The culture secretary wants us to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe. That's going to take some doing - such as surpassing Lithuania

The new culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that he wants - in the lifetime of this parliament (that's five years maximum) - to roll out broadband to remote areas which do not have high-speed internet access.

Here's what he said, again: "We are now ranked 33rd in the world when it comes to broadband speed, with an average that is nearly five times slower than South Korea", he said. "Within this parliament we want Britain to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe."

I'm sure that he's absolutely honest in that desire; note that he's expressing a want, not an objective. However, I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that by the end of this parliament we will not have the best superfast broadband network in Europe, no matter how much we might want one.

Presently, the best superfast broadband network - defined as the country which has the largest number of homes with fibre connections "to the home", aka FTTH - is (drum roll) Lithuania.

Eh? Yes, Lithuania is in the lead of the FTTH race at present, with 18% penetration. Sweden, Norway and Slovenia are above 10%. There's also Italy, France, the Netherlands and Denmark all making waves in FTTH. Quoth FTTH council Europe president Karel Helsen: "It is up to Germany and [the] UK to increase their efforts to follow as soon as possible."

Still, there is some good news from Fibrecity Holdings, which announced in May that "it intends to build the next Fibrecity networks, which will result in more than one million homes and businesses being connected to its fibre optic network over the next four years delivering standard speeds of 100Mbps and boosts of up to 1Gbps through the largest fibre to the home initiative in the UK."

Note that "intends". And note that it's not saying quite how much it might cost. Or how it's going to be paid for. Nor where the 1m homes are.

This is the crux with high-speed broadband: it's easiest to build it in cities, but the people who will really benefit from it are the people in rural constituencies.

The former fact means that telecoms companies are happy to pay for the building of the urban FTTH (and FTTC - fibre to the cabinet, the box on your street where the line are routed) networks, because they can charge people for the higher speeds they offer; you don't have to lay a lot of cable to get the payback. By contrast in rural areas, you have to lay a lot of cable (which is very labour-intensive, as well as capital-intensive) to pass relatively few homes. That means that rural areas don't get high-speed broadband (or even in some cases broadband) because it's not economic for the networks to build out to them. After all, if you had a choice of laying 500m of cable and passing 50 homes, or 500m of cable and not even passing 1 home, which would you go for in running your business?

Certainly Hunt's heart is in the right place. In the speech, he says: "It is a scandal that nearly 3 million households in this country still cannot access 2 Mbps broadband speeds, and less than 1% of the country is able to access the internet using modern fibre optic technology compared to an OECD average of around 10%. Some people ask why we need these speeds when the iPlayer can manage on less than one Mpbs. They are missing the point. Superfast broadband is not simply about doing the same things faster. It's about doing totally new things creating a platform on which a whole generation of new businesses can thrive. The Federation of Small Businesses has estimated that a superfast network could add 18 billion to GDP and create 60,000 jobs. NESTA thinks it could be ten times that 600,000 new jobs."

And a lot of those probably in rural locations - or at least not requiring people to shift from their present location, as superfast connections can let you collaborate remotely, rather than having to slow in all the time.

But that choice for telcos - 500m past 50 homes, or past one? - is an obvious one.

That's why building rural broadband, and especially building high-speed networks in rural constituencies, requires subsidy of some sort. The irony was that the Labour administration was prepared to fund this from the "outside in" - paying for those at the extremes of the network (basically, the Tory constituencies) to get connected, and so getting the telcos to pay for the bridging cost. The Tories, by contrast, were happy to push from the limits of the build (basically, Labour constituencies) outwards - but didn't, and I suspect still don't, like the idea of subsidies.

As we noted in March, the Tories' manifesto commitments weren't very helpful for rural communities.

Quite which model Hunt is looking for isn't clear. He said: "Government must ensure we do not open up a new digital divide between the urban areas most attractive to infrastructure providers and rural communities were superfast broadband may never be viable." OK, fair enough. Afterwards he added: "These rural broadband pilots will help us understand the level of government support that is necessary."

That's going to be quite a lot. The broadband consultancy Point Topic did a calculation which we wrote about earlier in the year: it reckoned it would require a subsidy of about 130m every year. Hunt says that the 250m "digital switchover" money from the BBC is going to be available for this. That would cover the bill; but is it going to be enough to get telecoms companies (actually, BT, because the capital and operational expenditure involved in rolling out fibre through over such large distances requires the sort of organisation that only BT can presently call on) to install it?

The comparison with South Korea, too, is false. That's a highly urban country, with the population very concentrated into cities, while the UK is (by comparison) far more evenly spread.

Still, it's good for Hunt to have ambitions. He says that "Broadband Delivery UK the organisation which will be the delivery vehicle for these policies and accountable to me will hold an industry event on 15th July to provide further details, and to describe how the procurement of these testing projects will be achieved." We'll certainly look to be there and find out more - especially to see how many "notspots" (above) can be filled in by 2015.

After details of the UK Supreme Court's expensive website emerged, another FOI request has shown how the CPS site has spent more than expected for the past five years

Another day, another Freedom of Information (FOI) request revealing a quite extraordinary spend on a government website.

The latest one: the site for the Crown Prosecution Service for England and Wales, where development and running costs amounted to 370,000 in its five years, from launch (relaunch?) in 2004/5 up to 2008/9 - including 121,965 in the 2008/09 year alone.

That's to add to the discovery that the website for the new UK Supreme Court cost - which, as we noted late last week, cost a total of 360,000.

Kudos to Henry Kitt, who has been putting down a series of FOI requests along these lines to try to shine some light on what looks like a murky mess of the commissioning, building and running of government websites.

As Simon Dickson (who has done some website development for the UK government) points out, for the Supreme Court contract, fulfilled by Logica without a tender, you get a website with "pretty basic errors" in its HTML, no RSS feed, and which seems to consist almost entirely of PDFs - without even a basic press notice.

As Dickson comments, "You need to ask yourself whether 360,000 seems like a fair price for such a website. I'd suggest it isn't. Even with a significant allocation for design, I'd have thought you could produce a similar result - with better functionality - for 95% less. If there's more going on behind the scenes than is obvious from the front end, perhaps they might like to explain what. This is a perfect example of why I'm not scared of all the talk about massive public sector spending cuts."

So now we move on to the CPS site. What do we find in that FOI response? First, the costs breakdown:

• 2004/05 - 70,020.60
• 2005/06 - 49,407.55
• 2006/07 - 70,626.16
• 2007/08 - 58,016.85
• 2008/09 - 121,965.19

Well. That's a lot of money. Keep reading on, though, because you haven't found out yet how much the original tender was for. It'll make your jaw drop.

"Q: Where the costs have been incurred with external providers, please list the companies in question."

"A: The CPS IT Business partner Logica UK Ltd provides hosting and support of the CPS corporate website whilst ECRU provide web publishing support."

Logica, eh?

So how did Logica get that gig? Kitt asks:

"Q: I would also be grateful to receive full disclosure of the tendering process including proposals of all unsuccessful bidders. Please also detail future budget allocations for public websites where these have been considered."

"A: The information you have requested in questions five and six are exempt from disclosure by virtue of sections 41 and 43 (2) of the Act."

"Information provided in confidence is exempt information if it was obtained by the public authority from any other person (including another public authority) and the disclosure of the information to the public (otherwise under this Act) by the public authority holding it would constitute a breach of confidence by that or any other person..... Section 43 (2) of the Act provides that, information is exempt information if its disclosure under this Act would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of any person (including the public authority holding it). This is a qualified exemption and will require the balance of the public interest test."

Indeed it will. Surely the CPS needs to show that there's a public interest in *not* revealing more details about the tendering process. That is, there was one, right?

Back to the FOI result:

"The CPS acknowledges that there is a strong public interest in the need for transparency in the accountability of public funds and the way in which public money is being used effectively. In addition, to ensure that government departments are getting value for money when purchasing goods and services. However, the CPS considers that the public interest factors against disclosure outweigh the public interest for disclosing."

Show your working, then, CPS, for considering that:

"Releasing information may have a detrimental impact on the ability of the CPS to obtain the appropriate suppliers to cater for the specialist needs and requirements of the organisation. Further more the CPS position could be weakened when buying from a competitive environment if it were to reveal information falling within the procurement process. Such information could be potentially useful to future suppliers when proposing services to the CPS, which would adversely affect the effective use of public money. Disclosure could make companies or individuals reluctant to provide the CPS with commercially sensitive information in the future and consequently undermine the ability of the department to fulfil its role."

So the CPS is saying that if future companies put in a tender to do the work, they might not like the idea that others could see what they're bidding, or what they're bidding for, and how they allocated resources.

Hang on, though, there's more:

"You may be interested that a tendering exercise was carried out for a three year contract, estimated total value 45,000. Due to the value, a full Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) exercise was not undertaken. Seven suppliers were asked to bid after being identified as potentially suitable by the Central Office of Information (COI) and the CPS Communications Directorate. Only two bids were received and the contract was awarded to ECRU. "

Er, just a minute. A 45,000 three-year contract that spent more than that in every single year for the past five years? That sounds like project management gone horribly wrong at the very least.

We'd love to know who the failed bidder was - any clues?

In the meantime, we'll ask Logica if it can explain how the numbers grew so far, so fast.

Update: Afua Hirsch, our legal affairs correspondent, points out that the UK Supreme Court blog, which is not affiliated with the UK Supreme Court (it's actually run by the lawyers Olswang), provides far more useful coverage. And it has an RSS feed, too.

It's all kicking off next week, but here's a shortlist of possible highlights...

Next week, the global video game industry converges on downtown LA for the annual E3 event, a glittering showcase of forthcoming interactive treats. While many of the titles on show will already be vaguely familiar to gamers, it's here that publishers and console manufacturers tend to make all their exciting new announcements, often spending the days beforehand whipping the specialist press up into an unseemly tizzy with veiled hints, teaser websites and the promise of 'behind-closed-doors' demos.

I'll be at the event and am planning to, yes, 'live blog' the press conferences as well as 'Tweet' from the showfloor and also 'blog' from my hotel room late into the night! But for now, here are five of the big rumours/teasers heading into E3 week...

Rare has a surprise ready
The veteran UK developer has just celebrated its 25th birthday by excitingly rebranding. But is this just the beginning of the company's leap back into the industry limelight? Its official website is currently showing a countdown to some unknown event, along with the phrase, 'one in a million'. Okay, so it's got to be some sort of E3 announcement, but what? The cheeky scamps are not giving much away on their Twitter Feed, apart from 'dismissing' a couple of guesses, including a new Bond game and a Rare-developed Halo title. I'm guessing... a Sabre Wulf MMOG? Or something to do with Xbox Live avatars? Anyone?
Intrigue-o-meter: 3.5/5

Valve has a surprise ready
The Half-Life developer recently cancelled its expected Portal 2 press conference and promised to replace it with a 'surprise'. But what could that mean. Apparently, it won't be Half Life 2, Episode 3. So what does the Washington-based studio have up its sleeve? Could it be Left4Dead or even Counter Strike flavoured? Hmm.
Intrigue-o-meter: 3/5

The Nintendo 3DS console will be as powerful as the Xbox 360 and PS3
For the last decade the big N has pursued a business model in which it produces comparatively underpowered hardware, but augments its proposition with interesting user interfaces. However, according to news source IGN, unnamed developers are claming that the forthcoming 3D-capable handheld console currently known as the Nintendo 3DS will have graphical and processing capabilities far in excess of the Wii, and perhaps even knocking at the door of the Xbox 360 and PS3. Seems unlikely, but Nintendo will surely reveal all at its press conference on June 15.
Intrigue-o-meter: 4/5

Respawn to make big E3 announcement
You may remember that earlier this year, Infinity Ward studio heads Jason West and Vince Zampella were relieved of their duties, triggering the series of events that inevitably became known as Infinity-gate. The duo quickly announced their plans to set up a new developer, Respawn Entertainment, and inked a distribution deal with EA. At this point, we assumed they'd still be constructing their Ikea desks and picking out some nice tiles for the kitchen area, but no - the duo's Facebook page states: "big time announcement at E3 next week. stay tuned, kiddies!" All we know about the project so far comes from an LA Times interview back in April: that it'll be a 'summer blockbuster'-sized behemoth competing directly with Call of Duty...
Intrigue-o-meter: 3.75/5

Sony to announce PSP 2
Okay, this one has been rumbling on for some time now, but industry oracle Michael Pachter believes nay, states that Sony will finally play its PSP 2 hand at E3. The latest speculation, courtesy of VG247, is that it'll have two cameras and a touch screen. Two cameras!
Intrigue-o-meter: 2.764/5

More on E3 after I touchdown in LA later this week!

Mobile phones don't consume much power but the networks they rely on do.

More carbon footprints: nuclear war, a pint of beer, more
Understand more about carbon footprints

The carbon footprint of using a mobile phone:
47kg CO2e: a year's typical usage of just under 2 minutes per day
1250kg CO2e: a year's usage at 1 hour per day
125 million tonnes CO2e: global mobile usage per year

A minute's mobile-to-mobile chatter comes in at 57g, about the same as an apple, most of a banana or a very large gulp of beer. Three minutes has a similar impact to sending a small letter (written on recycled paper) by second-class post.

Mobile phones cause a fairly tiny slice of global emissions, but if you are a chatterbox using your mobile for an hour each day, the total adds up to more than 1 tonne CO2e per year the equivalent of flying from London to New York, one way, in economy class.

Indeed, the footprint of your mobile phone use is overwhelmingly determined by the simple question of how often you use it. One estimate for the emissions caused by manufacturing the phone itself is just 16kg CO2e, equivalent to nearly 1kg of beef. If you include the power it consumes over two typical years (that's about how long the average phone remains in use, even though most could probably last for 10 years) that figure rises to 22kg.

But the footprint of the energy required to transmit your calls across the network is about three times all of this put together, taking us to a best estimate of 94kg CO2e over the life of the phone, or 47kg per year. This breaks down as follows:

Base station 23.1kg
Administration 7.1kg
Manufacture 6.3kg
Switchboard 5.6kg
Phone energy 3.2kg
Transport before sale 1.6kg

In 2009 there were 2.7 billion mobiles in use: nearly half the world population has got one. On this basis, mobile calls account for about 125 million tonnes CO2e, which is just over one-quarter of a per cent of global emissions.

If you want to reduce the footprint of your communication habits, texting is a much lower-carbon option. Landlines offer carbon savings, too, because it takes about one-third of the power to transmit a call over a fixed landline network than it does when both callers are on a mobile.

It took a lot of digging to get data for these calculations. In the end I was pleasantly surprised that there is some reasonably sensible looking analysis out there. Nevertheless, now feels like a good time for a reminder that all footprint estimates contain considerable uncertainty and some more than others.

See more carbon footprints.

This article is drawn from How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee

Aleks Krotoski and Charles Arthur welcome Tom Watson MP in this week's lively Tech Weekly discussion about open data, the newest iPhone announcement from Apple, and the most recent problems plaguing social network Facebook.

Watson, who was instrumental in helping the previous Labour government understand the value of opening up its public records, shares his view on the reasons why openness should be valued and what he had to do to convince his political colleagues. Charles Arthur speaks with Wolfram Alpha creator Conrad Wolfram about one of the potential applications of the government data, and how more like this should be released for the benefit of his service and of mankind.

Charles also reveals the specs of the newest handset in the Apple iPhone lineup, announced on Monday. But how did the leak of a prototype affect the launch? The team also discusses Steve Jobs' visions of the future, and how similar they are to Microsoft.

Finally, we hear how to avoid being "likejacked", or scammed by hackers who've taken hold of a new Facebook feature that allows you to share where on the web you've been with your social network friends.

Don't forget to ...

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If you don't like Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), odds are you won't find much to like when Steve Ballmer talks. If you like Microsoft, you probably still won't and that's a shame. The Microsoft chief executive and chief software architect Ray Ozzie opened the last day of D8.


Photo by Rain Rannu on Flickr. Some rights reserved

The latter owned the quality-to-noise ratio but Ballmer, who can sound incoherent as he accuses Google (NSDQ: GOOG) of being with its dual OS efforts, came through with some points that needed to be made amidst all the verbiage. The best sum-up I've heard so far came from Rob Glaser, chairman of RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK) and a Microsoft alum in a tweet about a conversation during the session: "Guy asks me "Is Microsoft empire about to crumble?" Me: "Yes, like the British empire, not the Soviet."

Some bits from Ballmer; three videos embedded below.

Explaining why he thinks we're moving towards a era of general devices that can be used like appliances: "I don't think the whole world is going to be able to afford five devices a person." That may work in the "bubble world of Terranea," the resort just south of Los Angeles where D8 was held, he added, but not for most people. That's a reminder some people need to hear.

Ballmer tried to avoid letting the competition - Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). in this case - own all the definitions. "The real question is, 'what's a PC?'" For Ballmer, it includes shifting form factors that get smaller, lighter, faster. He's right: it's to the competition's benefit to make the category seem more narrow.

On mobile, Ballmer says it's about the value of "excellent execution." He didn't sugarcoat how much Microsoft has slipped: "We were ahead of this game. Now we find ourselves #5 in the market." He went into more detail in the segment in the video.

As for RIM (NSDQ: RIMM), Ballmer says, "The thing people miss about them is how good a job they've done on the consumer side."

The ease with which Facebook's 'Like' button can be added to a page also makes it easy to exploit - and that could have serious effects quite soon

Facebook's announcement of its "Like" button has been a gift - to scammers and malware authors who take advantage of its simple Javascript to write exploits.

Such "clickjacking" exploits first began appearing last week, though with no "payload" other than to spread pages virally throughout the site. However, anti-virus companies such as Sophos are warning that it could turn into a much more aggressive technique that will end up installing malware on peoples' machines when they think that all they're doing is going to hit a "Like" button on an innocent site.

Graham Cluley at Sophos explains that it exploits a bug (or is it a feature?) of pretty much every browser: if you overlay an invisible iframe on top of a link on a page, then you can't tell if you clicked on the link - or the iframe.

(We wrote about iframes and the threat they posed in April 2008: What's an iframe attack and why should I care?)

As Lockergnome points out, "clickjacking is not an operating system specific exploit, but a browser-based attack so it impacts Windows, Mac, and Linux users the same."

In the first round of exploits, which went around last week, the messages that led to the iframe exploit included "LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE.", and "This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS!!" and finally "The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School.". (Give the scammers some credit - they know how peoples' minds work, as well as how websites work.)

The next wave had targeted links that displayed text that says either, "Paramore n-a-k-ed photo leaked" or "Justin Biebers Phone Number Leaked!"

The overall method was the same, though. Users following the link were taken to a page saying "Click here to continue if you are 18 years of age of above." Clicking anywhere on the site then launched an invisible iframe which contains a Facebook Like button, thus spreading the link to more and more users.

Simon Willison, web developer extraordinaire and occasionally of this parish, notes on his blog:

"Since Likes show up in your Facebook stream, it's an easy attack to make viral. The button is implemented on third party sites as an iframe, which would seem to me to be exploitable by design (just make the iframe transparent in the parent document and trick the user in to clicking in the right place)."

More dangerous are his conclusions:

"I can't think of any way they could support the embedded Like button without being vulnerable to clickjacking, since clickjacking prevention relies on not allowing your UI elements to be embedded in a hostile site, while the Like button's functionality depends on exactly that."

It's another example of the collision between fabulously idealistic ideas of how to join all the web together, and make communication easier, and the reality - which is that there's always someone looking to make a quick (dishonest) buck. The "Like" button is a nice idea, but lacks security robustness.

As ReadWriteWeb remarks,

"The problem has to do with the overly simple way Facebook has implemented the "like button" feature. Non-developers can plug a URL into a wizard that generates code that can be copied and pasted anywhere on the Web. Like buttons created this way or manually, via handwritten code, will function properly even if they point to a webpage that's on a different domain from the page where the button is being hosted."

Facebook can't do a great deal about it, because the Like button and associated code sit outside Facebook itself; and it can't detect whether someone has overlaid an iframe or similar bit of malware on the site. The only recourse open to them is to spot users and pages that seem to be passing on recognised scams and blocking exits from Facebook to them, or incoming links from them. That, however, is going to be an arms race to compare with the one against email spammers.

"Clickjacking" was the term created by Jeremiah Grossman and Robert "RSnake" Hansen, the security researchers who brought the technique to public awareness in late 2008, notes The Register.

Google Street View cars around the world mistakenly collected Wi-Fi data

Google's legal problems surrounding data collection around the world intensified today when it emerged that the company faces a police investigation in Australia, the latest in a growing number of countries expressing concern about the its Street View mapping services.

The probe, which comes amid accusations that Google breached privacy laws, was announced a day after the firm agreed to hand over data it has collected through wireless networks to French, German and Spanish authorities. Canada has also recently launched a probe into Google amid privacy concerns relating to the Street View service which uses camera-equipped fleets of cars to take 360 degree panoramic pictures for an online atlas.

Last month, Google acknowledged it had mistakenly collected fragments of data over public and unsecured Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries as it was taking pictures of neighbourhoods. It said it discovered the problem after German regulators launched an inquiry into the matter.

In the UK, the information commissioner ruled last year that Google's Street View technology carries a small risk of privacy invasion but should not be stopped, although members of the public have taken direct action in at least one location to prevent the company from taking photographs on their streets.

Residents in Broughton blocked the driver of a Google Street View car, which captures the photos, when it tried to enter the village, near Milton Keynes.

The Australian investigation comes as more regulators and consumers watchdogs around the world are complaining that Google does not take people's privacy seriously enough.

Google maintains that its users' privacy is one of the company's highest priorities. Australia's communications minister Stephen Conroy has accused Google of being responsible for the "single greatest breach in the history of privacy".

Google apologised, saying it accidentally collected the information. The company and the Australian government are arguing over Senator Conroy's proposed mandatory internet filter, which Google says amounts to censorship.

"There have been some complaints voiced by the public in respect to practices that have been reported involving allegations that some information may have been obtained by staff of Google travelling around the streets," said

Australia's federal attorney general Robert McClelland.

"In light of concerns having been raised by the public, my department thought there were issues of substance that were raised that require police investigation." The case was referred to the Australian federal police on Friday, he said. It will focus on whether the company breached the country's telecommunications interceptions act, which prevents people accessing electronic communications other than for authorised purposes.

"This was a mistake," Google said in a statement. "We are talking to the appropriate authorities to answer any questions they have."

The US Federal Trade Commission has already begun an informal inquiry into the matter and Google has said it would co-operate with authorities.

Last month Michigan Democrat John Conyers, the head of the House Judiciary Committee in the United States, sent letters to Google and Facebook urging them to co-operate with any government privacy inquiries. Conyers asked Google to retain the data until any inquiries are complete.

Google first revealed that cars were also collecting wireless data in April, but said no personal information from Wi-Fi networks was involved.

But after an audit requested by Germany, Google acknowledged in May it mistakenly had collected samples of "payload data."

Suits have been filed in Washington, California, Massachusetts and Oregon by people who accuse Google of violating their privacy by collecting data from open Wi-Fi networks.

On its official blog Google has said that the software code responsible for collecting the data was used by mistake, and that all Street View cars were grounded when the mistake was discovered.

Audioboo has announced a major investment from radio content firm UBC Media, Imagination Technologies and angel investor Don Cruikshank, who now becomes chairman.

The recording tool, which came out of beta in March last year, allows users to record geotagged audio which they can upload and share. 

Photo by philcampbell on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Audioboo initially launched for iPhone and now has a web interface, social media tools and Android app, and has also created a premium, professional service licence by the Open University, Royal Opera House and the British Library, which us the tool for its Soundmap project.

The tool has recorded 120,000 app downloads, with high-profile users including Stephen Fry, Channel 4 News, the Labour Party's David Miliband and the Guardian, which used the tool to cover the G20 protests.

Audioboo founder and chief executive Mark Rock said the deal will mean the firm can "rapidly experiment and develop our ideas about how audio content will function, feel and make money in the future".

"We are also very fortunate that Don has accepted a role as chairman. His experience of turning opportunities into significant businesses will be key to our future success." 

Audioboo has also been added as a feature on some models of Imagination Technologies's Pure radios. "Innovation around audio and the web has all been about music," said Rock. "This is an experiment to connect people who create audio with people who listen to traditional radio."

The deal also sees former Orange, Vodafone and One2one executive Bruce Akhurst join Audioboo's board after joining the firm as chief commercial officer.

AudioBoo was one of the first projects to be funded by 4ip, Channel 4's technology innovation fund; 4ip's investment has now been converted into equity in the firm.

"Audioboo has been a flagship project for us," said 4ip's digital commissioner Daniel Heaf. "Our remit to support new creative talent working in digital media helps companies like Audioboo realise their dreams of bringing an innovative product to market, demonstrating audience and commercial traction and raising investment to take the business further."

Here's BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones using Audioboo to talk about the deal.

Appeal by grounded passenger fined for spoof tweet about blowing up snowbound airport is backed by prominent lawyer

Paul Chambers, a former trainee accountant who was fined 1,000 after posting a message to the social network Twitter joking about blowing up an airport, is to appeal against his conviction.

Chambers was found guilty in May of sending a message of a "menacing character" under the Communications Act 2003 after he tweeted in frustration in January at the closure of Robin Hood airport, near Doncaster, owing to snow. "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!" he wrote, frustrated that his plans for a flight to Ireland looked like being thwarted.

The appeal, which is likely to be heard next month or August, is being co-ordinated by Allen Green, a prominent lawyer who writes the Jack of Kent blog, and will be led by Stephen Ferguson, a leading defence barrister who is being paid from a defence and appeal fund for Chambers.

The arguments will turn on whether the message could reasonably be interpreted as menacing under the terms of the legislation.

Writing on his blog, Green says: "I think that we can be optimistic for Paul's chances on appeal, but that sadly is not a certainty. There is still a lot of work to be done so that this injustice can be remedied."

After the initial verdict at a magistrates' court, Chambers admitted that his tweet was "silly" but called the police reaction "absurd", saying his tweet was "like having a bad day at work and stating that you could murder your boss" and that "I didn't even think about whether it would be taken seriously."

Chambers left his job as a financial supervisor at a car distribution company after having been arrested in January at work by four police officers. His solicitor in the initial case argued that the tweet was a "Basil Fawlty" outburst immature, tasteless, unacceptable, but not criminal. The airport itself described the message as "not credible" as a threat, and its operations were not disrupted, but it was obliged to tell South Yorkshire police. They took a different view.

"I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of a Twitter post. I'm the most mild-mannered guy you could imagine," Chambers said after the initial verdict.

Airline plans to fit jets with infrared sensors that allow pilots to detect ash clouds and fly around them

Airline disruption caused by volcanic ash could be reduced using technology found in domestic security cameras, according to easyJet.

The airline said today that installing two infrared sensors in an aeroplane tail fin, at a cost of 20,000 ( 16,600), would allow pilots to spot and fly around ash clouds up to 62 miles (100km) away.

EasyJet said it hoped to place the system on 12 of its jets by the end of the year, subject to tests. The aviation industry is attempting to prevent a repeat of April's European airspace shutdown that cost airlines and airports up to 2.5bn.

Andy Harrison, easyJet's chief executive, said millions of passengers were grounded because safety authorities across the continent did not know how much ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano was in the atmosphere and relied on computer models whose accuracy has been questioned by carriers.

Under the new system, developed by the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, the two cameras effectively operating as heat sensors will be able to discern particles of volcanic ash that absorb infrared radiation and would be shown as red clouds on a pilot's monitoring screen. Ultimately, a Europe-wide ash map could be constructed if entire fleets of planes carrying the technology relay the results to operations centres on the ground.

"We believe that will mean that the mass disruption we have seen in recent months will be a thing of the past," said Harrison, who described the system as a weather radar for ash. The current ash limit, a significant change from the former blanket ban, is 2mg of ash a cubic metre, but airspace closures still rely on computer models run by the Meteorological Office. This has prompted calls from airlines to let the industry do more evidence-based monitoring.

The Civil Aviation Authority, which has accused the industry of "buck-passing" by attempting to blame regulators for the ash shutdowns, welcomed the easyJet announcement. Andrew Haines, the CAA chief executive, said: "I very much hope that this is a sign that the industry is ready to play its part in finding a fundamental solution ... rather than pretending that the problem does not exist."

The system, the Airborne Volcanic Object Identifier and Detector, or Avoid, is based on technology tested on active volcanoes in Sicily and proven to work with satellite and ground-based sensors. But the system's creator, Dr Fred Prata, admitted it still needed further testing before it could be rolled out by easyJet. Those tests include a trial aboard an Airbus A340 jet, which must fly through ash clouds elsewhere in the world because Eyjafjallajokull now appears to be dormant. Further flights will then measure ash density in the test flight area to ensure the A340 test has not generated rogue readings.

Prata said airlines should not use the drop in volcanic activity in Iceland to put off the quest for new solutions to tackling airborne ash. "There will be a next time. Volcanoes have been around for millions of years," he said.

Ever heard of PremierOpinion? You soon will: but this doesn't quite look like the long-expected attack of malware on Macs. Instead it's a comScore subsidiary that's the culprit.

If you have downloaded and installed one of a long list (see the end of this post) of screensavers for the Mac, you've also got some spyware on board.

Yup. Spyware. On the Mac. The sector is becoming big enough to be worth the attention of the writers of scummy software. You might think it's not malware, but that's only because you haven't read the (long) list of things it does.

Intego, which has ploughed a fairly lonely furrow offering anti-virus checking for Macs (though it also picks up malware aimed at Windows machines, which Macs can pass on via email or Office documents), says it has found the spyware program - which it calls OpinionSpy, aka PremierOpinion - distributed within a number of free applications and screen savers on a variety of sites.

The principal source, though, and the largest number of infected files, come via a site called 7art-screensavers - which is registered to Alex Korsakoff of Moscow. But we don't think he's behind the spyware; in fact we're all but certain about that.

Worth noting too that 7art-screensavers has a number of "partners" also offering screensavers. It's quite possible that they have also provided this spyware as part of installations.

Where's the spyware from? Apparently a company called PremierOpinion, which has a privacy policy as long as your arm (if you have long arms). Which is owned by VoiceFive Networks. Which is owned by comScore.

In fact the VoiceFive/PremierOpinion software - which also attacks is available for Windows - has already been pointed out by Ben Edelman, longtime scourge of spyware, as "not something you'd want on your computer".

We have contacted PremierOpinion and VoiceFive to ask why they install software which scans email and web headers. (There's no given option to remove PremierOpinion from Macs on its FAQs.)

According to Intego, "This spyware, OSX/OpinionSpy, performs a number of malicious actions, from scanning files to recording user activity, as well as sending information about this activity to remote servers and opening a backdoor on infected Macs."

How does it manage that? Because you let it: "The spyware itself is not contained in these applications, but is downloaded during the installation process. This shows the need for an up-to-date anti-malware program with a real-time scanner that can detect this malware when it is downloaded by the original application's installer.

"The information provided with some of these applications contains a misleading text that users must accept explaining that a "market research" program is installed with them, but not all of these specify this. Some of these programs are also distributed directly from developers' web sites with no such warning."

"The malware, a version of which has existed for Windows since 2008, claims to collect browsing and purchasing information that is used in market reports. However, this program goes much further, performing a number of insidious actions, which have led Intego to classify it as spyware."

If you think that you may have let this program get onto your machine, see our accompanying post on Ask Jack: How to get rid of OpinionSpy / PremierOpinion's spyware from your Mac.

Intego gives a long list of things that this does:
• This application, which has no interface, runs as root (it requests an administrator's password on installation) with full rights to access and change any file on the infected user's computer.

• If for any reason the application stops running, it is re-launched via launchd, the system-wide application and service launching facility.

• It opens an HTTP backdoor using port 8254.

• It scans all accessible volumes, analyzing files, and using a great deal of CPU time. It is not clear what data it copies and sends to its servers, but it scans files on both local and network volumes, potentially opening up large numbers of confidential files on a network to intrusion.

• It analyzes packets entering and leaving the infected Mac over a local network, analyzing data coming from and being sent to other computers. One infected Mac can therefore collect a great deal of data from different computers on a local network, such as in a business or school.

• It injects code, without user intervention, into Safari, Firefox and iChat, and copies personal data from these applications. Code injection is a form of behavior similar to that of a virus, and this malware "infects" applications when they are running to be able to carry out its operations. (It infects the applications' code in the Mac's memory, and does not infect the actual applications' files on the user's hard disk.)

• It regularly sends data, in encrypted form, to a number of servers using ports 80 and 443. It sends data to these servers about files it has scanned locally, and also sends e-mail addresses, iChat message headers and URLs, as well as other data. This data may include personal data, such as user names, passwords, credit card numbers, web browser bookmarks, history and much more.

• Given the type of data that it collects, the company behind this spyware can store detailed records of users, their habits, their contacts, their location and much more.

• The application can be upgraded automatically, with new features added, with no user intervention, and without the user being aware of this. It occasionally asks users for information, via the display of dialogs, such as their name, or asks them to fill out surveys.

• In some cases, computers with this spyware installed no longer work correctly after a certain period of time; it is necessary to force-reboot such Macs.

• If a user deletes the original application or screen saver that installed this spyware, the spyware itself will remain installed and continue to operate.

Worried? You should be: this is about as nasty a piece of spyware as you could expect to find. The fact that it's downloaded during installation is a clever trick. The claims to be collecting "marketing information" is a flat-out lie, so one would hope that the people behind it will be caught.

We've emailed 7art to ask about what knowledge it had of PremierOpinion/OpinionSpy and its real function. We'll update the post if and when we hear from them.

We've also emailed VoiceFive, PremierOpinion and comScore to ask them about this.

So is that the end of innocence for the Mac? Actually, there's been malware about on Mac OS X for quite some time (much of it spotted by Intego, it should be said) - but there hasn't been a piece of software with this vicious potential on OS Xbefore that I can recall. The subtle element here being the download-during-install, and the use of the admin password to install as root and make itself self-launching.

And more to the point, this isn't a team of l33t hax0rs writing malware aimed at the Mac: it seems to be a company trying to get more information about web users (that's comScore's raison d'etre), and deciding that the Mac demographic - so far underserved by spyware - deserves a bit of attention. Unwelcome attention, with a program that goes too far (a monitoring program shouldn't install as root, and shouldn't install in launchd). But it's not the stealth attack that's often been feared.

How to protect against this sort of stuff? The pricier method: get anti-virus such as Intego. The cheaper method, though requiring more attention: don't run as an administrator (run as a normal "user" with limited rights); when you're asked for your password, ask yourself why this piece of software needs it. (Most applications will work perfectly fine without having to be in the /Applications or /Utilities folder, so there's no reason for them to go there; it also makes it easier to update or wipe your machine if only the Apple set of apps lives in /Applications. Some apps won't agree, but that's tough on them.)

As Intego notes, "this application that purports to collect information for marketing reasons does much more, going as far as scanning all the files on an infected Mac. Users have no way of knowing exactly what data is collected and sent to remote servers; such data may include user names, passwords, credit card numbers and more. The risk of this data being collected and used without users' permission makes this spyware particularly dangerous to users' privacy.

"The fact that this application collects data in this manner, and that it opens a backdoor, makes it a very serious security threat. In addition, the risk of it collecting sensitive data such as user names, passwords and credit card numbers, makes this a very high-risk spyware. While its distribution is limited, we warn Mac users to pay careful attention to which software they download and install."

comScore/VoiceFive/PremierOpinion will no doubt disagree on the privacy point. But in our opinion, adware is virtually indistinguishable from spyware, and both are scummy. Consider yourselves warned.

Here's the list of affected screensavers, from Intego:
"Below is a list of the screensavers and applications that we have found so far which install this spyware.All these screensavers are made by the same company, 7art-screensavers, and are available from their web site, http://7art-screensavers.com. (We're not linking to them. Can you guess why?) Note that you may have downloaded one of these screensavers without going there - a number of download sites offer them.

7art Eternal Love Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
7art Foliage Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Color Therapy Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Crystal Clock ScreenSaver v.2.6
Emerald Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Everlasting Flowering Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Fiesta Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Fire Element Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Fractal Sun Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Freezelight Clock ScreenSaver v.2.9
Full Moon Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Galaxy Rhythm Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Gravity Free Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Lighthouse Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Love Dance Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Magic Forest Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Nature Harmony Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
One World Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Precious Stone Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Radiating Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Rocket Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Secret Land ScreenSaver v.2.8
Serenity Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Silver Snow Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Sky Flight Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Sky Watch ScreenSaver v.2.8
Sunny Bubbles Clock ScreenSaver v.2.9
Water Color Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8
Water Element Clock ScreenSaver v.2.8

Applications: so far, Intego has only found this spyware in one application:
MishInc FLV To Mp3, http://www.mishinc.info/mac_flv_to_mp3.php

Xbox 360 (reviewed)/PS3/Wii; 34.99- 49.99; cert 12+; Harmonix/EA

After the success and all-round brilliance of Beatles Rock Band, it was inevitable that another popular beat combo would see their back catalogue converted to console gaming. It's not like we're short of acts with the necessary back catalogue and fan base. Queen, for example. The Stones. U2. Kiss. Or, for those less dexterous souls, perhaps, the two-chord delights of Status Quo. But Green Day? Really?

Although they don't seem an obvious choice, the Californian sort-of-punks hit the right buttons. Eight studio albums across 20 years. The sort of actually-quite-melodic tunes that work in this format. A demographic that, frankly, has "gamer" written all across it. While the game is, undeniably, a less-than-essential purchase for non Green Day fans, you will also know more of the songs here than you realise.

Predictably, Green Day Rock Band is Beatles Rock Band with a punk lite makeover and lower production values. The basic details are fine the band, I'm assured, look like their real-life counterparts but while the Beatles came with exquisite animations, Green Day get a considerably less fancy treatment.

The game itself is solid though, and follows the Beatles' structure closely. Career mode is the main event, tracing the band's rise via their three biggest albums and three key venues, from dive to stadium. Thrillingly, one of these is Milton Keynes (stadium, that is, not dive) surely the first time that town's rock heritage has been celebrated in game form?

Play well and you earn stars. These, as with the Fab Four's version, unlock photos and videos and additional content, and earn Cred points which you can use to unlock further challenges. As with all Rock Band incarnations, you can play along on guitar (lead or bass), drums or vocals. As with the Beatles, you can also score points here with vocal harmonies, and for the more experienced player teaming up with a novice or two, the very handy "no fail" mode can be assigned to individuals. Given the challenge of some of the guitar lines anything above Easy is surprisingly testing this is a very good thing.

Elsewhere, it's rhythm-based business as usual, with a Quickplay mode, Duel and decent online play and an efficient training set-up. There's still no Guitar Hero-esque drop in/drop out facility, however. It's only a small thing, but for gamers who need to take the odd phone call or get the beers in, it's damned useful.

All told, Green Day Rock Band is another solidly executed chapter in the series and, with 47 songs fully exportable to other Rock Band titles it's not bad value either. Business as usual then.

Rating: 4/5

Game review; 39.99; cert 3+; Nintendo

Consoles usually take a while to get into their stride, but the Wii, as befits its disruptive nature, seemed to have reversed that trend. The compelling games with which it was furnished when new dried up in recent months to a trickle of dross, and one suspects many Wiis began to gather dust in the back of toy-cupboards. The arrival, then, of Super Mario Galaxy 2 could not be more timely.

The problem isn't likely to resolve itself until medical technology allows us to clone several copies of Nintendo's in-house development genius, Shigeru Miyamoto. At least Miyamoto-san saves his best efforts for games featuring Mario, as Super Mario Galaxy 2 amply demonstrates.

Structurally, it is near-indistinguishable from its predecessor, with several worlds to navigate, each split into seven or so galaxies (the last of which presents you with a boss to be defeated before you're awarded a Grand Star). This time around, you can opt to play as Luigi as you enter each galaxy. As in the first Super Mario Galaxy, you have to reach stars to open new galaxies, by executing deft platform moves and solving all manner of puzzles, often involving delicious mischief with the laws of gravity. Those puzzles are invariably so good that they will make you chuckle and nod in appreciation of their sheer cleverness.

The key to reaching what often appear to be unreachable stars is Mario's array of power-ups and special abilities, and Super Mario Galaxy 2 has two new ones. The first is a drill attachment, which Mario carries above his head; shake the Wiimote, and he will burrow straight through the centre of whatever planet he is on. This clever mechanic can be used for puzzle-solving by, for instance, burrowing to the top of pillars too high for Mario's jumping abilities, or for boss-battles, in which you have to time and position your burrowing to hit creatures' vulnerable parts.

But the undoubted star of Super Mario Galaxy 2 is Mario's old mate, Yoshi. He appears in many galaxies, bringing a range of abilities when Mario jumps on his back. With his lizard-like tongue (the direction of which you can control with the Wiimote), he can gobble up and spit out enemies, and swing from designated points. Feed him Blimp Fruit and he will float for a while. And when he swallows a chilli pepper, he gains the ability to run like Forrest Gump (complete with boggle-eyed expression and siren sound effect), enabling him to temporarily escape the normal restrictions of gravity (although he becomes tricky to steer).

All of Mario's existing power-ups appear, too, including Bee Mario and Fire Mario (one clever ice world can be reshaped by Mario's fireballs and by rolling snowballs into melted areas). There are underwater worlds and a flying sequence in which Mario is suspended from a Fluzzard, and at one point, he can power-up into a rolling boulder. His ground-pound move also features heavily.

As the above suggests, the surreal nature that characterises Mario's games is to the fore. Mated with the game's irresistible sweetness, the outcome is a game-world which is truly universal in its appeal the youngest children and grizzliest hardcore gamers alike will be held equally rapt by its charms. A long-overdue reminder of what the Wii is all about.

Rating: 5/5

For all its flaws, it may still herald the next instalment of the computing future, says John Naughton

Everywhere I went last week, people asked: "Well, what do you think of it, then?" The "it" was my shiny new iPad, aka the Jesus Tablet, but I stoutly declined to give an answer. I've been around long enough to be suspicious of first reactions to fancy gizmos, so I resolved to live with the device for a week, using it as much as possible and recording my impressions in an online diary before reaching any conclusions. The week is now up, so here goes.

First, the iPad is insanely, eye-wateringly expensive, especially in this country. So if you're thinking of getting one, find a friend who's going to the US and get him or her to buy you one over there. I paid nearly 700 for the top-of-the-range 64GB Wi-Fi+3G model, based on many bitter years of discovering the two great truths of life: you can never be too thin and you can never have too much computer memory. In this case, however, I was wrong. Everything I needed to do with the iPad could have been done with the base model (16GB, Wi-Fi only, 429). So I have effectively just blown 270. I'll put it down to experience. For everyone else, the message is caveat lector.

Second, it's really just an iPod Touch on steroids. I've had a Touch for ages and it's a wonderful little device that functions as an email machine, occasional web browser, podcast and music player, calculator, internet radio receiver, ebook reader and more besides. It's small enough to slip into a shirt pocket and goes everywhere with me.

The iPad looks gorgeous to people who haven't ever experienced an iPod Touch or an iPhone. But to those familiar with Apple kit, it's just an engorged version of the former. There are some apps that will only run on the iPad, but few would justify the increase in price and bulk.

And the bulk matters: the iPad is heavy 1.5lb (680g). This may not seem much, but after you've been holding it for a couple of hours while browsing the web or reading an ebook, believe me, you really feel it.

Many people have remarked on how good the display is and they're right: it's bright, crisp and renders colours beautifully. But it has one big drawback: it's almost unusable in bright light, so if you're thinking of using it to read an ebook on a Mediterranean beach, forget it. The battery life may be great (10 hours, minimum) but the readability in those conditions ain't. And because it's a touch-screen, the iPad gets smeared with fingermarks. This doesn't affect the usability too much, but if you're someone who likes shiny things to stay shiny, prepare to be obsessive.

The essence of the iPad is that it's a good device for passive "consumption" of preprepared multimedia content. That's why the old media dinosaurs are salivating about it: it seems to offer them a way of regaining control of the customer and of ensuring that s/he pays for content. And one can understand why they are so charmingly deluded about this: all apps have to come through the iTunes store and can be charged for. No wonder Murdoch & co love the device. They think it'll rescue them from the wild west web, where people believe that content should be free. Yeah, and pigs will also fly in close formation.

It's when one tries to use the iPad for generating content that its deficiencies become obvious. The biggest flaw is the absence of multitasking, so you have to close one app to open another, which is a bit like going back to the world of MS-DOS. Email, using the on-screen virtual keyboard, works fine, and if you buy Apple's text-processing app, Pages, then you can create documents. But the hoops one has to go through to pull existing documents in for editing are ludicrously convoluted and there's no way one can easily print from the device.

And the apps are crippled in some ways; after importing a long Word document into Pages, for example, I found that all its footnotes had been stripped out. A presentation imported into the Keynote app came with some of the images removed. And so on.

In the end, a week with the iPad left me with two over-riding impressions. The first is a renewed appreciation of my laptop, which has all the tools I need for a productive life. The second is a conviction that what Apple has done is to legitimise a new format. Just as the iPhone showed the world that phones should be powerful, handheld computers that could incidentally make voice calls, the iPad may convince people that henceforth computers should be fashioned from a single piece of aluminium.

If so, then the next instalment of the computing future starts here.

The Full Stream Ahead campaign allows UK users to try digital film streaming for free for one week only

Movie fans are being given the chance to watch their choice of blockbusters at home for nothing, as a host of Hollywood studios team up with UK-based technology firm Blinkbox to run a week-long free streaming service in an effort to lure internet users away from pirated material.

As part of the "Full Stream Ahead" campaign, which is backed by the UK Film Council and BFI, and launches tomorrow, anyone accessing the Blinkbox website from fullstreamahead.co.uk will be offered 20 credit to spend on films from studios including Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. Titles include Avatar, Sherlock Holmes and Up in the Air.

Users will be able to stream their choices over the internet and watch them on their computer or if they have the right cables on their television.

Music streaming services such as Spotify have proved a hit, helping to arrest some of the piracy that has affected that industry. The film studios are hoping video streaming services will do a similar job, attracting people who may otherwise succumb to unlawful filesharing networks. Many British consumers already use catch-up TV streaming services such as the BBC iPlayer, 4OD and the ITV Player.

"We are doing it much earlier," says Michael Comish, chief executive and co-founder of Blinkbox. "By the time the music industry enabled strong and good-quality legal [streaming] services it was arguably too late. We are in the early days of digital retail for movies, and our ambition is to make people aware of the benefits of streaming services before it is too late."

Research by Global Web Index last year showed that web users were turning to unlawful filesharing sites because the content they wanted was not easily available elsewhere. The survey showed that 45% of filesharers said they would consume films legally if the technology allowed them.

Previously unpublished findings by Trendstream, the UK-based consultancy, show that 28% of those using peer-to-peer filesharing to view unauthorised content do so because it offers instant access. The movie industry hopes that streaming services, which offer similar access, may bring these people back into the fold.

Blinkbox, backed by venture capital firms Eden Ventures, Nordic Venture Partners and Arts Alliance, already has more than 1.2 million users a month, who between them watch about 5m streams per month. While it does not stream content in high-definition, Comish, the former head of new media at Channel 4, said picture quality was good on the average residential broadband line - which runs at between 3Mb and 4Mb per second - while anyone with a slower connection can reduce the file size that they are viewing in order to get a reliable service.

"If millions of people take up this offer, yes, it is going to cost us a lot of money," he said. "But the cost of not doing it is far larger. If we do not make people aware that there is good-quality streaming video available, then we will hit a tipping point in online piracy."

Loss of DiggBar and change to Google's ranking algorithm may have had an impact on social bookmarking site

The famous American baseball manager Yogi Berra was also famous for his gnomic even Zen-like remarks such as "when you come to a fork in the road, take it" and "nobody goes there any more it's too crowded".

The latter seems to be the case for Digg, the site that exploded into web consciousness in 2004 and 2005 as part of the new wave of web 2.0 sites that, rather than telling you what you should read, let their readers determine what the day's most interesting stories were. Digg, founded by Kevin Rose, quickly outstripped Slashdot, the "news for nerds" site where editors picked and chose from among user-contributed links to post on to its news pages. And instead of sites being "slashdotted" by a flurry of clicks from Slashdot, they would stagger under the weight of Digg traffic as readers in their thousands followed links. BusinessWeek featured a lank-haired, stubble-faced Rose asking how he could have built a site of such (speculative) value so quickly. The $40m of venture capital it has attracted testifies to the excitement about its future prospects.

Now, the latest figures from compete.com, one of the many web metric measurement agencies, suggests that between March and April, Digg lost a third of its visitors from 38 million in March 2010 to 24.7 million in April below the 26 million it was claiming in 2008 when we interviewed Rose.

Why? The suggested reasons vary. One comment pointed to Rose's killing-off in April of the year-old "DiggBar", which meant that any links you clicked on were actually framed inside the digg.com site so people stayed longer. More important, anyone outside who clicked on a http://diggurl would be taken to the Digg site not the site being linked to. In killing the bar, Rose said that it had been "bad for the internet". But doing so may have been bad for Digg: if clicking on those links no longer takes you to Digg, there go loads of visitors.

A separate suggestion, via Twitter by Nick Halstead, is that tweaks in March and April to Google's ranking algorithm meant that Digg fell in its search results and that half Digg's traffic comes from Google.

Quite possibly both are correct. But either means that Digg's influence on news sites, which have over the past four years become familiar with incorporating Digg buttons all over their content and surreptitiously "digging" their content through various accounts, is on the wane. The drop in visitors can't be reversed without restoring the DiggBar, which Rose isn't going to do.

So just as you thought you were getting a handle on "social news", and which sites are important, the focus changes again. If Digg's visitors are indeed below the 2008 number, and the DiggBar was inflating visitor numbers, then it's unlikely there's any way back. Just as in American politics, there are no second acts on the web: the examples of Bebo, AOL, MySpace, Friends Reunited and many others show that it's OK to stop growing; what's not OK is to shrink, because you lose advertising income and can't increase your rates. Result: a death spiral.

Certainly, 24.7 million visitors in a month is a more-than-respectable number: but it's also an inflection point, where on Compete.com's graphs it begins to cross over with the rising traffic to twitter.com. But in fact, Twitter is already far bigger than Digg, because those compete.com figures only measure what desktop browsers do not mobiles, the mobile internet or API traffic via dedicated applications such as Tweetdeck or Twitter's official iPhone app. It's probably not an accident that a notably tidier Rose shorter hair, no stubble showed off in a video the other day how he wants to reshape Digg: when you log in you'll have "people you follow", who'll post links that you can "digg" to your followers and perhaps set off a chain reaction to find the stories of the day.

Looking at it, one thought that it looked exactly like Twitter, with perhaps a little more data. Rose as much as admitted it: "Because we're only links and news, we cut out all the miscellaneous status updates that you see on other sites," he says. So, Twitter without the gossip sociability? That's not quite closing the sale, Kevin.

Berra's other impenetrable aphorism may yet turn out to be the fate of Digg: it came to a fork in the road, and took it. But everyone else took the other one. For news sites, it means another adjustment to a new landscape. For Digg, it could mean life or death. Shall we give it a year?

Former US president George Bush attempts to fill those empty hours of retirement by setting up a Facebook account

After dreaming of this day for so long, it's finally here: former US president George W Bush has joined Facebook. That leaves only his father George HW Bush and approximately 16 other US citizens who haven't yet joined the popular social media site.

Sadly, there is no option to "poke" George Bush.

At the time of writing, George Bush already has 36,000 Facebook citizens who "like" him since the page went public on Wednesday morning, although judging by the messages on his wall there is also a substantial number who would like an option to "unlike" him. "I'm glad you finally learned how to use a computer so your supporters can reach you," writes one on Bush's wall, followed by: "And with this, Facebook has officially jumped the shark."

As Facebook accounts go, it doesn't tell us much about him, other than his birthday is on 6 July 1946, and "Personal information: 43rd President of the United States, Former Governor of Texas," which is already in the public domain (although given Facebook's sieve-like privacy posture, anything you post on Facebook is also probably in the public domain, whether you know it or not).

The wall comments are a bizarre bunch: "Thanks to you, we have more than one internet!! God bless!!!" writes one. "Mr President, I SO WISH you had played yourself in the Harold and Kumar film. NOT KIDDING!" writes another. Others are more pointed:

This is awesome to have you on Facebook. The true Americans miss you a lot. Obama is screwing our country. How could so many stupid people vote for that man. He's a muslim just like the ones that took down our Twin Towers. We miss you. God Bless America. And lastly glad to have you back in Texas !!

First prize for best wall comment:

Please don't have your farm pre-emptively attack my farm on Farmville. Sincerely, The Ghost of Saddam

Oh, and then there's this advice:

ps don't join myspace!

A pedestrian is suing Google for supplying unsafe directions in its Maps tool after she was hit by a car on a Park City road. Even with the acknowledgement that most American cities are built for cars, rather than people, isn't that a lawsuit too far?

Lauren Rosenberg is seeking $100,000 in damages after the accident in January when she tried to cross a busy state highway with no pavements at night and was hit by a car. A lawsuit filed in a Utah District Court last week accused Google of being "careless, reckless, and negligent" in supplying unsafe walking directions.

Rosenberg's lawyer Allen Young said: "We think there's enough fault to go around, but Google had some responsibility to direct people correctly or warn them. They created a trap with walking instructions that people rely on. She relied on it and thought she should cross the street."

Rosenberg has been the subject of some vitriol for an apparent lapse in common sense and a rather 'hopeful' lawsuit. Unfortunately that appears to have been directed at another Lauren Rosenberg - a PR executive with a strong online profile who has received various incredulous voicemail and email messages - including one from a friend who said "I thought you were smarter than that".

Danny Sullivan on SearchEngineLand points out that Google Maps' walking direction, which are still in beta, clearly show a warning: "Use caution - This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths". He also says: "I suspect a court is going to find that despite getting bad directions from Google (or a gas station attendant, a local person or any source), people are also expected to use common sense."

Young later told Sullivan that if Google "is going to tell people where to go, they need to have some responsibility to warn them that that might not be the way to go".

"She was in an area that she'd never been to before. It was pitch black. There were no street lights. She relied on Google that she'd cross there and go down to a sidewalk."

Update: We asked Google for comment but they declined.

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?

Newly-published Treasury data shows Department of Health spent most, followed by Department for International Development and Home Office

The government spent 1.8bn on consultants last year, according to figures contained in the comprehensive database of the nation's finances released by the Treasury today.

The figure suggests a substantial rise on the previous year, when official estimates put the bill for outside consultants at 1.5bn. That comes after several years in which Labour had reduced the consultancy bill in efficiency savings.

The coalition government today opened up its accounting books for the first time as it published the entire contents of the Treasury spending database.

The vast database contains a total of 24m individual entries, documenting every government expenditure in the financial year 2009-10.

The Guardian has built a database that allows the public to scrutinise the data, which reveals the bills incurred in every government department for every programme they ran, from the Olympics to procurement budgets in the Ministry of Defence, to the public sector wage bill.

Initial analysis shows the government incurred a 1.8bn bill for employing consultants.

The Department of Health spent most ( 480,402,000) followed by the Department for International Development ( 288,100,000) and the Home Office ( 194,116,000). The total bill came to 1,809,676,000.

Publication of the complex 120GB Combined Online Information System (Coins) promises a unique insight into the everyday running of government, and has been widely welcomed by campaigners for open democracy.

But it is proving controversial in Whitehall. Some ministers have expressed unease about the transparency it will bring, exposing every spending decision they make.

However, Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, hailed the release of the data.

The Liberal Democrat minister said: "For too long, the previous government acted as if the public had no right to know where their hard-earned taxes were spent.

"Today we have lifted that veil of secrecy by releasing detailed spending figures dating back to 2008.

"This data is complex, but this is a major step forward and shows we are delivering on our promise to make this government more open and transparent while ensuring we deliver value for money for the taxpayer.

"I hope people will take the opportunity to scrutinise carefully how their money is being spent as I am doing every day in preparation for the spending review."

He said the government would not stop there, adding: "We plan to release more data in the coming months that will be easier for the general public to understand."

The data is being released in a raw format. Members of the public will find it difficult to understand the database without sophisticated analytical tools and expertise, and developers all over the country are working out how to break the data down.

In opposition, the Tories had suggested such a data release could stimulate an industry to analyse and create online services from it, worth up to 6bn a year.

Tom Steinberg, the founder of MySociety, a non-profit organisation that runs several democracy websites in the UK, was this week appointed to a new government committee, chaired by cabinet minister Francis Maude, looking at how to open up government data further.

Steinberg said yesterday that the publication of the data was "definitely very important as a sign to the rest of government that it is no longer out of bounds from the public any more".

He added that there had been some resistance to the idea from public bodies. "What we're doing is about institutionalising a government that is uniquely more open about publishing data and answering questions," he said.

"We have a couple of hundred years of a culture of not being open to get over. It's not surprising that the big public organisations should prefer to continue a tradition of privacy and secrecy.

"The public should be able to get information out of government, and very soon after it is created, with minimal hassle, without being asked why they want it and what it's for. This is a means to an end of a better government and a more engaged public."

The issue was debated at yesterday's cabinet meeting. A Downing Street spokesman said there had been a "discussion on the government's transparency agenda".

He added: "The prime minister emphasised the importance of transparency across all departments and made the point that while it may not always be comfortable, it was a necessary and important part of making government more accountable.

"The chief secretary to the Treasury gave an update on the Treasury's plans to publish the Coins database and set out more detail on public spending."

There are some concerns that the commercial application of public data particularly if, in future, it relates to individuals has the potential to invade people's privacy.

Jim Knight, the former Labour minister responsible for data in government, welcomed the publication, calling it "a rebranding of the open government programme we were working on".

He said: "These days, people can mesh government data with commercially available data. That can give you data right down to the level of a few houses.

"It won't be hard to get down virtually to the individual. Some would argue that gets pretty scary."

The Conservative technology manifesto said: "Our plans to open up government data and spending information will not only help us to cut wasteful spending, but according to new research ... it will also create an estimated 6bn in additional value for the UK."

All platforms are vulnerable, company warns, and could let attacker take control of system

Adobe is warning of a "criticai" vulnerability in its Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Acrobat software, installed on almost all PCs, which it says is already being exploited by hackers and which "could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system".

All platforms - Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris - are vulnerable, says Adobe.

The affected versions are: Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2, 9.0.262, and earlier 10.0.x and 9.0.x versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris; Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.3.2 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX.

Windows users who want to continue to read PDFs can choose from a variety linked to on Wikipedia, or see Jack's recommendations from January - though not Adobe itself, obviously. Apple users may wish to avoid using Adobe Reader or Acrobat by using OS X's built-in Preview app, which is anyway a lot less hassle than Adobe Reader, especially on OS X.

There's no schedule yet for a fix, but some people are deciding that the best way to avoid the risk is to download the Flash Player 10.1 Release Candidate - and Adobe says that it "does not appear to be vulnerable".

It adds that "Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8.x are confirmed not vulnerable." But the vulnerability will still persist - and seems to lie in the authplay.dll file: Adobe recommends that

"Deleting, renaming, or removing access to the authplay.dll file that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x mitigates the threat for those products, but users will experience a non-exploitable crash or error message when opening a PDF file that contains SWF [Flash] content. The authplay.dll that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows is typically located at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\authplay.dll for Adobe Reader or C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat\authplay.dll for Acrobat."

As with all such security warnings, there is a lot of over-reaction, and we've already seen one super-over-excited email which suggests that the flaw will let hackers take over your computer, siphon your bank account, kick the cat, cancel your house insurance and leave a rude message on your mother-in-law's answering machine. That's not quite the case, but until Adobe has a fix, it's best to be wary.

Disconnecting downloaders will alienate the entertainment industry's most loyal customers

With the passage into law of the dread Digital Economy Act comes Ofcom's guidelines that are the first step toward rules for when and how rightsholders will be able to disconnect entire families from the internet because someone on or near their premises is accused of copyright infringement.

Consumer rights groups and privacy groups such as the Open Rights Group, the Citizens Advice Bureau, Which, and Consumer Focus participated in the process, making the Ofcom rules as good as possible (an exercise that, unfortunately, is a little like making the guillotine as comfortable as possible).

But this isn't the last word in the copyfight not even close. Because disconnection for downloaders will only serve to alienate entertainment industry customers (remember that the most avid downloaders are also the most avid buyers "most avid" being the operative word here the 20% of customers who account for 80% of sales, downloading, concert tickets, box-office revenue, DVDs, T-shirts, action figures, etc). And because those who download most avidly will simply change tactics.

The entertainment industry's capacity to gather evidence and make accusations against downloaders relies on the fact that, at present, most downloading systems don't bother to encrypt the traffic or disguise the user's identity. Neither of these things are very hard to do, though both are computationally more expensive than the alternative. But, in case you haven't noticed, computation is getting cheaper all the time.

Once non-anonymous, non-encrypted downloading bears a significant risk, downloaders will simple switch to anonymised, encrypted alternatives.

For example, SSL-based proxies like Sweden's IPREDator (use of which is also a tonic against identity thieves and other creeps who may be monitoring your network connection) provide a nigh-impenetrable layer of misdirection that confounds anyone hoping to trace a download session back to a user. And services like Easynews.com provide encrypted access to enormous libraries of material including infringing copies of popular shows, music and movies.

So why worry? If users won't be deterred from downloading and may even be driven to start taking care to protect their connections from snoops and creeps then how bad will the Digital Economy Act be?

Bad.

Because the naive user who only downloads occasionally will still be in harm's way, as will his family or housemates if his connection is disconnected by an entertainment bully.

And because once the state decides that it has a duty to police the internet to maximise the profits of a few entertainment companies (no matter what the public expense), it sets itself on a path of ever-more-restrictive measures. Once disconnection drives downloaders to make use of SSL-based proxies, watch for Big Content to inveigle their friends in parliament to enact laws prohibiting the use of virtual private networks never mind that these are the best practice of anyone trying to safeguard a corporate or organisational network.

Once the Act drives downloaders to use SSL-encrypted services that are harder to monitor, watch for the entertainment lobby to ask for great swaths of the internet to be blocked by the Great Firewall of Britain that the Act also provides for.

Once you swallow a spider to catch a fly, you're on a course to swallow a bird to catch the spider, a cat to catch the bird, and so on until you swallow a horse and every toddler knows that happens next.

'Suicides' at Chinese factory 'troubling' says Apple chief executive at All Things Digital conference in US

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, finds "troubling" a string of worker deaths at Foxconn, the contract manufacturer that assembles the company's iPhones and iPads, but said its factory in China "is not a sweatshop".

Jobs was making his first public comments about employees' apparent suicides at a complex operated by the unit of Hon Hai Precision Industry, which also counts Hewlett-Packard and Dell among its clients.

At this year's All Things Digital conference, an annual gathering of A-list technology and media executives in California, Jobs sniped at Adobe Systems's "waning" Flash technology, vowed not to get into a search battle with Google, and waxed lyrical about the future of tablet PCs.

Jobs also talked about how he conceived the iPad even before the iPhone. Apple released the iPad in April and it has quickly defined the tablet computer market, selling more than 2,000,000 units in the first 60 days.

But a string of deaths at Foxconn's base in southern China, which critics blame on stressful working conditions, threatens to cast a shadow over the device's success.

"It's a difficult situation," Jobs said on stage. "We're trying to understand right now, before we go in and say we know the solution."

The iPad's momentum has helped drive share gains. Apple last week overtook long-time nemesis Microsoft to become the world's largest technology company by market value an event unthinkable a decade ago and Apple's shares have spent much of 2010 hitting new highs.

Shares of Cupertino, California-based Apple, rose 1.5% yesterday to end at $260.8 on the Nasdaq.

"For those of us that have been in the industry a long time, it's surreal. But it doesn't matter very much, it's not what's important," Jobs said. "It's not what makes you come to work every morning."

Jobs has appeared at the event in previous years, but not since 2007. Much has changed for Apple and its chief executive in that period. A pancreatic cancer survivor, the company's founder underwent a liver transplant a year ago.

The company's growing clout and business ambitions have also increasingly put it at the centre of several high-profile disputes and in the regulatory spotlight.

The US justice department is making preliminary inquiries into whether Apple unfairly dominates the digital music market through its iTunes store, sources say.

Hostility between Apple and Adobe has been brewing for months. Apple has criticised Flash as a buggy battery hog, while Adobe has accused Apple of exerting tyrannical control over developers creating programs for the iPhone and iPad.

"We didn't start off to have a war with Flash or anything else. We just made a technical decision," he said.

Adobe's Flash multimedia technology allows video and interactive media on the web.

Apple is widely expected to unveil its newest iPhone next Monday, when Jobs delivers his keynote address at its developers' conference in San Francisco.

Consumers may already have seen the next iPhone after a prototype, famously lost by an Apple employee at a bar earlier this year, was purchased and displayed online by a technology blog.

Jobs said there was debate about whether the phone was picked up after being left at the bar, or stolen.

"This is a story that's amazing," Jobs said. "It's got theft. It's got buying stolen property. It's got extortion. I'm sure there's sex in there somewhere. Somebody should make a movie out of this."

Four idealistic students at New York University have raised $200,000 to fund a project building a more privacy-centric social network.

Diaspora isn't likely to take Facebook down just yet, but after a very flattering introduction in the New York Times a few weeks back the group watched hundreds of small donations flood in - more than 6,400 donations have been pledged so far - and in less than one month. Zuckerberg himself is rumoured to have contributed.

The four wrote on Monday that they had expected to scrape an initial $10,000 together through Kickstarter, the creative project funding site, from friends and family - but recognise they have "struck a chord with the world and identified a problem which needs to be solved".

That 'problem' is the need for what they describe as a "privacy-aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network".

"You may not hear too much from us in the coming months and we will try our best to provide regular updates, but our silence means we are hard at work," wrote the team: Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer and Ilya Zhitromirskiy.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg was given a grilling by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at the D8 conference yesterday; what MarketWatch described as his "Nixon moment".

"Zuckerberg, literally squirmed in his seat, took off his famous hoodie sweatshirt and had a Richard Nixon-like moment under the grilling... Sweat literally dripped from his face as he mostly dodged giving specific answers about the backlash stemming from the popular social network's recent privacy changes that caused ire among users. Zuckerberg also mostly dodged specific answers about how the backlash stemming from another recent privacy uproar affected him personally."

Watch Zuckerberg answering key questions on privacy; as John Paczkowski says in the introduction "if you're looking to straightforward answers to those questions, you're going to be disappointed".

Users of the microblogging service complain at apparent censorship as discussion grows around deaths on convoy - but it isn't justified (updated)

The attack by Israel on a flotilla of ships approaching Gaza has, as you'd expect, generated a huge response on social media - and of course Twitter, with its real-time content, was quick to react.

Many users began the morning by tagging their comments about it with "#flotilla" - a "hashtag" which gives a structure to a discussion or emerging event, as you can filter searches in applications such as Tweetdeck so that you only see those with that tag.

But at around 11am, as #flotilla began "trending" - rising to the topmost-used hashtags on the service - it seemed to vanish.

Was this censorship by Twitter? Quite a few asked the question.

Certainly if you went to the standard URL for such a search - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23flotilla - you briefly got a result saying "Twitter error".

However if you used the advanced search, you get the results as you'd expect.

What also happened was that people started using a new hashtag: #freedomflotilla. That rapidly trended.

The error in #flotilla search results quickly fixed itself, though. Possibly the rapid rise in the hashtag's visibility tripped an anti-spam filter at Twitter headquarters (where it was 3am in the morning, so we might assume that it's the machines, rather than the people, who are on duty - though then again, knowing the nocturnal habits of programmers, perhaps not).

Update: Mike Butcher at Techcrunch points out that this surely was a case of anti-spam filtering: there had already been a "flotilla" story in the past week - the anniversary of Dunkirk (for non-Britons: a dramatic rescue during the second world war of British and French troops from the Dunkirk beaches by small craft). And Gaza is frequently topical. (Thanks @vensa in the comments.)

So Twitter's anti-spam algorithms - that is, the machines - likely decided that this was a spam attack trying to piggyback on old hashtags, and pushed the "#flotilla" hashtag out of the trending topics. Is it censorship if it's done by machines that think it's spam? Given that "#freedomflotilla" instead rapidly trended, clearly there's no human censorship against the story of the attack being made visible to other Twitter users.

That's why Trendsmap, which is independent of Twitter and from which the screenshot is taken, looks as it does: it reflects what's on Twitter.

Update 2:: Sean Garrett, who handles communications for Twitter, tweeted this morning to say that "We are investigating a technical issue that caused search errors for a short period of time this morning. Twitter facilitates the open exchange of info & opinions -- when that is hampered by a bug, we take it very seriously." The bug has now been fixed, Twitter says.

So: shock as Twitter not being used to censor news. But it does show the enormous sensitivity there now is about Twitter's impartiality that any suggestion that a world event might be pushed out of its "trending topics" (displayed on the right-hand column of every Twitter user's home page) can create such frustration.

It doesn't, of course, help anyone on the convoy that was attacked. But getting information into public hands is a public good. Twitter is coming closer and closer to being viewed as a utility - certainly by those who use it. Perhaps we'd all feel more comfortable if it had a business model that had real, declared profits - because (to answer @Strummer) that would mean you could be confident of unmediated messages from everywhere in the world.

Tim Dowling imagines the problems for posters having to identify themselves

Today's topic: with both the Times and the Independent banning anonymous comments from their websites, the age of the unidentified poster may be at an end. Is this a good thing? If you think so, why not take this opportunity to introduce yourself?

My real name is Bruce Wayne.

Batman at 06:36 on 31 May 2010.

Hi all. I'm Nick, the moderator on the site, but I sometimes post mildly inflammatory comments under this pseudonym, just to keep the ball rolling. Otherwise it gets really boring. kronick68 at 07:02 on 31 May 2010.

I applaud the decision made by those newspapers. It's time to put an end to abusive anonymous posters. What possible harm could come from people taking responsibility for their online comments? I changed my username to my real name this morning and I hope others will do the same.

MaryFDolan_Acc407371sortcode81-60-21_answer_to_secret_question:"Fluffy" at 07:09 on 31 May 2010.

I'm Donald J and I get paid to come on sites like this to change the subject to internet poker. I don't even know anything about poker, I just paste in phrases from a list. A robot could do it, but I'm cheaper, apparently.

BonusBob at 07:27 on 31 May 2010.

What a cool idea! My real name is Mark Pearce, and I just told work I was ill when I'm really still in Spain! Here's a link to a pic on my Facebook page of me being sick all over a police horse! http://btx4Jk9. Friend me!

TheOfficeThief at 09:13 on 31 May 2010.

YOu FEAR OUR POWEr! YOU CaNOT SILENCE ThE POEPLE!!!

kronick68 at 09:54 on 31 May 2010.

Mark: you're fired.

IamyourBOSS at 10:17 on 31 May 2010.

Dudes! I just won 360 playing heads-up hold 'em! Check out this great site! http://gh7lkp9

BonusBob at 11:04 on 31 May 2010.

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.

Web crackdown began last week when Facebook page invited users to post images of the prophet Muhammad

Pakistan will restore access to YouTube but will block videos offensive to Muslims posted on the website, the government said today.

A number of high-profile sites were blocked last week over offensive content, such as a Facebook page that urges users to post images of the prophet Muhammad. Many Pakistanis supported the crackdown, but some questioned why whole sites were blocked rather than specific pages or videos.

The government seemed to move in that direction today by deciding it would restore access to YouTube but continue to block videos "displaying profane or sacrilegious material", said NajibullahMalik, the secretary at Pakistan's information technology ministry.

Videos displaying "profane or sacrilegious" material would be blocked, said the information technology ministry. Most Muslims regard depictions of the prophet, even favourable ones, as blasphemous.

Large and sometimes violent protests erupted in Pakistan and other Muslim countries in 2006 when a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Muhammad and again in 2008 when the cartoons were reprinted.