered if the BBC was simply satisfying the demands of Adobe's content licence desires.
"It would seem that this move is likely [to] impact users of platforms not supported by Flash, with an unsatisfactory implementation (eg too resource intensive for the platform, with video tearing, etc.), or those who just wish to use an open source player," he said.
"Ironically, third party utilities that download files (which presumably the verification is there to prevent) still work fine. It is possible that this move will actually increase the occurrence of downloading files which will not be time limited, or torrenting of copyrighted material."

A spokeswoman for the BBC Trust told The Register: "The decision to block open source plugins is a matter for BBC Management. The Trust has not received any complaints on this issue and has no plans to look into it further at present."

There's no way of knowing how many UK-based iPlayer users have PCs but can't or won't run the Adobe AIR version, but it's probably not a large percentage of 61.4 million.

Google has added to its long string of acquisitions with Picnik, one of the first good online photo-editing sites.

Google has announced that it has bought Picnik, one of the early online photo-editing sites, for an undisclosed sum. Picnik was started in Seattle in 2005, and now has a staff of 20. Part of its appeal is that it lets users edit their photos online then post them to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. It uses a "freemium" model where the basic service is free and users are asked to subscribe for access to more advanced features.

Picnik is the third company that Google has bought this year -- the others were search companies Aardvark and reMail -- and brings the total to more than 60, according to a list on Wikipedia. Its best acquisitions include Pyra Labs (Blogger), Picasa (photo album), Keyhole (Google Maps, Google Earth), Android (phone software), YouTube (video), JotSpot (web apps), DoubleClick (advertising) and FeedBurner. Somehow it missed Flickr.

The Official Google Blog says: "We're not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we'll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we'd like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks."

Picnik's blog says: "What does this mean for Picnik? It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we'll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome."

The New York Times's Bits blog notes: "This is not the first company that Picnik's chief executive, Jonathan Sposato, has sold to Google. His first sale was a product called Phatbits that became part of the Google Gadgets platform."

I wrote about Picnik in the Netbytes column in January 2008, when it was both reasonably powerful and very easy to use. It's also in our list of 100 essential websites for 2010.

The competition includes the powerful and more professional Aviary suite, and Photoshop.com, an online version of Adobe Photoshop Express, among others.

The British executive tipped to take over the helm at chip maker Intel is taking extended medical leave after suffering a stroke.

Sean Maloney, 53 - who heads the sales division of the world's biggest computer chip company - became unwell over the weekend, the company said. It added that he has an "excellent" chance of making a full recovery, and is expected to return to work in several months.

"I visited with Sean and his sense of humour and determination to return to work fill the room," said Paul Otellini, the company's president and chief executive. "We wish him a speedy recovery and look forward to his return."

After an early career in programming, the Londoner joined Intel in 1982 and spent several years working for the company's European arm. He then rocketed through the ranks after being handpicked to be an assistant to Andy Grove, the former Intel boss credited with turning it into one of the world's most powerful technology companies. Since then he has been widely tipped as a future successor to Otellini, and is responsible for overseeing sales and marketing around the world.

Based at the company's headquarters in California, Maloney told the Guardian last year that he spends around 80% of his time travelling.

Nintendo DS; 29.99; Cert 12+; Activision

As many film critics have pointed out, Percy Jackson Lightning Thief, the big screen adaptation of Rick Riordan's novel, is essentially Harry Potter does Greek myths. Jackson is an apparently average schoolboy who discovers that he has a magical secret in this case, that he's the son of Poseidon and so he must attend a secret school for magical beings, while coming up against dark magical forces intent on doing him a mischief.

How this plays out on the DS is via lots and lots of turn-based team battles. Why, in this day and age, anyone would think that turn-based combat was interesting enough to base a whole game on is a mystery. In even the most poorly thought-out and lazily designed RPGs, there will generally at least be some elements of world exploration, or a smattering of tactics and planning to get to grips with, or some half decent graphics, or something.

All Percy Jackson has is the fighting battle after battle, interspersed with the most ham-fisted storytelling imaginable. In the many unanimated sequences interspersing the battles, uninspiring manga-esque characters pop up on screen and deliver pages of tedious expository dialogue, after which it's time to move on, board game-style (no exploration here), for yet another poorly animated skirmish.

And these battles are hardly exciting watch your energy gauge fill up; attack an enemy or heal an ally; every so often try to jab at the screen at the right moment to dodge or deflect an attack. After a spate of battles there's a spot of levelling up, followed by some more dialogue to read, then some more battles, and that's about it.

It's slow, repetitive and, above all, boring. In the unlikely event that you happen to be a huge Percy Jackson devotee with a near-obsessive love of turn-based combat and lousy dialogue congratulations, this one's for you. For everyone else, you're likely to have more fun setting yourself on fire and running around the garden screaming.

Rating: 1/5

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.

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

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."

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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?"