It looked horrible, and users hated it. Even so, Google persisted with it for hours - and only stopped it because of a 'bug'

Google ended its experiment to put a picture on its front page whether you wanted on or not only 14 hours into its 24-hour experiment, blaming the decision on a bug which meant that an explanatory link wasn't included.

The problem was caused when it added a World Cup doodle - which of course would look like a mess of pottage if you had chosen a picture for your background.

Really, Google? A bug meant you didn't include a link? And you didn't spot that during testing? Mmm.

In the blogpost originally posted to explain the use of the image, an update by Marissa Mayer, the head of search products and user experience, now notes:

Update June 10, 11:31AM: Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users' choosing as the background for the Google homepage. Today, we ran a special 'doodle' that showcased this functionality by featuring a series of images as the background for our homepage. We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today's series early. We appreciate your feedback and patience as we experiment and iterate.

Judging by the number (and negative attitude) of the comments that we saw on our own post, and the fact that for some time "remove google background image" was appearing on Google Trends, this looks like an experiment that just went wrong. Either that, or as Simon Jary suggests over at PC Advisor, it was a means of making people think, when they went to look at Microsoft's Bing, that it was just horrible.

Either way, Google has probably got a few more people to sign up with it (to change the awful images), and perhaps made them think Bing isn't the thing. Or it has driven them into the arms of Safari or Opera, which didn't display the image for us. (Thankfully.) Chalk it up to experience, Marissa. And never do it again.

Abdullah Gul tweets his disapproval and says officials will look at ways of reopening access

The Turkish president has used his Twitter account to condemn the country's ban on YouTube and some Google services.

In separate tweets, Abdullah Gul said he did not approve of the bans and had instructed officials to examine legal ways of reopening access.

Courts have blocked access to YouTube since 2008 after Greek users posted videos alleging that Ataturk was homosexual.

Last week Turkey extended the ban to some Google pages using the same internet protocol addresses as YouTube.

In January the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe urged Turkey to abolish or reform a law allowing it to block around 3,700 Internet sites.

Websites can be blocked under article 5651 of the Turkish penal code for a range of offences including insulting Ataturk, child pornography and encouraging suicide.

Only a tiny number of people use huge amounts of data - which means that many more have seen 'unlimited' contracts killed off. It's a tragedy of the commons for mobile data

So the free lunch - otherwise known as the unlimited data tariff - is over. O2 said on Thursday that it will no longer be offering new or upgrading customers its "unlimited" tariff for smartphone users - principally, it's believed, the iPhone users, whose numbers connected to O2 have grown from 1m to 2m in a year.

O2 isn't the first: Vodafone ended its "unlimited" offering last month, and Steve Jobs had barely sat down after delivering his WWDC speech before AT&T announced that it too was ending its "unlimited" offering, replacing it with a tiered set - $15/month for 200MB, $25/month for 2GB. Orange is expected to follow suit in the next few weeks, though when asked the company simply says that it "constantly reviews its pricing". However the noises we're hearing from parts of the company suggest that a review will see it follow O2 to dump the "unlimited" offering.

Why? Because a tiny number of users are slurping huge amounts of data. And because the mass of users are demanding more and more data (though lots less than the real slurpers). There's all sorts of interesting information that we can pull out of this - especially with the help of O2's chief executive Ronan Dunne, who signed a lengthy post at the company's blog with a tortuous justification for why the company has changed its rules. The strange thing is why he hasn't come out with the simple reason - because it would make O2 a lot more popular at a stroke.

He goes over the points that were made in yesterday - that 97% of O2 smartphone users use less than 500MB, and that only a tiny number use more than 1GB. (Interesting to note that Apple-watcher John Gruber, someone who I'd expect to be a heavy user, says he uses about 500MB per month. So he's clearly just one of the 97%, even if an outlier there.) Even so, smartphone users are a problem:

"one streamed YouTube video has the same effect on the network as half a million text messages sent simultaneously, the equivalent of everybody in Newcastle sending a text at once."

Well, yes, but nobody made you offer the iPhone, Mr Dunne. You were the ones who wanted it so much. This makes it sound as though you like getting peoples' money, but don't like offering them a concomitant service to go with it.

However it's more complicated than O2 getting a bit whiney. What we're hearing here at the Guardian though is that Apple itself helped to kill off the "unlimited" tag, because it doesn't like it being used with services that call it "unlimited*" and then explain further down the page in tiny print that that actually * means "subject to 'fair usage'". (We understand that Apple vetoed Vodafone's initial pricing for the iPad data plans for just that reason.) It seems that just as broadband ISPs became addicted, when the race to sign up customers was on a few years ago, to the phrase "up to..." for their line speeds, so mobile data networks have gotten too comfy with the "unlimited*" word - where the asterisk is all-important. You could even call it Unlimited™ - which has quite a different meaning from unlimited.

Apple's weight isn't the real reason for the change, though. Stay with us.

There's other interesting stuff in that blogpost: O2 says there that the average user uses 200MB per month; that FaceTime, the video calling offering introduced by Apple with the iPhone 4, will only be available on Wi-Fi (at least from O2); and there will be regular texts to let you know how you're doing on your data allowance. And if you go over it without buying more, you'll see your data speed slow down.

Given those numbers, let's make some assumptions. There are 2m iPhone users (and even more if you add in Android users). That's a large enough population that you can treat it as a random sample. I'm told by one of the networks that data use follows the normal distribution (aka the bell curve - that mathematical prediction of where the members of a random population will be: it applies for things like height, for example). It's probably not a perfect normal distribution - there will be a low-end cutoff, because any device connected to the network will use a least a little data. But for modelling, it's a start.

So: 200MB average; 97% use less than 500MB. Plus those numbers into a normal distribution calculator and you discover that those 0.1% who are annoying O2 so much consume more than 690MB of data per month. That's about 23MB per day - roughly a megabyte every single hour. What, you think, are those folks doing? In fact, one network tells me that those people are downloading many gigabytes per month. That's quite hard to do on a smartphone.

Is it because of music streaming services like Spotify or We7 or (in the US) Pandora? The networks say no: audio doesn't take up that much bandwidth (certainly compared to video), and they haven't seen much takeup. So those gigabyte users aren't listening to streams. (The iPlayer is only available via Wi-Fi on most networks.) Yet O2 says that while it has doubled the number of iPhone users, mobile data use is doubling every 4 months, equivalent to an eightfold growth every year.

So: lots of growth, but some real extremes. What is causing it? Closer investigation suggests that this is a sort of collateral damage from the rumblings that preceded the Digital Economy Act - that it's caused by peer-to-peer users who were perhaps worried about the "three strikes" talk, and figured that their landlines (if they have them) might be monitored or throttled if they download a lot of P2P data; or they might be surcharged. For as we've pointed out before, "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited on landline broadband.

So those wary folk - put by one network as numbering "in the few hundreds" out of millions - have signed up on "unlimited" plans, taken the SIM out of the phone, and then use it in a 3G dongle to download stuff. Because it's unlimited, they can get what they want. And as they don't mind how quickly it arrives, the speed isn't a particular issue; they're just after volume. O2 says that 0.1% of its smartphone users - that's about 2,000 people - are consuming 36% of its data. Other networks indicate the same.

It's also a bit foolish on the part of the downloaders, because the Digital Economy Act does actually allow for measures to be taken over illicit filesharing over mobile networks. But possibly the people doing it don't think they'll be noticed.

Here's news: the mobile networks have noticed.

So it's not really down to the iPhone or Android phones, which are more of an annoyance to the networks, because they make multiple, frequent requests to the network - but those are small amounts; those aren't the reason why O2 is ending the unlimited package. It's because some people took it at its word when it said data access was unlimited.

At this point, your - and our - reaction is "so tell that 0.1% to stop being data hogs - shape their bandwidth, send them letters, that sort of thing. Because obviously you're not going to want to burden yourself with having to set up new billing for millions of customers just because you've got 0.1% who are a bit annoying. No, that would be silly."

It's certainly puzzling that O2 isn't being clearer about the reasons. But the networks say they don't want to annoy those big downloaders. That's because they want to keep them as customers; but as paying customers. Yet the unlimited contracts aren't being withdrawn; they'll simply not be renewed. "At some stage, people will want a new handset or a new contract," an O2 spokesperson said yesterday.

I wouldn't be so sure: someone who's using their iPhone SIM as a dongle really isn't worried about upgrading; they've probably got a PAYG SIM stuffed into their iPhone for their phone calls. They're not stupid. Unless O2 - and the other networks - start taking some aggressive action, such as throttling their connections, then the faux-iPhoners will carry on. It's a tragedy of the commons, mobile data-style. Just like spam and comment bots, the tiny number of P2P mobile downloaders are screwing it up for everyone else.

It's odd that internet evolution is going in reverse here: I thought that ISPs had learnt that offering broadband was far better for retaining customers than the penny-per-minute dialup nightmare of 1990s internet connectivity (yes, children, we used to have dialup modems, and paid per minute we were connected. And you couldn't use make a phone call while you did).

It's a retrograde move - and even though the networks insist that most people won't be affected, the fact is that we're data-hungry. Eventually, we'll all be over the limit. Will the P2P donglers still be on their unlimited contracts even then? One feels that it's time for the networks, if they're really serious about offering a good service to all their customers, to have a think about that "fair use" clause.

Meanwhile, the 97% get a little inconvenienced, plus the constant worry that they'll go over their limit. That's actually the worst thing about what's happening here: that the confidence that you can use the mobile internet anywhere is suddenly gone, replaced by a nagging worry that this page or that service will land you with a big bill. The mobile internet shouldn't be like that: it should be like the landline version, where you don't worry about the megabytes. It's not a free lunch - but it's not a system where the person in front is treating the buffet as an all-you-can-eat either.

All Points Bulletin has been in development for five years and next month the cops and robbers MMOG will finally be released to the public. We've just played the game at Realtime Worlds HQ. Here's what we found...

Video games, at least the most interesting video games, are all about those moments when something utterly unexpected happens. Sure, set-piece shoot-outs are fun and it's always satisfying to beat a well-designed end-of-level boss by learning and exploiting its codified weaknesses. But the moments that really lodge in the mind are those that you create yourself, or that happen around you spontaneously, moments brought to life within an intelligent and truly adaptive system.

Dave Jones, the founder of Realtime Worlds, has envisaged APB as a game built solely around those experiences. The project, a vast online cops and robbers shooter, started out five years ago, and builds on everything Jones has learned about sand box game design since greenlighting Grand Theft Auto in the mid-90s. With that title, he oversaw the birth of the open world crime adventure. With this one, perhaps, he aims to usher it into a crazed sort of adulthood.

To begin with, the basics. In the fictional city of San Paro, two factions the enforcers and the criminals fight for control of the streets. Behind them lurks a stratum of corporate giants and underworld organisations, manipulating the action, profiting from the chaos. Those are the guys you'll work for as the overarching story of APB unravels.

The game operates in uncharted territory somewhere between an MMOG and an online multiplayer shooter. When you enter, you choose whether you want to be a good guy or bad guy, you build your own avatar using the astonishingly powerful character creation system (everyone in the game can look utterly unique), then you jump into a district containing up to 100 other gamers. From here, it's up to you. You can meet a bunch of friends or use the seamlessly integrated matchmaking system to hook up with some likeminded strangers. Whatever you do, you need to get into a group this is not a game for loners. You'll play in squads of four, and it's smart to mix things up a bit have a good driver, a good sniper and someone who can rush in with a semi-automatic and cause mayhem.

The action is essentially based around a string of missions handed out by contacts non-player characters who represent the city's warring organisations. Groups need to locate and pledge allegiance to a contact who'll then start providing them with tasks. These are usually multi-phase: as an enforcer, you might need to pick up a VIP from a safe house and get him across town. As a criminal, you could be breaking into a building, blagging its contents, then driving the loot over to your fence for distribution across the city's blackmarket. At every stage in the mission, the game system will calculate your group's skill level, then search the district for an opposing squad of similar abilities. It then matches you up and the fun starts now it's up to the other guys to thwart you.

Recently, during a Realtime Worlds press day, I played as a criminal for several hours, piling through dozens of hectic mission objectives. What the game feels like most is Counterstrike with vehicles and a huuuuuge map. Whatever the missions consist of, whether it's tagging buildings with your gang logo, or helping a corrupt politico snag a replacement liver, the action is invariably built around the FPS staples capture the flag, team deathmatch, conquest, etc it's just that here they segue into each other on the fly, creating a breathless symphony of action and destruction. One minute we're driving a truck containing a donor body part, the next we're trapped in a rat run of alleys by the cops, trying desperately to reach our delivery point in time.

There are lots of tasks that end either in a car chase (criminals are often given five minutes to evade the police) or in chokepoint face-offs as one team is required to defend a certain area from the other side. This is when the game feels most like a traditional FPS, albeit a traditional FPS playing out within an open world with miles of roadways to escape down. Familiar tactics immediately slink into play the snipers camping on distance rooftops, the heavy weapons crew moseying in and strafing the area. It's as far from the ponderous world of the MMORPG as you could conceivably wander within the same loose genre pigeonhole.

But of course, what APB adds to the first-person shoot-'em-up experience is the 'living breathing city' element; the fact that the streets are filled with 3,000 intelligent pedestrians, and at least 200 cars. So suddenly your firefight is broken up when an enemy is run over by a truck, or you steal a passing motor and bundle away to lick your wounds. Again, the interesting part of the game is the way it seamlessly switches genres and tropes five seconds ago you were in Modern Warfare, now you're in GTA, burning rubber as you escape a deadly exchange of fire before scoping the block for a better vantage point on your enemies.

I was playing with several members of the dev team, as well as three of the guys from US-based fansite APB Evolved and they've all developed a symbiotic understanding of the game environment and the rhythms of combat. There were several occasions where I was pinned down in the middle of a major battle, when suddenly a member of my group spins round the corner in some customised muscle car and escorts me from the danger zone. Hitting the direction key, I'd then lean out the window and take a few celebratory pot shots at my aggressors.

APB, then, is free-form, yet somehow epically staged violence, like a Michael Mann shoot-out sequence filmed as a piece of shaky cam reportage. This, you may not need me to inform you, is enormous fun. Adding to it is the concept of 'escalation'. If one side is being massively out-finessed, they can call for back up and the system pulls in another group in the same district to help out. If this tips the balance too far in their favour, the other faction gets to call for back up, too. And so on. Eventually you're in a mass battle with 20 people on each side and all the while the city goes about its business in the background.

The game contains two distinct 'action' districts, where all the missions take place. The Financial District is a mass of skyscrapers, neon signs, animating billboards and swooping overpasses; the Waterfront is more of a relaxed tourist zone, with plazas, outdoor cafes and docklands. "We have a huge team of guys here who've worked on nothing but architecture," says community manager, Chris Collins. "The cities are loosely based on real-life layouts, but they're designed specifically so that you have an easy transit system, you can get to the objectives quickly and in a way that feels action-packed.

"But then during all of the objectives you can break away from that main road into back alleys, into shopping malls and little residential areas, and those in themselves are, I guess, shooter maps; they're areas with choke points and architectural features that allow you to control the zone well. But because the action is generated in a quasi-procedural way, you can never use everything to your advantage."

On the streets, there are 30 basic vehicle types, but groups get to customise their own signature cars, which can be spawned during any mission. Each type has up to four slots for upgrades, ranging from steel plating to nitro boosters. It's up to you whether you want to cruise the streets in a tank, or blast down them in a super-charged sports car. There are no manufacturer brands in here, but there are obvious allusions to Hummers, Dodge Vipers, Jeeps, etc.

There are also around 100 basic weapons, a cavalcade of familiar favourites from shotguns, rifles and semi-autos to rocket launchers. Some of them are specific to one faction: for example, officially only the enforcers get stun guns and other non-lethal weapons. However, apparently it's possible for criminals to forge deals with enforcer crews to get hold of these rather amusing devices. As you'd expect, they leave players lying on the ground entirely incapcitated for up to 30 seconds. And thanks to a range of customisable taunts and victory moves, that whole time might be spent watching your attacker performing a moonwalk in front of your prone character.

Certainly, the variety of weapons is impressive, but right now, it feels as though there are some slight balancing issues, especially when you play as a low-level character. The default semi-automatics have a decent fire rate, but pitiful damage, while the heavier weapons take an age to load and leave you horribly stranded in a gunfight. Sure, these can all be modded, but newcomers should be handed at least one piece of entry-level all-round hardware that can do a reasonable amount of damage without requiring a PhD in marksmanship. Another thing some beta testers are complaining about is the lack of head shots; you can't bring a character down with a single well-aimed trigger pull. The dev team is still tweaking, though, so let's see how it goes.

Fortunately, as in any role-playing game, your character levels up with every mission, unlocking new upgrades and items all the time. Like cars, characters have up to four slots for upgrades, including stuff like faster health regeneration, greater resistance to damage and the ability to set up mobile ammo stores so your group can load up without having to find a nearby bullet shop. Realtime Worlds has also created an acheivement system in which players are rewarded for fulfilling certain pre-described roles so providing supporting fire in a number of face-offs gets you a 'Wing man' award, while foiiing enough criminal missions earns the Detective badge. All of these come with their own perks and can all be levelled up as you go.

And this, really, is just skating along the surface of what APB represents. After five years in development it has evolved almost beyond recognition, from a rather traditional MMOG (it was originally to be published by specialist MMO company Webzen, before Realtime Worlds bought back the brand) to today's frantic hybrid experience. "If you look at the game, look at the number of features, I think we have the best customisation system in the world," says technical lead Rob Anderberg. "I mean, it's got a music sequencer in it! We've created a system where every single character and vehicle is unique, but on top of that, we've decided to have 100 people in the same area, and have an open world And yes, the game has changed over time, it started as one type of thing and changed fairly dramatically. We didn't have this fully featured idea of what APB was when we began, we just started coding!

"We've taken complete features out of the game, absolutely, from the ground up, and we've just started again. We'll review it and say, 'you know, it's just not working.' And rather than just try to cobble it together somehow, we start again from scratch. That's an incredibly painful thing to do, but we have that commitment to get it right."

And naturally, those growing pains have resonanted through the beta testing process. According to Stephen Lynch, the founder of APB Evolved, the original closed betas suffered horrendous lag as players in the States were forced to take part via European servers. Now there are servers and data centres in the US and Europe, and Lynch insists they're getting a smooth, almost lag-free experience. The matchmaking systems have also vastly improved, allowing friends to find each other easily within the backend structure of severs, realms and districts.

I suppose what I haven't experienced yet is the sense of 'belonging' that comes with an MMOG like World of Warcraft. Of course, I'll need many more hours of play to get there, but I'm not sure that APB will build or even wants to build that same sense of being utterly swallowed up in a gigantic fantasy fiction. Perhaps it's the breathless nature of the action or the emphasis on PvsP, or it might be because at most you only have 100 people in your district; whatever it is, beyond the (significant) customisation element and the open world structure, the game experience feels so much more like an online shooter than it does an MMOG. It will be interesting to see if and how this changes when the full experience goes live and we start to see a narrative emerge from the maelstrom of shoot-outs and car chases.

What's clear is that the evolutionary process won't end when the game launches. The team has masses of plans for specialist areas where fans of particular game types will be able to congregate. Realtime Worlds is thinking about territorial battles, where clans get to fight over and own areas of the map; there will be chaos districts where all 100 residents can fight each other (at the moment, you can only actively engage with players or teams who you've been matched against by the game). There's talk of having a district where all the cars are removed which will allow perhaps a hundred more players to take part in city-wide wars.

Really, that's what APB is about flexibility and potential. It is about allowing the users to build their own stories; it's about the quote that Dave Jones chose to introduce the game back in 2005: the player is the content. You will get out of this game, what you put in maybe that'll mean a few hours a week of errant blasting, maybe it'll mean joining a gang with a rigid identity, with its own branded clothing, music and vehicles, and immersing yourself in that culture. Weirdly, with its fast-paced cyclical structure, the sense of imaginative ownership, the passionate fanbase, in some ways what APB most resembles is Football Manager. It has that same rolling addictive quality just one more match, one more mission. You don't know why you're playing for hours on end, you just are.

And for a game that will live and die by its community, it seems already to have built a passionate following. The closed beta has just come to an end, attracting over 96,000 users, who indulged in over 3,500,000 battles in a combined game time of 75.5 years. "APB has a great PvsP base," says 'Din' a moderator on APB Evolved. "There is a bit of grinding, but it's not in the traditional sense of 'get quest, kill mob, return to quest giver'. You're against other players ALL the time, you're not sitting there thinking 'I've got to kill nine million more goblins before I get this sword'. You're going up against a constantly changing pool, you never know what the competition is going to be that changes things completely."

So much is riding on the technical elements of the game, and how player communities choose to mould the worlds on offer. But if this works, it's going to be something else. Truly, something else.

APB is released on July 2. There are three payment models: players can subscribe, they can buy chunks of game time, or they can produce and sell customised goods in the game world, thereby earning extra play hours.

Actor Kimberley Nixon on her boyfriend's efforts to stop her iPod killing her, her dad's tech support, and why she prefers PCs

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
It's very boring, and everyone's said it, but it has to be my iPod. I travel a lot, and being on my own for hours for hours and hours on a train or a plane, it's something to keep me company.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
This morning on my way to work. I'm doing some rehearsals for the RSC, so it was good to get some kind of music into my system.

What additional features would you add if you could?

It's already been invented the iPod pillow speaker, which I got as a Christmas present. I like to listen to my iPod when I go to sleep, but I always get tangled up in the wires. My boyfriend got it for me so that I didn't kill myself.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
I'm sure it will. I'm sure there will be this tiny chip that you can just put in your ear, and anything you think you want to listen to will appear.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
I'm very impatient, and if I get a new piece of technology, no matter what it is I recently got the iPhone, which is very exciting I can't be doing with reading manuals. I want it to work immediately and to do what I want it to do.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
Yes. I had a tape thing for drama school, to record the singing lessons and voice lessons. I hated it, it never worked properly and I think it's at the bottom of a drawer somewhere. I was a student I couldn't afford a good one.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Ask Dad! If something doesn't work in my house TV, phone, stereo, anything I just call my dad, and he knows the answer.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
Somewhere in between, I think. I don't know very much I'm not very technically minded but I love my laptop, and all the things I can do on it, and I love my iPod, it's amazing.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
My car. When I did Angus, Thongs [and Perfect Snogging], I finally had a little bit of money to buy myself a car just a Ford Focus, nothing flashy! You know you're an adult when you're handing over a lot of money.

Mac or PC, and why?
I have a PC because I don't know how to use a Mac. Actors always have Macs with them, and when I try to use someone else's, I can't get the hang of it. It's very strange, I don't like it.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I buy DVDs almost every week. I'm more of a film buff, so I usually buy more DVDs than CDs, but if I like someone's album I will by the CD of it. I had a bit of a geek splurge recently, so I bought Private Benjamin, Monk the detective thing, cos it's fantastic and Black Book.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I don't like that idea. I've seen Bicentennial Man, and I don't think it ended well. It didn't end well in AI, either. I think they're bad, bad ideas.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I think I'd like my own plane, stacked with all my favourite films.

Kimberley Nixon stars in Black Death, out now in UK cinemas

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

Trade in your old TV and qualify for a 150 discount on a new Sony Bravia TV. It's tempting, but how green is it?

Should I trade in my old TV for a new one in time for the start of the World Cup, as Sony is urging me to do?

L Taylor, by email

Having read through the responses so far, I have to say that I'm instinctively with milehound on this one:

As long as my 14-year-old CRT set still works, you can take it from my cold dead hands. You have to be a truly hardcore sports fan or too impatient to wait for the 3D sets to go on sale to even consider this offer if your old set is in good condition.

(I would, perhaps, go even further: I totally fail to see the attraction of 3D TV when the equivalent cinematic experience is so poor.)

It is, of course, absurd that Sony should be encouraging people to ditch their otherwise perfectly decent TV sets for a brand new one. As Thermostat says: "We need to adopt the mindset of using something until it breaks; mend it; keep using it; give it to someone else to use if we don't need it anymore Somehow we have got to shake this consumerist mindset where we aspire to having a house just like the catalogues where everything is shiny and new."

Along with half the planet, it seems, I'm tremendously excited about the start of the World Cup, but I can't see why it could ever be deemed enough of a reason to warrant throwing out your old TV and spending hundreds of pounds (with or without Sony's "subsidy") on a new one. The fact that the World Cup is being held in Africa provides extra poignancy, I feel, given what Greenpeace discovered last year about "recycled" TVs.

I'm not entirely impressed, either, by Sony's response after I asked it to contribute to this debate. In particular, I asked it to explain why it was encouraging people to discard TVs that were working perfectly well. See what you make of this:

The disposal of the traded-in technology is the responsibility of the individual retailers. Sony is not 'encouraging people to trade in perfectly good sets' the condition of the equipment does not matter, it can be in working condition or not.

Judging that it had slightly missed the point of my query, I asked it to clarify its position. Even though, I inquired, it is heavily promoting this scheme, and benefiting from it with new sales, it takes no responsibility for what happens to the traded-in set?

It took two days to come up with a response:

Sony can confirm that the responsibility lies with the retailers. All Sony centres are franchises so not "owned" by us, same goes for the independents and nationals. You can find all eco-information on all Sony products here. All Sony Bravia televisions have eco-settings, which reduces their power consumption when the consumer turns them on.

I'll leave it to you whether you think Sony provided a satisfactory answer. (Hint: its slogan is "Make. Believe".)

But, with or without the EC's WEEE directive, which ensures that retailers accept and recycle electronic goods, I don't think it's acceptable that manufacturers such as Sony should be blatantly encouraging people to toss away things that might still have a working life lasting many years. Planned obsolescence is one thing, but this is advertised obsolescence.

Anyway, moving on. Greenerguy, cbewley and others all raise the issue of which type of TV uses the most power. The general consensus seems to be that plasmas fare the worst, followed by CRTs, then LCDs. To throw another variant into the mix, the Energy Saving Trust says that TVs with LED backlights use "a lot less energy than a conventional LCD TV". Here's a nice breakdown of the technologies and their relative power consumption on CNET's energy efficiency guide (written for a US audience).

Another important point raised by yepandthattoo and others is that size matters when it comes to TVs. Mike Berners-Lee makes an interesting calculation about this specific point in his book How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, which tallies with jw4g's view that "most appliances are not worth replacing if your goal is to minimise CO2 emissions".

All the sums are based on these assumptions: that your old TV is a typical 28-inch CRT model; that whatever choice you make now, you will stick with it for 10 years; and that you will watch one hour of TV per day through-out that time.

In short, my sums indicate that sticking with your old TV is a good idea unless you're happy to switch to something smaller. There are two clear winning options, each with a similar viewing experience and costing about the same over the 10-year period: a new energy-efficient 15-inch flat screen or a second-hand 14-inch CRT. Although the 15-inch flat screen has the lowest energy use, the 14-inch CRT wins overall at just 35g of CO2e per hour including the satellite receiver. But if you keep your TV for longer than 10 years the winning option on every count is to buy the 15-inch LCD.

If you don't want to switch to a small screen, however, sticking with the 28-inch CRT screen is the best option because the embodied energy of its manufacture has already been written off.

So the message is that although getting a new TV does give most people a chance to improve their energy efficiency, if you don't buy carefully, it is likely to do the reverse.

Please send your own environment question to ask.leo.and.lucy@guardian.co.uk

Leo originally wrote on 7 June:

It's quite an enticing offer on the surface, isn't it? You've probably seen the ad on TV involving some former England managers. Trade in any old TV, says Sony, and you will qualify for a 150 discount on a new Sony Bravia TV set. It is also offering trade-ins on cameras, DVD players and other forms of electronica.

Also to coincide with the World Cup, the BBC is heavily promoting a similar scheme to encourage more users of digital radios. Old analogue radios will be reconditioned and "sent to children in southern Africa".

But where do you stand on these trade-ins from an environmental perspective? Aren't they just encouraging us to swap a perfectly functioning TV or radio for a marginally superior product? Or is there some environmental logic to all this?

As ever, I'll return on Friday to join the discussion.

Email addresses obtained by hackers after a breach of AT&T website

The White House chief of staff is believed to be among 114,000 iPad owners, including chief executives and military officials, whose personal details have been exposed through a breach of the website of the US phone network AT&T.

AT&T acknowledged the leak but said the risk was limited to the subscriber's email address and that the issue had been "escalated to the highest levels of the company". UK customers are not thought to have been affected or to be vulnerable to the same attack.

The names and email addresses of those involved apparently includes Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, members of the US Senate and House of Representatives, staff at Nasa and the department of homeland security, the New York Times, Viacom, Time Warner, bankers and venture capitalists.

It will be an embarrassment to Apple, which has sold more than 2m of the tablet computers since they went on sale in the US at the start of April, and late last month internationally. The iPad comes in two main versions, one with 3G and one without. The news that the 3G version could have been liable to hacking could depress sales of the more profitable version. It will also increase friction between Apple and AT&T, which has had the exclusive rights to sell the iPhone since 2007, and now the 3G-enabled iPad in the US. The exclusivity is believed to be a five-year deal but many Apple fans have accused AT&T's network of being unable to support their growing demand for bandwidth.

The Gawker website, which says it has seen details of the email addresses provided in a foot-high printout suggests that the flaw makes any of those people vulnerable to spam marketing and malicious hacking. The breach was demonstrated by a team of hackers calling themselves Goatse Security, who have previously pointed to weaknesses in web browsers. They were able to use a flaw in the AT&T website to get the email address of any AT&T subscriber by providing a piece of data called an ICC-IDS, used to identify the SIM card belonging to that subscriber.

The team sent data to the site pretending to be each of a huge sequence of ICC-IDS devices, and requested the email address. They say they also shared the knowledge of the hack with others, until AT&T closed the breach a few days ago.

An AT&T spokesman said: "AT&T was informed by a business customer on Monday of the potential exposure of their iPad ICC-IDS. The only information that can be derived from the ICC-IDS is the e-mail address attached to that device. This issue was escalated to the highest levels of the company and was corrected by Tuesday; and we have essentially turned off the feature [on the website] that provided the e-mail addresses.

"The person or group who discovered this gap did not contact AT&T. We are continuing to investigate and will inform all customers whose e-mail addresses and ICC-IDS may have been obtained."

"We take customer privacy very seriously and while we have fixed this problem, we apologise to our customers who were impacted."

Apple did not have any statement.

If the hackers have discovered a flaw that was widespread in AT&T's handling of the ICC-ID system, then it is possible that every owner in the US with an iPhone 3GS or a 3G iPad may have had their email address lifted by the group, and possibly others.

Only iPads which use 3G networking would be vulnerable to the hack, and although any device which uses a SIM will have an ICC-ID, it is not known whether the British networks which provide connectivity for the iPad would have the same flaw as AT&T's website.

West accused of focusing too much on social networking sites during last year's post-election protests in Iran

It was described as the "Twitter revolution", but almost a year on from Iran's disputed presidential elections, during which the use of social media by the opposition movement made headlines around the world, such claims prompt wry smiles from seasoned observers.

Carried away by the enthusiasm of the protests, tens of thousands of Twitter users across the world switched their locations to Tehran in an attempt to confuse Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's henchmen. The US state department official who persuaded Twitter to delay a technical upgrade of its software so that it didn't occur during a protest was described as the "man who saved Iran". And a former aide to George Bush even suggested awarding Twitter the Nobel peace prize for its role in the Iran crisis.

Such hyperbole reveals more about western fantasies for new media than the reality in Iran, argues Hamid Tehrani, the Persian editor of the blogging network Global Voices.

"The west was focused not on the Iranian people but on the role of western technology," he says. "Twitter was important in publicising what was happening, but its role was overemphasised."

Tehrani estimates that there were fewer than 1,000 active Twitter users in Iran at the time of the election. "Some people did provide updates from Tehran, but many didn't check out. When someone tweeted that there were 700,000 people demonstrating in front of a mosque, it turned out that only around 7,000 people showed up."

The Oxfordshire-based Iranian writer who only gives her Twitter name Oxfordgirl was a prominent and much-followed source during the protests. She insists that in some instances Twitter did help organise protests by warning demonstrators about the presence of security forces. "I'm still getting information from people I know in Iran from Twitter, but it is not such an easy flow," she concedes.

Other forms of social media played a perhaps more important role than Twitter. Victoria Grand, YouTube's head of policy and communication, says that during the protests "people were holding up their cameras as it were a sword in a way. They really understood that if you can get the global community to see what's happening that will be your greatest defence".

That may also be overstating the case given the violent suppression of the protests. But even those wary of western exaggeration concede that sharing mobile phone footage was crucial. "YouTube was important, because so many people watched the videos It was living proof of what happened and it's difficult to fake, despite what the Iranian government claimed," says Tehrani.

"Without Iranian citizen media, people would never have seen Neda's face, or other Iranians killed and beaten, or defying the security forces," he says, referring to Neda Soltan, the young woman whose death was broadcast on YouTube.

Annabelle Sreberny, professor in global media and communications at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, agrees. "Twitter was massively overrated. But spaces like YouTube and Facebook have been very important for sharing information."

But Sreberny, who is organising a conference next week on the role of non-conventional media in Iran, adds: "I wouldn't argue that social media really mobilised Iranians themselves the protest were best organised using SMS."

The importance of social media is perhaps best illustrated by the government's response to it. Many sites have been filtered or blocked in Iran, including YouTube and Facebook. The speed of the internet was also deliberately slowed down. And Prominent bloggers, like the former vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, were among those first arrested. More recently the so-called Iranian cyber army has attacked reformist websites, and the organisers have had their computer files deleted.

In the cat-and-mouse game between the regime and its opponents online, the government has gained the upper hand in the last few months.

"Some of the best websites are now outside Iran," says Sreberny. "Many people have run away, so in that sense the 'mice' are more spread."

The turning point was 11 February, when the opposition attempted to hijack the 31st anniversary celebrations of the 1979 revolution. The event turned out to be a show of strength for the security forces and the government's supporters. As Tehrani says, "People began to realise they should pay more attention to the reality on the ground and not become imprisoned by the visual bubble created online. The cornerstone of this movement is not technology, it's people."

Sreberny has a different explanation. "By February the demand for a recount had gone. It wasn't just that the regime had become more vicious, the opposition movement also needed a breathing space to work out what its key demands are," she says.

The next few days and weeks are seen as crucial to the opposition as it marks the anniversary of the election and Neda's death. Oxfordgirl says: "The big test will be whether there's a significant protest on the anniversary. I don't think there will be protest on the same scale as last year. But in a way they don't need to happen, because they were a catalyst that created a great deal of change within the regime."

Eljero Elia 'anti Moroccan' comment forces Twitter ban
Player claims comments were not intended to offend

Holland's World Cup squad has been banned from using Twitter during the tournament after the winger Eljero Elia sparked a racism row with comments on a live streaming video.

Viewers reacted angrily to the video in which Elia appears to insult Moroccans forcing him to apologise and prompting the Dutch coach, Bert van Marwijk, to impose the ban.

The defender Gregory van der Wiel said on his Twitter account the squad were no longer allowed to use it, and this was confirmed by Ryan Babel and Elia who both went offline.

On the video Elia and Babel are seen playing a computer game in their room in front of a webcam, with several other team members visiting them.

Elia apologised for his comments but insisted he had not intended to insult a group of people.

"I want to apologise to the Moroccan community but I am not a racist," he told Dutch media. "I grew up in The Hague in a neighbourhood with 75 percent Moroccans and have a lot of friends among them.

"What I said was meant for a friend of mine, Reduan, who always calls me 'negro' ... it sounds odd, but it is some slang."

Van der Wiel last year learnt the hard way that Twitter comments can land you in hot water.

The defender pulled out of the Dutch squad for a friendly against Australia with concussion but said on Twitter that he had visited a concert the night the team travelled to Australia.

Holland start their World Cup campaign on Monday against Denmark.

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.

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

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.

PC; 12.99; cert 16+; Team 17

Alien Breed evoked a time when developers really pushed the abilities of hardware. And yet, last year's update of the franchise failed to set gamers alight in the way the Amiga original did. So full marks to Team 17 for putting the second episode of AB:Evolution on hold and trying to reboot the reboot instead. The question is, have they done enough?

AB: Impact does boast a few improvements to the last effort. You can now spend credits on new weapons or upgrading your favourite ones a welcome addition that means you have more to look out for in the maze-like levels other than health or ammo packs. The control system has also been tweaked, now working perfectly to steer your hero with the direction keys, using the mouse to and aim and fire your weapon. Once you get used to moving quickly while panning the camera with the mouse, it makes for some exhilarating run-and-gun gameplay especially when monsters start crawling out of the ship in significant numbers.

Which makes it all the more disappointing that the gameplay remains a curiously cold and uninviting affair. Despite some attractive effects (the random explosions that rip through the ship, for instance) the levels are long and far too formulaic to either surprise or truly involve. It's usually a case of searching for a keycard to unlock a door, fighting off the enemies that pour out and then doing it all again at each new bottleneck.

Another disappointment are the aliens themselves once the game's highlight due to their impressive (albeit borderline litigious) similarity to HR Geiger's seminal designs for Alien. Apparently, these have been tweaked to make them more distinctive, but the result is still underwhelming given the capabilities of the Unreal engine used to render them something not helped by the top-down perspective, which doesn't make for any great level of texture or detail.

As an effort in nostalgia, AB: Impact has much to commend it. It's keenly priced, the sound is excellent and the frenetic gameplay and sheer number of onscreen enemies makes for some thrilling rearguard actions in tight, moodily lit corridors. However, as an illustration of what today's PC is capable of, it fails to impress. Gamers of a certain age may warm to its old-skool charm, but others may end up wondering what the all the fuss was about in the first place.

Rating: 3/5

Jill Llewellyn's daughter wants a camera for her birthday, and she plans to share her photos on Facebook

For her 12th birthday my daughter would like a simple (cheapish!) digital camera that she can mainly use to take pictures of friends and get them onto Facebook. I assume this means loading pics onto the PC first and then transferring them to Facebook she has her own laptop connected to our wireless broadband. Have you any suggestions? I notice that a Fujifilm AX245W Pink digital camera is on offer at Tesco, down from 119.97 to 69.97. Tesco also has the Fujifilm FinePix Z70, down from 119 to 99, which can upload pics/video to Facebook and YouTube, though it's a bit more expensive than I'd like.
Jill Llewellyn

A good camera for young daughters, which I included in the Technology section's Christmas gift guide, is the pink Samsung ES55, which Amazon.co.uk is selling for 64.90. It's 13th on Amazon's bestsellers list for compacts, and ranks about 19,000 places higher than the Fujifilm AX245W in Electronics & Photo. (You can buy from other sources, of course.)

One of the Samsung ES55's advantages is the lithium ion battery, and the camera can optionally be recharged from a PC's USB port. The Fujifilm AX245W and many other compacts use AA batteries, which adds to the running costs.

Note that in both cases you will need to add an SD (Secure Digital) memory card. There are lots of cheap 2GB SDHD cards available, if you don't already have a spare.

Another disadvantage of both cameras and of most compacts nowadays is the lack of an optical viewfinder. Pictures have to be framed using the screen on the back, and this can be hard to see in sunlight.

Your daughter will need to transfer the pictures from the SD card to her computer before uploading them to an online service. Many laptops now have an SD card slot to make this easier. If not, she could use a small plug-in USB adaptor.

The Fujifilm Finepix Z70 aims to make it simpler to upload photos to Facebook and other sites. What you do is select images for uploading while they are still in the camera. Then, says Fujifilm's site, "When the FinePix Z70 is connected to a PC, the marked images are uploaded to the designated site, eliminating the need for time-consuming PC-based image processing or selection." For this to work, the PC has to be running the MyFinePix Studio software supplied with the camera.

But you're paying quite a lot for the convenience (compared with 65 for the ES55). For that sort of money, the Canon PowerShot A1100 is a better camera, and it has a viewfinder. Amazon.co.uk has it in pink for 103.92, reduced from 219.

You don't say if your daughter already has a Facebook account: many children do. However, Facebook's privacy policy states that users must be aged 13 or older, adding: "If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under age 13, we will delete that information as quickly as possible." That could be a bit devastating for a child who has put a lot of effort into building up a profile and network of friends.

Either way, you must make sure that your daughter understands that Facebook does not store her original photos, and that she must not delete them from her PC. If she uploads a high resolution image measuring 3648 x 2736 pixels, Facebook will reduce it to about 720 x 540 pixels. In other words, it will throw away the 10MP image and show a 0.3MP image instead. This makes sense to Facebook because it stores billions of photos. However, it does mean that Facebook images are useless for making prints.

(Facebook users could resize their own prints to 720 pixels wide then upload the smaller versions, but I don't know anyone who does this manually.)

The low quality of Facebook photos is a great leveller, and many people send photos directly from their camera phones, without using a PC. The drawbacks are that smartphones can be expensive to buy and even more expensive to run, and even the best cannot match good cameras for flexibility and image quality. But it might be worth considering a cheaper touchscreen cameraphone such as the Pink Samsung Genio S3650, which costs 59.50 on Vodafone PAYG from Amazon.co.uk.

The Genio S3650 or Corby takes 2MP photos and has software to connect to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. It also has an FM radio, and it works as a video recorder, MP3 player, and games machine. Again, you will need to add an SD card for storage.

Finally, there's also another way of cutting out the PC stage: just add Wi-Fi to the camera. This can be done by using an Eye-Fi card, which combines wireless with 2GB to 8GB of memory in a tiny SD card. This is not a cheap option, at the moment, but I expect more cameras to have built-in Wi-Fi in the future.

It lacks a PVR and Wi-Fi access, but the iPlayer is the saving grace of this Freeview box

With World Cup fever about to engulf the land just as Freeview HD launches, you can expect a flood of devices that pump Freeview HD to your telly in the next few weeks. One of the first is the nice but clunkily named i-CAN Easy HD, a small white plastic box (wait, white? Isn't white a bit last-century?) that includes not only that Freeview HD tuner, but what is also for me its killer app: the BBC iPlayer.

The Freeview stuff first: the HD picture seemed really not bad at all to my untrained eye on my 32in Full-HD Panasonic telly. At the moment, of course, HD content is limited to a couple of channels (BBC HD, Channel 4 HD and ITV 1 HD) and it's only available in some parts of the country. However, most of the time you'll be watching standard-def pictures, and I found those a bit soft and occasionally blocky. Sit far enough away from your telly, though, and that won't be a problem.

There's a comprehensive EPG and the onscreen menus are clear, though I thought the graphics were rather cartoon-like. However, they walk you clearly through the set-up and the box is up and running quickly. I had one minor irritation which was that I couldn't find how to turn off the default setting for subtitles, which is that they are on, and had to turn them off every single time I changed the channel. Apparently that's easy to fix a pity I didn't find that setting, though.

Where this box really shines, though, is with the iPlayer, which feels as though it's been set free by being beamed straight to your telly rather than you having to watch EastEnders on your laptop. The interface is easy to navigate and assuming your broadband connection can cope with it it will also deliver high-def content. It stuttered a bit for me, which I put down to the flakiness of wireless streaming, but it was really very good overall.

Mind you, you have to connect it to your router, and therein lies something I find infuriating. Why aren't devices like this equipped with Wi-Fi? This box, like every other piece of internet-capable TV equipment, comes with an Ethernet port. Now, I don't know about you, but my telly is nowhere near my router; and I do not want to sling great lengths of CAT-5 cable around my flat. Which means that you have to buy a wireless bridge Belkin does one for about 35 and set that up. I have a D-Link bridge with four ports but that is both expensive and surprisingly tricky to put on your network.

The remote is a bit confusing as it has various buttons that don't yet have a function, suggesting further clever tricks to come. And it, like a couple of other things about this box (like turning off the subtitles), isn't very intuitive you'll need to refer to the manual more times than you might like.

The biggest niggle of this box is that isn't a PVR if you want to record or archive material you'll need to add another piece of kit to the collection under your television. But if you want HD Freeview for a reasonable price ( 129), then this is a very good option. And having the iPlayer on it is just sublime.

Pros: HD content, the iPlayer, small and neat

Cons: Not a PVR, cartoony graphics, annoying remote, no Wi-Fi, not always intuitive

Advanced Digital Broadcast

Shares jump over speculation that success of iPad could put Apple in acquisitive mood

British chip designer Arm Holdings leapt 11% on renewed speculation that the company could be a takeover target of Apple, one of its clients.

Traders' talk about a possible offer lifted the stock by 31p to 305p by noon, after having reached 362.4p, a jump of 32%, in earlier trading.

The company denied an approach and referred to previous comments by chief executive Warren East, when he said a takeover would make no sense as companies like Apple could already use Arm's technology without buying the business.

The market is speculating that Apple could turn acquisitive given the initial success of the recently launched iPad.

Cambridge-based Arm licenses its technology to a variety of clients, including Apple. The company said in April first-quarter sales rose by 19% to 143.3m, while pre-tax profit soared by 57% to 37.6m.

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.

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?

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.

Man of the moment Dennis Crowley, the Foursquare founder, spoke at the Mashable Summit this week, and gave the beginnings of some interesting answers in this brief voxpop afterwards.

He said venues have been extremely positive about the various marketing deals being set up on the service, because it helps them interact with their customers.

The difference between Foursquare and a Facebook page for a business, for example, is significant; brands need to devote quite a bit of time to curating that page online because Facebook is about maintaining relationships and contacts, and sharing information. Foursquare is much simpler, a status game where all the user needs to do is check-in and the venue, well, doesn't really need to do anything apart from watch who's regular, the time they come in and try and anything else that can inform their marketing accordingly. It is a social network, but one that continues "after you've closed the laptop," as Crowley put it.

Location tools are going to be very big indeed, particularly because there is an obvious commercial incentive for both the venue and the consumer.

And because they are going to be so big, there is massive competition in this space. Using both Foursquare and Gowalla, I'm constantly comparing and contrasting features between the two - what does work and what doesn't. And so are Foursquare's competitors, because reviews tool Yelp has controversially introduced kings, barons and dukes to its functionality. It might be the greatest form of flattery, but it also shows a remarkable lack of imagination.

It's shame this came out after the Mashable event, but we can only hope Crowley has a pop on his Tumblr, like he did last time.

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.