Google 'smart TV' service offers web search and apps on television, starting with Sony products in the US

Google has launched a "smart TV" service, in conjunction with partners including Sony, that will allow viewers to search the web while watching programmes.

The service, called Google TV, will theoretically work with any TV set. However, the first products to incorporate the search capability will be developed by Sony and arrive on the US market from the autumn.

Google TV-enabled sets, which will feature an on-screen search box similar to the company's look and feel on the web, will allow people to search for web content and download applications as well as programming from across the internet.

"Over the past decade, the internet has created unprecedented opportunity for innovation and development across the world, but so far the web has largely been absent from living rooms," said Google. "Google TV expands video choice from the hundreds of channels available today through a pay TV provider to the vast storehouse of video content available through the web and streaming videos."

Partners at launch include Intel, the set-top box and peripherals company Logitech and Adobe, the maker of flash technology.

Google said it also plans to open source the Google TV platform to "help spur innovation in the industry and so that other developers can benefit from the project".

"The long-term goal is to collaborate with the entire developer community to help drive entertainment in the living room forward and to introduce the next generation of TV-watching experience," the company said.

Data protection chief defends 'proportionate' response to Street View Wi-Fi affair, as other countries plan investigations

The UK's information commissioner says he does not want to "declare war" on Google over its breach of the Data Protection Act by collecting data about home wireless networks even though Germany, Spain, France and Italy have all announced that they will investigate the company under the same European laws.

Christopher Graham, who heads the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), told a meeting on information governance in London on Thursday that it was better to act quickly to ensure that the data collected by Google was destroyed.

However, prosecutors in Hamburg have opened a criminal investigation into Google's activities over the way that it collected private data from wireless networks while its Street View photo mapping car was driving around European countries including the UK and Germany.

Google has insisted that it was trying to map the existence of the networks, which use the Wi-Fi standard, but that it accidentally left in computer code which collected actual data from unsecured networks.

German prosecutors have requested access to one of the hard drives used in the data gathering though Google has so far refused. German data protection officials have given the company until 26 May to hand over the system.

"We are absolutely at an early stage," Wilhelm Mollers, a spokesman for the Hamburg prosecutor's office, told the New York Times. "This isn't something that will be wrapped up in two or three weeks. We have to analyse whether there is reason to file criminal charges."

In German law, a conviction for illegal data-gathering carries a two-year prison sentence or a fine. Johannes Caspar, the Hamburg data protection supervisor who made the original request to Google to inspect one of the hard drives, said he met Google executives on Wednesday to discuss Street View and the improperly obtained data.

Google admitted on Friday that it collected 600GB of data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks around the world while collecting photos to Street View. The company has offered to destroy the data an offer that has been accepted by the UK and Irish regulators.

Meanwhile Spain, France and Italy are also investigating whether Google broke national privacy laws in the collection of data. The Spanish agency "will call on Google to explain whether it has captured data without the consent of citizens in Spain," it said in a statement on Wednesday, and sent a formal request urging Google "to block the data associated with wireless networks gathered in Spanish territory."

Yet although data protection laws are broadly similar throughout the EU because they implement the 1995 EU Data Protection Directive the UK's ICO has decided not to investigate the company, and remains satisfied with its decision to destroy the data relating to UK networks which it collected.

"Google contacted the ICO, and it was better to act quickly to ensure the data was destroyed than declare war," Graham said. "It was proportionate and in the public interest."

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said this week that the company "screwed up" by collecting and storing information from Wi-Fi networks while gathering data for its Street View mapping service, while the chief executive Eric Schmidt said that privacy is "paramount" but dismissed concerns about the data collection, saying that "what really matters is actual harm".

Google is coming under increasing pressure from European government agencies over the question of privacy and data protection. On 11 May officials from 30 European countries adopted a common approach under which they want Google to improve blurring techniques used to disguise images in Street View and to make faces and car numberplates harder to recognise. "The [Street View] product as such is not in breach, but more measures have to be taken to improve how images are gathered and used," Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, said at the time. The group is made up of the European Union's 27 nations, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

Switzerland's data-protection agency sued Google in November for allegedly failing to comply with proposals to make it harder to identify people and cars on Street View. That case is pending.

The German investigation, which will determine whether prosecutors bring criminal charges against Google employees, came in response to a complaint filed on Monday by Jens Ferner, a law student from Alsdorf, Germany. Ferner said he wanted to clarify German law regarding the collection of data from unsecured wireless networks.

Theresa May agrees adjournment of judicial review to consider whether Gary McKinnon is fit to be extradited to US

The extradition of the computer hacker Gary McKinnon has been put on hold after the home secretary, Theresa May, agreed to an adjournment of a judicial review that was supposed to start within days.

The move will allow May to begin formal consideration of the medical evidence to see whether McKinnon is fit to be extradited. If it is established that he cannot be allowed to go, it paves the way for a prosecution in the UK.

A Home Office spokesperson said: "The home secretary has considered the proposal from Gary McKinnon's legal team and has agreed an adjournment should be sought. An application to the court is being made today."

McKinnon's lawyer, Karen Todner, said she hoped May would make a decision on whether he was fit to be extradited in a matter of weeks.

Todner said: "The secretary of state, having recently taken office and having received further representations from the claimant's representatives, wishes to have appropriate time fully to consider the issues in the case." She said she hoped the decision was "a signal of a more compassionate and caring home secretary".

McKinnon's lawyers were granted permission for a judicial review last week having failed to win one last year into whether a decision by the former home secretary Alan Johnson to allow extradition and trial in the US breached McKinnon's human rights.

The judicial review was supposed to start next week and was virtually a last throw of the legal dice. Its adjournment allows May to cast a fresh eye on what has turned into a cause celebre, and to make a close examination of the extradition agreement between the US and the UK.

Legal experts said May's main difficulty would be to override her Home Office advisers.

"They will, perhaps, tell their minister that if she reverses the [Jacqui] Smith-Johnson decision, the Americans might take her to court for judicial review. But this is unreal: the Obama administration is unlikely to challenge, on behalf of a local state prosecutor, a decision of the new British government," Geoffrey Robertson QC wrote on the Guardian's Comment is free website, this week.

McKinnon's supporters believe the new coalition government is sympathetic to their cause as David Cameron and Nick Clegg have in the past publicly criticised plans to extradite McKinnon. Last year, Cameron said any trial should take place in the UK. He said there was "a clear argument to be made that he should answer [any questions] in a British court".

McKinnon admitted to hacking into 97 computers in the US defence department and Nasa from his London flat, and said he was looking for evidence of UFOs between 2001-2.

Despite a lengthy legal battle and strong public support for the Free Gary campaign, McKinnon has so far failed in his seven-year fight against extradition. His supporters argue that McKinnon has Asperger's syndrome and was driven only by an obsession with UFOs. The US government argues that his hacking attempts were a deliberate effort to breach American defence systems.

McKinnon's mother, Janis Sharp, called the development good news and said it was significant that the court process is now on hold.

"Overall I'm cautiously optimistic," she said. "It's a step in the right direction, but we really need to know that Gary will be staying here. Only then can we relax. In some ways this is almost the most difficult time. I've got hope for the first time and if that hope was dashed I don't know what I'd do.

"We've had this hanging over us for eight years. Some murderers get less than that. All he was doing was tapping away on a leyboard in Crouch End, being curious."

Sharp added that McKinnon was not in a good way: "He can't go out, watch anything about the case on TV. He's under the care of a psychiatrist."

The controversial case has crossed the desks of six home secretaries.

Facebook and Zynga, the company behind Farmville, have settled their dispute over game credits and entered into a five-year strategic relationship

Facebook and Zynga, the company behind games such as Farmville, have buried the hatchet, announcing a five-year strategic relationship and "shared commitment to social gaming".

The two companies have been at loggerheads over Facebook's attempt to make its virtual currency, Facebook Credits, the only one players of games made by Zynga and others can use.

Farmville, the hugely popular game where players cultivate their own farm, is free but players can buy virtual currency with real money to boost their plot.

Facebook takes a 30% commission every time its currency is used, leading Zynga which reportedly makes as much as $100m ( 70m) a year from selling virtual items such as barns to threaten to quit the social networking website.

The two companies, which did not reveal the details of the deal, said that the agreement "provides a solid foundation for both companies to continue to work together to provide millions of people with a compelling user experience for social games".

Zynga has more than 230 million users of its games and spends a huge amount as an advertiser on Facebook. The New York Post estimates that Zynga could account for 10% to 20% of Facebook's revenue, while the social networking website's 400 million-plus global users have been a huge part of why games like Farmville have taken off.

"Facebook was a pioneer in opening their platform in 2007 and in just three years tens of millions of Facebook users play our games everyday, from FarmVille and Cafe World to Treasure Isle and Mafia Wars," said Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive at Zynga.

"We are excited about Facebook's long-term commitment to social gaming and Zynga, and look forward to working with them and other platform providers to bring the best social gaming experience to users worldwide," Pincus added.

Zynga, which also has its games on websites including MySpace, MSN and Yahoo, is "testing" Facebook Credits in selected games. The company said it would expand the use of the virtual currency to more titles "in the coming months".

Join Aleks Krotoski, Charles Arthur and Jemima Kiss as they dissect the latest fracas surrounding the privacy policies of web giants Facebook and Google. How much information do they have on their users and what are the business alternatives for these companies?

The team is also joined by Professor Stephen Coleman from University of Leeds who explains exactly what it is about government websites that makes e-participation more or less likely.

Charles grills Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz on the company's search and content intentions, while Jack Schofield talks to Microsoft corporate vice-president Jeff Teper about the latest version of the company's Office software.

There's also the latest on the Apple-Adobe soap opera, and company highlights of YouTube now that it's hit its fifth year.

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All formats; 39.99; cert 16+; Ubisoft

Now that we've become used to the concept of the franchise reboot, Ubisoft has thrown a curveball with what can best be described as a deboot. 2008's unsubtitled Prince of Persia was a reboot, adding a female djinn who saved you from ever dying and a complex fighting mechanic; The Forgotten Sands dumps both and returns to the PoP format of yore.

This time around, the nameless Prince, visiting his brother Malik's city, walks into a full-scale invasion, thwarted when Malik releases King Solomon's zombie army, which then proceeds to swamp the city, while Malik becomes possessed by their demon-leader. Cue classic Prince of Persia platform-style action: the Prince can run along and up walls, swing from poles, slide down banners using his knife as a brake and so on, which is just as well since he must get to countless seemingly inaccessible places.

Mechanical puzzles abound, most of which are very good indeed (that is, challenging but not baffling), the level design and graphics (at least on the next-gen consoles) are simply stunning. The Prince's swordfighting has been dumbed down since his last outing, but he still has some nifty moves and the more enemies he kills, the more special attacks and upgrades he gains.

As the game progresses, the gameplay cleverly acquires extra dimensions, with the Prince becoming able to freeze water (turning jets into poles on which he can swing), leap great distances using enemies or vultures as a sort of magnet, and rebuild missing bits of the environment. The classic Prince of Persia blades, spiked poles and traps are present and correct, leaving you thankful that the Prince, as ever, can rewind a period of time (using the energy that his special attacks also consume).

Disappointingly, the boss-battles are too easy and consequently utterly lame, and you don't have to use much strategy when fighting, although there are enemies which summon extra zombies (so must be dealt with first). The storyline is a bit flat, and the Prince somewhat lacking in personality, but the focus of the game death-defying athleticism which out-Laras Lara Croft is so well executed that you feel inclined to gloss over such flaws. It also bucks the trend towards short single-player experiences, which is just as well since it has no multiplayer element.

With no credible new Tomb Raider instalment on the horizon, The Forgotten Sands provides action-adventure game fans with the fix they will have been craving. It's a judicious mix of the inventive and the familiar.

Rating: 4/5

Scores of zombie accounts on the social network are being used to try to install a banking and keylogging Trojan - and many have fallen victim already

A malware attack is being spread via Twitter using "zombie" accounts to push a site which claims to link to a fun video.

Using the tagline "haha this is the funniest video ive EVER SEEN!", and a wide variety of Twitter hashtags, the website instead uses a Java exploit to drop a keylogger program and a banking Trojan (which will search your hard drive for any banking details and watch when you log in to online banking sites) on Windows computers that visit it.

The large number of accounts are being used to try to push the link onto trend-mapping sites that show popular links on Twitter.

F-Secure spotted the emergence of the threat today, and explained how it works. And it had a suggestion for how to avoid the problem: "Lesson of the day is probably this: do you really need Java in your browser?" asks the company. "Seriously, do you? If not, get rid of it."

The breadth of the attack indicates that the linked problems for Twitter - that it doesn't seek any authentication of accounts beyond an email - and URL shorteners, which can make it hard for people to know where they are going mean that users of these services have to be cautious when using Windows systems.

Bit.ly has been alerted to the threat from the link; presently its statistics indicate that there have been more than 1,630 clicks on the link - each of which means an infected computer and someone whose banking details are therefore at risk, and whose computer is a potential spam generator and botnet member.

If you have clicked on the link, you should immediately take your machine offline and scan it with an antivirus system.

If you need to check the final destination for a bit.ly URL, it's easy with bit.ly links: add a + to the link you're offered (eg http://bit.ly/b6Z3BC+, which shows the statistics for the URL for the dangerous site).

Other URL-shortening services can make it harder to check where you're being sent. Tinyurl offers a "preview" function, but it's always wise to look at any available information before continuing to a link from a source you don't completely trust.

Powerful gossip blogger to consider deal tabled by rivals Zack Taylor and Nik Richie, according to Gawker

Celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton has reportedly been offered $20m ( 14m) for his website PerezHilton.com.

Hilton, who Forbes recently named the biggest star on the web for the third year running, has been offered the deal by Hotornot.com owner Avid Life Media, according to a report on Gawker.com.

The blogger, real name Mario Lavandeira, would receive $18m upfront and another $2m following in a year, Gawker reported. The deal has been tabled by Avid Life Media in conjunction with Zack Taylor, the gossip blogger who runs ZackTaylor.ca, and Nik Richie who runs adult gossip site TheDirty.com.

According to the report a letter of intent has been submitted to Hilton's attorneys with a response pending.

If a purchase materialises, PerezHilton.com will be "operated" by Taylor and Richie which, speculates Gawker, could be used as a "sort of massive traffic-forwarding address to a new gossip site".

Avid Life Media paid $20m for Hotornot.com in 2008.

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Plans include auditing of BBC accounts and rapid roll-out of superfast broadband

Culture, Olympics, media and sport

We will maintain the independence of the BBC, and give the National Audit Office full access to the BBC's accounts to ensure transparency

We will introduce measures to ensure the rapid roll-out of superfast broadband access across the country. We will ensure that BT and other infrastructure providers allow the use of their assets to introduce superfast broadband in remote areas at the same time as in more populated areas. If necessary, we will consider using part of the TV licence fee that is supporting digital switchover to fund broadband in areas that the market alone will not reach

Communities and local government

We will impose tougher rules to stop unfair competition by local authority newspapers

We will enable partnerships between local newspapers, radio and TV stations to promote a strong and diverse local media industry

Civil liberties

We will extend the scope of the Freedom of Information Act to provide greater transparency

We will review libel laws to protect freedom of speech

We will end the storage of internet and email records without good reason

Families and children

We will crack down on irresponsible advertising and marketing, especially to children. We will also take steps to tackle the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood

The Guardian today introduced the second phase of its Open Platform initiative, expanding the content-sharing service to commercial partners.

A comprehensive set of developer tools and resources, the commercial launch of Open Platform makes Guardian content available for advertisers and brands to tailor to specific online campaigns.

Open Platform provides a content application programming interface, or API, that makes Guardian content searchable and downloadable for use in external applications. A second resource is the Data Store statistics directory - detailed data curated by Guardian editors.

Launch partner Enjoy England used Open platform to build an interactive map of England plotting specially commissioned articles on places of interest alongside tips and photo uploads from readers.

Part of a wider campaign for Enjoy England, the map features Guardian content but could be published anywhere on the web, according to the plans of the campaign.

Access to the service is based on three levels: keyless, where headlines and basic data can be used without registration; approved, which allows full article content to be published; and bespoke, a customised service for licensing content and developing rich applications.

The first two allow partners to keep any revenue earned, while the bespoke service offers various revenue sharing deals through sponsorship, licensing and other commercial formats.

Guardian News and Media's consumer media director Adam Freeman said the service benefitted partners by providing access to a global audience of 33 million users each month, while offering an incentive of 50,000 in media spend to the next partner that spends more than 100,000.

"The commercial launch of the Guardian's Open Platform marks a unique and pivotal step forward for the online publishing landscape, and a new area of development for advertisers," he said.

"Not only will GNM's award-winning journalism and online content be able to reach new audiences, but other online publishers and brands will be able to use our content to develop more compelling digital campaigns, products and services.

The Guardian claims that Open Platform, which launched in beta last year, is a first for the newspaper industry. More than 2,000 developers have registered since the launch, creating more than 200 applications and products.

Today's launch is followed by a 24-hour developer challenge, sponsored by Amazon Web Services.

Scientists in Japan filmed the maiden flight of their lifesized mechanical butterfly

The swallowtail butterfly has exceptionally large wings relative to its body mass, a feature that makes its in-flight movements unique.

This scale model, which copies the shape of the swallowtail's wings and the thin veins and membranes that cover them, reveals that the insect achieves forward motion with simple flapping movements. Other butterflies have different flight characteristics.

The mechanical butterfly was built by Hiroto Tanaka and Isao Shimoyama at the University of Tokyo and is reported in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

Series including South Park, Fawlty Towers and Planet Earth available on online '30-day rental' model

SeeSaw, the video-on-demand website born from the ashes of the failed Project Kangaroo, has launched a paid-for service with 1,000 hours of programming from 99p per episode up to 17.99 for a series.

The VoD operator, which is owned by Arqiva, officially launched in February offering 3,000 hours of free programming including Home and Away, Neighbours, Hollyoaks, Skins, Kingdom and Doc Martin. This programming will remain free.

SeeSaw has today unveiled 1,000 hours of new content as part of its subscription offering, including new deals with Comedy Central for programmes including South Park and MTV for shows such as The Hills and Laguna Beach.

The paid-for content also includes new BBC Worldwide shows such as Fawlty Towers, Planet Earth, Spooks, Top Gear, the Royle Family, Gavin & Stacey, I'm Alan Partridge and Only Fools and Horses. It is also thought that a deal has been struck with Disney to allow users to rent programming including Lost and Ugly Betty.

The company has launched a rental model that will allow single programmes to be rented for up to 30 days with 48 hours for viewing to be completed once a show has started to be watched. For whole series, viewers will have 90 days rental and 48 hours to complete the viewing of each episode.

Charges are between 99p and 1.19 per episode. For a series, prices will vary widely from 3.99 to 17.99 depending on the number of episodes in the series and how recently the programme has aired on TV.

The charging structure, and programming that users will have to pay for, is broadly similar to the regimes run by rival services such as Channel Five's Demand Five.

SeeSaw, which aims to be a "one-stop shop" for online TV programming, is planning to increase the amount of content to 5,000 hours and is already looking at widening its distribution beyond PCs.

Arqiva is one of the partners in Project Canvas, the joint venture to bring VoD content to digital viewers with Freeview and Freesat, which the Office of Fair Trading yesterday cleared of requiring a competition investigation.

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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Next attack could come down fibre optic cable, warn experts
Russia seen as potential partner in missile defence against Iran

The world's most powerful military alliance is increasingly vulnerable to attack by unconventional weapons and cyberwarfare in particular, Nato governments were warned today.

"The next significant attack on the alliance may well come down a fibre optic cable", according to a draft new Nato "strategic concept". There are unacceptable "serious gaps" in Nato's cyber defences, it warns.

The warnings are contained in a report by a group of high-level experts chaired by Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state. They will provide the basis for an agreement due to be signed by Nato leaders at a summit in Lisbon in November.

Senior Nato military officials and diplomats say they are concerned about the lack of co-ordinated planning against cyber attacks. They are wrestling with the prospect of member states asking for help under article five of the Nato treaty, originally designed to provide mutual assistance to an ally faced with a conventional military attack.

Asked whether a cyber attack or the cutting off of energy supplies also cited in the report would in future be considered a military attack, the paper dodges the issue by stating that whether Nato's article five would be triggered would depend on "the nature, source, scope, and other aspects of the particular security challenge". Article five was invoked for the first, and so far only, time after the September 2001 attacks on the US. Three years ago, Estonia appealed to its Nato and EU partners for help against cyber attacks it linked to Russia.

"Already, cyber attacks against Nato systems occur frequently, but most often below the threshold of political concern," says the Albright report. "However, the risk of a large-scale attack on Nato's command and control systems or energy grids could readily warrant consultations ... and could possibly lead to collective defence measures under article 5."

Effective cyber defence, it continues, "requires the means to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from attacks".

The most probable threats to Nato allies in the coming decade were unconventional, more volatile, and less predictable, according to the report. Three stand out, it says an attack by ballistic missiles from a rogue state, strikes by international terrorist groups, and cyber assaults of varying degrees of severity.

Other threats that pose a risk include disruptions to energy and maritime supply lines, the harmful consequences of global climate change, and financial crisis.

The report also recommended that Nato's new strategic concept should endorse "constructive re-engagement" with Russia, which should be embraced as a potential partner in a missile defence system directed principally at Iran. Nato must also win the war in Afghanistan and assure the security of its 28 members.

The report distances itself from some countries, notably those from eastern Europe, which enthusiastically backed Nato membership for Ukraine and Georgia, a prospect strongly opposed by Russia. Although the report reiterates Nato's "open door" policy, it says only that the allies "should make regular use of the Nato-Ukraine and Nato-Georgia commissions to discuss mutual security concerns and to foster practical co-operation".

It also states that "as long as nuclear weapons remain a reality in international relations, the alliance should retain a nuclear component to its deterrent strategy at the minimum level required by the prevailing security environment".

In a reference to US tactical nuclear weapons based in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey, it says: "Under current security conditions, the retention of some US forward-deployed systems on European soil reinforces the principle of extended nuclear deterrence and collective defence."

Oscar-winning film director Scott Hicks wishes that he could use his iPhone when travelling to foreign lands

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
My favourite is my Gator which, if you're not familiar with it, is a six-wheel independent transmission all-terrain vehicle that I use at my vineyard. It has a light footprint, huge fat tyres, and it's endless fun. In springtime, we're dogged with kangaroos which come out of the bush and nibble the new vine shoots. Because we don't want to shoot them, I get my Gator out and go up and down the rows chasing kangaroos. There's no more contemplative experience than watching kangaroos bouncing along in front of you.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
I used it last weekend when my family came up camping at the vineyard. I took my grandsons for a spin.

What additional features would you add if you could?
I would put on a klaxon horn that did a fanfare. I think that would be quite a feature. Something really grand announcing your presence. That would teach the roos a lesson.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
Absolutely not. It's now 10 years old and it's as good as the day I bought it. Barring disaster, I think it'll still be going strong.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
Built-in obsolescence. The minute you buy something, it's already out of date. With most hi-tech products, it's all built-in. You just know that with the iPad they already know what the better ones are going to be like. But they have to sell it in layers.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
Beyond a potato peeler? I've got to admit, I'm struggling with my iPhone. It's a glorious thing, but because I travel a lot I've found it very difficult in the US with the network restrictions on it. It's locked into a telephone company. That's been a real shame; the idea of getting it was getting something that would work wherever I go, but the US is a huge stumbling block to that.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
You have to have my eldest son at your beck and call. I pay him a retainer because he's a technological genius. He can troubleshoot me wherever I am, take over my computer with terrifying software, and I just sit and watch things moving on my own desktop.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
A born-again luddite. I'm definitely not a nerd. I'm competent with what I need to do, for the most part, but I do find myself hankering for simpler technologies.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
Apart from a car, I guess it would be two Leica 35mm cameras. I expect someday my grandchildren will be using them. I love the old range-finding focus technology: the images are stunning.

Mac or PC, and why?
It can only be Mac. Otherwise I'd be completely in the dark. Macs help you to blunder your way around. The great bugbear with modern tech is that usually the instructions are inside the actual thing. There's no manual any more. You have to be able to use the thing in order to find out how to use it. It's very frustrating.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I do download, but I'm one of that dying breed that has to own the physical object too. Funnily enough, the last CD I bought was the soundtrack to [my 2009 film] The Boys Are Back. My youngest son's band is on it, and I wanted to get that track to somebody.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I think if it was modelled on Stephen Fry's Jeeves, with the voice, that could work. My wife for my birthday gave me a clock which wakes you up with the Jeeves character in those dulcet tones laced ever so slightly with contempt. A whole robot ... as long as you could turn it off.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I need a Tardis. Something I could just step into and be somewhere else. Enough of all this travel. Just a Tardis. That would be fantastic.

The Boys Are Back, directed by Scott Hicks, is out on DVD on Monday

It's better to stop surveillance control because it is the people who really want to be free

For 10 years I've been part of what the record and film industry invariably call the "information wants to be free" crowd. In all that time, I've never heard anyone apart from an entertainment executive use that timeworn cliche.

"Information wants to be free" (IWTBF hereafter) is half of Stewart Brand's famous aphorism, first uttered at the Hackers Conference in Marin County, California (where else?), in 1984: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

This is a chunky, chewy little koan, and as these go, it's an elegant statement of the main contradiction of life in the "information age". It means, fundamentally, that the increase in information's role as an accelerant and source of value is accompanied by a paradoxical increase in the cost of preventing the spread of information. That is, the more IT you have, the more IT generates value, and the more information becomes the centre of your world. But the more IT (and IT expertise) you have, the easier it is for information to spread and escape any proprietary barrier. As an oracular utterance predicting the next 40 years' worth of policy, business and political fights, you can hardly do better.

But it's time for it to die.

It's time for IWTBF to die because it's become the easiest, laziest straw man for Hollywood's authoritarian bullies to throw up as a justification for the monotonic increase of surveillance, control, and censorship in our networks and tools. I can imagine them saying: "These people only want network freedom because they believe that 'information wants to be free'. They pretend to be concerned about freedom, but the only 'free' they care about is 'free of charge.'"

But this is just wrong. "Information wants to be free" has the same relationship to the digital rights movement that "kill whitey" has to the racial equality movement: a thoughtless caricature that replaces a nuanced, principled stand with a cartoon character. Calling IWTBF the ideological basis of the movement is like characterising bra burning as the primary preoccupation of feminists (in reality, the number of bras burned by feminists in the history of the struggle for gender equality appears to be zero, or as close to it as makes no difference).

So what do digital rights activists want, if not "free information?"

They want open access to the data and media produced at public expense, because this makes better science, better knowledge, and better culture and because they already paid for it with their tax and licence fees.

They want to be able to quote, cite and reference earlier works because this is fundamental to all critical discourse.

They want to be able to build on earlier creative works in order to create new, original works because this is the basis of all creativity, and every work they wish to make fragmentary or inspirational use of was, in turn, compiled from the works that went before it.

They want to be able to use the network and their computers without mandatory surveillance and spyware installed under the rubric of "stopping piracy" because censorship and surveillance are themselves corrosive to free thought, intellectual curiosity and an open and fair society.

They want their networks to be free from greedy corporate tampering by telecom giants that wish to sell access to their customers to entertainment congloms, because when you pay for a network connection, you're paying to have the bits you want delivered to you as fast as possible, even if the providers of those bits don't want to bribe your ISP.

They want the freedom to build and use tools that allow for the sharing of information and the creation of communities because this is the key to all collaboration and collective action even if some minority of users of these tools use them to take pop songs without paying.

IWTBF has an elegant compactness and a mischievous play on the double-meaning of "free," but it does more harm than good these days.

Better to say, "The internet wants to be free."

Or, more simply: "People want to be free."

A new data point about the state of YouTube, which has a fondness for using anniversaries to release them. On the eve of its fifth birthday, the site says in a celebratory blog post that it is now getting more than two billion views a day. That's up from the one billion-plus daily views YouTube said it was getting back in October, when it was marking three years in Google's fold.

No mention among the cheering, of course, of the $1 billion Viacom lawsuit, which has led to some less than pretty revelations about how the site may have attained some of its early growth - or whether YouTube is actually profitable yet. Some analysts have said however that YouTube could start contributing to Google's bottom line this year.

Nikon's new Coolpix digital camera looks smart and is easy to use, but it produces mixed results

Nikon's new Coolpix S3000 is a lovely little camera, very easy to use, and reasonably priced at 109.99 or less. I liked it a lot, until it came to viewing the pictures. The results were mixed, but disappointing compared with the two Nikon digital cameras I actually own an older, bulkier Coolpix 5600 and a D40 DSLR.

The Coolpix S3000 follows the style established by Canon's Digital Ixus line, the Pentax Optio, and earlier Nikons such as the Coolpix S220. In other words, it's thin and flat when you carry it around, but the lens comes out when you turn it on.

The S3000 looks just last year's S220, but provides a moderate advance in specification. You get a 4x optical zoom instead of a 3x zoom, a 2.7in LCD screen instead of 2.5in, and 12 megapixels instead of 10. Both cameras include Nikon's Smart Portrait software. This offers face-priority focusing, will take the shot when the subject smiles, and is "blink proof" it takes two images and automatically saves the one with the eyes open. It also has a bright focusing light on the front and, unlike many small cameras, doesn't seem to produce a "red eye" effect with flash.

The zoom covers 27mm to 108mm, in terms equivalent to a 35mm camera, so you get a usable wide-angle. However, I found it almost impossible to frame pictures precisely. You can push a little lever to make the motorised lens zoom in or out, but you can't make it stop where you want it.

I also missed having an optical viewfinder. Using the LCD in sunlight, it can be hard to see exactly what's in the frame, and you can't keep the camera still by holding it against your face. I wasn't happy with the sharpness of some pictures either because the focusing wasn't quite right (sometimes it was a long way off), or I moved the camera slightly (despite the built-in "electronic vibration reduction"), or the sensor/software combination didn't resolve enough detail. (The S3000's 1/2.3 sensor is small 11mm in diameter but respectable by compact camera standards.)

It didn't help that the S3000 tended to overexpose, leading to a loss of highlight detail and a corresponding lack of colour saturation. But flash shots showed the lens was capable of producing sharp pictures, and pictures taken in slightly overcast conditions showed good colour.

To be fair, it's very easy to use exposure compensation on this camera, and you can set an option for Vivid Color instead of Standard Color. But it's a point-and-shoot camera, and I suspect few users will experiment with the menu options, even if they know what's where.

The S3000 comes with a small removable lithium-ion battery, which is charged inside the camera via a USB cable that fits into a mains plug (supplied) or into a computer. Nikon reckons a charge should provide about 220 shots. If you want to recharge a battery outside the camera, you can buy a separate MH-63 charger.

The price does not include a slipcase or an SD card for photos, but the S3000 has enough internal memory for about a dozen photos at the maximum resolution of 4,000 x 3,000 pixels. These 12MP photos typically take up 2.5-3.0MB each, which is twice as much as snaps taken with my 6MP (3,000 x 2,000 pixels) Nikon D40, but in this case, bigger isn't better.

Pros: Well made; very easy to use; 4x glass lens starts at 27mm wide-angle; good results with flash; available in different colours; reasonably priced.

Cons: Picture quality can be disappointing; no optical viewfinder; no fine control over zooming; SD card costs extra.

Nikon.com

Hard data

CCD sensor size: 1/2.3in (6.16 x 4.62mm; 0.28cm )

Effective pixels: 12m Pixel density: 42MP/cm

Maximum resolution: 4000 x 3000 pixels

Lower resolution options: 3968 x 2232 (16:9 widescreen), 3264 x 2448, 2592 x 1944, 2048 x 1536, 1024 x 768, 640 x 480 Movie formats: 640 x 480, 320 x 240 ISO range: 80-1600 (auto); 80-3200 (manual)

Accessories included: USB/charging cable with mains plug; audio-video cable; software on CD-Rom Dimensions: 94 x 56 x 19 mm (3.8 x 2.2 x 0.8 inches)

Weight (with battery): 116g (4.1 oz)

Popular peer-to-peer platform found liable for infringing copyright of America's four major labels

US record labels have claimed another victory in their war against filesharing, winning a major court case against LimeWire. On Tuesday, a federal court ruled against the popular peer-to-peer platform, finding LimeWire's owners personally liable for copyright infringement.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represents the four major US labels, brought the case against LimeWire in August 2006. Almost four years later, the service is still perhaps the most popular software for exchanging files allowing users to search each other's music libraries for songs they would like to share. According to CNET, LimeWire has been downloaded more than 200m times including 340,000 downloads last week. A survey by the NDP Group found that LimeWire was used by 58% of people who have downloaded music from a peer-to-peer network in the last year.

Like Napster (and AIMster and Grokster) before them, LimeWire's owners denied they were responsible for the legality of files shared by their users. Unlike Napster, LimeWire does not host any shared files on their own servers the material is distributed among users. But Judge Kimba Wood was not convinced by the argument. "The evidence demonstrates that [LimeWire] optimised [their] features to ensure that users [could] download digital recordings, the majority of which are protected by copyright," she said.. "[Lime Wire] assisted users in committing infringement."

In a summary judgment, Wood ruled that LimeWire founder Mark Gorton, as well as parent company Lime Group, had committed copyright infringement, engaged in unfair competition, and induced copyright infringement. By finding Gorton personally responsible, Wood's decision will be particularly terrifying to other "edge case" entrepreneurs. In other words, Facebook's owners had better make sure people don't start uploading illegal MP3s.

The court has not yet determined the issue of monetary damages, though the RIAA has claimed they are owed up to $150,000 for every infringing work. With millions of files in question, that number could become huge. "[LimeWire] thumbed its nose at the law and creators," the RIAA's chairman said. Labels will now likely move for an injunction against LimeWire, forcing the service to go offline.

According to George Searle, chief executive of LimeWire, the company "remains committed to developing innovative products and services for the end-user and to working with the entire music industry, including the major labels, to achieve this mission".

Machine with flashing eyes and plastic pigtails presides over wedding of Kokoro employee and robotics professor

Almost everyone stood when the bride walked down the aisle in her white gown, but not the wedding conductor, because she was bolted to her chair.

The nuptials at this ceremony were led by I-Fairy, a 4ft seated robot with flashing eyes and plastic pigtails. The wedding today was the first to be led by a robot, according to the manufacturer, Kokoro.

"Please lift the bride's veil," the robot said in a tinny voice, waving its arms in the air as the newlyweds kissed in front of about 50 guests.

The ceremony took place at a restaurant in Hibiya Park, central Tokyo. The I-Fairy wore a wreath of flowers, and wires led out from beneath it to a black curtain nearby where a man crouched and clicked commands into a computer.

Japan has one of the most advanced robotics industries in the world, with the government actively supporting the field for future growth. Industrial models in factories are now standard, and recently companies have been making a push to inject robots into everyday life.

Honda, the car manufacturer involved in artificial intelligence research, already makes a walking child-shaped robot, and other firms have developed them to entertain the elderly or play baseball.

Kokoro, whose corporate goal is to "touch the hearts of the people", makes giant dinosaur robots for exhibitions and lifelike android models that can smile and laugh.

The company is a subsidiary of Sanrio, the 50-year-old "small gift, big smile" company, which owns the rights to Hello Kitty and other Japanese characters.

Today's bride, Satoko Inoue, 36, who works at Kokoro, said: "This was a lot of fun. I think that Japanese have a strong sense that robots are our friends. Those in the robot industry mostly understand this, but people mainly want robots near them that serve some purpose."

Her new husband, Tomohiro Shibata, a 42-year-old professor of robotics at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in central Japan, said: "It would be nice if the robot was a bit more clever, but she is very good at expressing herself."

The I-Fairy sells for about 6.3 million yen ( 46,000), and three are in use in Singapore, the US and Japan, according to a company spokeswoman, Kayako Kido.

The robot has 18 degrees of motion in its arms, and mainly repeats preprogrammed movements and sounds.

Exchange 2010 offers an improved user experience, but it still doesn't offer full functionality in all browsers

Running Exchange and thinking about upgrading to 2010? There's a myriad of new stuff in the latest version of Microsoft's enterprise mail and calendar app including greater mailbox resilience, higher availability and simplified compliance.

However, what's really improved is the user experience. You don't have to search very hard to find that one of the biggest grumbles about Exchange has been the pitiful cross-browser support for its webmail client, Outlook Web Access (OWA). With full drag-and-drop and right-click functionality only available in recent versions of Internet Explorer, it's been a very unattractive option for Mac users or, indeed, anyone who prefers or has to use a browser other than IE.

The biggest advance in Exchange 2010 is that finally OWA works properly in more, but not all, browsers. It offers all the functionality in Firefox on Mac or Windows, Safari for Mac and Chrome for Windows but not Safari for Windows, nor Chrome on the Mac, nor in Opera. In those cases, you'l l see the same Light client as Exchange 2007.

If you like threaded conversation views, you'll love OWA 2010 as they're on by default; and if you're syncing with a Windows Mobile device, you'll get threaded emails there, too. Fortunately, for those of us who don't like it, you can turn it off and you can specify it on or off for each folder.

For an admin, the new OWA client also lets you manage users, roles and groups under the options tab, meaning that if you're away from base you won't have to log on to the server remotely. Users too can do more for themselves via OWA, including joining public groups and wiping a device paired via ActiveSync if it's lost or stolen.

OWA can also handle voicemail and texts, and by adding Office Communications Server to your Exchange infrastructure, your users can communicate via instant messaging in the OWA client.

On the downside, the default theme for OWA 2010 is hideous a bilious yellow with two-dimensional buttons that feels like a step back from the elegant default blue theme of OWA2007. Out of the box it does have a couple of other themes, including an ugly Zune one, but for now only an admin can change the theme, and only for all users. However, SP1 a beta of which will be available in June promises to restore the choice of themes to individual users.

Under the hood, Exchange 2010 is only 64bit and demands Windows Server 2008, so it's a significant upgrade if you've skipped Exchange 2007. Also, it doesn't run on Small Business Server, as Exchange 2007 does, so that's not an upgrade path for a smaller company. However, you'll spend less time nagging your users to keep their mailboxes under control as 2010 can use cheaper storage than previous versions required and also lets users have much bigger folders.

That's just scratching the surface. At the end of the day it's a big upgrade in terms of functionality, user experience and hardware requirements, and no IT admin embarks on such a move lightly. However, if you gave 2007 a miss and your hardware is creaking, now is as good a time as any to make the jump.

Pros: vastly better user experience; more self-service options for users, reducing the load on a help desk; less exacting storage requirements

Cons: Ugly and hard to change OWA default theme; requires Windows Server 2008 and 64bit hardware

Microsoft Exchange online

Oracle chief Larry Ellison says he is already turning around Sun, but can a software maker figure out the hardware world?

In the movie Iron Man 2, Larry Ellison makes a cameo appearance as a billionaire, playboy software magnate. It is a role he knows well. He is playing himself chief executive of Oracle, one of Silicon Valley's most enduring, successful and flamboyant figures.

At the age of 65, he is undertaking one of the biggest challenges of his career, and it's not playing Hamlet on Broadway. Oracle, the company Ellison founded three decades ago and built into dominant force in the software industry, is making a go at hardware with the acquisition of money-losing Sun Microsystems.

This is not entirely unlike MIT deciding to field a competitive football team, but Ellison being Ellison, he could not be less worried. "We have a wealth of technology to package into systems," said Ellison, who won the America's Cup in February. "I see no reason why we can't get this to where Sun under Oracle should be larger than Sun ever was."

In a rare interview he discussed his turnaround efforts at Sun so far, revealed plans to buy additional hardware companies and detailed new products that will launch in the near future. And he did so with his usual in-your-face style heaping all manner of abuse, for example, on Sun's previous managers.

During the 1990s, Sun prospered by selling high-end computers at top dollar to large corporations and dotcom startups. Its business peaked in 2001, then slid with the collapse of the internet boom and never recovered, though the company is still widely respected for its technological prowess and the brain power of its engineering staff.

Sun came into play in November 2008 after IBM chief executive Sam Palmisano made an overture to buy it. Oracle, which had been strictly a software maker, unexpectedly jumped in to outbid IBM by just 10c a share, paying a total of $5.6bn ( 3.8bn)in cash.

Now Ellison says he is going to rebuild Sun's hardware business by using a strategy that helped IBM prosper in the 1960s selling computer systems built with standardised bundles of hardware and software.

Plenty of skeptics doubt Ellison can pull it off. Sun lost $2.2bn in its last fiscal year as an independent company. Conventional wisdom holds that he will end up divesting the company's hardware business.

Ellison has a pretty good track record when it comes to predicting where the industry is headed. Besides innovating the wildly lucrative relational database that bears Oracle's name, Ellison was quicker than most in creating software that works with both internet technology and the widely used Linux operating system.

He also started buying up smaller software makers in 2003 when critics said his consolidation strategy was doomed to fail. It hasn't. "People have lost a lot of money second guessing Larry about IT strategy," said Dave Roux, co-founder of Silver Lake, the world's biggest private equity firm focused on technology, in which Ellison was an original investor.

"He's a very thoughtful and reasoned observer of the big tectonic forces that kind of go rippling through the industry," said Roux, who worked for Oracle before setting up Silver Lake.

Ellison has maintained his status as the leader of a powerhouse in the topsy-turvy, protean technology world. IBM, which pioneered business computers, nearly collapsed in the 1990s, but then recovered as it aggressively expanded in services and software. Ellison's close friend Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple, only to return a decade later to resurrect his company with the iPod. Meanwhile, Google has replaced Microsoft as the "ubertech company" and occasional villain.

Although his products are used by businesses only and not nearly as recognisable as Apple's Macs or Google's search engine, they've made Ellison the world's sixth-richest man, worth an estimated $28bn, according to Forbes. Oracle counts the bulk of the world's major corporations as customers, and the company's market value now tops that of Hewlett-Packard, the world's top maker of personal computers.

Ellison says he has already stopped the carnage at Sun, less than four months after the sale closed in January.

"Their management made some very bad decisions that damaged their business and allowed us to buy them for a bargain price," he told Reuters. He added that he expects profit from Sun's operations to boost Oracle's earnings in the current quarter, which ends May 31.

The integration has proceeded swiftly, says Ellison, because a protracted antitrust review in Europe gave Oracle time to draw up an exhaustive plan for resuscitating Sun. In typical Ellison fashion, he took a hands-on approach to the integration, choosing to meet directly with technical managers at Sun as often as four days a week to diagnose its problems, rather than delegating the work to underlings.

Mark Barrenechea, a former Oracle executive who used to sit in on weekly engineering meetings with Ellison and is now CEO of specialty computer maker Silicon Graphics, says this is what Ellison does best.

"He doesn't write the code. He doesn't solder resisters onto motherboards. But he understands how all the pieces fit together and how he wants the building to look," Barrenechea said.

Want to be a better street fighter? Ryan Hart answers your questions about Capcom's fighting game series...

Last week we invited you to put your Street Fighter questions and problems to European Street Fighter champion, Ryan Hart (who last week won Paddy Power's SFIV challenge). Here are his in-depth responses.

If you have any queries that haven't been covered, especially about the newly released Super Street Fighter IV, add them to the comments section, and we'll pass them on to Ryan!

"I've been playing SF since the first arcade machine came out but only recently got my hands on the top of the range arcade stick. While the Xbox pad sucks for SF I'm still having trouble getting used to the stick - do you have any tips for those making the switch? I usually play as Chun-Li, Sakura and Ryu but look forward to getting back in to using Guy and Ibuki in SSFIV"
djpray2k

When making the switch from pad to stick, getting your movement up to scratch is important, so I'd say to work on this. Use the training mode to practice your combos, this will get your fingers used to reaching for the larger buttons in their respective locations on the stick face. The more you use it, the more you'll adjust.

Try to choose a character that doesn't require complex commands frequently. Maybe start out with a charge character just to get used to the feeling of holding a stick. Then gradually advance from there. Later on, if you find you prefer the stick with some characters and the pad with others, try to look at what it is you find more comfortable on pad. If it's something that you find more demanding on the stick, use that as a way of improving your stick skills. The challenging aspects are what make it fun!

"I have a question about combos. I main as E Honda. I know his sumo head butt can be cancelled into his super Onimusou. If I am *right next* to the opponent I can usually pull this triple head butt move off. But if there is any distance between Honda and the other character I can never seem to get the timing right but I can't work out if I am being too fast or too slow! Any tips on cancelling?"
JenniferRuth

Super Onimusou? I think you mean Super Killer Head Ram? In any case, as this is a charge move, it can only be done close, as once you release the backwards charge in order to do the first sumo headbutt, you lose the charge for the super as well.

"Is there any way to make Abel a useful character instead of his usual overly slow, frustrating, French waste of space?"
timthemonkey

Yes, Abel is a very good character, but he requires patience as he does not have a projectile to fight a long distance game, and can't get in to play his close combat game easily. On the ground however, he does have a number of tools to help him get close. One of his best moves is his forward and medium kick then forward to dash, after which you have a few options. Two other moves which can help you get stuck in are his EX change of direction and his Marseilles Roll. The former can absorb one hit from an opponent and still continue moving forward, meaning if you predict a fireball, for example, you will be able to perform the EX change of direction, go through the fireball and then strike the opponent. After lots of practice this can be done on reaction.

If your opponent uses a lot of pokes from a distance, you may be able to hit his attack with a standing light kick or a crouching medium punch or crouching medium kick which you can then link into a change of direction.

Additionally his crouching hard kick has good range and can surprise opponents who are prioritising movement over a low guarding position as both cannot be done at the same time.

His best strategy is to get the opponent down and try to keep them down. With Abel, this is best done by using his Marseilles roll and his crossup game with his air medium kick. When you get the opponent down, use the roll and time it in a way that it becomes difficult for your opponent to know which side you will end up on. This makes things difficult for their defence. In the crossup game, once you land a crossup medium kick, you can go into a combo from his crouching medium punch.

If they block it, alternatively you have the tornado throw and the regular throw which isn't as demanding. A crouching light kick string will get an opponent who tries to stand guard or jump away. If they dash back then you have forward and medium which will catch some backdashes, and also a crouching medium punch into a combo will be useful here too. For anti-air, his good moves are jumping hard punch and crouching medium kick.

Lastly, don't forget that his ultra (Soulless) can be used as a long range tool to go through projectiles, and his new ultra in Super Street Fighter IV (Breathless) covers over half the screen, can be cancelled at will, can be held for delayed execution, is extremely fast and cannot be blocked. So Abel will be even stronger with this new weapon.

"Now I'm a half decent SFIV player (shut up Umboros). I can hold my own online with most people, and I've beaten the game on the hardest mode, with most characters. So why oh why can't I do the trial challenges? Even on the easy level, I can only get most characters up to the 3rd challenge. Is then any special method to these?"
JimBob78

The trials are not easy and many of these combos could take many days of practice to complete. Some combinations here are designed to challenge even the most technical of players. My advice here would be to breakdown the exact part of the combo you find most difficult and work out what you are having trouble with. Maybe even just practice this section separately until you see improvements, then go back and retry the combo all together.

"What are the best options for playing a ground game and mixing up strategies to confuse opponents? It's always tempting to jump in to start a combo on Street Fighter, but if your opponent blocks it leaves vulnerable. Getting past Ken when he's throwing fireballs usually results in a dragon punch to the face, how can you deal with these tactics and keep the opponent off guard?"
Umboros23

In Street Fighter and just about any fighting game being safe is a key factor in survival, and it must be prioritised. This fact is not really focused on, but combos are often a case of how good your reactions are. For example, if you jump over Ryu as he does a fireball it's down to your reactions whether you can capitalise on this opening and pull off your combo.

However, this also goes slightly deeper than simply jumping projectiles. Combos can also be used in block strings (which is a succession of moves that keep the opponent frozen in the block position after the first hit has been blocked). This is important as it applies pressure to the opponent, builds your super meter and helps to create openings.

Now, if you notice that one of your attacks has hit, you may be able to link this to another move and create a combo, but as mentioned earlier, it's all down to your reflexes whether or not you are fast enough to capitalise on this opening or not. This usually takes practice and gets easier with experience.

On the ground, it's important to understand your character's best tools to combat the opponent's ground tools. This is one thing that the training mode in Street Fighter IV is very good for. You can set the opponent to record and have him repeatedly perform moves you find tricky to get by. You can then playback your recording and then use your own character to see what beats the opponent's moves.

For Ken's fireball, you can simply stay back, jump over them all and none of them will hit you. Another method is to use the focus attack dash forward to go through the fireball which will give you the advantage if done with the right timing. Also depending on your character, there are a number of moves you may be able to do go through fireballs, so test these out too.

"This is more a history question but, long ago in my formative years down the local arcade, all the best players used to play with Guile for their serious matches, I even seem to remember a combo that froze the opponent, but that's by the by, anyway, these days I see very few play with Guile. Has he been deliberately weakened or is it just that everyone else has been improved?"
koolherc

In some areas Guile has stayed the same, and in others he has weakened. He is still a very good and playable character and shouldn't be underestimated in any version. In Super Street Fighter IV, he has new combos and a new ultra and is definitely stronger than in the predecessor.

By the way, Guile's handcuffs, which I believe you were referring to, was so funny. If the handcuffs were not removed before the time ran out, resetting the machine was the only way to get things back to normal. I still remember a guy walking in to the local cab station where we played, putting his 20p in, doing handcuffs on someone then walking out while everyone's credits were in the machine and no one knew how to undo the cuffs.

"With Ken's buffs in Super, are you going to be breaking him back out in tournaments or chancing out a new character?"
Owwmykneecap

Yes I will be keeping Ken in my arsenal of top characters and I will also be adding some new ones too.

"Where exactly do you look on the screen? Do you focus solely on the opponent or take in the screen as a whole?"
sunsetbeach

I focus on everything but not all the time. There are just so many factors to account for. My attention is divided and everything is broken down based on priority. For example, on Super Street Fighter IV as the clock is relatively slow, the time clock does not need to be checked regularly. However, as your opponent is moving all the time, your eyes need live updates constantly to keep up with their movements and to judge spacing, movement, etc, on the screen. The super meter of both you and your opponent is also important, as this can determine the next move or even next few moves. In some cases, I even think about what the opponent will do in a few moves once he has the super. When you are planning ahead, you need to take the health and time into account as well. But generally, as long as you keep a good eye on the main things your opponent and all gauges it should be okay.

"I was hoping to pick up Ibuki because I loved her in 3rd strike and never really found a main in SFIV. I was looking for a good way to combo after her kunai vortex; I know you can hit the c.jab (c.jab, s.jab, s.mk spinkick or whatever) but more often than not, it seems very punishable, even on hit. Any advice on getting the combo or making it safe on block? And any other general advice on someone looking to pick her up?

Also, are you planning on keeping Sagat as your main, or are you tempted by the new cast members?"
Kanped

After you land a combo with her spinkick, you have the advantage. Standing medium kick should beat most of the opponent's options bar the dragon punch or things which are invincible on startup. Another suggestion would be to end your combos with the neck breaker so that you floor the opponent and have a chance to set them up again. At least this way you won't have to feel like you're on a back foot even after landing a combo. Getting the opponent down and keeping them down is key so try out neck breaker combos and then see if that improves things.

As for Sagat, I'm in a bit of a dilemma right now. I'm picking up other characters who appear to be more fun than Sagat, but I'm not sure if I will drop him as main just yet. We will have to see at a later stage but it is possible. The new cast are very fun, different and interesting.

"What's the best strategy for fighting against Sagat online? I always meet fireball spammers and when I try and jump to get close, I'm met with a flying knee or uppercut.

Also, what type of controller do you use? Is the joystick really worth the money? I'm still on the PS3 pad."
cameroon95

When you fight against Sagat online it's important to take him out of his comfort zone, which is usually with you at the back of the screen. Try moving close to him (by blocking tiger shots then walking forward) but not right next to him: you need a range where, if he does a tiger shot, you can jump it and combo him. It's not to say that you will necessarily do that, but having that added as an extra option will make you more of a threat.

When you are both at the back of the screen, he can throw tiger shots all day and even if you jump over them you're out of range to inflict any damage, so try getting close and this extra pressure will force Sagat to change his gameplay. If he continues to spam tiger shots even up close, take advantage and jump in for a combo and take the most you can. Once you get close, Sagat will get wary of your range, he may try a jump in on you so make sure you have a solid anti-air move you can use against him. If he tries to move back to make more space then move in once again until he is in the corner with nowhere to run, then you can get the party started.

As for sticks, I'm currently using a number of option to try and find the best one, so this is to be continued. Generally, the most preferred sticks for Street Fighter IV are made by Hori and Madcatz.

"Can Ryan give us any tips about how and when to use the focus attack? I rarely if ever use it and it's clearly a major gap in my game at the moment, but I'm never sure when to whip one out. I mostly play Ken and Vega and I only ever do it as Ken to dash cancel through fireballs or cancel a bodged dragon punch. With Vega I only use it if I'm cornered and can't think of anything else to do, or to cancel a claw roll. I never actually hit anyone with it!"
BeardOfBees

People generally want to attack before being attacked on fighting games, so if you use block strings on your opponent they will want to attack you once you leave an opening here is when you can aim for a focus attack to eat up their attempted offence. When you play, keep a close eye on what your opponent uses. For example, against a shoto, if you notice that they use crouching medium sweep into fireball on the ground you can focus the crouching medium kick and then release the focus to attack them before their fireball is released. This will result as a counter hit on their attempted fireball. Try walking into their crouching medium kick fireball and go for it!

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had his passport confiscated when he returned to his native Australia last week, according to The Age.

Arriving at Melbourne, immigration staff told Assange his passport was looking worn and would be cancelled. Thirty minutes after his passport was returned to him, a police officer then searched his bags and questioned him about his computer hacking offences he committed in 1991 when he was a teenager.


Julian Assange, left, speaking at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress in January this year. Photo by andygee1 on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Despite the search, Assange was then told his passport is still classified as 'normal' on the immigration database and could therefore travel freely.

Speaking on Australia's Dateline show, Assange said he is wary of travelling in Australia, where he was born, because of information that has been published on Wikileaks.

Assange had been told that the publication of a proposed blacklist of banned sites has been referred to the Australian Federal Police, who were investigating how it was leaked and then published on Wikileaks, though AFP told the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday that the case had been dropped.

Looking at the site, it's hard to believe there are many countries where travel is not a problem. Some light reading from the front page:

CIA report into shoring up Afghan war support in Western Europe
US Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks
Cryptome.org takedown: Microsoft Global Criminal Compliance Handbook

Film studios' injunction granted by German court means that BitTorrent site has no internet connection (updated)

The Pirate Bay has (briefly) vanished beneath the internet waves again, after several Hollywood film studios won an injunction against its bandwidth provider CB3ROB via a court in Hamburg.

Update: the site is back up, though it's not clear who the carrier is: traceroute doesn't resolve, and there's nothing in the name servers to indicate who's hosting it - probably for good, injunction-related reasons.

The injunction (which Torrentfreak says was granted without an oral hearing) prohibited CB3ROB from "connecting The Pirate Bay website and its servers to the internet".

A Pirate Bay source told TorrentFreak that it is already working on a backup solution to bring the site online; the servers themselves haven't been touched (or moved) rom their well-guarded - and highly secret - location; they simply need to be routed through another provider.

That will be hard on both Pirate Bay and CB3ROB - the latter being sympathetic to the Pirate Bay's position on copyright, backing the Pirate Party in the Netherlands (here's a translation of CB3ROB's page on the Pirate Party manifesto).

The Pirate Bay's four co-founders were sentenced to a year in jail and a $3.6m fine in April 2009 after being found guilty of assisting the distribution of illegal content online. Charges against the site, which allows web users to access music, movies and TV shows without paying for them and claimed 22 million users during February, were brought by a consortium of media, film and music companies led by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

A Stockholm court found the four defendants guilty of making 33 specific files accessible for illegal sharing through The Pirate Bay, which means they will have to pay compensation to 17 different music and media companies including Sony BMG, Universal, EMI, Warner, MGM and 20th Century Fox. It is not known whether the reparations have yet been paid.

A Whois search on thepiratebay.org presently shows that it has no connection - the name servers (which provide the lookup for the domain) point recursively to thepiratebay.org, while the traceroute (to the address 194.71.107.15 - assigned to The Pirate Bay) fails at Level 3 hosting.

This is surely not the end of The Pirate Bay - but it may be forced to increasingly desperate measures to keep the site online as film companies keep pursuing it to new territories.

[Update: A note to commenters: the music and film industries ceased saying some time ago that there is a 1:1 correlation between illicit downloads and 'lost' sales. They use what's called a "substitution factor" which suggests 1 lost sale per 10 downloads. Arguably, that's high - you could argue it should be more like 1 per 100 - but please don't misattribute such things when there are published reports just a web search away.]

Apple appears to have run out of its stock of iPads for British customers, even though it will not start shipping the device this side of the Atlantic for two weeks.

The Californian company said just over a week ago that the iPad would go on sale on May 28 in the UK starting at 429 for the basic version with the top of the range 64GB device with both Wi-Fi and 3G network access costing 699. It opened up pre-orders on May 10.

But eager iPad owners visiting its website over the weekend were being warned that if they ordered an iPad now it would ship "by June 7th".

The delay is believed to have been caused by Apple running out of its initial supply of devices in just three days, with pre-orders being far higher than the company originally forecast.

Market research firm GfK NOP, whose pronouncements about the retail sector are well regarded, estimates that Apple will sell more than 2m iPads in the UK. It has carried out research that suggests around 5% of British consumers intend to buy an iPad.

Those gadgets fans who had registered for an iPad by the middle of last week are expected to receive their device on May 28, but anyone who has bought it more recently is likely to face an increasingly lengthy wait.

Apple has already delayed the launch of the iPad in the UK once, blaming "surprisingly strong" demand in the US, where it sold more than a million in the first month.

The device is already a faster seller than the iPhone in the US. It took 74 days for Apple to shift a million of its first mobile phone. It sailed past that milestone with the iPad in just 28 days.

There is also concern that shipments of the iPad could be further delayed if the cloud of ash spewing from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland causes further disruption to international flights.

Find out his attitudes to porn, and what he thinks Bob Dylan would think of Apple, the company, if he were 20 now

Steve Jobs on the cover of Time. Getting an interview with him turns out to be easier via email. Photo by kevinspencer on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Want to know Steve Jobs's thoughts on the role of the iPad, Flash, porn (yes, that word), and what Bob Dylan would think of Apple, the company, today?

Look no further than Ryan Tate's email back-and-forth with him - which shows that the chief of Apple is, if nothing else, not unwilling to indulge in some email sparring with completely random strangers. Though Ryan Tate of Gawker (for it was he) is more than just random; he's also employed by Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, which Apple doesn't like because.. oh, just read about it.

"If [Bob] Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with 'revolution'? Revolutions are about freedom", Tate wrote after seeing an iPad advert.

Three hours later, Jobs replied: "Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. [We think he means viruses and malware.] Freedom from programs that trash your battery. [We think he means Adobe's Fl*sh.] Freedom from porn. [We think he means.. er, porn.] Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin' [for younger readers: this is a Bob Dylan reference; Dylan is one of Jobs's favourite musicians], and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is."

There follow an argument about Flash, batteries, Objective-C, porn ("you might care more [about not having it] when you have kids", remarks Jobs), whether Apple has a private police force that kicked in a Gawker person's doors ("You are so misinformed," Jobs retorts. "No one kicked in any doors. You're believing a lot of erroneous blogger reports").

Jobs concludes: "Microsoft had (has) every right to enforce whatever rules for their platform that they want. If people don't like it, they can write for another platform, which some did. Or they can buy another platform, which some did.

"As for us, we're just doing what we can to try and make (and preserve) the user experience we envision. You can disagree with us, but our motives are pure."

And then a final, very Jobs-ish little parting shot:

"By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others [sic] work and belittle their motivations?"

An interesting question which we'll leave hanging. But truly, the tendency of Jobs to reply to emails from all over the place show that he's taking an intriguing approach to that chief executive/customer interaction stuff. Plus the not-sleeping thing - most of the emails were sent after midnight California time.

Hell, next you know he'll be turning up on Twitter. (Meanwhile there are plenty of blogs devoted to recording his email replies; this Tumblr one seems one of the best.

Meanwhile, if you want to email Jobs, his email is hardly a secret. (Finding it is your initiative test.) If you get an answer, do share. But think of a useful question first..

'I pulled off into an unknown backstreet and drove in that urban style first pioneered by Jack Regan in The Sweeney'

How do you test a car? One way, obviously, is to put on a helmet and take it round a racetrack at maximum speed. On the whole, I tend to avoid this approach, partly because I don't possess a helmet, and partly because I don't have access to a racetrack. So my compromise position is just to drive it as I would my own car.

Yet every now and then fate places us in situations that provide a far more severe test than any circuit could offer. Such were the circumstances on one of the first sunny days of spring this year. I had to get to the funeral of an old friend, Elspeth, on the East Sussex coast. She was a stickler for good taste, was Els, not least in cars, so I don't know what she would have made of the brightly coloured Mazda 3 Sport that I set out in.

Come to that, before the journey, I wasn't quite sure what I made of it, either. With all its various tapers and indents, it looked a bit like one of those hatchbacks that someone with too much time on their hands had customised in their backyard.

And judging by the alarmed expression of another friend, who we picked up on the way, it clearly wasn't the most appropriate vehicle for the occasion. Still, at least it would get us there.

Or so I thought. In my anxiety, I had forgotten about south London, that vast traffic jam masquerading as half a city. After sitting stationary on the Old Kent Road for 30 minutes, I realised that radical action was called for. The nifty little satnav was telling us that we were due to be 15 minutes late, so I pulled off into an unknown backstreet and drove in that urban style first pioneered by Jack Regan in The Sweeney. It was like slipping through a wormhole. For all I knew, I could have emerged in Romford. But miraculously we found ourselves, sometime later, on the M20 conducting a close study of the location of speed cameras.

The Mazda 3 proved itself commendably adept at negotiating this section of the trip. But according to the satnav, we were still going to arrive eight minutes after the ceremony had begun. We were now in an episode of 24, with the clock counting out impending disaster.

Next came the traffic-laden single carriageway to the coast. The Mazda 3 doesn't boast the most powerful acceleration, but it had enough to overtake when it mattered, which was practically all the time.

We eventually drew up with 10 seconds to spare. It wasn't ideal preparation for the draining emotions to come, but I think Els would have been amused by the drama. The Mazda 3: it will get you to the church on time.

Mazda 3 Sport

Price 20,380
Top speed 132mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 8.2 seconds
Average consumption 50.4mpg
CO2 emissions 149g/km
Eco rating 6/10
Bound for The brink
In a word Lively

Ofcom report reveals users of sites such as Facebook have become more savvy about online security and are reluctant to reveal details online

UK internet users have become significantly more cautious about how much personal information they reveal on social networking websites such as Facebook, according to a report by media regulator Ofcom.

The twice-yearly report, a survey of the internet habits of 1,824 people aged 16 and over, found that since 2007 users have become more savvy about online security and are now more reluctant to provide personal information online.

Ofcom's report found that 80% of those surveyed who have a social networking website are likely to only allow friends or family to see it. This is a significant seachange in attitude compared to 2007 when just 48% of those surveyed took such steps.

The report has been published in a climate where the practices of social networking sites Facebook in particular have come under scrutiny for privacy and security practices. Earlier this month, EU data protection officials called Facebook's latest privacy changes "unaceptable" and the world's biggest social networking site has been embroiled in a controversy over "panic buttons" for child users.

Almost half of adult internet users in Scotland say they have set up a social networking profile compared with 46% in Wales, 44% in England and 31% in Northern Ireland.

However, about a quarter of internet users say they "lack confidence" in installing filtering software or security features.

The report found that the Scottish were the least likely to worry about entering personal details online with 50% "happy" to enter their home address details on the internet, compared with 23% in Wales and Northern Ireland. More than 40% of Scottish adult internet users are also happy to enter credit card details.

When it comes to trust in media, just 31% of internet users believe web content to be "reliable and accurate". This compares to about 50% of adults that trust television and radio content. However, news sites are trusted by 58% of web users.

Adults in Scotland say they use the internet at home the most at 10.6 hours per week, with adults in England at 8.3 hours per week and those in Wales at 6.8 hours per week. Adults in Northern Ireland say they use the internet at home the least at 6.5 hours per week.

Jaron Lanier's new book is not a Luddite rant but a reasoned attack on the prejudices of web culture

"You Are Not A Gadget", the new book by Silicon Valley luminary Jaron Lanier is, he says, fundamentally a book about spirituality. He is at pains to stress that humans are not machines, though the digital revolution has developed the habit of assuming we are. So, he advises, "We should assume supernatural specialness to people."

Supernatural? Specialness? Spirituality? It seems misplaced language for the man who coined the term "virtual reality" and is routinely included on lists of leading public intellectuals. Is it anything more than West Coast hippie-speak?

Lanier's central complaint can be stated in more humdrum terms: software design is, for the most part, dehumanising. Think of websites like this one. They routinely play host to trolls, individuals who post abuse behind veils of anonymity. Lanier believes the problem is not anonymity per se, which is sometimes necessary to protect people, but transient anonymity, which removes the personal consequences of posting. He does not mean that people should be fined for, say, threatening an airport with destruction. He means that anonymous posters collude with a web 2.0 culture that doesn't treat people as people, but as the mindless generators of fragments of stuff.

"Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger," he advises, because you dehumanise yourself too. And it must be a principled stance you take. Everyone has an "inner troll". No-one, given the right circumstances, can otherwise resist the pleasures of "drive-by anonymity". It's a serious issue, he believes. Two factors came together to allow the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany: economic humiliation and adherence to a collectivist ideology. "We already have the ideology in its new digital packaging, and it's entirely possible we could face dangerously traumatic economic shocks in the coming decades."

Indeed, the new ideology is already entrenched. Web 2.0 culture is embedded in the most celebrated internet phenomena of our times: Open source, Wikipedia, Facebook. Wikipedia, for example, aims to be a single book containing all knowledge. It lacks the context that informs reader discernment, and the authorship that informs reader trust. Compare that with a lesson of history: societies that follow a single book are totalitarian. "Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available." Our civilisation is built on libraries and authors, not portals and fragments. Web 2.0 puts both of the former under threat.

Or consider Facebook. It segments people: you're defined by your relationship status, gender, age, location and so on. More importantly still, you have no option other than to present yourself in ways the interface allows. Again, that's dehumanising. You are locked-in by the design and this is a site used by 40% of all internet users, and counting.

At base, what Lanier believes technologists distrust are notions of quality, of meaning, of mystery. They believe the reductionist models of consciousness that sees the brain as a computer. This has two consequences. First, it interprets experience is the processing of bits, which means "you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded onto a computer." Second, it treats people as computers too, who will one day be ousted by superior computers. "The ideology has encouraged narrow philosophies that deny the mystery of the existence of experience."

Individuals like Larry Page, one of Google's founders, expect the internet to come alive quite soon, Lanier reports. (Google's website already says it was "brought to life in September 1998.") Such personal details could be ignored as eccentricities, except that the people who hold them wield power. Their missionary preference for machinism over humanism is imposing limits on the world in which we live. "If a church or a government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive."

He's no Luddite. Rather, "Enlightened designers leave open the possibility either of metaphysical specialness in humans or in the potential for unforeseen creative processes that aren't explained by ideas like evolution that we already believe we can capture in software systems." So, he prefers a mysterious view of life over a materialist one, not out of any prior metaphysical conviction, but simply because it works works in terms of enlarging, not restricting, our humanity. It's a pragmatic advocacy of a religious attitude to life, and no doubt shaped by his Californian context. But it's a strikingly religious attitude, no less.

Promise to bring superfast internet to two-thirds of UK
BT announces profit of just over 1bn for the year

BT today pledged to bring the next generation of high-speed broadband internet access within the reach of two-thirds of British homes within the next five years. The move will cost 2.5bn and extend its scope beyond that of bitter rival Virgin Media, which covers half of the UK.

Unveiling a return to profit, BT also announced plans to offer cut-price access to Sky's premier sports channels as part of a 200m revamp of its BT Vision service. Following regulator Ofcom's ruling last month that the satellite broadcaster must reduce the price it charges rivals for access to Sky Sports 1 and Sky Sports 2, BT intends to offer both plus ESPN to its customers for under 20 per month in time for the next Premiership football season.

"We want to offer Sky Sports to our customers. We know it is a hole in our proposition at the moment. We know some customers do not come to us because we have not got Sky Sports and now we have access to it," said BT Retail chief executive Gavin Patterson. "I am not going to tell you exactly what the proposition is going to be, but it is going to be sharp and under 20."

There are fears, however, that Sky will use the leeway it has under Ofcom's ruling from last month to move some key football games away from Sky Sports 1 and 2. At the weekend, for instance, the crucial Manchester United game was shown on Sky Sports 3, which is not part of the regulator's deal and would not be available to BT Vision customers.

BT group chief executive Ian Livingston warned Sky that such behaviour would not be tolerated and that it would complain to the regulator if the satellite broadcaster attempted to "game" the system. "If they do use Sky Sports 3 and Sky Sports 4, that would lay those channels open to exactly the same remedies as Sky Sports 1 and Sky Sports 2," said Livingston. "I think the phrase is there should be 'no material movement' in the content and we will be keeping a very close eye on them."

BT also announced plans to launch an online gaming service in the UK, having taken a 2.6% stake in a Silicon Valley internet firm called OnLive, founded by former Apple executive Steve Perlman. OnLive has created an on-demand gaming service which allows customers to play the latest video games titles through their broadband connection without needing an expensive gaming console such as an Xbox 360.

It is part of BT's attempt to expand its business after a disastrous year in 2008 and a year of cost-cutting and writedowns in 2009. BT announced that its cuts helped it claw its way back into the black, making a pre-tax profit of just over 1bn in the year ending in March, compared with a loss of 244m a year ago. The previous year's plunge into the red was caused by writedowns to the value of BT's IT business, Global Services, which had made wildly over-optimistic profit projections.

Livingston said the improved performance demonstrated the credibility of BT's turnaround plan. "What we wanted to do was create some solid foundations and they are a lot more solid today."

BT's core business is still in decline, with revenues down 2% to 21bn for the whole year. But while the company expects that trajectory to continue into 2011, with annual revenues for this year expected to be 20bn, from then on it expects to see a return to growth, powered by new products such as high-speed broadband and BT Vision.

BT announced that it would pump an extra 1bn into its fibre-optic rollout, pushing the network to roughly two-thirds of the UK 16m homes by 2015. A quarter of those homes will get speeds of 100Mb per second. BT has yet to launch a 100Mb per second service, but earlier this year started selling BT Infinity, which runs at 40Mb. It expects 4m homes to have access to this service by the end of the year.

Shares in BT rose by more than 10% as BT said the increased investment in fibre optics could be managed within current spending plans and that BT Global Services would make more cash than it spent in two years' time. But some in the City were sceptical about the figure: in a note, HSBC reckoned the fibre-optic rollout would cost 3.5bn to 4bn.

On this week's programme, we look back on the past 14 days of politics, and the uncomfortable love triangle that unfolded between the three main party leaders. Their allegiances flipped faster than the MP housing market, and we've been watching it all on the web.

So to what extent has the UK general election of 2010 been a digital election? Discussing this are the Guardian's new media correspondent, Jemima Kiss, and Matthew McGregor from Blue State Digital, the team that orchestrated the Obama new media campaign.

We also have a dispatch from the front line of online crime: Joseph Menn, the author of Fatal System Error tells us about his research into cybercrime that could end up bringing down the web.

And in the week that the iPad's UK pricing plan was unveiled, we take a look at one of Apple's most persuasive competitors, the JooJoo Tablet, with the CEO of Fusion Garage, Chandra Rathakrishnan. Originally this device was to be released as the CrunchPad as a pet project of TechCrunch's Michael Arrington but the relationship fell apart and lawsuits seem likely.

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