If you are fed up with your home phone/broadband provider but tied into a long contract, you can now buy out of it for much less, following the intervention of the telecoms regulator.

Over the past 18 months, Ofcom has been working with the three biggest UK landline providers, BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media, to ensure the charges they impose when customers end their contracts early ("early termination charges") come down.

Ofcom said the three firms have agreed a new set of maximum charges and it is good news for consumers who want to vote with their feet.

Those wanting to escape BT contracts will have to pay between 2 and 5 for every outstanding month, depending on the package taken.

Those wanting to leave TalkTalk early will pay between 3 and 8 a month to escape, while Virgin customers face a 4- 9 penalty per outstanding month.

Prior to Ofcom's intervention, customers had to pay the full monthly tariff if they wished to leave their contracts early.

Ofcom's partner for strategy and market developments, Peter Phillips, said: "We very much welcome the reductions made by BT, TalkTalk and Virgin Media."

For a full list of the charges go to Ofcom.org.uk.

Other telecoms providers are expected to bring their termination fees into line with these. If they fail to, Ofcom is expected to intervene.

Having lost its exclusive rights to sell Apple's new phone, the mobile network now seems to have an inverse pricing at its low end to discourage 24-month contracts

O2 has announced the pricing for its iPhone 4 handsets - and seems to be trying to push people away from buying longer-term contracts.

Under the 24-month contracts, the phones are more expensive than the 18-month contracts, by between 70 (for the white 16GB version priced at 209 for 18 months, or 279 for 24 months) and 24 (for the black 32GB version, costing 299 for 18 months and 323 for 24 months). Even though the price plans at that tariff differ by 5 per month, over 18 months the 16GB handset works out cheaper on the lowest tariff by 10.

Pricing plans for Vodafone's iPhone 4 leaked out earlier this week, although the company has not formally announced them and is only letting people indicate interest in ordering it.

Orange's charges start at 169 for a 16GB phone on a 30-per month 24-month contract ( 229 on 30 for 18 months)

O2's pricing decision has puzzled people on Twitter: "O2 seems to have forgotten the idea is to lure people onto longer contract by *lowering* upfront costs. Duh.," commented journalist Scott Colvey.

The decision - tied to O2's decision to introduce strict caps on data downloads per month, varying between 500MB and 1GB, replacing its previous "unlimited" data contracts that many are still using - may mean a migration of former iPhone customers away from the company, which until last Christmas had the monopoly on iPhone sales in the UK. Now the phone is sold by Orange, Vodafone and 3 - though only Orange and Vodafone have announced prices.

Many iPhone owners who bought the second-generation iPhone in 2008 on 18- or 24-month contracts will be eligible to upgrade with O2 - or possibly to shift to another carrier.

Apple has apologised to would-be customers after overwhelming demand meant that its own and AT&T's servers crashed when the phone went on sale in five countries on Tuesday. It says that 600,000 phones were ordered on the day - which suggests that it has tapped into huge pent-up demand from owners of older versions, as well as new buyers seeking to join the smartphone bandwagon.

AOL confirms sale to new owners Criterion Capital Partners, which describes business as 'attractive media platform'

AOL has confirmed the sale of Bebo to new owners Criterion Capital Partners, which argues that the young user base and revenue history continue to make the business an "attractive media platform".

Details of the deal were not disclosed it has been rumoured that Bebo may have been sold for $10m or less although AOL admitted that "the transaction will create a meaningful tax deduction". AOL needed to structure the deal to avoid being hit by massive corporate tax charges after paying $850m for Bebo just over two years ago.

Adam Levin, the managing partner at CCP who led the deal, said that Bebo remained attractive as both a "standalone entity and in the context of our broader investment objectives".

"The young, highly active user base, revenue history, presence in countries throughout the world and solid technical infrastructure make it an attractive media platform both as a standalone entity and in the context of our broader investment objectives," he said.

Tim Armstrong, chairman and chief executive of AOL, said that the deal meant that Bebo users would be able to "remain within the social platform that they know and love".

"Criterion Capital Partners are specialists in facilitating growth plans and turnarounds, and are well placed to drive Bebo's effort to strengthen its foothold within the highly competitive social networking arena," said Armstrong.

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

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It's only eight years since Steven Spielberg's Minority Report amazed audiences with its futuristic technology. But now science is fast catching up

The launch of Microsoft's new Kinect games system, which allows players to run, jump, punch and shoot without having to wear strange clothing or hold any kind of controller, has got technology and cinema buffs alike thinking of Tom Cruise again. Specifically, the moment in the film Minority Report when Cruise, playing police chief John Anderton, tries to figure out film footage and computer data by waving his hands around in mid-air to manipulate it: turning it, shrinking it, pushing it aside, revolving it. Give it time: in a few years, we'll more than likely be controlling our computers in a similar way.

When Minority Report came out in the summer of 2002 the iPod was less than a year old and the iPhone and iPad weren't even gleams in Steve Jobs's glinting eyes its technological visions of the future seemed mind-bogglingly cool. The film was set in 2054 (Philip K Dick's short story, on which it is based, isn't so specific), so director Steven Spielberg presumably reckoned he was giving it plenty of room for the array of cutting-edge technologies to become part of our daily life.

What Spielberg didn't count on, though, is what might be called "the Star Trek effect". If you show off imaginary cool technology in a film or TV series, then kids, teenagers and enthusiastic technologists of all ages will try their damnedest to make it come true. When James T Kirk beamed down to an alien planet and flipped open his communicator, when Spock waved his tricorder over strange life forms and murmured "intriguing . . .", when the crew of the Enterprise teleported, carried phasers, communicated with their computer by voice and carried data around on little plastic sticks, a generation looked at it and thought: that's a future I want to live in.

And so with Minority Report. In the manner of all the best science-fiction, it included numerous gadgets but didn't rely on any of them as the key to its plot, which still revolved (as was Dick's predilection) on people's ability to deceive themselves about truth, lies and reality.

For a lot of geeky fans, however, the plot was incidental to the possibilities offered by the technologies on show. And there were plenty: pre-crime (predicting that a particular person will commit a crime); iris recognition (picking you out from a crowd on the basis of the unique pattern of your iris); personalised advertising (where what you see on hoardings is targeted specifically to you); e-paper (electronic paper, for newspapers with moving images that people can read on trains); 3D video (do we have to explain this?); computer-guided cars (which follow preset patterns); spider robots (for tracking people); jetpacks; and some rather unpleasant police restraint technologies including the sick stick (makes you sick on contact) and "the collar" (which effectively paralyses you once fitted).

Things such as gesture computing were still way off (though a jetpack had been used in the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympic Games). But, eight years on, Spielberg and his technical advisers look as though they were too cautious . . .

Gesture-based computing

John Underkoffler, the MIT scientist who created the gesture-based computing that Cruise used in Minority Report, has developed his own company Oblong Industries to make it real and market it. But he has already been overtaken by companies such as Apple with the iPhone, offering "pinch" and "pull" and "swipe" for pictures and text since 2007. And of course by Microsoft, both with its new Kinect games system and its table-sized, touch-screen Surface, which lets you move things around with your hands.

Dynamic iris recognition

Your iris has a unique pattern, and is already used to identify you (so long as you are standing still in front of a camera) by border control agencies in the UK, Netherlands, United Arab Emirates, US and Canada. In the film, people's irises are read while they're on the move, presenting the extra challenge of movement and resolution. But with cameras and computers improving all the time, don't bet against this not being ready way before 2054.

Personalised ads

In Minority Report, the iris recognition then led to personalised ads bombarding you on hoardings everywhere. That doesn't happen offline, but you do get them to some extent on the net: DoubleClick, the huge advertising company owned by Google, tracks any sites you visit that use its adverts, and can tailor what ads you see to an agglomeration of your interests. Attempts by the UK web-tracking company Phorm to let internet service providers do similar things with ads, by tracking where you went online, ran into privacy problems. And don't forget Facebook, which is spookily good at targeting ads because it has access to everything you have told it about yourself (though it insists it does not share that with advertisers).

Computer-guided cars

Arguably, the closest we will get to this is satnav systems, which are actually pretty pervasive; the market is nearly saturated, at least in the UK. However, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (which gave us the internet) has had an "autonomous car" competition and entrants are getting better. Wouldn't it be nice if your car could drive you home after a night on the booze? Pubs would cheer.

3D video

Have you seen Avatar? Up? Sky's new 3D TV service? The new Nintendo 3DS? Done.

E-paper

Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle are a bit bulky, but lots of news organisations think they are just the ticket for electronic reading. But real "electronic paper" bendy, able to retain an image, electronically rewriteable is getting closer all the time. In January, the Korean company LG showed off a 19in flexible e-paper, and companies such as Plastic Logic and E Ink are getting electronics that look closer to paper all the time. Perhaps it will be a hit when newspapers stop printing. So, 2054 then. Or perhaps 2015?

Pre-crime

In the film, "pre-cogs" can look into the future and inform the police (they have got no choice they are stuck in baths in the basement). In 2008, Portsmouth city council installed CCTV linked to software that would note whether people were walking suspiciously slowly. University researchers had already realised in 2001 that, if you recorded the walking paths of people in car parks, you could spot the would-be thieves simply: they didn't walk directly to a car, but instead ambled around with no apparent target. That is because, unlike everyone else in a car park, they weren't going to their own car.

That's not the end: Nick Malleson, a researcher at the University of Leeds, has built a system that can predict the likelihood of a house being broken into, based on how close it is to routes that potential burglars might take around the city; he is meeting Leeds council this week to discuss how to use it in new housing developments, to reduce the chances of break-ins. So although pre-crime systems can't quite predict murder yet, it may only be a matter of time.

Spider robots

The US military is developing "insect robots", with the help of British Aerospace. They actually have eight legs (so, really, arachnid robots) and will be able to reconnoitre dangerous areas where you don't want to send a human, such as potentially occupied houses.

"Our ultimate goal is to develop technologies that will give our soldiers another set of eyes and ears for use in urban environments and complex terrain; places where they cannot go or where it would be too dangerous," Bill Devine, advanced concepts manager with BAE Systems, told World Military Forum. Give it 10 years and they will be there.

Sick sticks

These have already been the object of some research: Pennsylvania State University researchers developed a system to emit ultra-bright light pulses that induce "temporary blindness, disorientation, nausea and blindness". And a company called Intelligent Optical Security has built and sold it for the US's Homeland Security organisation so feel worried. There's no sign of restraint collars yet, although watching England play football has been known to have the same effect.

We head back to Helghan and get a frosty reception from the locals

Hermen Hulst, the managing director of Guerrilla, made an interesting admission at the beginning of his Killzone 3 demo. He said that shortly after completing the previous instalment in the shooter series, the studio got to see two other titles from Sony's stable Uncharted 2 and God of War 3. "We were proud of our game, but we realised we had to step it up." And at E3, we're getting a first glimpse at the results.

Set immediately after the events of Killzone 2, The Helghast leader emperor Visari is dead, but this has only opened up an almighty power struggle between his ambitious generals. Now there is corruption and confrontation everywhere, and the ISA troops find themselves fighting for survival in the immediate aftermath of their decidedly pyrrhic victory. What they'll face is a revitalised Helghast force, with new tech and new weapons. And this coming asymmetric war will apparently take place amid massive new areas of the Helghan homeworld from jungles to frozen wastelands. According to Hulst, levels are ten times larger in this game, than they were in the last.

The demo we see is a huge chunk of level four, where players are beginning to encounter a range of new Helghast technology. It's a massive industrial base, in an arctic hellhole, littered with derelict oilrigs and hulking cranes bunched together amid the swirling skies. The look is typical Killzone: cold, rusted, inhospitable, mechanical. And the action which kicks off as soon as we're in is familiar too. Machine gun fire rips by the player as he takes out first an enemy emplacement and then a Helghast aircraft with well-aimed grenades. The chopper swirls uselessly in the air, then explodes into a building a special effects sequence that would have Michael Bay leering in admiration.

From here, what Guerrilla is promising is a more open design structure, the larger levels allowing for multiple routes through the environment, with plenty of set-piece choke points on the way. Although the visual style is extremely familiar (the industrial look, and the muted cold colours, are hugely reminiscent of the Killzone 2 environs), the detail and interaction with environments seems to have been increased. At one point, we're attacking a Helghast rig in armoured aircraft, strafing the decks with mini-gun fore that brings gargantuan pipe system crashing to the icy ground.

But alongside these epic moments of long distance warfare, Killzone 3 is also bringing in a new emphasis on close quarters fighting. The team has introduced a self-explanatory new mechanic, named 'the brutal melee system', which allows players to punch and kick Helghast enemies to the ground, or smash them with a rifle butt. When they're down, it's another rifle jab to the face,. This is a highly physical reflection of the game's chunky, brutish weapon handling and looks to fit perfectly into the pitiless Killzone universe.

I got a quick hands-on with the game, taking a few bloody strides into level four. Kicking off, I was in a gunship, blasting that rig apart and watching the Helghast troops run for cover. On the ground, things are as they have always been; it's about deadly firefights, picking your way through cover and being absolutely accurate every time you chance your head above cover. This is furious, relentless hardcore FPS action, with beautifully tuned weapon feedback. I also got to see a couple of Helghast jet pack troopers, who wear huge flying suits with broad wings, like metallic harpies, blasting you from above. (Apparently, players get a chance to pilot these bad boys at some point.)

Playing in 3D is an interesting experience. All the stuff we're told about the technology, that it helps players to judge depth, and to pick out targets, has an element of truth to it. When standing on a ridge at one point, looking out over a Helghast base, I could pick out the merest pixels of solders, lurking amid metal crates and other military detritus. Oh and the blood effects when you're hit are fantastically gruesome, appearing to smear semi-transparently across your vision; you almost want to wipe the stuff off your 3D lenses.

As for multiplayer Hulst promises new game modes and a more accessible matchmaking system making it easier for payers to find and play against their friends.

So, is this Killzone 2 write large?

Judging from our very small sampler, there's little so far to convert ardent non-fans. It would have been great to see an environment totally at odds with the Killzone 2 experience, and it's certainly what we're being promised indeed, Hulst says the finale of the game is going to take us way out into space, a fascinating proposition. But regardless of scenery, Killzone 3 already has a solidity, a grasp on modern graphical effects and a rampant pleasure in destruction that's undeniably and viciously compelling.

BBC Worldwide bids to open up new revenue stream as it faces loss of income from having to hive off part of its magazines

BBC Worldwide is to make its first foray into pay-to-play gaming linked to TV programming with an online version of The Weakest Link.

The move marks a toe in the water for BBC Worldwide in its bid to open up new revenue streams as it faces a loss of income from having to hive off part of its magazines while delivering on a promise for profits to hit 200m by 2012.

Last month BBC director general Mark Thompson revealed that the operation will record profits of about 140m in the year to the end of March, up from 103m the year before, with official figures to be published in about two weeks. BBC Worldwide has licensed company Amuso.com to launch the game and it is not taking revenue from players.

BBC Worldwide already offers a free version of the Anne Robinson-fronted BBC knockout quiz; Amuso.com will now charge players a variety of amounts from as little as 1 to play. Amuso.com, the two-year-old venture backed by investors behind Skype and Joost, has signed doctor-turned-comedy writer Fintan Coyle who co-founded Weakest Link to be a strategic adviser.

The BBC claims that there are online protection systems to try to avoid under-18s signing up and gambling. If any player makes more than a 50 deposit the game asks for identity validation through a scanned copy of a driver's licence or passport. Players are asked to register a birth date during registration. A paid-for check using the 192 verification service backs up name, address and birth date details.

"BBC Worldwide is always keen to extend a brand beyond the traditional use, and social gaming is one of great interest to us," said Robert Nashak, executive vice president of digital entertainment at BBC Worldwide.

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

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Game issued a profit warning after bid hopes waned and before the launch of Kinect and new Nintendo 3DS

The huge task facing Ian Shepherd, new chief executive of Game, was laid bare today as the struggling computer games specialist issued its second profit warning of the year and warned of a first half loss.

The shares were the biggest faller in the FTSE 250, closing down 5p at 83p after the retailer said like-for-like sales in its British and Irish stores plunged 17.2% in the 19 weeks to 12 June. At a group level like-for-like sales were down 12.3%. Game said it had recruited Shepherd, aged 41, a former Vodafone executive and keen gamer, to start work at the end of this month. He replaces Lisa Morgan who quit in April after presiding over a sharp fall in annual profits. Shepherd, who has also worked for BSkyB, is on a similar pay deal to Morgan who earned 535,000 last year.

Game said new titles such as Red Dead Redemption and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 had sold well but not enough to make up for weaker overall demand.

According to Gfk Chart-Track market data UK console sales slumped by a third during the period mainly owing to lower sales of the Nintendo Wii and DS while software was down 11%, leading to an overall decline of 19%. Last week, Argos owner Home Retail reported a 8.1% decline in first-quarter sales, which it blamed on slumping sales of TVs and gaming products.

The games market is a heavily cyclical with each generation of consoles enjoying a lifespan of five to seven years before demand peters out. Game's fortunes are intertwined with new technology launches and sales have been hit as the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii mature ahead of the launch of a fourth generation of products such as Microsoft's Kinect billed as the first hands-free gaming device and the Nintendo 3DS.

Game said it would have to cut prices to compete with Argos and the supermarkets but added that it expected to make a profit in the second half which includes the Christmas trading period.

Game described it as a "transitional" year for the industry and said it did not expect new technology launches such as Kinect to "materially" impact trading until next year.

Game's shares have halved in value over the past year and hopes of a bid from US retailer GameStop have waned. "The market has to balance the poor record of this cyclical stock and fading hopes for a bid from GameStop with the rosier outlook for the new generation of motion-sensitive games and devices," said Arden Partners analyst Nick Bubb.

Analysts had expected Game to make a profit of about 64m this year but Singer Capital Markets analyst Matthew McEachran said he expected that figure to be cut by 20% following the update.

yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah.com popped onto Mashable's radar overnight. It's a constant stream of random photos. That's it.

It's either the sixtyone.com of photos, or the chatroulette of photos - I can't decide.

Its key 'feature' is that anyone can upload anything by emailing pictures to yeah@yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah.com. Stay at the top of the page and you're seeing uploads in real-time.

You really could see absolutely anything next - so precautions in the office, people. I hope there's some anti-porn flesh filters running or things could start to get sticky. I was served up butchery, a 'pretty lady' and a Fear and Loathing-themed LolCat, so I got off lightly.

Generally, I think the equation of anonymous + random + unmoderated = asking for trouble, or certainly mischief.

Creator Tyler Healy of Type/Code, via Parsons, told Mashable the site "challenges the ideas of surveillance, and public versus private by creating a medium for people walking down the street to instantly anonymously broadcast their experiences to the world using today's mobile phone technology".

Phoebe Whitlock is looking for a portable that's more powerful than a netbook

I'm looking to get a laptop for university. It needs to have a big enough screen for me to work on. A large memory would be a bonus so I can transfer my music and pictures to it. Weight is not really an issue as I will have it on my desk most of the time, it just needs to be portable from home to university. I was looking at a Dell as they are funky looking and practical. My dad has a Samsung netbook, which is excellent, but I definitely need something bigger.
Phoebe Whitlock

Netbooks are great at what they do: they are relatively cheap, very portable, and offer long battery life. However, if you are looking for what's basically a desktop replacement to run from the mains, a laptop has many advantages. These include a bigger keyboard and screen, a faster processor, a bigger hard drive for storing things, and a built in DVD/CD-Rom drive for making backups and playing movies.

Almost every PC manufacturer offers laptops that will do the job for less than 500, including (in alphabetical order) Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba. You can try most of them in high street stores, to see whether you like the feel of them. However, remember to Google your chosen model to see if it has been reviewed, and if it has any known problems.

The base specification for a laptop costing 350 to 500 is, roughly, a 15.5 or 15.6 inch screen (1366 x 768 pixels), a 250GB or 320GB hard drive, 2GB to 4GB of memory, and Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium. The latest models have new Intel Core i3 processors, while cheaper ones will have Intel Core 2 Duos or, further down the price scale, chips branded Pentium or Celeron.

Cheap Core i3 laptops include the HP G62-105SA ( 432 at amazon.co.uk) and Samsung R530 ( 450). It's always good to have the latest processor, but I suspect you won't need anything more than a 2.2GHz Pentium Dual Core T4400.

Dell now offers eight ranges of laptops. For consumers, Inspiron is the mainstream "value" brand, with the Studio range adding style and XPS adding performance. Dell also offers Alienware laptops for gamers, and Adamo advanced luxury models. (For business users, Dell has the entry-level Vostro, mainstream Latitude and performance oriented Precision ranges.) An Inspiron 15 with a 15.6 inch widescreen and a T4400 chip would cost you about 450, while a Studio 15 with a Core i3 costs about 530.

You can, of course, pay more. The PC industry works by offering basic systems at low prices then "upselling" extra features. These include separate graphics cards (which are faster than Intel Integrated Graphics chips), bigger and sharper screens, larger hard drives, and Blu-ray movie players. Most are useful for entertainment purposes rather than essay writing.

There are a few other things to consider.

First, you need a backup strategy so that you never lose important work. You can do this by adding a USB thumb driver or external hard drive or buying a spindle of CD-R discs or signing up to an online service where you can store things. Many laptops now have SD card slots so you can copy essays straight to a tiny 2GB or 4GB card that you can keep somewhere safe.

Second, consider your health. Generally, desktop PCs are more ergonomic and better for your back than crouching over a laptop. Some students therefore prefer to have a small desktop PC and a netbook, for much the same outlay, though the cables mean small desktops are not as easy to move around. Another solution is to stand the laptop on a "riser" and perhaps plug in a separate USB keyboard. A riser will also help your laptop to stay cool.

Third, laptops can be broken, lost or stolen, though you can use a system with a Kensington lock and fasten it to your desk. As mentioned, it's very important to have separate copies of your work, but you should also consider how long it would take to get your laptop repaired or replaced, and whether it is covered by insurance. If you depend on a system, it's worth considering next-business-day in-home service.

Xbox 360/PS3/Wii; 39.99; cert 3+; EA Sports

Famously, amid Tiger Woods' recent woes, his brand-partners abandoned him in droves but at least EA Sports stuck by him. And the latest version of the golf game that bears his name should provide him with some consolation, as it's very good. Although one aspect which, on the face of it, might add to his creeping paranoia strikes you when you see the packaging: for the first time, Tiger is joined on the cover by another pro golfer, Northern Irish hot-shot Rory McIlroy.

McIlroy's presence shouldn't be seen as evidence that EA Sports is hedging its bets on Brand Woods, though. Rather, it reflects the fact that Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 contains a virtual facsimile of the Ryder Cup which will run this October at Celtic Manor in Wales, so a European poster-boy is required along with an American. The game's inclusion of the Ryder Cup should provide fans of the franchise with all the motivation they need to buy the latest iteration, and it is implemented in a commendably flexible manner: you can pretend to be Colin Montgomerie and pick a squad, then jump into whatever ongoing match takes your fancy after each hole. If you opt for the defaults (but choose the European team), you will be paired with McIlroy against Woods and Jim Furyk, at least in the initial stages of the tournament a daunting proposition.

However tempting, it's best not to jump straight into a Ryder Cup, as Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 has a new RPG-style Experience Points (XP) mechanism. You earn XP for things like hitting fairways and greens in regulation, plus sinking birdies and eagles. But great chunks of XP can be liberated by taking on Skills Challenges, fronted by various pros, in which, for example, you might have to match noted short-iron specialist Boo Weekley around the greens. You can then cash in your XP on a bewildering array of attributes (or virtual items in the Pro Shop), and it makes sense to improve your golfing skills before taking on the hopes of a continent in the Ryder Cup.

You can also play an entire PGA Tour season, emphasising that this is a very meaty game. Along with the XP, there is another new gameplay mechanic called Shot Focus, which lets you improve length and accuracy by adding power-boost to your shots, imparting spin in mid-air or seeing a preview of your putt's likely course. But this is finite, so you must use it sparingly (although it recharges over the course of a few holes).

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 looks absolutely stunning: at last, there is a clearly visible demarcation between fairway and rough, and the cloud-studded skies and camera angles are great to behold. There are also plenty of engine tweaks that make the game more true-to-life: the wind can now swing around from shot to shot, for example, and your ball will no longer automatically be dead in the centre of your aiming circle, even if you catch it perfectly. Hitting from the rough is more unpredictable. Two teams of 12 people can contest a Ryder Cup online, and there's a slightly gimmicky mode called True Aim, which gives you a view close to what a real golfer would see and makes you think more about yardages. A very classy effort, which should bring a rare smile to Tiger Woods' lips.

Rating: 4/5

PSP; 29.99; cert 15+; Konami

The Sony PSP is almost the forgotten handheld console. Compared to the ever changing and ever popular Nintendo DS and iPhone/iPod Touch (and now the iPad), the PSP feels like yesterday's toy.

Last year's neat but commercially underperforming download-only PSPGo didn't help matters either and a skimpy release schedule shows publishers are not sold either. Which is a shame as the PSP has always been the best handheld for gamers who want the depth of a 360 or PS3 game on the go. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is a classic example. This is a truly epic PSP game with a lengthy main game supplemented by numerous objectives and challenges.

The meat of the game is the standard mission-based Metal Gear Solid action. So think lengthy cut-scenes, unfathomable plots and lots of sneaking and subtle dispatching of guards. The good news is that the cut-scenes and plot have both been toned down for this handheld instalment and you are never too far away from the action. Less impressive is the inability to save anywhere you can bet you'll be stuck fighting an end of level boss character while trying to jump off a bus or train. You will need as few distractions as possible too as some typical Metal Gear Solid difficulty spikes particularly in boss battles crop up more often than is enjoyable.

As always with Metal Gear games, stealth is key. Jumping in all guns blazing simply multiplies your threat and usually ends your mission. Mercy is rewarded too, with those enemies you have knocked out rather than shot getting scooped out of the battlefield and added to your growing back at base army. This army is crucial, with captured troops used for combat, intelligence and research. This ongoing development and the new gear you get from it is an addictive sidegame in itself.

The controls are a little fiddly though not in Monster Hunter league but there are plenty of configuration options. The graphics are generally impressive too, and prove that the PSP can more than hold its own.

Overall, there is a lot to like here. The depth of the game means this is a console game you play on your handheld rather than a perfectly created portable experience. But gamers would expect nothing less from the Metal Gear brand. Peacewalker may renew interest in the PSP or it may just be the last great game for the original PSP. Either way, this a must for PSP owners.

Rating: 4/5

The writer of the new Doctor Who games for PC and Mac describes how the process differs from writing for TV. And Josh Williams, CEO of location based social network Gowalla talks takeovers and the future of the service. Plus this week's tech news.

You thought that the droning of Downfall videos had been stopped by the action of the original film makers? Nah you'll never stop people sneaking these things in.

Yes, of course it had to happen and of course a Briton has written the dialogue: the inevitably Hitler Downfall parody (no, they haven't all been killed off) about those damn delightful vuvuzelas that so add to the atmosphere at the World Cup and have audiologists all over South Africa's cities rubbing their hands at the hearing aids they're going to be selling in 20 years' time.

For we take up the story Hitler is looking forward to Germany's onward march to the World Cup final, where it will meet Brazil, of course, with all their lovely drums and singing. What? What's that? Fifa hasn't banned the vuvuzela? And off we go...

"Stay. If you have a vuvuzela."

"Are you insane? Ruining the World Cup with a plastic bloody horn?"

"There are over 300 million people like me watching in their slippers at home suffering through 90 minutes of tuneless droning trumpet."

Written by Ken McHardie, who describes himself as a "Sometime filmmaker, photographer, IT Consultant & Technical Author (the bit that pays)" from St Albans (can you imagine any other nation than Britain using "slippers" in that above sentence? No), we have to say nice one Ken.

Reading your reactions to our World Cup 2010 Twitter replay visualization made me smile. There's no better affirmation for a web project than seeing it reach people around the world. With readers of every competing nation taking an interest, I thought it might be worth describing how we put it together. As with football, teamwork is everything.

The project kicked off a few months ago with a simple but challenging brief: "Can we make a distinct and engaging representation of Twitter activity during the World Cup?"

The last few years have seen some fantastic Twitter visualizations using all sorts of approaches. Standing out would be difficult. That said, whilst many of these are great fun, only a few convey a sense of context or capture the spirit of popular occasions. Looking at these precedents it became clear that two key problems must be overcome. One, the tide of Twitter activity needed to be stored and made sense of throughout the tournament. Two, the resultant data should be presented without losing the energy of each tweet it was made up from.

I pondered all this on holiday and returned with a plan. A system that samples the shifting popularity of words could record and relay data to an app that animates these changes over time. With this approach, we could create the data-driven equivalent of a fast action replay for every game in the tournament. If we got it right, people might see the roar of the crowd passing through Twitter.

The first step in making this happen was enlisting the help of our Java team. In order to capture and analyse tweets minute-by-minute throughout the cup, Francis Rhys-Jones got to grips with the Twitter API and started putting together a web app. At root, a scheduling system slurps relevant tweets and adds them to a full-text index. A further task calculates the twenty most popular words every minute and stores the results. Finally, a REST service enumerates this data in JSON format for a required window in time.

The next challenge was in some ways the most critical. Having collected the data, how could we represent it in a distinct and engaging manner? My original sketch had several problems. It relied upon being able to assign every word of every tweet to a specific team. It supplied little context about what was happening in the game. It involved the dynamic layout of a list of words whose sizes and positions were constantly changing. Fortunately, our graphics team were on hand to help sort things out. After some wise words from Paddy Allen and Michael Robinson, Mark McCormick strolled up to the whiteboard and drew the first version of our expanding bubble layout. By placing the bubbles around a central hub containing the score, he solved two problems at once. Nice. As these graphics progressed, country and timeline information were incorporated to enhance the narrative pull. Finally, Andy Brockie and the editorial design team tweaked the fonts and colours to keep things consistent with the rest of our World Cup coverage.

As ever, having some graphics in place really got things moving. We swiftly realized our next problem the team info and timeline panels in the design required data to feed them. Our football mad product manager, Alex Liesche, had the solution: a large number of our existent match and tournament pages on the site are generated from feeds provided by ESA. Once a match is completed, they provide a full summary of teams fielded and major game events like goals, cards and corners. The Java guys then coaxed the requisite tournament data into a single summary and the stage was set.

The biggest job throughout this process fell to one man. Martin Shuttleworth is a fantastic Flash developer who I've worked with a number of times in the past. Once the designs were ready and the various data feeds agreed, we sat down and discussed how the interactive itself would work. On start up, the appropriate data would be loaded and assembled to model the tournament. A match browser would enable any completed game to be selected for replay. Once the game summary was loaded, the appropriate time window would be calculated and a call made to the word popularity API. With all the data in place, the main view could be built and the match replay started. Data flow would be controlled from an interactive timeline representing the match duration in the same way a video scrubber might. Replay would whizz through at sixty times real speed, so 90 minutes could be watched in 90 seconds. Users would have the freedom to pause, rewind or jump to a specific moment in time. At the heart of all this we have a series of data frames, each one describing the 20 most popular words for a specific minute in time. Each frame could be represented graphically as a series of bubbles sized according to word popularity. Transitioning from one minute to another would be a question of animating the change from one state to the next.

At this point, I should probably mention where the real magic lies. If you've ever watched someone drawing a packed circle layout by hand, you'll know it takes some time. The circles must all be sized according to their relative values but never overlap. Our code would need to make these calculations more or less in realtime. Word popularity could vary drastically from one minute to the next, particularly if a user was jumping around the timeline at will. The solution, I knew, would involve a physics engine. Box2D has a great pedigree, having started off as a C library for games programming. Furthermore, AVM2 is reasonably fast when executing mathematical calculations. Still, keeping our balls in order was going to be a big challenge. To my mind, Martin not only solved this problem, he managed to solve it so that the animation feels right. In lesser hands, the explosions of activity surrounding each goal might have become a swollen mess. Hats off to Mr Shuttleworth.

To recap: we started by figuring out how to collect aggregate stats from Twitter, produced an initial design for representing this data graphically, pulled together some supplementary feeds of match and team information and then started to build an interactive that uses a physics engine to help render animated replays of the changes in word popularity over time. What else could possibly be required? As always, the devil was in the detail. Once we started to work with the ESA feeds, we discovered that they didn't include all the information we needed. Most crucially, they provided no accurate indication of when matches were finished or how penalty shootouts unfolded. Thankfully, our ever helpful Central production and sport teams came to the rescue. Paul Torpey and the sport team undertook to maintain a number of Google Docs that would fill in all the gaps in the ESA data. One should never underestimate the importance of this kind of manual intervention. With the project running to such a tight deadline, we would have been hard pressed to get things done otherwise.

Two final challenges emerged just as we were preparing to go live. On one hand, I delved into the depths of Flash's Date object to ensure that everything would work in every possible timezone. On the other, we'd decided to allow deep linking of individual games using swfaddress. This isn't a standard feature of our interactive pages and we weren't due to release a new version of the main site code for at least another week. Kudos in this case goes to dev team stalwarts Grant Klopper and Tony McCrae who incorporated the appropriate JavaScript file through a little known back door. One last round of tweaks later, we had a build of the interactive ready for launch.

So there it is the story of one of our more ambitious interactives. To conclude this tale, I must also express thanks to Sean Clarke and Igor Clark, whose ever valiant cat herding was vital in getting much of this done, and Giles Anderton who kept the balls rolling whilst I was off sick. As all Beach Boys fans are aware, you need a mess of help to stand alone.

Chasing Google Docs, Microsoft now lets you create and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents online for free on live.com. But they missed some usability testing steps

Microsoft has launched a web version of Office and unlike Office, it's completely free if you have a Hotmail account. That's remarkable on a number of levels it means that it's finally trying to fight Google on Google's turf or that it's trying to defend its turf on the PC. Which is it, Microsoft?

To find out, I dived right in. Just as Google requires you to log in with a Google account, Microsoft needs you to have a Live.com account (a Hotmail account will do). Fine.

The normal document options are there: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.

I began with the Word Web App.

But where Google lets you create a document and just start typing, Office Online insists that you first give the document a name.

(And not just any name: it can't include any of the magick Windows-killing characters such as \ or :, nor can it start with the magick Unix-killing .).

By default (and with no option), the documents are created in the .docx format, which older version of Office can't read directly, though you can get free translators.

Fine; start typing. That's the easy part; and in many ways the setup is just the same as Google Docs. Typing, typing, typing

Next: across the top of the document are four tabs: File, Home (which you're in if you're editing), Insert and View.
Clicking Home gives a number of file-based options: open in Word, Save changes, Share the document with others, Properties [of the document], and then the also-rans: Give Feedback, Privacy [find out how it's protected], Terms of Use, Close. Now: have you noticed what's missing from that?

There's no option to upload a document or, at this time, to download it (though that will come later in our adventure). At this moment in the process, you can't get your content from your computer to the cloud, or vice-versa.

Well, actually, you can see later but it's not done from "inside" any of the programs. Unlike Google, again, where you can upload a document into an existing one at any time, and you can download a document as soon as or even before you've saved it.

This is a classic example where Microsoft hasn't thought about the user interface. One feels it's so busy protecting the Office monopoly on desktops that it can't give you the best experience, or even the best cloud-based experience, in case you stop buying Office.

Now, in the process of trying out the app, I clicked on the "View" tab. A fresh annoyance: a dialog box saying that the changes to my document haven't been saved, so do I want to abandon them?

The first thing it doesn't do, in Word: save regularly. (Though it does do this in the PowerPoint version. As we'll see, this is typical of the inconsistencies across the setup.)

This is a mad question. I'm in the cloud. What if I'm on a train and I lose my connection? Does Microsoft really need an explicit "save" order? But you can't proceed without it. By contrast, Google Docs also has a "View" tab (which shows you a layout version of the page) but its autosave invoked, one suspects, when you hit the button means you can flip between the "Edit" and "View" tabs without thinking about it.

Then I noticed another tab: "open in Word". Clicked on it, in the hope of getting an instant download. But ah, no, to do that you have to be "running a supported version of Microsoft Word and a browser that supports opening files directly from the Office Web Apps".

The next thing to try: sharing the document. This is a process that can be done from inside the document with Google; in Office Web Apps, it's a whole different place altogether. (You get a warning that you've leaving the page, so do you want to save your changes? Sighing, you agree that you do, while wondering if they've really never heard of Autosave in Redmond. Or never tried Google Apps?)

The Edit Permissions tabs is rather neat a slider from "some friends" to "friends" to "friends of friends" to "Everyone". Or you can specify people. Just as with Google, which enforces a Google account, your friends will need a Live.com account. But they're free, and mostly painless. However, you can't make a world-editable document which can actually be useful (we used one to crowdsource Oracle and Sun's list of takeovers last year, for instance).

Having saved the document, you then get the option to download it to your computer the left-hand sidebar in the "File" tab changes to include it.

This is, again, terrible design. Menus which don't have consistent contents are confusing to the user, because you don't know when a particular element is going to be there. (How should it be done? Have the "download document" option all the time, but either gray it out, or if someone invokes it before saving, prompt them to save or name the file.)

So I downloaded the file which came down with the most remarkable name. Instead of being test document1.docx it was called "test document1.docx" the quotes are there too. That's terrible, frankly. It wasn't called that when it started (because, you'll recall, I wasn't allowed to use any such extras in the filename).

I actually had to edit the filename (to remove the characters that would have been illegal in the cloud) before I could open it. Terrible piece of work, Microsoft.

So I turned to PowerPoint Web App, thinking that this would surely be awful. It turns out not to be the case: for a start, it saves automatically.

On seeing that, one's instant reaction is: "Why not do that in Word Web App too?" Possibly the answer is that these come from different programming teams but the lack of a consistent UI in a product that needs to be impressive, because it's competing against something from Google that's already there and is plenty good enough, is bad.

Again with PowerPoint Web App, there's the File/Home/Insert/View tabs. When you click on "File" you get told there's no save (but, Microsoft, why not just say "PowerPoint Web App saves your file regularly. Click to learn more" instead of making people go and read an explanation?). Still no Download option, you'll notice: again, you don't get that until you click on the View button. That, at least, is consistent but it's stupid. Why do I need to stop editing, do a save and view my work in order to download it?

Then we come to the other problem with Skydrive and the Web Apps: they're not always the snappiest. I got to see a lot of the "Loading " button. Fortunately, you can generally drive it along by simply reloading the web page. But again, given that this is a product in its earliest days, not in wide-scale adoption, is it really too hard to keep up with the user?

Uploading documents: It turns out that you can just not from inside any of the apps. (There must be a mental partition in the Microsoft mind: you're either in the filesystem, or you're editing a document. But what if you're inside a document and you need to add in another document? Google lets you do this, a direct injection; Microsoft doesn't. You'd have to open one document, copy the text, close it, open the second document, and paste. More steps, but of course completely logical if you're used to a desktop model. Except we're not on the desktop any more.

Next up: Excel Web App. This actually worked quite neatly. I uploaded a spreadsheet from my desktop to the files area, and then opened it though Office Web Apps complained it was in the "wrong" (I suspect Office 2007) format, and made a great play of converting it to a different one which I suspect was .xlsx, as there's no obvious difference between them seen in a list. (Another mistake, Microsofties. You need to see the suffixes of files online if they're stored and have the same names.)

Excel Web App runs smoothly, and is actually the best implementation of these three: you don't get bothered about the difference between "editing" and "viewing", you can download a snapshot or the entire spreadsheet, and it autosaves. That's more like it. It's even quite fast. And while it doesn't have the (desktop) option of inserting a chart unlike Google Docs, where you can it's tolerably good. I got the impression that the expectation was that this would be the most-used of the three.

On balance, though, this product has a long way to go. If you saw this and didn't know the brand name, you'd say that this was a company which didn't really get the web: where's the embed code, so you can include a spreadsheet or presentation in another web page? You'd say that it hasn't picked up on autosaving, that it seems to have learnt little or nothing from Google's implementation, and that it must have been done in a terrible rush, since the user interface (UI) quirks stand out like a sore thumb; you could get used to them, but you'd have to adapt to them, rather than using a program that smoothly tried to get out of your way.

If someone then whipped off the sheet and said "Look it's from Microsoft!" you might well say "oh, that explains it, then." I still find it amazing that with so many people, Microsoft can't get good UI designers. Or perhaps it can, but they're buried in layers of management too deep to effect change. That's a pity: Google needs some good competition in this space, like anyone. Office Web Apps aren't that, yet.

Office Web Apps from Microsoft

Pros: Free; works on range of browsers; supports wide range of functions, particularly in Excel. Can interact directly with newest version of Office.
Cons: Maddeningly and unnecessarily confusing and inconsistent UI; insists on saving in Office 2007 (.docx, xlsx, pptx) format; often slow; no charting option in Excel; no autosave in Word; no upload-into-file option; no "embed" function (to include a spreadsheet in a separate web page).
live.com

Lost in a sea of irreconcilable needs? Look no further

Seat Ibiza 5dr FR TDI

Price 16,840
Top speed 130mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 8.2 seconds
Average consumption 60.1mpg
CO2 emissions 123g/km
Eco rating 8/10
Bound for Starbucks
In a word Agreeable

Sometimes although not that often one does have to feel a little sympathy for the car industry. Not only does everyone identify the car as the main cause of urban congestion and pollution, as well as a major contributor to global warming, but nearly everyone wants one, if they haven't already got one (in which case they probably want two).

And what many of us want is a small car with plenty of space, that doesn't burn much fuel but is also powerful and speedy, that feels fun to drive while being serious about carbon emissions, and looks good without appearing too conspicuous. Oh, and affordable, too.

Just a few years ago, those kinds of demands would have inspired nervous breakdowns in the most innovative designers, but now cars that go a long way to fitting that conflicting bill are in some sense a reality.

Take, for example, the Seat Ibiza FR TDI. A couple of years ago I drove an Ibiza 1.6 with a 0-62mph acceleration of 10.5 seconds and fuel consumption of 42.8mpg. The new Ibiza FR TDI, with an admittedly larger two-litre engine, gets to 62mph in 8.2 seconds and has an average fuel consumption of 60.1mpg. OK, it's true that it's almost six grand more expensive, but still, that's a pretty dramatic improvement in statistics.

But stepping back from the figures, what about its figure? The Ibiza tries hard but no one would accuse it of being a thing of great beauty. It conforms to the standard hatchback shape, and while there is a lot to recommend that shape in terms of ergonomics and ease, it is now rivalled only by the facade of Starbucks and the generic roundabout as the dullest form of design on the planet.

Still, most of us are willing to tolerate its ubiquity as a payoff for its convenience. And the interior offers its own laudable attempt at compensation. It's clean, unfussy, with a pleasing attention to detail, and there's plenty of light, thanks to the sunroof. That said, you're not going to invite the neighbours to sit in it for the pure joy of the experience.

You might, though, invite them for a drive, because the Ibiza FR TDI is a surprisingly frisky little ride that should surpass most cars in its class and hold up against plenty of so-called hot hatches. The Ibiza is more a cool hatch, which is of course a contradiction in terms, in particular when the hatch in question is a diesel. Perhaps better to say there are a great many hatches, including those with petrol engines, that are far less cool.

So if you want a car, but you're lost in a sea of irreconcilable needs, the Ibiza might be the compromising island for which you've been searching.

Last week's security warnings are obviated by the new download - but mind you don't get saddled with unwanted anti-virus on the way

Following last week's warnings about a serious security vulnerability in Flash, Adobe has posted version 10.1 of its player - which seems to fix the vulnerability. If you're using Flash (and that's pretty much everyone except you iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users), then you should update.

There's some explanation of how to do that too at Microsoft's Clubhouse ("the place to have some fun by showing others what you know about Windows and to learn new tricks and tips every day" - no exclamation mark included, apparently). There we note some of the sneakier stuff involved in getting you to update your system:

"If you use the Adobe Flash Player Download Center, be careful to UNCHECK the box shown below. It is not needed for the Flash Player update!"

Sneaky, that - trying to get you to install McAfee Security Scan Plus when all you actually want is an update of Flash.

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.

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?

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?

People have been talking about the coming mobile revolution for 20 years, but on a recent book tour with my Android phone, I realised it's finally here

I've just come back from a month-long, multi-city, US and Canada book tour for my new novel, For the Win. I've done book tours before, but this one was different: this was the tour with an Android Nexus One phone, and it was game-changing.

I've been told about the coming mobile revolution for 20 years now, but frankly, mobile phones are generally rubbish. The carriers are awful and abusive. The apps suck. And so on. Something's changed.

Take directions: Google Maps are, of course, the ne plus ultra of navigation, so having them in your pocket is powerful. But combine that with Android's stellar turn-by-turn directions, which incorporates Google's traffic data to get you round the terrible snarls, and things get really easy. What's more, the ability to program the map destination by speaking it (Google's various voice apps have given it improbably good voice-recognition performance, producing a training set that is wide and deep), or by photographing it on a printout (using the Google Goggles app that converts images to words to Google searches), felt futuristic and deeply right.

Young adult book tours involve a lot of school visits, often in deep suburbs that the media escorts supplied by your publisher aren't that familiar with (these escorts often come armed with confusing Mapquest printouts that seem to come from an earlier century). When you're not running late to a tour stop, you're often running early, with just enough time to stop for a cup of coffee and a snack. Add Google location search to that and you can avoid going to a petrol station or (even worse) McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts and find hidden gems that you'd have to be a local to get at otherwise. I ate better on this tour than I ever have before.

I "rooted" my Nexus One, breaking into the OS so that I could easily "tether" it to my laptop, using it as a 3G modem between tour stops (we didn't have to root my wife's matching phone, as Google supplied us with an unlocked developer handset). My typical tour day started at 5am with breakfast and work on the novel, then a 6am interview with someone in Europe, then pickup, two to four school visits with a short lunch break, three or four interviews, then a bookstore signing or a plane (or both). As busy as that sounds, there's actually a fair bit of dead time in it while sitting in the escort's car, trying to find the next stop.

This time round, I plugged the laptop into the cigarette lighter and the phone into the laptop this gave the phone a battery charge and the laptop internet access. And best of all, it meant that I could harvest those dead minutes to answer emails, keep on blogging, and generally stay abreast of things.

Which meant that I got lots more of the touring author's most precious commodity: sleep. On previous tours, returning to the hotel meant sitting down for three to four hours' worth of emails before bed, which cut my sleep time to less than four hours some nights. But this time round, I got back to the room completely caught up, and was able to flop down in bed, eat some minibar cashews, and hit the sack.

Travelling with your own internet source is brilliant. At Atlanta airport, I was stuck for four hours while a monster storm hammered the building with barrages of lightning. Immediately, every one of the expensive Wi-Fi networks in the building went dead as thousands of stranded travellers tried to use them all at once. I found a corner with a mains outlet, plugged in the laptop, tethered my phone, and enjoyed my own private network connection. It wasn't fast, but it was free and it worked.

I still have a US T-Mobile account from when I lived in the US, and I pay for the unlimited data plan there (which, like the Orange UK Sim I use here, has a bizarre and fraudulent definition of "unlimited" that includes a data cap). It's easily worth keeping the account alive for those times that I'm back in the US one day's 3G savings (not having to pay for expensive hotel and airport broadband) pays for a month's mobile service.

But when I travel to places where I don't have a Sim, such as France or Germany, where I'll be touring in September, it's not pretty. Orange charges nearly 1 per megabyte, and its bolt-on Euro traveller plans charge something like 30 for 30MB, and limit you to 30MB per month. I can't figure out who the putative customer for this is: the travelling exec who really needs email on the road, but receives a tiny trickle of email every day, apparently.

The most absurd part is when you take an Orange UK Sim to France (France Telecom being Orange's parent company) or a T-Mobile Sim to Germany (Deutsche Telekom has the same relationship to T-Mobile except in the UK, where it's a joint venture with France Telecom) and the company charges an extortionate roaming charge for using their parent company's network, on the grounds that they're "different companies".

Which is the fundamental paradox of mobile so long as the mobile carriers remain a part of mobile computing, it will only work for so long as you don't go anywhere.

Cory Doctorow's new novel, For The Win, is out now

Search giant's new service will add property listings to Google Maps

Google UK has set its sights on cashing in on the property market by beefing up Google Maps with new house-hunting services from partners including real estate agent giant Countrywide, Zoopla and Trinity Mirror.

The new property finder service, which goes live today, will allow home buyers and renters to search for properties by a city or location and drill down by specifics such as price, type and numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms.

"About half of the queries on Google have a geographic component," said Andrew Foster, product manager at Google. "We want Google Maps to be a map that contains all of the world's information. We know that many UK home buyers are already using Google Maps in their house-hunting, and by adding property listings to the map we're putting everything together for them in one place."

Google has signed up UK partners including Countrywide, the UK's largest estate agency with a portfolio including Bairstow Eves, Bridgfords and Sotherby's Inernational, and Spicer Haart. Deals have also been struck with online-only players including Zoopla, which acquired Property Finder from News International and Thinkproperty.com from Guardian Media Group last year, Trinity Mirror's Zoomf and SmartNewHomes, Vebra, Property Pal and Ezylet.

"With tens of thousands of properties available the most important thing for us is to showcase to the widest audience in most efficient way," said Grenville Turner, group chief executive of Countrywide. "We want to operate in the online space in the same way we do in every other part of our business clearly traffic shows Google is a major portal for the average customer so this deal takes us to where customers are already operating and looking".

Google, which said that it has several hundreds of thousands of properties lined up for the launch today, will make money from running ads above and below search results. Estate agents and online property companies will not be charged to be partners.

"We are completely open to working with any company," said Foster, when asked why major players such as Rightmove have not been signed up at launch.

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

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

But how do they compare with the other networks? And how do they compare with previous prices?

Vodafone has - oops! - leaked details of its iPhone 4 pricing. Which, since you can pre-order them from Tuesday 15th, means that it's not much of a leak, but on the other hand you'd think the networks might have got their pricing out earlier.

The numbers were accidentally leaked by Vodafone and captured from its datasheets by Engadget (whence we've copied them) reader Liam Gladdy, and we've got them here now for you.

Note that the white version seems to be the 16GB one, and the black one is your 32GB one. Pore over the details and tell us your thoughts.

Last week the government released the massive Coins database. Find out what we know now
Coins explorer

The Coins (Combined Online Information System) data release continues. Here are the key points so far:

1. More data

On Friday the Liberal-Conservative Coalition government released another three years of data - which means we now have every financial year from 2005/06 to 2009/10 - and you can use our Coins explorer to help navigate around the data

2. Overspends at the National Audit Office

The National Audit Office spent more than 60m on the refurbishment works to its Grade II listed art deco offices in Victoria, central London, which included marble flooring and leather sofas; and nearly 20m on temporary accommodation while the works were carried out, between 2008 - 2010. Some 2.33m was spent on furniture alone. The NAO is in charge of monitoring government spending.

3. The government's bad debts

Government was owed tens of millions of pounds in unpaid student loans and overpaid benefits last year.

4. COINS is too complicated

George Osborne announced that COINS would be redesigned next year to make it easier to use

5. The government spends a lot of money on consultants

1.8bn spent on consultancy by government departments, up from 1.5bn in the previous year.

6. We now know a lot more about government spending

Spending: 60bn public expenditure in March before the election - in August (the lowest month) it was 44.3bn
European parliament: 6.8m spent on goods and services for members of the European parliament
Swine flu: 100m tackling the flu pandemic
Westminster: 25m net cost of the House of Commons
Academies: 31.83m spent by the Department for Children, Schools and Families
Lost legal fees: 111m Ministry of Justice provision for unbilled legal fees in October - up from 73m in April last year
Counter-terrorism: 4m Office of security and counter terrorism payments to local authorities

7. The Guardian's specialists have been through the first release of data

You find out more on what our specialists found here.

8. The list of suppliers to one major government department

Courtesy of Where does my money go? we've seen that the only way to get detailed spending out of Whitehall is still to put in a Freedom of Information request. They put in a request to the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs to ask them how much they had spent on individual suppliers - which is missing from Coins. The results are fantastically detailed - we've put them on a spreadsheet which you can download here, or roll through them below.

They're asking for help to put in more requests so that we can fill in the Coins holes - get involved via a Google spreadsheet. Does this mean we're still going to need to perform copious FoI requests in future?

9. We know more about how the government categorises public spending

Lisa Evans at Where Does My Money Go? has also put together a list of programme object groups just for energy infrastructure, transport and tackling climate change. There's also an interesting freedom of information request now for more details about government department's bank accounts.

10. COINS is not comparable to other government finance publications

Lisa Evans writes about the the machinations of how the database came to be made public.

I'll tell you the story of the COINS database, which is a store of public spending and planning data, and you can judge for yourself how similar the story is to a gripping TV show.

The way COINS is described in documentation is that it's a store for government spending records. In the background to reports on public expenditure, like the PESA report, and many of the Office of National statistics reports on government spending, the guidance says the reports rely heavily on COINS data.

I asked for the COINS schema, but what I got was the dimensions of the OLAP database and no description of the fields meant, so that was the first mystery. Then I requests and got the COINS training notes, but with all the screen shots and lots of the descriptions redacted, so this was the second mystery.

When I met some people from the Treasury to talk about COINS some more and they told me about the thousands of spending codes in COINS, which I then requested, but with a number of them redacted, this was the third mystery.

Then, on Friday 4th June, we got the COINS data itself, well a sample from this year, and some COINS guidance(PDF) to go with it. The guidance says:

It is possible that you won't be able to recreate the numbers that Treasury or ONS have published. This is because:

COINS has a single structure that is updated to reflect the latest classification of spend and organisation of government. The snapshots taken by the Treasury at defined points (e.g. to enable reports to be published) contain certain key fields, which then reference the latest structure. Any changes to the structure since the report was published may mean that it is not possible to recreate published figures;
of the time difference between the publication of aggregated information and this release of data, with the potential that data have been updated between the differing points in time.
Not all the data used to calculate these numbers are sourced from COINS.

So it's not possible to check the figures against the published reports, like PESA, to check we understand the data published. Another mystery.

So, effectively we can't compare Coins with other government data reports.

But, thanks to blogger Martin Budden - there may be a way of comparing. He has written two blog posts about COINS, one giving a brief overview of the COINS data format, and the second about how I used COINS to generate some of the PESA (Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses) reports. You can see more of what he's done with Coins at http://github.com/martinbudden/coins.

And, just for context, here's an interactive showing last year's overall spending by department.

Email us at coinsdata@guardian.co.uk if there's more you've found - or would like to know.

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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.

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."

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.

Industry denounces law, saying there is no significant evidence that phones are harmful to health

San Francisco where composting is compulsory and plastic bags are banned has passed the first law in the US requiring retailers to display the amount of radiation given off by mobile phones.

The city's mayor, Gavin Newsom, hailed the law as a victory for the public's right to know what their mobile phones are doing to them even though some critics say there is no significant scientific evidence that they are hazardous to health.

The city council, known as the board of supervisors, voted 10-1 in favour of the law, which requires retailers to place information on the amount of radio waves absorbed by a mobile phone user's body next to each device to allow shoppers to choose between them.

"This is about helping people make informed choices," said Sophie Maxwell, chief sponsor of the legislation.

But the industry says that information may lead consumers to wrongly believe that there are proven dangers from using mobile phones.

"Rather than inform, the ordinance will potentially mislead consumers with point-of-sale requirements suggesting that some phones are 'safer' than others, based on radio frequency emissions," said John Walls, vice president of public affairs for the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. "In fact, all phones sold legally in the US must comply with the Federal Communication Commission's safety standards for emissions."

A similar measure proposed in the California legislature this year was killed off amid heavy lobbying by the mobile phone industry. A law in Maine to require health warning labels on mobiles, similar to those on cigarette packets, also failed this year in part because the impact on health of sustained use of mobile phones remains a matter of scientific debate.

The mayor's spokesman, Tony Winnicker, said that the law was not designed to discourage the use of mobile phones but to make information that is already published by regulatory authorities more readily available. "This is not about telling people not to use cellphones," he said. "Nobody loves his iPhone more than Mayor Newsom."

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.

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.

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

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".