The social networking website 'missed the mark' on privacy controls, says founder Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook is to revise its privacy settings within weeks to make it simpler for people to keep their information private, according to Mark Zuckerberg, its founder and chief executive of the giant social network.

Acknowledging a growing level of irritation among the site's 450m users, Zuckerberg said: "Simply put, many of you thought our controls [for determining who could see information about you] were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark."

But Zuckerberg insisted that concerns that Facebook is selling personal data to advertisers were misplaced. "We do not give advertisers access to your personal information," he said. "We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone."

Writing in the Washington Post, the 26-year-old insisted that Facebook will "keep listening" to users' concerns.

However, he stopped short of offering users the choice of opting in to having all their information spread throughout the social network and the internet which may mean that the new settings will not satisfy users after all.

Facebook makes money principally by selling advertising space on users' pages; the adverts can be tailored to the interests or experiences of the users without the advertiser knowing who it is being sent to. Thus someone who says their favourite band is U2 might see adverts for a new album or concert tour by the band, though the advertiser will not have known precisely who was targeted.

A rising number of people have expressed dissatisfaction with the social network's ever-changing privacy policy, which has grown in complexity since the site began in 2004 and has also seen the default settings for sharing information go from "friends only" to "the entire internet" for almost everything that people put on it.

The ease with which people can find out anything about people who are unaware of the settings has been demonstrated by a site which uses Facebook's new connectivity to its underlying database, launched on 21 April.

Youropenbook, which has the tagline "Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life. Whether you want to or not", says that it wants Facebook to restore the privacy of information "so that this website and others like it no longer work".

The site's creators say there are two fundamental problems with Facebook now: "First, they do not do a good job of indicating how public each piece of information you share on the site will be. Second, they change the rules far too often. If you understood Facebook's privacy settings two years ago (or even six months ago), that information would be worse than useless with today's bewildering settings."

Others think it is time to give up Facebook: one group has come up with a "Quit Facebook Day" idea, urging people to delete their accounts on 31 May.

Zuckerberg insists in the Washington Post article that Facebook will always be a free service which suggests that it will have to continue to rely on selling advertising space targeted at users' interests and activities. That, in turn, means that at least some of the user information must be shared with advertisers, even in anonymised form. And that, in turn, must mean a limit on some of the limits that users can put on sharing their data.

He does not retreat in the article from his frequently-expressed view that sharing information is beneficial. "Six years ago, we built Facebook around a few simple ideas," he writes. "People want to share and stay connected with their friends and the people around them. If we give people control over what they share, they will want to share more. If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that's more open and connected is a better world. These are still our core principles today."

No date has been put on the release of the new privacy settings.

How to control your Facebook privacy settings from sharing everything to locking down your photos to deleting your account.

Closure of school IT qango set to save 80m, but 240 staff to lose jobs

The Treasury's decision to close the education ICT agency Becta by November, cutting 80m from this financial year's government budget, has dismayed its 240 staff and some teachers who found its work especially useful because it provided a central platform for standardising on technology.

The move has been made as part of the government's wider programme of cuts worth 6.2bn for 2010-11.

"Naturally we are very disappointed at the government's decision," said Becta's chairman, Graham Badman, and chief executive, Stephen Crowne. "Becta is a very effective organisation with an international reputation, delivering valuable services to schools, colleges and children.

"Our procurement arrangements save the schools and colleges many times more than Becta costs to run. Our Home Access programme will give laptops and broadband to over 200,000 of the poorest children. Our top priorities now are to make sure we have an orderly and fair process for staff, and that as far as possible schools, colleges and children continue to benefit from the savings and support that Becta has provided."

The organisation employs 240 staff and 120 contractors. On its site, Becta says that 1.5bn has been spent through its procurement agreements since 2002, and that this has saved the education system 223m which would be an average of about 28m per year. It also says it has achieved cost savings of 55m for educational institutions and providers including schools, local authorities and the skills sector in the past year alone.

Early reactions were that Becta has been useful, and that closing it will lead to losses in expertise which will have to be made up by extra spending elsewhere. Paul Wareing, now an iPhone developer but for eight years a Becta employee, mourned its passing. He cited achievements such as the creation of the National Grid for Learning, launched in 1998, which provided a gateway to online educational resources; the Self-Review Framework, which let schools assess their own use of ICT; and Laptops for Teachers, which got teachers who might have been unfamiliar with computers to use them.

"It was the envy of the world," Wareing wrote on Twitter. "The cost of its loss will be much more than the saving of its cost." He pointed to its initiatives such as work-based learning, offender learning, adult and community lending as well as schools and home access which will be ended or shifted to other, less prepared agencies.

Fred Garnett, another Becta supporter, commented: "[The] Becta closure won't save 62m & must hit Home Access & inclusion initiatives. The use of inaccurate term quango indicates sleazy politics."

Becta was also seen as having played an important role in driving down the cost of computers to schools. In 2005 it produced a paper suggesting that schools could halve their IT bills by adopting open source software rather than Microsoft's Windows and other applications. In 2008, it suggested that schools should adopt more open source software which led to Microsoft dropping some of its costs for licensing software to schools.

Other teachers contacted the Guardian to cite Becta's ICT Baseline, which let teachers rate their ICT provision, as an example of good practice put in place by Becta.

The question now is whether the closure will indeed reduce overall costs of public sector spending.

Becta, formerly known as the British Educational and Communications Technology Association, was set up in 1988 to promote the effective use of ICT in education. It has admitted that, although schools are being kitted out with the latest technology, only one in five is using it effectively.

The agency already faced a budget cut of almost half its 112.5m annual spend over the next two years. The money was provided by the former Department for Children Schools and Families.

The official Treasury document on the cuts says that they aim to "cut Whitehall waste and protect schools spending".

Becta has been promoting Home Access, the former Labour government's scheme to bridge the "digital divide" by ensuring all children have a computer at home. It has encouraged English secondary schools to integrate the online reports into virtual learning environments so parents can see what their children are doing in the classroom.

It has also been promoting the adoption of ICT to enable people studying for diplomas in vocational subjects to move between schools, colleges and work placements.

The author and blogger explains why he publishes his books free online

Politically engaged and disarmingly geeky, Cory Doctorow is one of the better-known faces of the digital revolution: co-editor of the celebrated blog Boing Boing ("a directory of wonderful things"), he is also author of half-a-dozen science fiction novels and a journalist. Born in Canada, the 38-year-old writer now lives in London, although when we speak, he's in the US, promoting his latest book, For the Win. This tells a story of teens rebelling against global corporations and is pitched at the "young adult" market. As with all his fiction, the book has been released simultaneously in bookshops and, for free, online.

You've released For the Win using a Creative Commons licence, giving it away for free. Why?

I give away all of my books. [The publisher] Tim O'Reilly once said that the problem for artists isn't piracy it's obscurity. I think that's true. A lot of people have commented: "You can't eat page views, so how does being well-known help you earn a living as a writer?" It's true; however, it's very hard to monetise fame, but impossible to monetise obscurity. It doesn't really matter how great your work is; if no one's ever heard of it, you'll never make any money from it. That's not to say that if everyone's heard of it, you'll make a fortune, but it is a necessary precursor that your work be well-known to earn you a living. As far as I can tell, these themes apply very widely, across all media.

As a practical matter, we live in the 21st century and anything anybody wants to copy they will be able to copy. If you are building a business model that says that people can only copy things with your permission, your business is going to fail because whether or not you like it, people will be able to copy your product without your permission. The question is: what are you going to do about that? Are you going call them thieves or are you going to find a way to make money from them?

The only people who really think that it's plausible to reduce copying in the future seem to be the analogue economy, the people who built their business on the idea that copying only happens occasionally and usually involves a giant machine and some lawyers. People who are actually doing digital things have the intuitive knowledge that there's no way you're going to stop people from copying and they've made peace with it.

Your young adult novels are concerned with the political issues surrounding new technologies, such as questions of privacy. Why?

Kids' relationship with privacy is really confused; they're told by teachers and adults that their privacy is paramount, that they should stop disclosing so much information on Facebook and so on. And then they go to schools where everything they do is monitored; there's mandatory spyware that takes every click they make, every word they utter and sends it back to teachers and headmasters for disciplinary purposes.

When they go out in public, they're photographed every five minutes and there are signs that prohibit taking any affirmative step to hide themselves from scrutiny or maintain any privacy.

So on the one hand, we're telling kids that their privacy is the most important thing in the world and that they have to guard it as jealously as anything that matters to them. On the other hand, we're systematically depriving them of their privacy and punishing them for asserting it.

The problem with privacy is the same problem as with smoking: the consequences of doing something that's bad for you are a long way from the action itself and so you don't learn.

If we want kids to give less information to Facebook, then we should start by having them give less information to everybody. That means giving them the tools that help them to understand that privacy really matters and that giving up your privacy is something that's hard to stop doing once you start.

Do you see young adult fiction as an effective way of getting a message across?

Young adults treat literature with a lot more seriousness and often see literature as a call to action whether that's to go to the library or to try to write some software or even to found a protest group. I do hope to have this alerting presence about the risks of technology. I want to inspire kids and adults to ask how we can start seizing the means of information again, how we can use technology to liberate us as it did when I was an adolescent.

Gadget Show presenter Suzi Perry unveils her favourite gizmos

What's your favourite piece of technology and how has it improved your life?
I'm going to generalise and say the smartphone. Starting from Nokia's N95, I've had a bunch of smartphones since they came along they're feature-rich and bring everything from the office to your pocket. They've made life so much easier.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
I've got a BlackBerry Bold and an iPhone. I'm on the BlackBerry right now, talking to you, and I've been using my iPhone this morning to arrange a virtual sporting event.

What additional features would you add if you could?
I'd like a little projector built in, to project pictures on to any surface. I think we'll see them in the next year or two.

Do you think the smartphone will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
No, but I think it will move on. There will always be a need for a hand-held phone.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
I think the industry can be seen as pretty geeky and quite nerdy. I've been working with Train2Game providing courses for people who want to work in the gaming industry. It's a sexy industry, the tech industry, and these days it's quite chic to be a geek.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
I did once throw a Motorola handset against the wall, because it drove me mad, but I think ugly, obsolete tech is terrible. For me, the Amstrad Emailer is the piece of tech I dislike the most.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
I'm a big embracer of new technology, but I do try to only buy tech that I'm going to use I try not to be a magpie and swoop up everything shiny or new.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
I consider myself a she-geek!

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I haven't really spent an enormous amount of money on anything... probably my MacBook Pro.

Mac or PC and why?
I'm in the 4% I'm a Mac girl. I think over the years PCs have improved massively to meet the requirements and their ease of use. But for me, it's always a Mac I love how it looks, I love the user system and all the software works so well together. And with my iPhone and my iPod touch, it all syncs really nicely.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I'm a downloader. I have an Apple TV at home, which is fantastic for downloading and renting movies. I buy streamed TV shows, using the season pass on iTunes I recently bought True Blood season two, Damages season three and 24 season eight. As for music, I downloaded Paul Weller's album, Wake up the Nation.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
Anything that does things for you is a good idea, but not yet. We're not ready.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I would like to own a teleporter and have it built into a 1950s American Airstream trailer. I love them. Inside, I'd like it tricked out fully with gadgets. Travel bores the pants off me and I have to do it so much.

Suzi Perry co-hosts The Gadget Show on Five. She has also been working with Train2Game to launch its new artist and animator course

PS3/Xbox 360/PSP; 49.99; cert 16+; Yuke's/THQ

Last year, UFC 2009 turned a load of gamers onto this particular franchise myself included. However, it was far from perfect, with laggy online play merely one of its foibles.

And, although the multiplayer aspect was impossible to test before launch, this update manages to correct all the other niggles while building on everything that we liked before. Naturally, there's a top list of fighters to choose from, and although the likes of Brock Lesnar or Shogun Rua are not exactly household names over here, fans of their cable TV exploits will immediately recognise their faces and many of their trademark moves.

More significant are the changes to the gameplay, many of which will initially dismay fans of the series as they alter many of the moves they may have been using up to now. For instance, it's a lot harder to score easy points by bringing your opponent to the canvas and repeatedly pummelling him with energy-sapping blows, thanks to an improved system for clinches and ground grapples. There's also a brand new sway system that brings another level of subtlety to stand-up technique. This involves tapping the right analogue stick to sway left or right to avoid oncoming blows. Time this right and you can score extra damage; get it wrong and you can find yourself on the canvas when you would have previously simply blocked the attack.

Other changes are more subtle in their impact. There are new fighting styles including Karate and Greco-Roman wrestling and during cage fights you can use the walls to your advantage. The game's expanded career mode is also far more interesting, spanning 12 years of training, minor bouts and final and invitation to join the UFC where the bigger names and kudos lie.

It's true that UFC's success is still largely Stateside, making the steep price seem like a risk for non-fans. However, with smooth animation and excellent fighter likenesses, it's a joy to watch and a rewarding challenge to play. Unlike most other fight games, where memorising moves is the order of the day, in this one success can hinge on every grapple meaning you're always looking for some advantage, even once committed to a particular move.

All things considered, this puts UFC 2010 right up there with Tekken and Soul Calibur as one of the best fight games around.

Rating: 4/5

Pentagon creates specialist online unit to counter cyber attack amid growing fears of militarisation of the internet

The US military has appointed its first senior general to direct cyber warfare despite fears that the move marks another stage in the militarisation of cyberspace.

The newly promoted four-star general, Keith Alexander, takes charge of the Pentagon's ambitious and controversial new Cyber Command, designed to conduct virtual combat across the world's computer networks. He was appointed on Friday afternoon in a low-key ceremony at Fort Meade, in Maryland.

The creation of America's most senior cyber warrior comes just days after the US air force disclosed that some 30,000 of its troops had been re-assigned from technical support "to the frontlines of cyber warfare".

The creation of Cyber Command is in response to increasing anxiety over the vulnerability of the US's military and other networks to a cyber attack.

James Miller, the deputy under-secretary of defence for policy, has hinted that the US might consider a conventional military response to certain kinds of online attack.

Although Alexander pledged during his confirmation hearings before the Senate committee on armed services last month that Cyber Command would not contribute to the militarisation of cyberspace, the committee's chairman, Senator Carl Levin expressed concern that both Pentagon doctrine, and the legal framework for online operations, had failed to keep pace with rapid advances in cyber warfare.

In particular Levin voiced concern that US cyber operations to combat online threats to the US, routed through neutral third countries, "could have broad and damaging consequences" to wider American interests.

Plans for Cyber Command were originally conceived under President George W Bush. Since taking office Barack Obama has embraced the theme of cyber security, describing it last year as "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges [the US faces] as a nation".

During his confirmation hearing, Alexander said that the Pentagon's networks were being targeted by "hundreds of thousands of probes every day" adding that he had "been alarmed by the increase, especially in this year".

Cyber warfare has increased rapidly in scale and sophistication with China accused of being at the forefront of prominent recent attacks, including the targeting of Google and 20 other companies last year as well as "Titan Rain" in 2003 a series of coordinated attacks on US networks. Russian and North Korean hackers have also been accused of large-scale attacks.

Moscow was accused of being behind a massive cyber assault on Estonia in 2007 the second largest cyber warfare operation ever conducted.

While Alexander has tried to play down the offensive aspects of his command, the Pentagon has been more explicit, stating on Friday that Cyber Command will "direct the operations and defence of specified Department of Defense information networks [involving some 90,000 military personnel] and prepare to, when directed, conduct full-spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, [to] ensure US allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."

The complex issues facing Cyber Command were thrown into relief earlier this year when the Washington Post revealed details of a so-called "dot-mil" operation by Fort Meade's cyber warfare unit, backed by Alexander, to shut down a "honeytrap website" set up by the Saudis and the CIA to target Islamist extremists planning attacks in Saudi Arabia.

The Pentagon became convinced that the forum was being used to co-ordinate the entry of jihadi fighters into Iraq.

Despite the strong objections of the CIA, the site was attacked by the Fort Meade cyber warfare unit. As a result, some 300 other servers in the Saudi kingdom, Germany and Texas also were inadvertently shut down.

Of equally concern to those who had opposed the operation, it was conducted without informing key members of the Saudi royal family, who were reported to be "furious" that a counter-terrorism tool had been shut down.

The issue of cyber warfare and how to combat it has become an increasingly fraught one.

The need to have electronic warfare capabilities, say those who support them, has been proven repeatedly by the apparent success of hostile attacks on government networks, including last year's massive denial of service assault on networks in both the US and Korea.

Last year, hackers also accessed large amounts of sensitive data concerning the Pentagon's Joint Strike Fighter programme.

The difficulties facing the new command were underlined in March by former CIA director Michael V Hayden, who said that the Saudi operation had demonstrated that cyber warfare techniques were evolving so rapidly that they were now outpacing the government's ability to develop coherent policies to guide its use.

"Cyber was moving so fast that we were always in danger of building up precedent before we built up policy," Hayden said.

The iPhone app featuring your own homeless person shot to the top of the iTunes download chart but it is far from a sick joke

It sounds like a sick joke but in just one week iHobo an iPhone application that allows you to interact with your very own homeless person shot to the top of the iTunes download chart. At the end of last week, 210,000 iHobos had been downloaded. But the thinking behind it, the app's creators claim, is as serious as it is provocative.

"The challenge was how to grab attention without falling back on the traditional route of creating a high-impact, attention-grabbing TV or poster ad," explains Tom Ewart, an executive creative director at the ad agency Publicis, which came up with the idea for Depaul UK, a youth homelessness charity. "People have grown bored of the shock tactics marketers in the charities sector have come to rely on."

Step forward, then, iHobo an otherwise nameless youth who, when you activate the free app, "lives" on your mobile, making a series of direct and increasingly desperate appeals for help, knocking on the screen for attention at any time of day or night.

How he fares is the direct result of the nature and speed of your response to the dilemmas he faces choices that are based on the experiences of young people Depaul UK has worked with. Look after him and he could just make it through. Make the wrong decisions, however, and his life starts to spiral out of control.

At the end of three days, the "real-time interactive experience" ends with a direct appeal by Depaul UK for each user to make a donation, again via mobile, of either 3, 5 or 10. It is, the charity's chief executive, Paul Marriott, says, an unapologetic attempt to court a younger generation of supporters. Even so, he admits, iHobo treads a fine line.

"Is this a Tamagotchi-style approach to playing with a homeless person? We're very clear on that one," he insists. "While the name is a carefully considered attempt to attract attention, this is not a game and there is no winner in the conventional sense."

At a time when charities have seen personal donations fall by more than 11% over the past year, iHobo shows the way ahead, both Marriott and Ewart claim. But while this innovative marketing ploy is generating significant word of mouth online, its success won't ultimately be measured by publicity or even download volumes but by the uplift in donations it produces.

Meg Carter

Sabotage Times

A new project from former lad mag editor James Brown, who aims to do for the discerning middle-aged fella what Loaded and its ilk did for 1990s hedonists. Under the banner "we can't concentrate so why should you?", you'll find a healthy mix of archive articles and new pieces with the emphasis on nostalgia. Shed man totems Steve McQueen, Paul Weller and Geoffrey Boycott feature, as do homages to Adidas trainers and the Vespa scooter, plus amusing opinion pieces, reportage and fiction alongside more predictable internet distraction from YouTube. Men of a certain age will find their pub chat repertoire reignited.

MovieViral

Film companies are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with their viral campaigns having successfully tapped into the film nerd mindset; basically, we enjoy being teased and husky-voiced trailers are no longer good enough. The film campaign that changed everything was for JJ Abrams' Cloverfield, with its dozens of fake sites and snatched footage that got the web talking months before the release. The Lost producer is at it again with his new project Super 8, and you can see developments (pictured) here. Elsewhere, there's a Scott Pilgrim vs The World contest, the latest games from the upcoming Tron sequel and bogus news stories connected to Finnish space Nazi movie Iron Sky.

Blog roll: Parenting

Shit My Kids Ruined

A warning to prospective parents of the spectacular techniques children employ to destroy houses, decorate pets and alter their action figures.

STFU, Parents

Mocking new parents who "overshare" on Facebook with tales of their babies' latest poop and other unwanted information.

My Daddy Cooks

Recipes and videos from Nick Coffer and hysterical two-year-old son Archie, plus tips on how to wean kids away from junk food.

ParentDish

Seven bands that have appeared on Yo Gabba Gabba!, the teenager who wore the same shoes for four years and the kid who stunned Lady Gaga.

Parent Hacks

How to make Converse trainers last longer.

What we learned on the web this week

The BBC is restructuring

What the future holds "if you're a drug addict"

The campaign to stop Twitter slurs

Sometimes the world is unintentionally pornographic

The 10 largest oil spills of all time

Some album covers have come to life

Otters love posing

What Nick Clegg believes

How to get Twitter, Wikipedia and Google in one place

Not even Alvin And The Chipmunks is free of sex and violence

Split/Second Velocity, PC, PlayStation 3 & Xbox 360

The tone of Disney's film and television output shouldn't be mistaken for that of its interactive division, which, while shying away from the horrors of Manhunt, isn't solely a saccharine-coated children's playground. Split/Second is a demonstration of this, set in a near future where a gladiatorial racing-based reality TV show pits drivers against each other on tracks through towering scenery rigged with explosives that you detonate to take out opponents. Despite its unusual mechanics, races are impressively balanced and rapidly become breathless games of cat and mouse among the burning debris, bringing to mind Burnout's brand of white knuckle racing. Instantly gripping, Split/Second's slight lack of subtlety only becomes apparent with extended play, but for dabblers and for many, many hours, this is an utterly thrilling racer.

Disney Interactive, 35- 40

Halo: Reach Multiplayer Beta, Xbox 360

Halo: Reach is the final instalment of Microsoft's defining series. In reality a prequel set on a doomed human colony called Reach, following Halo 3's promise to "finish the fight" and the slightly anaemic Halo: ODST released last year its developer says this absolutely, definitely is the last in the series. As is now customary, Microsoft conducted a worldwide test of its multiplayer mode the part of the game that endures way beyond the dozen hours its campaign takes to complete giving anyone who purchased ODST the chance to see what things will be like when the full game arrives in the autumn. The addition of jet packs and the retooling of mechanics to allow you to choose a specialist class of trooper rebalance the action in an immediately pleasing and intuitive way. With a clutch of new maps and game types playable, the extraordinary polish already evident is going to make the wait for autumn excruciating.

Microsoft, free download

Alan Wake, PC, Xbox 360

When schlock horror writer Alan Wake goes on holiday to the remote town of Bright Falls, his wife mysteriously vanishes and he starts discovering pages from a book he doesn't remember writing. His attempts to find out what's happening are hampered by "the taken"; shadowy, often axe-wielding former residents who need to have a torch shone at them before they can be hurt by conventional ammunition. Taking refuge in pools of lamplight, Alan's voyage through pitch black, increasingly populous and nerve -jangling woodland is a thoroughly action packed slice of survival horror, heavily influenced by Resident Evil 5's need for continual undead crowd control. Plot exposition is elegantly handled, with a TV-inspired "previously on Alan Wake" punctuating the chapters.

Microsoft, 32- 40

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 keyboard 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.

The Information Architects team have come up with a way of looking at Twitter that echoes maps of how the universe began

Back at the dawn of microblogging time, when Twitter had only just started, there were only three users who mattered: Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey - the three key people behind the service. Now there are more than a hundred million users - but the key influencers in this huge network can be quite easily identified.

Now the team at Information Architects have decided to come up with a neat Twitter visualisation, akin to The Independent's classic 1992 "How the universe began" graphic, of the top 140 Twitter influencers, "sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity" and by when they joined the service (which determines how close to the centre they are).

The size of the blob indicates how many followers; "influence" is measured by... actually, they don't explain, though possibly it's using something like the Twiinfluence algorithm.

Interesting to see who's in there: Stone and Williams, of course, but also latecomer Marissa Mayer (VP of search product and user experience at Google), who only joined in July 2009, and Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google (December 2009) - and of course there's always Bill Gates, who didn't get on board until January 2010. And of course Stephen Fry and indeed Jonathan Ross.

You can get the PDF (1.1MB) or buy it from them for $99 because, as they remark, "we're convinced that our print is way superior to what you can do with your plotter". And you will need a plotter - the graphic is 84cm by 119cm.

We're happy to see that @guardiantech is in there, showing up in something like the place where Kappa Velorum would be in the Milky Way. (We've highlighted it below to help.)

Does this make any difference? Well.. it might do, if this list of the top 140 were made into a list. Anybody up for that, we wonder?

We grumble about privacy on Facebook and Google, but the sharing of personal information online is second nature

I'm an inveterate oversharer. I tweet what I eat, I blog my baby photos, I check in on foursquare. It is second nature to me now. But even early adopters didn't start out this way. Most of us are resistant to new technology, and pick it up a few months, or years, down the line, when it seems more mainstream and relevant and when friends seem to be using it. That never happened more dramatically than with Facebook, which credits this "network effect" for an exponential increase in users after its launch in 2004 to the 500 million it is about to announce.

Five years ago a pseudonym was de rigueur, yet now we share the minutiae of what we're reading and thinking, and who we're seeing. We are all sliding up the adoption curve to a future where this behaviour will only become even more extensive, more normal. How did our perception of what is an appropriate public identity shift so far, so quickly?

Concern over the dilution of our privacy came to a head in the last week with a sizable faction of Facebook's users rebelling against users' profiles being made publicly accessible by default. Their action may just have pushed Facebook into simplifying its bewildering 150-option privacy settings. Google, meanwhile, confessed that some remarkably lax code-pasting led to its Street View cameras accidentally recording personal data from domestic WiFi networks.

Both have rightly prompted outrage and an interrogation of the state of our digital privacy and are being scrutinised by regulators. But Facebook and Google are fashionable and intriguing targets for sensational headlines. In truth, most Facebook data is meaningless and conversational while most of us are still listed by our home address in BT's online phone book.

Assuming none of us this side of the digital divide are willing to disenfranchise ourselves socially and professionally by giving up the internet altogether, we have to be prepared to give up something. The free lunch is over; we pay with money, time or behavioural data. There is a benefit, too, because sharing information about ourselves opens the door to the semantic web; the powerful, personalised internet of the future.

Already, from your internet connection to the sites you use, everything you share, search, comment, email, read and watch every social signal you make is recorded. The only rule you need to protect yourself online is to commit something to the web only if you would be happy for anyone to read it.

The internet is indelible. I put a lot online, but I filter. I don't post my home address or about my childminder. Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, reminded us this week that much of the five exabytes of digital information the world generates every two days equivalent to 100,000 years of DVD-quality video is created by our social signals.

If you want to experiment and, like me, understand what's possible, you could try Blippy, a Twitter-like service that records every purchase you make and shares it with friends. If you want to take control, try Garlik or ReclaimPrivacy.org. For startups, there's opportunity at every turn.

Mark Zuckerberg, the fresh-faced Facebook founder, has a demanding audience he needs to impress, and increasingly expectant investors who want to see a return on those 500 million users. Facebook, in particular, is constantly pushing and testing the boundaries of what its users will accept as public information. It has normalised much of the information-sharing we were once uncomfortable with, and will continue to act as an agent for change.

In Google's case, it is tempting to characterise this uniquely influential company as a vast corporate machine with $25bn in the bank, questionable ethics and a world-dominating agenda, quite possibly operating from a hollowed-out volcano somewhere near Mountain View.

The truth is far less dramatic. Neither company has a malevolent agenda, but both operate in the fast-moving, demanding bubble of Silicon Valley, with the world's smartest engineers and both appear at times almost naive to the implications of the technology that they wield.

Google famously wants to index the world's information and, with 65% of the world's search market, is better placed than anyone to help us find and manage what we put online. In the past it has provided advice and created centralised profiles to give users more control, but this all needs to be much more comprehensive and conspicuous.

It is beholden on both these companies to educate, inform and empower their users to take control of their digital footprint. The web will only keep developing and keep challenging us in this way. This is not just a phase we are going through. All these issues are only going to intensify, and as they say on Facebook: it's complicated.

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.

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.

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".

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."

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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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.

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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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.

Filmmaker Joel David Moore is a Mac man and an iPhone addict but is desperate for a spell-check

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
Unfortunately, I'm going to have to say the iPhone. It's the most used piece of machinery I own. But it's a love-hate relationship with the typing if I didn't go back every three words to fix a typing error, it would look like an alien language. And not a good one, it would be an alien race that never left the planet and still hadn't figured out fire.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
I'm using it to answer these questions. But not without switching over every couple questions and playing a tower defense game. geoDefense is what I'm addicted to now. It's like thumb crack.

What additional features would you add if you could?
Well, a physical slide-out keyboard, but that'll never happen so I'd settle with I know this sounds crazy, but SPELL-CHECK!!! It's ridiculous without it. It's like if when they brought out the mouse, when dragging it around it went whatever direction it chose to go.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
No. Unfortunately I will be obsolete before it will.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
That it's business. I get it. But it sucks. They have to let it out slowly, so we don't get all the goodies all at once. They make us buy 17 new models before, let's say, "cut and paste". You can see a theme here, right?

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Wait until the second generation. Play with someone else's until the new one comes out. Warning: this idea can't be used with sex toys.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
Yes. But I mask it well staying unshaved, which they make me lose for any role I play so I look more like a nerd. It's a tough cycle.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I don't go crazy buying expensive technology. I'd probably say my laptops and TVs are the most expensive things I've bought. Although I once got a gold-plated Nokia phone from a gifting suite one time. It may have been worth a lot but I sold it cheap on eBay. If someone bought it let me know if it works tweet me @joeldavidmoore.

Mac or PC, and why?
As you've guessed by now, Mac. But I've always used Mac my family had Macs growing up. On a PC I'm like a monkey trying to hump a football.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
Download. I haven't bought a CD since Milli Vanilli. And then Charles Shaw and John Leland, the actual singers.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
Great idea, if they will respond to verbal abuse and can know how to stave off lonely late-night advances.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
The clapper.

Joel David Moore's new film, Spiral which he stars in, as well as co-writing and co-directing is out on DVD on Monday

Search giant securely storing data captured from home Wi-Fi networks by Street View cars pending more specific instructions

Google is to retain data captured from UK home wireless networks while carrying out its Street View mapping until it receives more specific instructions from the UK Information Commissioner, it said today.

Update: the ICO said it has already told Google that the data can be deleted - but Google stated it will not do so yet.

The company also faces the threat from the advocacy group Privacy International that it might be liable under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) for unlawful interception of users' data and that the group may try to get the police to instigate an investigation.

Google is already facing criminal investigations in Germany over its capture of the data from open Wi-Fi networks and faces further investigations from a number of European countries for possible breaches of data protection laws and, possibly, computer hacking.

It has deleted the data that was collected in Ireland, Denmark and Austria, according to those countries' wishes. That means there cannot be any threat of prosecution in those countries as any evidence for a court case is unavailable.

In a statement released on Friday, the company said: "Following requests from the Irish, Danish and Austrian data protection authorities we can confirm that we have deleted payload data identified as coming from those countries. We can also confirm that, as requested, we are keeping data from Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.

"Given that there is some uncertainty about deletion generally for example, one data protection authority changed its instruction from delete to retain in the last 24 hours we think it makes sense to keep the remaining country data while we work through these issues."

Google later clarified that it is retaining the data for the UK so that the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) can inspect it as required. The data is being held in secure isolation. However the ICO restated that it has not required its preservation, reiterating a statement from earlier this week: "there does not seem to be any reason to keep the data concerned for evidential purposes. Therefore, in line with the data protection requirement that personal data should be held for no longer than necessary, we have asked Google to ensure that these data are deleted as soon as reasonably possible."

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.

The German prosecutors data protection authorities 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.

Google admitted last week that it collected 600GB of data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks around the world while collecting photos to Street View

The UK Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said on Thursday that the ICO did not want to "declare war" on Google over the matter and that it thought its response which was initially to accede to Google's offer to delete the data was "proportionate".

However, Google now appears to have decided to delay the deletion while it makes sure that no investigations have been opened; otherwise it might be deemed to have destroyed evidence.

Privacy International says that deleting the data would be "irresponsible" until its content has been investigated to see whether it does infringe the law. "We have directly put Google on notice that it is likely to be imminently subject to civil or criminal legal action as a result of the Wi-Fi interception," it wrote on its blog. "To eliminate the data would constitute destruction of evidence." It urged the ICO to rescind its earlier order to destroy the data: "We urge the commissioner to immediately rescind the order and allow Google to place the data in secure storage until such time as the legal questions are resolved.

"In the absence of a commitment from both Google and the commissioners to temporarily secure the data, Privacy International will seek a prosecution for unlawful interception under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. In those circumstances there would be no question of destroying the data."

Updated with statement from UK ICO that it is not seeking retention of data.
Update with clarification that it is German data protection authorities, not prosecutors, who are seeking access to hard drive.

paidContent:UK Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt says the new government will not repeal the controversial Digital Economy Act

Definitely not a venue for wing-wang squeezing

The thing about superminis, which appear to have adopted lapine habits of reproduction, is that they may be reasonably mini but they're not, on the whole, that super. The Citro n C3 gained a reputation when it first turned up, about eight years ago, as a sort of dull Ford Fiesta. Given that few people have ever required smelling salts as a result of driving a Fiesta, that's pretty damning faint praise.

Rather than cruelly raise false hopes, it's best to state straight away that the updated C3, in keeping with its predecessor, is also not a study in boundless excitement. There are improvements, but it's fair to say that when PJ O'Rourke penned his seminal National Lampoon article "How to Drive Fast On Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed And Not Spill Your Drink" he didn't have the C3 in mind, and not just because the piece was published over 20 years before the C3 was created.

Of the various C3 set-ups, the 1.6VTi is the tastiest, with a sprightly 0-62 acceleration of under nine seconds. Yet somehow it doesn't feel that tasty to drive and nor is it a hatch that looks particularly hot. None of these points is a criticism, really, because there are plenty of people who want a smallish car that doesn't look as if it's supposed to be a mobile venue for wing-wang squeezing.

My only reservation is that my feet kept clipping each other. This could be because I've advanced further into failing middle-aged co-ordination than I'd imagined or that the clutch and brake pedals were too close together. If it's possible to damn a car with faint criticism, then the suggestion of pedal proximity may be one such case.

Otherwise, it's fine. Actually, there was one other thing. The gears are not entirely pleasurable to shift and there's a slight need to over-rev at low speeds. But that aside, it's a sensible, light-filled, well laid out car that has good fuel economy and nothing crass or off-putting in its design.

Nor, it's true, is there much that's on-putting, other than the kind of sound engineering that is taken for granted by today's consumers. In many ways, then, the C3 is a renunciation of just about every Gallic clich : it's unpretentious, undramatic and uncool (the French are often uncool, of course, but rarely do they recognise the fact, much less make a virtue out of it).

But its lack of presence is indeed the C3's most conspicuous virtue, in that it would make an ideal car for someone who doesn't much care about the joy of driving or the thrill of design, and who just wants something compact, mobile and reliable that won't look like a fashion statement. From A to B via C3.

Citro n C3 1.6VTi

Price 14,690
Top speed 118mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 8.9 seconds
Average consumption 47.9mpg
CO2 emissions 136g/km
Eco rating 7/10
Bound for Marks & Spencer car park
In a word Straightforward

'Sacrilegious' content blamed for move, which comes one day after ban on Facebook

Some of the internet's most popular websites were blocked in Pakistan today as officials sought to restrict access to provocative images depicting the prophet Muhammad that many Muslims consider blasphemous, amid fears of possible street violence.

The government blocked the video-sharing website YouTube, one day after it banned Facebook, while users reported restrictions on Flickr and Wikipedia, prompting complaints from internet users but approval from angered protesters.

The censorship revolves around a Facebook competition that has attracted hundreds of images depicting the prophet Muhammad, including depictions of a bearded figure as a pig and wearing a bikini. The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority, which controls internet access, said it had blocked YouTube because some users were using the video site to repost the offending Facebook images.

BlackBerry service was also blocked for about 10 hours as government censors and mobile providers scrambled to find a way of blocking the offending pages without cutting off the entire internet.

The crackdown started on Tuesday after an Islamic lawyers' association won a court injunction, first against the offending web page and later against the entire Facebook site. It will be reviewed on 31 May.

Najibullah Malik, the civil servant heading the committee that implemented the ban, said it might be reviewed at a meeting next week. "We decided that this kind of information was going to hurt people's feelings. We have directed the PTA to block all and any sites that display those caricatures," he told the Guardian.

At one level, the controversy pits free speech fundamentalists in the west against religious extremists in Pakistan. Pakistani protesters accuse the government of crude censorship that is ineffectual because users can circumvent the restrictions through proxy servers.

Emails with instructions on how to find proxy servers swirled around Pakistani cyberspace from early morning. Many vented their anger on Twitter, which experienced a surge in demand from Pakistanis starved of social networking opportunities. "Way to go assholes. Why don't you just cut us off from the internet and get it over and done with," read one tweet.

Pakistan has about 20 million internet users, 2.5 million of whom are members of Facebook.

Government officials say they are acting pre-emptively to prevent a repeat of the 2006 cartoon riots that caused destruction of property and caused five deaths. But it was unclear whether the measures would satisfy the court or prevent disturbances.

Even after Facebook was banned yesterday, Islamist groups took to the streets, mounting minor protests. More are feared following weekly prayers tomorrow.

Inspired by an idea from a Seattle cartoonist, at least two Facebook pages are titled "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day", with combined membership of over 80,000 people and hundreds of controversial images. A website devoted to the idea has also been censored.

Although the pages claim to be upholding the right to free speech, many users are using them to spread images that crudely lampoon Islam or cause gratuitous offence to its followers.

The controversy poses a dilemma for Pakistan's minority liberals, many of whom oppose government censorship yet are also critical of western countries that allow the dissemination of hateful and potentially destabilising material.

Hasan Zaidi, a journalist and film-maker, said he and other internet users planned to file a court petition against the ban. "It's absurd," he said. "They haven't thought this through. The logical conclusion is that we should shut our eyes, stick our fingers in our ears and ban the entire internet, even email."

But Zaidi added that western countries with blasphemy laws protecting Christianity or preventing Holocaust denial were guilty of hypocrisy, and said he felt western rightwing extremists were using the controversy to heighten bigoted views.

"This sort of campaign to promote the right of free speech is very narrow minded and shallow," he said. "I'm not discounting that those images are offensive to the vast majority of people. My issue is with the [government's] solution."

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..

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

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.