Senior officers say site shirking its responsibilities in light of Peter Chapman's conviction for murder of schoolgirl

Senior police officers clashed with the UK's most-used social networking site today, accusing Facebook of ignoring worrying trends that it is providing a safe haven for predatory paedophiles by refusing to sign up to a "panic button" for children and young people.

Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit (Ceop), was joined by the country's lead officer on homicide to tackle the site about its repeated refusal to sign up to a key safety practice adopted by many other similar websites.

The American-owned site has 23 million active users in the UK but refuses to display an official "panic button" that links users directly to Ceop to report suspected activities by predatory paedophiles.

The police officers spoke out after the conviction of Peter Chapman for the rape and murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall.

Chapman, a convicted double rapist, posed as a young man called Peter Cartwright on Facebook and spent time grooming Ashleigh before the pair exchanged mobile phone numbers and agreed to meet. Ashleigh was raped and suffocated by Chapman, who dumped her body in a field near Sedgefield in County Durham last October.

Facebook has refused repeated requests by Ceop to include a panic button on its site. Information from the button is used to build intelligence reports on suspects which can become part of police investigations into paedophiles, rapists and violent individuals.

Ceop revealed today that nearly half of the reports received about Facebook last year involved individuals who were suspected of grooming young people on the site. But because Facebook does not have the Ceop button on its site, only one or two complaints came from Facebook itself.

Children use the button to make reports to Ceop's specialist police teams about suspected abuse, grooming and severe bullying. More than 500 such reports are received each month, four a day involve cases where children are in immediate danger. Although Bebo and MSN have adopted the button, Facebook has refused.

Gamble said: "We have been asking social networking sites for too long to do the right thing.

"Since we launched the button in 2009, we have carried out careful analysis to look at varying sites who haven't adopted our service and the trends are worrying."

Last year 267 reports were received about suspicious activity on Facebook. Almost half 43% related to cases of suspected grooming. But in 81% of cases, the individuals who felt under threat had to seek out other sites to make their reports to Ceop because Facebook has not adopted the direct link button.

"This is just not good enough," said Gamble. "Their argument for not putting our button into their environment, in my opinion, doesn't hold water."

Last year Ceop intelligence reports led to 334 people being arrested.

Jon Stoddart, the Association of Chief Police Officers's lead officer for homicide supported Gamble's call for Facebook to adopt the button. Facebook said it has yet to see any evidence that the Ceop reporting mechanism helps tackle the problem. A spokeswoman insisted the site was "one of the safest" places on the web.

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, also called on Facebook to fix the "glaring failure" to include the Ceop button.

Alan Johnson, the home secretary, said the government was looking at ways to alert authorities when convicted sex offenders were online.

"What our people in the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) agency do is go online themselves to try and lure in these people," he said.

"Whether we can get the technology to flag up when they're [sex offenders] online is something we need to look at."

Merseyside police, who should have been monitoring Chapman, today referred itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The force acted after revelations that it waited nine months before issuing a national wanted alert for Chapman, after realising last year that he had vanished from his home.

There was more controversy for Facebook today when a 27-year-old man, David Calvert, was wrongly identified as Jon Venables on Facebook, and some 2,370 people joined a group to discuss the "new identity" of one of the Bulger killers.

Calvert, originally from Liverpool, was the subject of similarly false rumours five years ago and has publicly described the hatred directed towards him, and fears for his family's safety.

Conflict sparks debate about online censorship and highlights Apple's control over software platform

The International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP) is considering making a complaint to Apple over the computer firm's request that German publisher Springer censor the naked girls on one of its iPhone apps.

Springer-owned tabloid Bild's "Shake the Bild Girl" app allows iPhone users to undress a model. Each time the user shakes the phone, the girl strips an item of her clothing. While Bild features naked women daily in its pages, Apple ruled that the girls in its iPhone app should wear bikinis.

The Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) asked FIPP last week to approach Apple over the issue. FIPP is debating the issue, but has no further comment at the moment.

The VDZ chief executive, Wolfgang Fuerstner, has warned that Apple's move might represent a move towards censorship. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel he said: "Publishers can't sell their soul just to get a few lousy pennies from Apple." Bild Digital CEO Donata Hopfen agreed: "Today they censor nipples, tomorrow editorial content."

Apple asks publishers of general interest apps to respect its US "no nipples" policy. In November, German weekly Stern's app was dropped from the App Store due to an erotic photo gallery.

When Apple approached Bild in January, the publisher censored the PDF version of the paper programmed for the iPhone.

According to Doepfner, Springer is Apple's second biggest client worldwide after Google. And Springer makes good money via Apple. The "Shake the Bild Girl" app costs 1.59 a month and can be topped up with a PDF of the printed Bild for 3.99 a month. Springer's head of public affairs, Christoph Keese, said that the iPhone apps launched Bild and its other newspaper Die Welt have sold a total of more than 100,000 units.

Apple's intervention has made it clear to publishers that they find themselves in a new role in a digital world.

When Apple announced at the end of Feburary that it would "remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store", publishers had to follow that request. It is Apple that has final control over its platform, not the publishers.

Company working with satellite provider on feature that would let users search both TV content and web videos on set-top boxes

Once again, rumours are making their rounds that Google is going to make some sort of set-top box play. The latest: the Wall Street Journal reports that the company is working with Dish Network on a new feature that would let users search both TV content and web videos on set-top boxes "using elements of Google's Android operating system".

The tie-in direct with Dish Network, a broadcast satellite service provider, makes sense, since both companies already have a close relationship on the TV, where Google TV Ads counts Dish Network as one of its primary partners.

But there are some big caveats and unknowns: It's unlikely that the service will come to market soon, since the WSJ makes a point of emphasising that the tests are limited for now to a "very small number" of Google employees.

Also, no set-top boxes that run on Android are currently on the market. But as far back as November 2007 there were rumours that Google was working to build an app platform for set-top boxes. Nothing has come of that, although that effort would presumably be related to this one in some way.

If Google did go ahead and launch some sort of "Google TV search", competitors would include Clicker, the much-hyped (and funded) online video search engine which has deals with set-top boxes like Boxee and popbox, so that users can search Clicker from their TVs.

A Google spokesman said the company does not comment on rumour or speculation.

Related stories

• Clicker Gets $11 Million For Online Video Search Engine
• Google's Android Is Moving Into The Digital Home

Video games publisher Ubisoft has apologised after thousands of players were locked out of its systems over the weekend.

PC users started reporting problems accessing some of the French company's most popular games, including best-seller Assassin's Creed 2, on Sunday afternoon. It later emerged that attackers had targeted the company's controversial anti-piracy system, causing it to break down - which in turn left thousands of people unable to play.

The chaos was so widespread because of the way that Ubisoft's copy protection system - which requires players who have bought the game to log in online and verify that they are not playing a pirated version - is designed. By flooding the anti-piracy servers with web traffic, the unknown attackers forced it to collapse and therefore locked out those players who tried to sign in.

This angered many gamers, who felt that they had been punished for buying legal copies of the company's games - which cost as much as 50.

"We've had to agree to their draconian rules in order to play their game, however Ubisoft haven't given a single thought to what happens when their servers screw up," said one disgruntled user on the company's web forums.

"[This] only penalises legitimate customers like myself who want to play your fantastic games but cannot," said another.

The company initially blamed the problems on "exceptional demand" - but in a statement on Monday, Ubisoft admitted that it had been targeted.

"Ubisoft would like to apologise to anyone who could play Assassin's Creed 2 or Silent Hunter 5 yesterday," it said. "Servers were attacked and while the servers did not go down, service was limited from 2.30pm to 9.30pm Paris time."

"Ninety-five percent of players were not affected, but a small group of players attempting to open a game session did receive denial of service errors."

The attack itself brings into question the company's decision to roll out its controversial digital rights management (DRM) to try and stop its games from being illegally copied.

Although the games themselves do not involve online play, the sign-in system is required for anybody playing titles like Assassin's Creed 2, which has sold more than 8m copies worldwide since it was release in November.

The constant tension between publishers, consumers and pirates has caused problems in the past - such as when Electronic Arts released Spore, a highly-anticipated evolutionary simulator that required online validation before it could be played. After complaints from thousands of users, the company eventually relaxed the rules.

But Ubisoft's system has caused extra irritation with players because it means that the titles cannot be used at all without a constant internet connection - a particularly drastic requirement given that the company says there are actually no cracked versions of the games in question in the wild.

The same denial of service technique employed by the Ubisoft attackers is often used by hackers and blackmailers to threaten online businesses, or by those protesting against web sites or companies.

And despite the company's assurances that only a handful of players were affected, however, it appears that the problems may not yet be over.

On Monday some users reported similar difficulties, leading the company to confirm via Twitter that "our servers are under attack again" and that "we're working on it".

Using programs that screen out online advertising is fairly popular - particularly among the sort of savvy readers who spend their time reading this blog. But how much of a problem is it for web publishers? Just ask Ars Technica, the technology news and analysis site that tried a bold experiment to show its readers the real impact of ad blocking systems... and opened up a number of issues for web users and publishers alike in the process.

Ad blocking, if you aren't familiar, is a technique used in a number of browser plug-ins that basically removes advertising from the web. Similar systems are also used to block Flash content - but basically, it looks for ads on a given web page and removes them.

That means if you're using ad or Flash blocking, instead of seeing a page like this:

You see one like this:

Now, the common argument put forward by users is that it makes their online experience better and that since they were people who would never click on adverts anyway, it doesn't make any financial difference to the site they visit.

That myth has been exploded by Ars, which ran a post yesterday called "Why ad blocking is devastating to the sites you love". Last week the site, part of the Conde Nast empire which includes magazines such as Wired, Vogue and the New Yorker, tried an experiment so that users running ad blocking software also had the content blocked. Why?

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue.

The analogy they make is to a restaurant: ad blocking users are dining for free, even if they don't think they are.

It's an interesting dilemma in a world where publishers are increasingly looking at paywalls, but users remain far from enamoured by the concept of having to pay for website subscriptions. So what do you do?

Well, ad blockers are popular online - I certainly know from the comments that plenty of you use plugins like Adblock plus. Indeed, a few weeks ago during a discussion here about the iPad, somebody in the comments asked me if I used AdBlock, and if not, why not.

I don't, not only for these reasons put forward by Ars Technica, because money made through advertising pays a good proportion of my wages and other reasons. It would be more than a little two-faced to want people to pay for my content with their attention and then effectively remove my attention from other peoples' sites. But I accept that it's an argument that isn't made enough by publishers - and that it may not brook much sympathy with you.

None of this is to say that adverts aren't often annoying, intrusive or unwanted - but it's an argument that isn't made enough by publishers, and even so it may not brook much sympathy with you.

So: is putting up with ads possible worth it to support the sites you love? Or are there other options?

Work going on in Hatfield could create robot home helps or even one day robot girlfriends and boyfriends

On a weekday morning in a Hertfordshire street, people are knocking on the door of an ordinary-looking house. Inside, a living room hosts a sofa, bookshelves, coffee tables and a TV. Through an archway, the kitchen kettle is boiling up, ready for the first of many cups of tea.

So far, so normal but there's something different about this Hatfield home: it's stuffed full of more technology than your average branch of PC World. Sprawled around its ground floor rooms are a family of robots belonging to the University of Hertfordshire's school of computer science. This is probably the UK's only robot home.

Companions

It's part of a project that began in 2005, when Kerstin Dautenhahn, professor of artificial intelligence at Hertfordshire, was working on a European-wide piece of research called Cogniron. The aim was to create a "cognitive robot companion" for humans, and the team began building and modifying the machines. When they were ready for testing, the team invited people to their lab, where they were monitored while they interacted with the robots.

"It didn't work well, because the participants didn't feel very comfortable in such an artificial context," Dautenhahn explains. She decided to take the project out of a campus setting and into the home, so the academics could investigate how robots work as personal companions in one of mankind's most natural environments. The robotics faculty first decamped from their laboratory into a local flat, but that soon became too small.

"So, in 2008, the university bought a two-storey house with a large ground floor area, so our robots and participants have a lot of space to move around," Dautenhahn says. "All the furniture makes the house look comfortable, giving research participants the feeling of visiting a friend it's not their home, but they could imagine living there."

With the testers relaxed, the robotics team could carry out a range of experiments to develop their robots' ability to work with and for humans. The projects differ depending on the particular issue the researchers are working on. In one, a person sits at a writing table, triggering a robot to fetch a pen. In another, robots try to negotiate rooms without crashing into moving humans. A further trial programmed a robot to persistently interrupt TV-watching participants to ask if they wanted a diet Coke. If the tester said no, the robot repeatedly returned to offer alternative drinks, checking what kind of robotic interruptions participants would bear.

Now Dautenhahn is working on a "proxemics system", controlling how close robots should get to people when approaching them. Earlier research found that humans felt alarmed when robots approached head-on, so the robots now approach from the side. Trials suggest that people are often happy for robots to get nearer than humans.

Humanoid

Like people, the robots vary: Dautenhahn's arsenal includes human-sized mobile machines and a humanoid, toddler-like robot called Kaspar, whose rubber face and realistic features are reminiscent of the characters of the animation film Up. Dautenhahn is using Kaspar for the Aurora project, which looks at how robots can become therapeutic toys for children with autism.

"The children generally respond very well to the robots, playing with them, and exploring their abilities and physical characteristics, for example, looking at our humanoid robots' eyes," says Dautenhahn. "Our goal is to help the children to interact and communicate with other people, so we've focused on using robots as social mediators: using a robot that encourages an autistic child to engage in interaction." That, Dautenhahn says, is the ultimate target of all her social work on robots: she aims to develop machines that help people.

"It's not about replacing people, it is about allowing robots to provide help in their homes. That's especially important for elderly people our work could allow them to stay in their own homes for longer. Robots can also help people to recover from injury, helping in their daily lives to allow them more independence and freedom."

To that end, the research team busily records all the robot-human interaction in the Hatfield house, with the academics watching participants from a small control room on the ground floor. The tapes, plus the surveys the participants complete about their experience with the robots and their personal background, help the team work out how best to improve the robots and make them more like social animals.

Although other researchers, mainly in Japan, focus on robotic engineering, the Hertfordshire work is distinctive in its focus on how robots can adapt for social behaviour. Dautenhahn now has a team of 20 working with her, including PhD students, research assistants and post-doctoral students, with backgrounds ranging from robotics and engineering to psychology and computer science.

She thinks companion robots, with realistic human-like features and intelligent functions that allow them to speak and understand speech will be available within 100 years. She also expects robot girlfriends and boyfriends to be creatable, but worries of "a danger that people will then find it too hard to have real relationships, when it's so much easier to have a robot that can be switched off when making annoying comments, and replaced so easily without arguments".

In her own home, however, Dautenhahn gets a break from her metallic friends. "My house isn't suitable for useful robots like robotic lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners," she admits. "They can't cope well with rooms cluttered with children's toys and unusually shaped and uneven gardens, like mine."

And as for the worry that robots will take over the world, Dautenhahn thinks we can relax. "The more you learn about robots, the more you appreciate what biological creatures, we and our fellow animals and other living organisms, achieve so easily. Basic issues of finding food, surviving, developing from a baby into an adult, or walking, talking, collaborating and negotiating with others are easy for us, but not for machines."

The latest version of Final Fantasy, now in its 23rd year, has garnered rave reviews and equally eager followers

Final Fantasy 13 review

Hundreds of UK gamers, many dressed as wizards and warriors, are expected in London tonight for the European launch of Final Fantasy XIII.

Fans at HMV's Oxford Street store will be the first to get their hands on the latest instalment in the long-running, Japanese role-playing game franchise, which has sold more than 92m copies worldwide since its release in 1987.

The Japanese release of the new game in December saw eager gamers snap up more than 1m copies in the first 24 hours.

Final Fantasy XIII became the first title on Sony's PlayStation 3 the laggard in overall sales to Microsoft's XBox 360 and Nintendo's Wii to sell more than 1m copies in Japan. Square Enix, the game's creator, said then it hoped to sell at least 2m copies in the country.

The latest chapter promises improved graphics and a reworked battle system for complex chains of attacks. The Guardian's review gives it a rare five stars.

The first 50 gamers to run the risk of ridicule on the tube and attend the launch in costume will win a free Final Fantasy XIII soundtrack, which includes Leona Lewis's song My Hands from her second album, Echo.

The DJ and TV presenter Alex Zane will host the event and Yoshinori Kitase, Final Fantasy's producer, is flying in from Japan to sign copies and meet the series' dedicated fans.

Game launches are beginning to rival film premieres. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold 5m copies worldwide on its opening day, making it the biggest entertainment launch in history.

Sales of Final Fantasy XIII are expected to push total sales for the series over the 100m milestone.

Advert suggests Apple wants tablet computer to go mainstream

Apple ran its first TV ad for the iPad during last night's Oscars coverage, while the company's founder, Steve Jobs, was spotted at the event. But while past campaigns won viewers over with their creative inspiration, this time Apple's ad seemed rather basic.

The ad positions the iPad as a device for private entertainment. That's it. You see the airbrushed hands of a man at home picking up the iPad to check out videos, read the New York Times, flip through book pages, check his private mail, and so on.

Apple has aired iPhone commercials during previous Oscars as it often uses high profile TV events to advertise its products and services. Its excellent 1984 ad that launched the Macintosh computer premiered during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.

Compared with the creativity of the 1984 commercial, the new ad for the iPad is rather disappointing, but it suggests Apple wants the iPad to go mainstream. The tablet computer will go on sale on 3 April in the US for $499, and hit the stores in the UK and other international locations in late April.

Jesse Divnich of EEDAR recons this is just the beginning of a new industry power struggle...

Last week began with two staff members allegedly being escorted from their development studio by burly security guards. It ended with a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the biggest games publisher in the world.

And while gamers are frantically trying to work out what the Infinity Ward/Activision saga means for the Call of Duty and Modern Warfare brands, there are some much wider industry issues bubbling beneath the surface.

Because when studio heads Jason West and Vince Zampella filed that astoundingly vitriolic 16-page lawsuit against their former publisher, they slammed a question mark down over the nature of IP ownership in the modern videogame era. If, as West and Zampella allege, Activision granted them 'contractual rights' over the Modern Warfare brand, could they really defect and take a Modern Warfare-like title to another publisher, as news sources are indicating? And step back a little; would a multinational corporation really sign off a massively profitable franchise extension merely to appease its workers?

That seems massively unlikely, but the battle over the future of Infinity Ward and of the Call of Duty series is going to be long and messy, and it will have ramifications. "Whatever the outcome, this will be an event that will shape the developer/publisher relationship forever," says Jesse Divnich a leading US industry analyst and vice president of research firm EEDAR. Here's why...

"The developer/publisher relationship has always been complex," continues Divnich. "But it is not uncommon to see publishers give their developers a certain amount of freedom and creative control. It is the price publishers pay for retaining top talent.

"Take-Two did something similar last year by giving the heads of Rockstar additional creative control and nearly complete freedom to produce whatever they wanted. The jury is still out on whether or not this proved to be a financially fruitful move, I'd argue it was."

It's the exact nature of this creative control that's at the core of the Infinity Ward debacle. What the lawsuit seems to imply is that West and Zampella were effectively granted power of attorney over the MW brand, that subsequent titles couldn't be developed without their approval. Conversely, the document also suggests that Infinity Ward had been given implicit permission to pull out of the Call of Duty development machine. On page eight is this paragraph:

"The MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] gives West and Zampella the right to operate Infinity Ward independently and to chose to develop new intellectual property after they completed Modern warfare 2"

So if we're to accept the situation as presented in the document, West and Zampella had the power to both control and walk away from the CoD brand. Weird. And even if only half of this is accurate - the half about Infinity Ward possibly quitting Modern Warfare - that is enough of a nightmare scenario for Activision. Infinity Ward IS Call of Duty, it IS Modern Warfare. The Treyarch titles pull in a decent revenue, but they don't do one billion dollars each. So maybe a carrot was dangled to keep West and Zampella onboard. It's just they tried to take a bigger bite than Activision expected...

"It is a difficult undertaking to employ those who constantly think outside the box," says Divnich. "They can be very unstable. I am not criticising the creatives, I am instead saying that you cannot take outside-of-the-box thinkers and cram them into a cubicle only to have them work on repetitive projects/tasks. They'll go crazy.

"But back to the main subject, developers retaining creative control - it is no different than Hollywood actors who often retain creative control or input on the films they work on.

"In fact. I consider this event a positive for the industry. For years developers have been viewed by management as nothing more than programming monkeys with complete expendability. It is about time that we began to see some reach a 'celebrity' status to the point where their involvement on a title can impact sales."

In some ways this is already happening of course. The likes of Molyneux, Miyamoto and Will Wright can open a game in the same way as Will Smith and Tom Hanks can effectively open a movie. But the future that this lawsuit suggests is one in which the members of any successful development studio may be able to leverage significant personal power for themselves.

The thing is, that's good for them, but is it good for us? We may have seen the last of Modern Warfare in its current form, and if you're a fan, that's got to hurt. Developer power is positive, but it'll complicate things - it'll lead to more trouble like this.

Film-maker spends time on internet chat service Chatroulette all in the name of research, of course

Heard and read about Chatroulette, but a bit frightened to check it out yourself? Now you can find out about the website that allows you to video chat with strangers all over the world thanks to New York film-maker Casey Neistat.

After being introduced to it by a friend, Neistat logs on to Chatroulette. He explains what it means to get "nexted", and explores different aspects of the phenomenon.

The film-maker says that of the 90 people he clicked through at 4pm New York time on a Thursday he found 71% men, 15% women and 14% perverts, while 83% were fairly young and 17% older people. With the help of a female friend he also found out that people on Chatroulette are much more likely to talk to a woman. While 95% "nexted" Neistadt, his friend Genevieve was clicked away by only 5%.

Neistat is best known for the viral video he made with his brother in 2003 about the iPod's irreplaceable battery called The iPod's Dirty Secret. This summer, HBO will air an eight-episodes series created by Neistat, his brother Van and Tom Scott. It is called The Neistat Brothers and features short stories about the brothers' lives.

The US yesterday said it will allow export of instant messaging, web browsing and other communications technology to Cuba, Iran and Sudan, in an effort to facilitate the flow of information and promote freedom of speech.

The move by the US Treasury department comes after Iranian anti-regime protesters used Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other sites to great effect in the aftermath of the disputed June elections. In the months since, anti-regime forces have used the technology to organise demonstrations, spread news and communicate with the outside world, including western journalists largely barred from covering the protest movement.

"The issuance of these general licenses will make it easier for individuals in Iran, Sudan and Cuba to use the internet to communicate with each other, and with the outside world," deputy Treasury secretary Neal Wolin said. "[Yesterday's] actions will enable Iranian, Sudanese and Cuban citizens to exercise their most basic rights. As recent events in Iran have shown, personal internet-based communications like email, instant messaging and social networking are powerful tools. This software will foster and support the free flow of information - a basic human right - for all Iranians."

Most US trade with Iran and Cuba is barred under US sanctions. Congress is considering banning government contracts with foreign companies that sell technology which the Iranian regime can use to suppress or monitor citizens' internet use, after it was revealed Nokia, the Finnish mobile phone company, and Siemens, the Germany technology giant, had sold such technology to Tehran in 2008.

Trade body the BPI says adding digital music to broadband packages could earn extra revenue and reduce piracy

The UK music downloads market could generate up to 200m a year for internet service providers such as BSkyB and Virgin Media within three years, according to a new report.

British music industry trade body the BPI estimates that the UK's major ISPs BT, Virgin Media, BSkyB, O2, Orange and TalkTalk could make between 100m and 200m a year between them by 2013 by bundling legal download services with the broadband packages they already offer.

BSkyB launched a music download service last October, called Sky Songs. Virgin Media announced that it was planning a similar service launch last summer, although this is yet to go live.

The report, produced by research firm Ovum for the BPI, based its revenue projection range on the basis of low (6,000 consumer sign-ups a month), medium (12,000) and high (24,000) levels of uptake of new legal download services over the next three years.

To generate 100m collectively a year by 2013, ISPs would need to sign up customers at a medium rate, while a high level subscriptions could benefit the companies by up to 203m a year.

"It is increasingly clear that it isn't smart to be a 'dumb [broadband] pipe'," said the BPI chief executive, Geoff Taylor. "This report shows that the revenue potential of digital music services alone makes sound economic sense for ISPs."

The report reckons that the big ISPs could save as much as 20m a year by reducing churn the proportion of customers cancelling their subscriptions by offering such value-added services as legal downloads.

Last summer's Digital Britain report called for a joined-up approach to tackling illegal downloading involving a crackdown on persistent abusers and the offer of "carrots" of viable, legal alternatives to attract users. Pressure has mounted on ISPs to police illegal downloading and launch legal alternatives to tackle piracy.

The BPI has been lobbying against what it claims is an ISP sector reluctant to police illegal downloading and slow to offer legal alternatives. The BPI has released a string of press releases and reports that aim to crank up the pressure on ISPs.

"With the right service platform, user experience and merchandising strategy, ISPs have an opportunity to reach a greenfield digital music market that mainstream download-to-own services such as iTunes do not reach today," said Adrian Drury, principal analyst at Ovum.

Ovum has based its revenue and uptake figures on offering a 6.49 a month service offering streaming with limited downloading. The revenue forecasts do not include income from standalone music download or subscription services that already exist in the marketplace, which Ovum estimates to be about 250m.

 To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

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Government and business computers regularly targeted by hackers, says security minister

Foreign states and terrorist groups are regularly launching cyber-attacks on the UK's computer systems with the potential to cause widespread damage, according to the government's security tsar.

Lord West of Spithead, who is parliamentary under-secretary for security and counter-terrorism, told the Observer that the UK was under daily cyber attack, often from agencies working on behalf of foreign governments.

He said there had been "300 significant attacks" on the government's core computer networks in the last year and warned of chaotic scenes if one successfully targeted infrastructure such as the UK's communications systems.

The security service, MI5, has warned that tackling espionage conducted by Chinese and Russian agents is taking up an increasing amount of its time.

West declined to identify the states carrying out the cyber-attacks on UK computer systems, but it is clear that he shares the service's fears that some states are using communications systems and computer networks to seek confidential information held by government agencies and private companies in the UK.

"There is no doubt some state actors have sucked out huge amounts of intellectual copyright, designs to whole aero engines, things that have taken years and years of development," West said.

"The moment you mention a particular state, they will deny it," West added. "The problem with cyberspace is that attribution is extremely difficult. It's almost impossible to do it in terms of evidence that would be necessary in a court of law."

However, he said the UK government had sufficient intelligence to be confident that it knew who the main perpetrators were. Russia has been widely blamed for launching debilitating cyber-attacks on Estonia and Georgia. West said such actions prompted new questions.

"If I went and bombed a power station in France, that would be an act of war," he said. "If I went on to the net and took out a power station, is that an act of war? One could argue that it was."

And he warned that there might come a time when the UK would feel compelled to retaliate. "If some state sponsor keeps trying to get into your systems, probably for industrial espionage, are you going to go back into their system and bugger it up? We're all capable of doing these things. At the moment we wouldn't do that, but maybe this is where we need to have discussions."

He suggested that the UK needed to be prepared to tackle a spectrum of threats in cyberspace, including those posed by criminal gangs and terrorists. "I'm very worried they [terrorists] may start becoming cuter and try to use our connectivity to have a go at our critical infrastructure, things [that control] our services, our food [distribution] and water supply," he said. Terrorists were currently "not brilliant" at attempting this sort of attack on infrastructure, he added, but they would learn fast and "we've got to be ahead of them".

As an example of the potential effects, he talked about what would happen if time signals from global positioning system satellites were disabled. "Not a single cash machine would work, the Docklands Light Railway wouldn't work, you wouldn't be able to berth oil tankers, great chunks of our transport infrastructure would stop," West said.

He drew comparisons with ice storms in the Canadian capital, Ottawa, several years ago. "All the power went down; there were riots with people smashing into stores," he said.

The government is so concerned at the evolving threats in cyberspace that this month it launched the Office of Cyber Security, which draws on expertise from organisations such as GCHQ, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.

The OCS is engaged in planning exercises looking at warfare in 2015 and 2040. Another part of its remit will be tackling online fraud. West described the rise of "malicious" computer code as "exponential" and "mindboggling". "The more you realise the malicious elements that are out there trying things, the more horrifying it becomes," he said.

Last week Spanish investigators arrested three alleged ringleaders of the so-called "Mariposa" botnet, which had infected and controlled up to 12.7m PCs. West acknowledged that the 2012 Olympics would be a target for cyber-attacks. "People will be trying to get into the Olympics [ticketing] site to see what they can do," he said.

His comments come days after the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, warned that militant groups, foreign states and criminal organisations posed a growing threat to US security as they targeted government and private computer networks. "Apart from the terrorist threat, nation states may use the internet as a means of attack," Mueller said. "They seek our technology, our intelligence, our intellectual property, even our military weapons and strategies."

Remarks may signal change in strategy for software giant

Microsoft is still most closely associated with its desktop software (Windows, Office etc), but on Thursday CEO Steve Ballmer said Microsoft was "betting our company" on the cloud. About 70% of Microsoft employees are working on cloud-related projects right now; that figure will reach 90% within a year, he said.

Ballmer's remarks made during an address at the University of Washington may portend a change in mission for the software giant, which for years has talked about a future of software plus web-based services. Contrast that with the tagline Microsoft is now using for its cloud efforts: "We're all in."

Some highlights:

The video cliche: Ballmer starts out by asking what the cloud is and then running a video of random people being asked what the "cloud" is. It's supposed to be funny.

The "cloud" has always been a source of tension at Microsoft; Ballmer refers to Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie's famous 2006 memo, in which he said that advertising-supported services and software presented a fundamental challenge to the company's business. Ballmer says that years later "there's so much unrealized potential." (Ozzie, by the way, is in the audience).

Ballmer gives a shout out to Apple's app store, saying that the company has done "a very nice job" with it.

He notes privacy issues that emerge as people move online. There was a big "internal debate" at Microsoft when it launched the most recent version of Internet Explorer with an "in-private browsing" mode.

The opportunity for progress in search: When Ballmer searches to buy flowers online, he doesn't want to see a bunch of blue links and instead wants to immediately see where he can buy them. Also notes that when he was trying to research the U.S. healthcare debate in order to determine what society was spending (presumably on healthcare?) it wasn't easy.

The future of social and professional interactions? "The day we all agree that virtual interaction through the cloud is as good as being here".

Ballmer talks about the new version of Office coming to market in June and how it will run online as an area of "important work" at the company.

Sure browsers are important, but Ballmer says that the "devices you use to access do matter; the cloud wants smarter devices." The previous version of Windows Mobile, for instance, was designed for "voice and the legacy world." By contrast, Windows Phone 7 Series is designed for the cloud.

"The cloud fuels Microsoft and Microsoft fuels the cloud." Says 70% of employees are doing something cloud-based or cloud-inspired. That will go up to 90% in a year. "We're all in," he says. "This is the bet for our company."

Is this a change in strategy for Microsoft, which has now launched a 'Cloud' website? For several years now, Microsoft has said it believes in a future of "software plus services" but Ballmer hasn't mentioned that once.

Ballmer is asked by a student whether Microsoft is being reactive. He responds, "All companies have their mix of proactive and reactive muscle; I'm keen on increasing hit rate in terms of early and often." Yes, Microsoft is following Google in search, but he also says that Google itself wasn't first to that market.

Related stories
Microsoft's Ozzie On His Company's Web Strategy
Microsoft's Personal Reboot: Web-Centric, But Beyond "The Cloud"

Our top bloggers in the field discuss whether the success of Avatar heralds the beginning of a new wave of movie-making

Akin Ojumu
Film editor, the Observer
James Cameron's Avatar, the biggest box-office draw in history, is up for nine Oscars at tonight's Academy Awards. But how much of its success is due to the fact it was shot entirely in 3D? We talked to top bloggers to discuss what the technology could mean for the future of entertainment.

Adam Woodward
Web editor, Littlewhitelies.co.uk
Last Friday, I sat down to watch Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland in eye-smacking 3D. During the more frenzied action sequences, I was left disoriented and, moreover, frustrated at the lack of clarity. By and large, I enjoyed the film, but I found myself wishing it had been presented in good old-fashioned 2D. Watching Alice made me realise that aside from Avatar, which I'll happily admit was an iris-evaporating sensory assault that left me cooing, there are very few 3D viewings I've actually enjoyed because of the extra-dimensional "enhancement".

Jon Lyus
Content director, Heyuguys.co.uk
Following the success of Avatar, you can expect a slew of similar event films and a rush of 3D conversions in post-production. The quality of these films, and their 3D nature, will vary wildly. It will always depend on the film. Jane Austen adaptations in 3D simply will not happen and 2D films will still be on offer at your local cinema.

Matt Bochenski
Editor, Littlewhitelies.co.uk
Studios are desperate for 3D to work, as are cinemas. They feel embattled at the moment. They've seen falling DVD and ticket sales, and while their audiences aren't disappearing, they're certainly dispersing. They're determined to sell you the idea that 3D is the future, but I think audiences and film-makers are savvier than that. Almost all film-makers believe that the future of film is not with Avatar-esque blockbusters, but with more modestly budgeted genre movies that have a built-in audience and a safer return.

Akin Ojumu
Film editor, the Observer
Hollywood has tried to use 3D in the past to add an extra wow factor to the movies and it has never worked for long. The technology now is amazing, but you need film-makers of great vision to ensure it really adds something worthwhile to a movie.

Ed Barker
Editor, Unitedrant.co.uk
I live to watch football in 3D. It's called 3pm, Saturday, at Old Trafford. Football on the TV is never going to be the same shared experience as in the stadium. The noise, passion, even the smell of match day just can't be recreated on a screen. But if the depth of view I saw in Avatar can be matched with 3D football on the television, then that's definitely an upgrade. Now, where do I get the pies?

patrickvons
Guardian.co.uk comments
It took colour film two decades to permeate all genres of Hollywood movies, so why do we expect that 3D should have that same effect after a mere handful of films or chastise it for not being right for a Ken Loach piece? With noted film-makers such as Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese venturing into the third dimension it is worth taking a step back and reflecting a bit more deeply on the medium.

Jonathan Cresswell
Britishgaming.co.uk
The gaming industry is trying to follow films into 3D. Although there is a lot of talk of in-home 3D gaming, the domestic technology does not yet exist, so it's a long way off becoming mainstream, and right now it doesn't look as if it will become standard. The next five years may prove otherwise, but at the moment gaming is just trying to piggy-back off the success of 3D film.

Matt Bochenski
3D can't change cinema forever. What can change cinema is the emergence of talented film-makers who understand how to utilise this new tool to show us something we've never seen before. Right now, too many of them are using 3D to poke us in the eye rather than pierce us in the heart. Unless that changes, audiences are going to get jaded very quickly and 3D will become a phenomenally expensive sideshow.

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

Twitter passed another milestone when a person unknown posted the system's 10 billionth tweet

Overnight, Twitter flew past the 10bn tweet milestone, according to the GigaTweet site, which tracks the microblogging service. It has taken more than three years to get there. However, Twitter's rapid growth means that the next 10bn should be knocked off in 203 days.

GigaTweet, an independent project, graphs the number of tweets per hour and per day, as well as showing the grand total. Twitter also monitors its own progress and in a blog post last month announced that:

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day that's an average of 600 tweets per second.

The system is not hard to track, because Tweets are numbered. You can see tweet 9,999,999,999 by Rafaela Marques from Brazil, who may now get some unexpected attention. Sadly, you can't see the 10 billionth because it was from a user who protects his or her tweets.

Either way, this is going to lead to some very long numbers indeed, assuming Twitter survives another 10 or 20 years. It's also going to consume quite a lot of disk space if Twitter keeps all the tweets.

Twitter's numbers are, of course, still relatively small compared to the sort of traffic hitting really popular sites such as YouTube and Facebook. Windows Live Messenger runs around 10bn "tweets" per day.

Senior industry figures expect controversial measures against illegal filesharing to become law before general election

The digital economy bill will become law before Parliament is dissolved at the beginning of April ahead of a likely general election in May, senior media industry figures believe.

That will usher in controversial laws enabling rights owners to cut off or restrict internet access for users who download films and music illegally.

The bill contains measures designed to combat piracy. If it becomes law it will compel internet service providers including Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media to pass on information about persistent offenders to rights holders.

It is currently in the House of Lords and about to get its third reading, when peers get the chance to table final amendments to the legislation.

One of the most contentious parts of the controversial digital economy bill was voted down by the House of Lords 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. Instead of new powers that threatened sweeping alterations to British copyright law, the Lib Dems added a clause that 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.

After the Lords, the bill will then go the House of Commons in a fortnight's time. If it proceeds to its second reading by early April, when an election is widely expected to be called, it could enter the statute book before parliament rises.

After an election is called, the Commons and the Lords normally spend a few days passing legislation that has not finished its passage through parliament in a process known as the "wash up". At this stage the government can only get measures through with opposition support and bills, or clauses of bills, that are opposed by the Tories will almost certainly be dropped.

One senior industry source said: "The government deserves credit for pushing through a proposal that is not a votewinner. They recognise that the creative industries are a huge asset for the country."

The Conservatives have said they will torpedo the bill unless the government reverses a bid to push through "independently financed news consortia", which will make regional news to be shown on ITV1, and ministers are likely to have to drop these provisions from the bill if they want to get the rest of it on to the statute book.

To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

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?

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.

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.

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.

Doc Martin's Joe Absolom only got a computer to fit in with everyone else but he can't wait to get back to his PlayStation 3

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
It's my PlayStation 3, because the games and graphics are so good it's got proper games on it now.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
Just before my Mum and Dad arrived they're staying with me for a week. And as soon as they leave, I'm going straight back on it, baby.

What additional features would you add if you could?
It does quite a lot of stuff, but I guess I'd like to be able to play all sorts of games on it if you could play cross platforms, such as Xbox games as well but I suppose that will never happen. Also, it takes a long time to download things on it, such as a film.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
I don't think it will be I think it's got a bit of staying power, just for the fact that you can get on the internet with it.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
I know people say that using computers is easy, but I still find things hard sometimes uploading, downloading, installing software and so on.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
I had a Sega DreamCast for a bit. I didn't hate it, but you knew that it was on its way out as soon as you bought it. And the games were expensive, too.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
I would say read the manual. Don't skim read it, READ it.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
Luddite. I got a computer basically because the world has changed, not me. I would rather not deal with it, but I have to. It has made things easier, and I'm not complaining, but it's not my choice I'm falling into line.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
A laptop it's a Mac. I probably only use about 1% of its capabilities looking at breasts and reading emails.

Mac or PC, and why?
Mac, because my brother told me that they were good. And as a result, I like iTunes.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I've never downloaded a film, because I like owning a box. CDs not so much. DVDs I like owning the physical box. My last purchase was The Hurt Locker on Blu-ray.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I think butlers in general are a bad idea. You don't need a butler, man just have a small house.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
A hoverboard that would be cool. Or an iPhone that was a remote control for your TV.

Joe Absolom stars as Al Large in the TV series Doc Martin. The DVD box set of Season 4 is out now.

Just what 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.

I've lost count of the number of products that mobile phones have replaced but now they're bringing new ones into being

The march of the mobile goes on and on but it is now taking off in a new direction with goodness knows what consequences. Until recently, the mobile phone's distinguishing feature was its ability to gobble up competing products in a way that no other consumer product ever has. I used to keep a tally of all the products that could have been sold separately but which have been cannibalised by the mobile: cameras, calculators, books, video cameras, music players, satellite navigation and so on. When the list reached 60, I gave up, because the arrival of the iPhone and iPod Touch made the list of extra products grow exponentially.

Now the mobile is moving into new terrain. Having satiated its ravenous appetite for existing products, it is creating services that only exist because of its unique technology. For those who don't have one of the new smartphones boasting augmented reality say 99% of all the people on the planet it might be helpful to imagine the screen of your mobile as a radar device. When you are looking at the screen as if you are about to take a photo the "radar" (a mixture of wireless, satellite positioning and cellphone triangulation) picks up whatever data there is within whatever distance you choose. If you are looking at the screen using, say, Google's Layar, and rotating yourself 360 degrees, you might find dozens of messages left by twitterers less than a mile away, photos from websites, relevant data from the Wikipedia or whatever. One new iPhone app, Worksnug, gives you a panoramic view of all the public Wi-Fi hotspots around you: the idea is to build up a community of people working in public spaces. If you point Google's Goggles app on its new Nexus One phone at a picture of, say, the Mona Lisa on a computer it immediately recognises what it is and comes up with all sorts of relevant information. Google's SkyMap app enables you to see current patterns of stars in the sky. Owners of these smartphones in effect have a CCTV camera in their pockets, only with a far wider range than the static ones libertarians complain about. The only difference is that in this case people have (mostly) given their permission for the data they generate to be monitored, even if they are often unaware of what they have let themselves in for. We are only at the very beginning of a new era in the application of mobiles where the sky is literally the limit.

Notice I have been writing about apps for once without much mention of the iPhone. This isn't because the landscape has suddenly changed. The iPhone family is still galaxies ahead in the popularity of its apps. But the arrival of Google is suddenly a big, big threat which helps to explain why Apple is suing HTC, the manufacturer of Google's Nexus One phone, for infringement of patents. Apple's own augmented reality screen can see a huge threat from Google looming over the horizon.

Why? It is partly because Google apps are based on open source balm for the bedroom coder rather than being behind Apple's beautiful though closed wall. But it is mainly because Google controls the world's information. If data is the gold dust of the new era, then Google will own the deepest mine. If, like me, you are willingly immersed in a snowstorm of Google products from GMail to mapping and Google Earth, then a phone like the Nexus One (sold from Google's website) which has access to everything about me is both a potentially awesome product in its own right and a huge threat to my liberty if Google misuses that information. It may be of significance that my cameraphone comparison site which reached a peak of more than 21,000 views a day this week shows a far higher level of initial interest in Google's Nexus One phone than in any previous one. Apple, be warned.

Google is nicking one of the secrets of Apple's success: the more you can control, the better user experience you can give. This is very bad for individual freedom and for the openness of the web but it probably won't worry most users if it delivers a great experience: you can always change your phone every 18 months or sooner on pay-as-you go. But what if years from now Google's monopoly of search is extended to the phone itself? Or what if Nokia which has been agonisingly slow to get its apps store together but still has a claimed 37% of the global market for phones exploits its latent strength with more vertical integration? There may not be any danger to the world economy as a whole if there are a cluster of vertically integrated silos as long as one whether Apple, Google, Nokia orSamsung or HTC doesn't become as powerful as Google is in search and Microsoft in operating systems. There is a kind of underlying paradox at work: the greater the user experience, the worse the dangers of an unacceptable monopoly developing.

While on the subject of economics, the profession, distracted by the credit crunch, has a lot of work to do to understand the impact of phones on economic growth. There is evidence that the explosion of mobiles is a stimulant to GDP (gross domestic product) particularly in developing countries such as India, as a recent report funded by Vodafone showed.

But what about the huge number of products not now being purchased because they are bundled into your mobile let alone the thousands of products that come free? Since mobile devices are still falling in price in real terms, it is certain that far less is being spent on mobiles than would have been on the products they absorbed.

Of course, GDP is not necessarily affected, because not having to purchase so many different products will leave more money in our pockets to buy other things. But it is almost certainly the case that GDP has fallen compared with what would otherwise have been the case while our personal satisfaction with having so many products in a single device will have gone sharply up. The disruptive power of the mobile knows no end.

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."

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