Move intended to save millions will see remaining sites forced to cut costs by up to 50%

Hundreds of government websites are to be scrapped in a move that will save millions of pounds, the cabinet office announced today.

Up to 75% of the existing 820 government-funded websites could be shut down, with those that remain forced to cut their costs by up to 50%.

A review of all existing sites will look at cost, usage and whether existing sites can better share their resources.

The move was announced as a Central Office of Information report was published on 46 government websites that cost 126m between them.

The report showed uktradeinvest.gov.uk cost 11.78 per visit, while businesslink.gov.uk cost 2.15.

However, UK Trade and Industry said the figure quoted for its website was "incorrect and completely misleading" because it only applied to 20% of traffic to its former site and it had now been replaced by a more cost effective version.

The cabinet office also said it had anecdotal evidence of government sites competing against each other, citing the examples of the Department for Energy and Climate Change and the Energy Saving Trust bidding against each other for Google search terms and some quango websites competing with central government ones.

The cabinet office minister, Francis Maude, said the Labour government had committed to "dramatically culling" the number of websites in 2006 but failed to make good on that pledge.

"This government is completely committed to getting the government web back under control," he said. "The days of vanity sites are over.

"It is not good enough to have websites which do not deliver the high quality services which people expect and deserve. That is why we will take tough action to get rid of those which are not up to the job and do not offer good value for money, and introduce strict guidelines for those that remain."

Maude said that the government's new digital champion, the internet entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox, would be advising on how to put key public services online and increase the number of people able to use the web.

But the former culture secretary Tessa Jowell claimed Labour had shut down more than 1,000 websites and warned that the coalition's government's plans risked being a "false economy" .

"Putting services online is not only more efficient, but often it is cheaper as well," she added. "The measures announced today ... may end up costing the government more money than it is looking to save.

"In the last two years, the Labour government already reviewed 1,795 websites, of which more than 1,000 have already been closed."

The cabinet office said no new websites would be permitted unless they could prove to the efficiency board, co-chaired by Maude and the chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, that they were "special cases".

The report on government websites is scheduled to be completed in time for September's spending review.

The transcript of the phone call earlier this week with Google's chief reveals the real signals he's sending out: Android wants to be the Windows of mobile phones

Android is getting too big to ignore. Photo by mathrock on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Below is a transcript (taken with shorthand, contemporaneously) of a conference call with Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, on 23 June. There may be some inaccuracies. After that, there is an analysis of what Schmidt said - and where the mobile market is.

Also on the conference call were journalists from Germany, the UK and Brazil. I won't indicate here who asked what questions; see if you can work it out.

Call begins

Eric Schmidt: Verizon is just announcing the Droid X made by Motorola, its fourth Android phone. We have seen a tremendous increase in the adoption of Android. This is one of the best phones ever made, on the very fastest network.

We've now got 160,000 new users per day. That's a 60% increase per month [compared to the 100,000 figure per day that was given at the Google I/O conference in May]. If you get an increase like that going on, well, I've done the maths, and it looks like an incredible trajectory.

[That equates to 58m per month, a 60% increase month-on-month would mean that by the end of the year there would be about 16m Android phones being activated every day, or 480m per month - which doesn't really sounds feasible. Obviously it is going to tail off or even slow down at some stage.]

Counting the number of apps, there are 65,000, compared to 50,000 a month ago. So the growth is accelerating. OK, questions?

Q: How large is Android in the US market and European market compared to the iPhone, because it hasn't done too well in Europe?

ES: I prefer not to talk about the iPhone as a competitor. The growth rate is very very strong, but I don't think it's really appropriate to make claims about market share.

Q: What's driving that acceleration?

ES: having multiple hardware partners - LG, Samsung, HTC, Motorola. The thing is it's a totally open platorm, so open that the source is available too. Any application can run on Android as long as it doesn't damage the network.

Q: Android is lagging in Europe compared to the US - why do you think that is?

ES: I don't know that it's lagging; I would have to look at the numbers. It was launched first in the US but we have enough European partners. The Droid phone was a big driver.

Q: Have you made any contacts with Nokia to discuss Android on Nokia?

ES: We have talked to everybody... I don't want to talk about any specific companies. [A rather odd response which tailed off amid expectation.]

Q: What sort of revenues are you seeing from Android?

ES: We make zero from it. Because it's free. (Q: but you get advertising revenue from it...) We don't break out what our mobile advertising revenues are... [in general] we make money when people have powerful broadband devices so we invest in Android so that people can invest in it. But our mobile revenue growth is very very quick.

We know that there will be a great deal of money made in ads from the mobile industry.

Q: Do you think Android can become for mobile what Windows was for the PC?

ES: well, the thing about Android is that anybody can use it.. Android in many ways is better than Windows because it's free, rather than Windows which had an ever-increasing price point. So anybody can build on Android, and it's free.

Also Android has GPS and a full media stack [possibly misheard], so it can do things that even the ordinary PC doesn't have and might never have.

Q: Who is your biggest competitor in this fight - Apple, Nokia, who?

ES: I try to spend time not focussing on those questions. Nokia has the largest market share, certainly. Apple, I was a proud board member there, I respect them. Nokia and Apple are both highly organised to be competitive.

Q: Isn't a problem with Android that of fragmentation of the platform - that some handsets can't update from earlier versions either because of the networks or the phones, so people are stuck on older versions which means you're trying to cope with a broad range of versions?

ES: That's a very good question. The first thing to say is that the networks are quite interoperable. Some phones shipped a year ago can't be upgraded. But most can be, to 2.2, though it might take some months to roll out.

The argument about fragmentation has been used by competitors of open source for years. But we agree to support compatibility at the platform level. It's important to understand this. Android apps will work on the current generation; any Android app written for one version will run on any phone with that version. That prevents fragmentation. Apps are written on a per-OS basis. But of course not every app written for any version will run on every version of Android - otherwise the platform couldn't evolve.

Q: A team at Larva Labs estimated that while Apple has paid developers $1bn from App Store revenues, the comparable figure for the Android Marketplace is about $200m. Is enough money going to developers to make Android attractive?

ES: Well, I haven't seen those figures, so I can't talk to them. The thing is, developers go where the volume is. That's the most important lesson from platform economics. It's about scale and volume. It's very important that developers get to a scale where they can see the ability to get to a very large audience. We believe we have done so.

Q: We've seen other companies talking about Android-based tablets - does Google intend to produce a tablet running Android?

ES: We've seen a number of announcements from other companies about tablets running Android. It's a reasonably obvious product extension that people have announced. We haven't announced any form of Google tablet.

[end of interview]

Analysis: the timing of this announcement - on 23 June, just as Apple's iPhone 4 was reaching its first customers - was clearly aimed at taking some of the shine off the iPhone announcement by implying that even if Apple activates 1m iPhones in the first sales burst, Android will almost match that in a working week. (Do the maths.)

That of course leaves out all sorts of maybes, gotchas and provisionals: are the activation figures volatile? What's the churn like - how many of the activations are new customers, and how many are renewing customers? An interesting calculation from the analysts Piper Jaffray, via Fortune suggests that (in the US, at least) 77% of iPhone 4 customers were existing iPhone users.

You can look at that two ways: what an enormous number of renewals! Or you could look at it from the other end: wow, Apple grew its customer base for first-day iPhones by 23% - among people who had to wait in enormously long lines. What's the last consumer product you recall people queueing through the day for? I recall how Microsoft managed the hype machine perfectly for Windows 95, with midnight store openings; rather less so for every subsequent OS release. The Xbox 360 got some dedicated queuers too.

But in truth, Schmidt really isn't looking at iPhone sales; he's not trying here to court buyers dithering between iPhone and Android. This was actually a piece of dog-whistle PR aimed at mobile developers.

Unfamiliar with dog-whistle PR? It's like dog-whistle politics: aimed at a particular group, couched in terms which don't say a lot to the average person, but which zero in on that target group and make them sit up. The people who Schmidt wanted to hear this latest bit of PR are mobile developers. He wants them to multiply 160,000 by 5 (working days - perhaps 6), and then by 4, to reach about 4m Android phones being activated per month, and to get them to think that this is a really good platform to be building for.

That's the point of his "platform economics" answer. Google can only capitalise on mobile advertising once it gets Android to a specific market share. It seems like that it has already crossed it, since it's by all accounts bigger than Apple in smartphone share in the US (and may even be challenging RIM, though still some way behind Nokia). What the numbers are like for Europe - well, we'll have to wait a couple of weeks for the end of the quarter for all those numbers.

The interesting challenge though will be whether the Android platform will indeed become the Windows of mobile. That could cut both ways: sure, the handset makers don't have to pay a levy to use Android (as PC makers do to Microsoft). But when they go to the networks (who are the equivalent, in this scenario, of PC purchasers) they may find that they're forced to bid down, and that their margins get eroded as more rivals pile into the market.

Apple, meanwhile, can be entirely happy with not having the lion's share of the market, yet making a colossal profit from both the hardware sales (because nobody else can make an iPhone) and the app sales. It does exactly the same in the computer market: it has about 5% market share worldwide, yet makes a stonking profit on every computer sold. PC manufacturers, by contrast, have long since reached the point where price-cutting to win share simply opens a vein in their profits.

Android could thus win - and for Nokia, the idea of using Android must look ever more enticing, since it would cut costs and let it use its heft with the networks to win back share - and yet the hardware makers would lose. That's a great danger - not imminent, but it exists - for Schmidt, Android and Google. By creating a flourishing ecosystem of app developers, Android could make life better for the handset makers.

Oh, and the company we haven't mentioned here at all, except in passing? Microsoft. If you look at what the Android and iPhone platforms are now doing, you have to ask how on earth Windows Phone - which will have a paid-for licence - is ever going to attract any handset makers. Schmidt's Android dog whistle might be loud for iPhone developers annoyed at the company's capricious treatment of their apps, but it must be loudest for developers considering whether the shrinking, forwards-incompatible pool of Windows Mobile phones is really worth bothering with.

Between the handset makers pondering the economics of paying for a Windows Phone licence, and developers wondering why they should write code for a platform, Windows Phone, that's presently activating zero phones a day - because it hasn't been released - versus one doing 160,000 per day, Microsoft has a real problem with Windows Phone. Apple can survive Android because it has that 77% base of loyal customers. Android has an expanding customer base.

But what on earth has Microsoft got?

* I asked the questions about fragmentation and Larva Labs.

Premier League enforcers are fighting a losing battle trying to close websites, while other sports bodies move with the times

As millions sat glued to their television screens watching the epic Isner-Mahut tennis battle this week, countless others took the opportunity to watch the match illegally over the internet. Thanks to the proliferation of illicit websites offering live streaming of every major sporting event, huge amounts of broadcast revenue are being siphoned out of the world of sports threatening the industry in the same way that Napster and Limewire decimated the music business.

I watched the final three games of Isner-Mahut via one such feed, and in terms of quality and timing there was no difference whatsoever from watching the game via a conventional, legal TV broadcaster. Gone are the days when low-resolution, high-interruption feeds were the only way to watch pirated sports games: today's technology makes watching ripped-off streams virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

Sport, like music and mainstream media beforehand, has a stark choice before its governing bodies. If they remain resolute in their determination to follow old-school methods of disseminating their product, they will quickly drown under the deluge of fraudsters and pirates all too eager to capitalise on their mistakes. On the other hand, if they realise that they have to adapt to financially survive, they need to move fast to prevent a potentially catastrophic loss of income.

In some quarters, sporting bodies are moving with the times. The Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket games are broadcast live and free via YouTube, effectively heading off at the pass any rogue broadcasters seeking to steal their feed for themselves. The IPL authorities have a guaranteed income from their YouTube deal and, with a dedicated millions-strong audience subscribing to their feed, advertisers know how many people they can reach via the stream and how much each commercial slot is worth.

Likewise, this year's Wimbledon can be watched via pay-per-view on the tournament's official website, although given that this requires significant payment from the consumer, pirate sites still have the upper hand over the organiser's package. The choice between paying $9.99 ( 6.50) for a "day pass" to online Wimbledon or a simple Google search for live, free tennis-streaming is not a hard one for most casual viewers to make, given that they get the exact same product with either option.

The malignant symptoms present themselves even more prevalently in the realm of top-tier football. The English Premier League and the Spanish Primera Division are two of the most heavily pirated leagues in the world, and despite the best efforts of regulators the problem is only getting worse with every passing year. Match highlights have been all but lost to copyright infringement, with uploads made by the thousand on YouTube and its peers, and touted on dedicated, legal sites such as 101greatgoals. Live games are increasingly going the same way, thanks to the authorities' refusal to accept that they can't beat the free-view pirates and should therefore join them instead.

Gambling companies have been quick to realise the potential draw of live feeds on their sites, especially in the realm of horse and dog racing, but also in slower-paced, more popular sports such as football and tennis. Betfair and Bet365 offer live broadcasts to punters with active betting accounts, easily reaping back in gambling revenue the outlay made to buy broadcasting rights.

Yet with all the signs pointing to a brave new world of online broadcasting, the industry dinosaurs continue plodding along the road to extinction. Premier League enforcers boast of their success in shutting down a handful of illegal feeds, but most online sports piracy goes unpunished. With mobile phones providing yet another alternative to television in the race for audiences, there is even more pressure on rights owners to be proactive rather than simply shut the stable door behind the bolting horse.

On anecdotal evidence alone, it is clear that there is a serious problem at the heart of the sports industry's broadcasting policies. In Tel Aviv, my peers and I watch football in bars with illegal satellites or via pirated internet feeds on laptops hooked up to plasma screens. No one bothers paying for dedicated sports packages when the alternatives are so free and easy, just as huge amounts of people illegally download films and TV series rather than spend money on DVDs.

The route chosen by the dogged likes of Rupert Murdoch in demanding money for access to his newspapers and sports packages is doomed to fail as long as there are equally determined rogue operators prepared to keep coming up with illegal alternatives. On the strength of this week's illegal tennis feed, the pirates have the upper hand; if the industry is to emulate Isner rather than Mahut, their style of play needs to change fast to redress the balance.

Video-on-demand joint venture expected to go live next year, but could face further challenges from rivals

The BBC Trust has approved the launch of Project Canvas, the BBC-backed venture to bring video-on-demand to Freeview and Freesat, subject to a number of conditions including an investment cap for the corporation.

Today's final approval, which follows provisional clearance in December from the BBC Trust , finally clears the way for Project Canvas to launch, although it is not expected to go live until next year.

However, rivals BSkyB and Virgin Media, who have objected to Project Canvas on a number of grounds,, could look at new avenues to block the launch.

BskyB has questioned whether the BBC should be involved in such a commercial

service. And the Office of Fair Trading, which in May said it would not investigate the Project Canvas's partner structure as a merger situation, nevertheless said that its decision "does not preclude the application of other provisions of competition law and other relevant legislation".

Project Canvas, which is likely to be called YouView a hybrid of YouTube and Freeview has been given the green light with a number of conditions attached to the BBC's involvement.

These include a guarantee to properly engage with industry, a thorny issue that has led to criticism from industry trade body the Digital Television Group.

Technical specifications for the platform must be published within the next 20 days and "final core technical specification will be published no later than eight months before launch of the first set-top boxes".

Project Canvas must always remain free-to-air but users "may be charged for additional pay services that third parties might choose to provide via the Canvas platform, for example video on demand services, as well as the broadband subscription fees".

Access to Project Canvas must not be "bundled with other products or services" and "listing on the electronic programme guide will be awarded in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory manner".

The BBC must also make sure that it does not breach EU state aid rules and the corporation must "not exceed the [BBC] executive's estimated costs by more than 20% over a five-year period".

"The BBC Trust has concluded that Project Canvas will deliver significant public value for licence fee payers," said BBC trustee Diane Coyle. "People with a broadband connection will be able to access a wide range of on-demand content including BBC iPlayer, free of charge, through their TV sets. We have however applied a number of conditions to the BBC's involvement in the venture in recognition of the potential impacts on the market if Canvas is successful."

The BBC Trust said it will review the BBC's involvement in Project Canvas a year after it launches.

The trust has said that the cost of Project Canvas, including development, launch, and to the end of the first four years it is running, will be 115.6m. Each partner is expected to pay an equal share.

BBC trustee Diane Coyle, who is chair of the trust's strategic approvals committee, said the success of Project Canvas depended on "open engagement" with the industry and that the conditions put in place today had been "welcomed" by the Digital Television Group.

A target launch date of April next year has been set for the launch of the new service. Coyle said she was not aware of any moves by rival operators to block the launch.

"There have been some issues raised by Sky and Virgin [Media]," she said. "We have gone through a very thorough and transparent process. We are entirely comfortable with the competition issue ourselves. If people want to bring a complaint, they can do."

"A lot of the issues raised during the consultation were about engagement with the rest of the industry. There is nothing in the trust conditions that affects whether or not Virgin joins Canvas. We are pretty happy that it is an open platform."

Coyle said the leeway allowed to BBC management to go 20% over budget was "just realistic given the nature of devising a technology platform. In any BBC budget there is 10% flexibility. It seems sensible".

The BBC had initially been expected to spend 24.7m on the new technology over five years, but the introduction of new partners means this is likely to be reduced to 16.4m.

She said Canvas was an "exciting opportunity" to bring new content into people's living rooms, and said she expected the BBC to "take the lead" in building partnerships with creative organisations such as museums and art galleries.

A spokesman for Virgin Media said: "We are disappointed the BBC Trust has approved Canvas and ignored the significant concerns raised by the commercial sector about the proposal. Our position on this matter remains unchanged. As it stands, Canvas will severely restrict competition and innovation and ultimately this will harm consumers."

A spokesman for BSkyB said: "The BBC's involvement in Canvas is an unnecessary use of public funds.

"The BBC Trust's announcement is a predictable decision from a body that has shown little inclination to think independently or set meaningful boundaries on the BBC's activities."

 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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The news entrepreneur explains why the future lies in innovation and why tech conferences are the place to be

News innovator Nonny de la Pe a on developing the media's future

Last week, Stroome, a media startup intended to speed the editing and distribution of video throughout the world was one of 12 projects to win the Knight Foundation's 2010 News Challenge, an award for initiatives likely to 'impact the future of news'. The California-based startup, run by Nonny de la Pe a and Thomas Grasty, researchers at University of Southern California, will be awarded $200,000 ( 133,500) in order to continue developing the project.

Launched officially in April 2010, Stroome aims to connect journalists, filmmakers, travellers and anyone else with a video camera, allowing them to upload their films to the internet and then collaborate with other users to create new video, audio, and photo mashups from every corner of the world.

While the Stroome community is still small, with only 500 members based in 40 countries, the opportunity and potential for growth is substantial: think YouTube and Wikipedia rolled into one big creative melting pot.

In London this week, De La Pe a spoke about where Stroome fits in the new media landscape.

Where did the idea for Stroome come from?

I'm a former correspondent for Newsweek magazine and the way that Newsweek used to work is that you'd have multiple people reporting on the same story from multiple bureaus, so I already had this natural sense of how journalism could be a collaborative process.

Then I was doing a masters in online communities, and from my thesis it was very clear that there was a need for this collaborative platform for journalists.

We've seen many times where journalists are reporting from a scenario or a rally and their cameras get taken. But imagine if that video could be automatically streamed to Stroome where editors around the world could be cutting it any way they want to, telling the stories any way they want and spitting it out across the web. So we made the Alpha version of Stroome, got it alpha tested, raised a little money and started work on the beta version. We launched it in April.

What makes Stroome different from other online editing suites?

The biggest difference is that there's an ability for you and me to form a group and I can remix you and you can remix me. I can share it just with Stroome, or just my friends; I can make private groups, or I can push it across the web. That's the biggest difference from other sites; we're really sharing the video, the openness of the files is really distinct.

How does Stroome fit in with what's going on with the media as a whole?

I'm trying to get people to do and think about how it's so clearly a place of energy and openness and jobs and there's just so much movement. I know a lot of people have lost their jobs. It's really difficult for a lot of people, but we absolutely are at a critical point where we need a lot of innovations and are open to a lot of innovations. My drive is to innovate and innovate in journalism. But I don't go to the journalism conferences, I go to the tech conferences. The tech conferences are just alive whereas the journalism conferences are just weeping. You just want to bring them together and say, 'Guys, this is exciting! It's not your death knell, this is a wonderful opportunity.' Stroome is a lot easier than all that. People understand video, they understand audio and they understand cutting it all together.

What's your financial model?

We have a few ideas, number one being storage. You can only allow people to upload so much until you just can't bear it anymore. At some point we'll put in some advertising. We've talked about charging something really nominal, like 99 cents (66p), after users create a certain number of groups, so that you can keep making as many groups as you want. Financials are one of the things we get to do this summer, really take a deep breath and figure out how we're going to implement the next iteration.

Wii/PS3/XBOX 360/PC/DS/PSP; 39.99- 44.99; cert 7+; Travellers Tales/Warner Bros Interactive

This is getting predictable. Travellers Tales comes along, take a successful movie franchise, turns it into a Lego-themed video game, I giggle my way through it like a six-year old, get obsessive about completing both the game and the vast array of side challenges and bonus content, finally get some sleep, persuade my wife not to divorce me, and then slap it with a five-star review.

The thing is though, the developers at Travellers Tales really know what they're doing. The Lego-based nostalgia oh the lovely, plasticky rumble when a character gets reduced to bricks! still packs considerable charm and the games are an interactive joy.

They're also tough as puzzlers go: expect a good few head-scratching moments (or searches for online walkthroughs) when, ahem, trying to get into the girls' toilet at Hogwarts (no, it's not like that, you've got a troll to defeat) and other similar challenges.

As the name suggests, the game covers Harry's first four years at Hogwarts, so you're guiding your scarred juvenile wizard (and an assortment of supporting players, from Ron to Hermione, and even Scabbers the rat) through the first four books. Rowling's work in these Philosopher's Stone, Chamber of Secrets, Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire actually lends itself quite well to the video game format. Harry et al have a mystery on their hands which needs solving. Hogwarts has a vast number of rooms that need exploring. And then up pops He Who Must Not Be Named in a variety of forms for the final showdown. This translates brilliantly to Lego's lovely format and gives a proper Boss-based finale to each year.

In the Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, different characters possessed different abilities and weaponry in order to complete the main game and its myriad puzzles and challenges. Once those characters and their skills are unlocked, you can then return to earlier levels, get into the areas you couldn't access before and complete all the extra challenges and bonus content.

The format is much the same here but, instead of just being able to play as the characters with the skills you need to complete the level Hagrid's strength, for example, or Madam Pomfrey's more powerful witchcraft over the course of the four years, Harry, Ron and Hermione will learn new spells, enabling deeper exploration of earlier levels. It's a neat touch, and rather like being back at school: you're that bit older, so you're now allowed in this room.

The learning curve, it almost goes without saying, is perfectly judged, the throwaway gags often sublime, and the adherence to the tales and spirit of Rowling's work is possibly even more faithful than the films. It might say 7+ on the box, but please tell me I'm not the only 40-something who thinks this is an utter joy?

Rating: 5/5

Antenna design on new iPhone is acknowledged as source of poor connectivity - but Apple says problem is inevitable and advises different grip. Or you could try duct tape...

Apple has issued official guidance - and its chief executive Steve Jobs has issued unofficial guidance - on how to avoid the widely-noted reception problems with the new iPhone 4 when held from below: don't hold it that way.

The cause has been narrowed down to a circuit being formed when the skin bridges the gap between the left and bottom antennas that form the phone's outer stainless steel bezel: depending on the conductance of the skin, it can make the phone reception drop off dramatically.

Emailed by the website Ars Technica about the problem, Jobs responded in his normal terse manner: "Just avoid holding it in that way," he wrote - a response from Jobs that was received by a number of gadget review sites and customers in the US.

Or, in Apple's official statement - which is only being passed out to news organisations which ask for a statement on the problem, rather than sent out (as happens with iPad or iPhone sales figures): "Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your Phone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases."

The problem emerged within hours of the first iPhone 4 devices being delivered to customers in the US, with dozens posting videos to YouTube showing mobile reception dropping off dramatically when they picked up the phone. Some users wondered why Apple had not spotted the problem during its testing of the iPhone 4 before its launch, and wondered whether the 25 "bumpers" that Apple sells to go around the casing - and protect the metal antennas - was an implicit acknowledgement of the problem. Apple had no comment on Friday on whether it had discovered the problem during testing, or only after the phone went on sale.

Spencer Web, an antenna engineer with Antennasys, notes in a blog post that antennas for mobile phones are generally placed at the bottom of the phone, in order to keep the radiative parts of the phone as far away from the user's head as possible. In the US the Federal Communications Commission measures the output of a phone, and the amount of non-ionising radiation given off, in specific tests - but Web says that those would not have picked up the problem: "when the FCC tests are run, the head is required to be in the vicinity of the phone. But, the hand is not!"

He added: "The antenna structure for the cell phone is still down at the bottom (I won't address the WiFi nor GPS antennas in this blog entry). The iPhone 4 has two symmetrical slots in the stainless frame. If you short these slots, or cover them with your hand, the antenna performance will suffer (see this video I found on YouTube). There is no way around this, it's a design compromise that is forced by the requirements of the FCC, AT&T, Apple's marketing department and Apple's industrial designers, to name a few."

There is some speculation that the problem only occurs on some phones because the antennas are usually covered with a clear finishing solution; if the finish did not cover them properly the phone might be more liable to the problem.

Meanwhile iPhone 4 users are developing their own solutions - which range from the use of duct or masking tape on the bottom edge, painting clear nail varnish over the gap, buying cases to cover the sides of the phone, or - the most expensive option - buying Apple's "bumpers" which cover the edge of the phone.

Meanwhile another problem has appeared on some of the new models: yellow discoloration under the screen. According to one suggestion, this is due to a chemical used in the fixing process that joins the touchscreen to the glass above it and will fade in a few days. That remains to be seen.

Icann decision marks end of 10-year battle, but pornography companies fear US politicians will shunt them into web ghetto

The internet could soon have its own red light district after the ".xxx" suffix was approved though pornography companies are not keen to use it.

Icann, the organisation which determines what "top-level domains" (TLDs) such as .com or .uk can be added to the internet announced today that it will begin the process of registering .xxx by making checks on ICM Registry, the company that wants to run the domain and sell registrations.

It marks the closing stages of a 10-year battle by ICM Registry, now run by the British internet entrepreneur Stuart Lawley, to get the .xxx domain set up so that legal pornography sites can be found in a single grouping.

Yet pornography is already plentiful online. One of the most valuable domains in the early days was sex.com, which was the object of a bitter battle in which rivals battled it out to own what was seen as a honeypot for surfers. In 2007 porn.com was sold for $12m.

But many pornography companies are unhappy with the idea of a dedicated space online because they expect that as soon as .xxx is implemented, conservative members of the US Congress will lobby to make any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as .com or .org.

That would mean that sex sites could be more easily filtered out from web searches, and lower their revenues. Free speech advocates also worry that sites about topics seen by US conservatives as controversial, such as homosexuality, might also be forced to use the .xxx suffix.

Icann acknowledged it had made mistakes in reversing its decision to accept ICM Registry's proposal three years ago under pressure from the Bush administration. Icann also said the proposal had been rejected because it lacked the backing of the pornography industry.

Lawley, who insists that child pornography will be banned in the domain space, thought the new address could easily attract at least 500,000 sites making it after ".mobi" the second biggest top-level domain name with a specific sponsor registrar.

The .mobi TLD, set up in 2005, was sponsored by a range of companies, including Google and Nokia, to create sites for browsing with mobile phones.

But where the .mobi TLD had commercial sponsors, the .xxx domain is notable for only having ICM Registry, which stands to benefit from every domain name it sells. Lawley says he expects to make $30m ( 20m) a year in revenue by selling each .xxx site for $60, and pledges to donate $10 from each sale to child protection initiatives.

Despite the best efforts of the House of Commons, we've managed to extract every MP expenses claim as a spreadsheet. See how the numbers add up
Get the data
MP travel claims, Oct-Dec 2009

Yesterday the House of Commons published the latest set of MPs' expenses. As I wrote then, they were published in a new searchable database, which actually makes the data harder to compile and extract. (Compare this to Simon Willison's work on MPs' expenses crowdsourcing).

Well, thanks to the work of Guardian developers Daniel Vydra and Roberto Tyley, we've managed to scrape the entire lot out of the Commons website for you as a downloadable spreadsheet. You cannot get this anywhere else.

Previously, we could give you totals claimed by MP: here's last year's. Because this is not a year's complete data, the Commons authorities are not keen on giving out totals - here's what they told me yesterday:

Please note that overall totals for each individual MP's overall expenditure are not published at this time of year. This is because MPs do not all submit claims on the same timescale: for example some submit claims at the end of the month and others do so less frequently, or even at the end of the year. Thus comparisons between individual total expenditure would be misleading.

It's a pretty reasonable reason, but that doesn't stop us working out totals from the data - with the enormous caveats above.

Here's how the totals look for just those two quarters, thanks to the genius of Many Eyes (I know we've been using Many Eyes a lot recently, but if you want to produce a quick visualisation, then it really can't be beaten at the moment).

The spreadsheet is just the raw numbers - with details of each claim for each MP. To get the exact details, you need to see the claim form on the commons site.

This is just a start - what can you do with the data?

Download the data

DATA: download the full datasheet

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Prominent Indian telecommunications investor provides backing to underdog Danish voiceover IP company

The underdog Danish voiceover IP (VoIP) company Vopium has received a large cash injection from a prominent Indian telecommunications investor and has declared it is gunning for Skype in a bid to compete with the frontrunning VoIP provider.

Vopium, sometimes dubbed the 'other' VoIP company, today announced that Indian investor Raghuvinder Kataria, an early backer of Bharti Airtel the third largest in-country mobile operator in the world would invest $16.5m ( 11m) in the Danish internet telecom, making him its largest shareholder.

In a statement, Kataria said: "We believe that the market demands an alternative mobile solution to Skype and the fast market penetration of smartphones opens up new and more intelligent ways of communication."

Kataria's investment significantly increases Vopium's funding as their last posted investment was 4.2m ( 3.5m) in 2008 from Enex Group SA, a private Luxembourg-based investment company.

But the little VoIP still has a long way to go before it catches up with Skype, the field's clear leader.

At peak hours, Skype reports 23 million users online and Skype traffic accounts for 12% of global international calling minutes. Its users made 3.1bn minutes of calls to landlines and mobiles, and 36.1bn minutes of calls between Skype users in the third quarter of 2009.

Vopium, on the other hand, has a total of one million users with 10,000 of them online at peak hours. Last year, Vopium reported 40m-50m minutes of calls during the whole of last year.

But at reported growth of 30% every month, Vopium could well be on track to become a real challenge to Skype's hegemony.

Vopium was founded in 2006 by Pakistani entrepreneur Tanveer Sharif. Users download software to their mobile phone, which then re-routes calls over the internet. It was initially founded to allow cheap calling to Pakistan, India and Bangladesh but launched throughout the world last year.

Following a pair of successful hacking attacks early last year, the social networking site is the first to be ruled against by the US Federal Trade Commission

Twitter's having a bad day. First it got told off by the US Federal Trade Commission for incidents in January and May last year when 33 accounts, including Barack Obama's, were hacked using the company's own internal support tools.

And then it's having to scale back on its API in order to get the site in order, according to its status page.

The FTC settlement is "the agency's first such case against a social networking site" over flawed data security.

According to the FTC's complaint, between January and May 2009, hackers who gained administrative control of Twitter were able to view nonpublic user information, gain access to direct messages and protected tweets, and reset any user's password and send authorized tweets from any user account.

The January case was interesting: "a hacker used an automated password-guessing tool to gain administrative control of Twitter, after submitting thousands of guesses into Twitter's login webpage. The administrative password was a weak, lower case, common dictionary word. Using the password, the hacker reset numerous user passwords and posted some of them on a website, where other people could access them. Using these fraudulently reset passwords, other intruders sent phony tweets from approximately nine user accounts. One tweet was sent from the account of then-President-elect Barack Obama, offering his more than 150,000 followers a chance to win $500 in free gasoline. At least one other phony tweet was sent from the account of Fox News."

The key there being "weak, lower case, common dictionary word". Weak passwords are likely to be the Achilles heel of startups, because nobody thought they'd get big, so they used easy passwords. Then when things get big, everyone's forgotten that there's a weak link in the system from those early passwords.

Similarly in May 2009: "During a second security breach, in April 2009, a hacker compromised a Twitter employee's personal e-mail account where two passwords similar to the employee's Twitter administrative password were stored, in plain text. Using this information, the hacker was able to guess the employee's Twitter administrative password. The hacker reset at least one Twitter user's password, and could access private user information and tweets for any Twitter users."

Guessable passwords: also not good.

However the action taken against Twitter could be called wrist-slapping: "Under the terms of the settlement, Twitter will be barred for 20 years from misleading consumers about the extent to which it maintains and protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent authorized access to information and honor [sic] the privacy choices made by consumers. The company also must establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program, which will be assessed by a third party every other year for 10 years."

Could be a lot worse, to be honest. Could have involved money.

Meanwhile, Twitter is having "issues" with its site, and has temporarily disabled RSS and Atom feeds, and has lowered the number of queries that can be made through its API per hour as it makes "adjustments to some site features".

Russia, Japan, China and Japan only remaining countries where Facebook not leading social network says founder

Facebook's global dominance is almost complete with just Russia, Japan, China and Japan yet to be converted and the social networking giant aiming to reach 1 billion users, founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed today.

Zuckerberg, who said he had recently met Prime Minister David Cameron "for just a minute [when] he was busy rolling out the budget", also admitted that one day he could see Facebook floating on the stockmarket just not anytime soon.

He added that there was "no chance" Facebook, which has cracked the 500 million user mark, would hit 1 billion this year but argued that "it is almost a guarantee that it will happen".

"If we succeed [in innovating and remaining relevant] there is a good chance of bringing this to a billion people it will be interesting to see how it plays out," he said speaking to two packed auditoriums one via video link at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

Facebook's global domination is almost complete, he said. "We are down to just four countries where we aren't the leading social network."

Zuckerberg added that in Russia Facebook had just 1 million users, the kind of numbers that saw AOL sell off Bebo and ITV relinquish Friends Reunited. But in Facebook's case, growth is "doubling every six months", according to Zuckerberg, and Japan and Korea have similar user bases.

He said that Facebook can tell when an explosive growth "tipping point" is about to be reached by who is "friending" who. When Facebook first launches in a country, nearly all the friend connections are with foreign Facebook users.

"We know that a country has tipped when local-to-local connections outnumber local to foreign," he added. "It is a long-term thing [and with regard to the four left to tip] we are probably not going to win in six months, not in a year [but] things look promising in three to five years out."

He also said that the company would make an initial public offering. "At some point, sure," he said. "It is probably not that different [running a public company compared with a privately held one]." However, after many sceptical guffaws in the Cannes audience he backtracked and said: "OK, I'm sure it is a lot different."

Zuckerberg added that one of the issues was that he was in it with a long-term view, which most investors are not if you go public, which he admitted was a "challenge".

He also addressed concerns over privacy, explaining that Facebook's meteoric growth had meant the company had been caught out while it was in "transition". However, he added that the changing face of how privacy is perceived now that users are in a digital age meant that there were always going to be "natural tensions".

"Six years ago most people didn't want any information about themselves on web," he said. "To start off people were a bit reticent about this. Then over time people think it is great to be connected and share things. I think the world looks a lot different now. There is a real natural tension between people seeing the value of sharing more stuff but wanting control over what they share."

Zuckerberg added that as Facebook developed it built privacy controls for everything. At one point there were more than 100 individual settings users could change, which it had been important to simplify as the company had to "transition [and be] pretty quick to adjust and evolve to 500 million users".

"People have very legitimate questions and it is an important dialogue," he said.

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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Judge rules that video-sharing site did enough to remove copyrighted clips and throws out potentially ruinous complaint from entertainment company

YouTube has fended off a $1bn lawsuit from the entertainment company Viacom, after a US judge ruled that the video site was protected from being sued for copyright infringement under US law.

The summary judgment by the court followed a suit that had gone on for more than three years and which was seen as potentially ruinous for YouTube if it had lost it.

But the judge determined that YouTube's efforts to remove content meant that it was protected against the lawsuit under "safe harbor" provision of the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Viacom filed suit in March 2007 against the site, which Google bought for $1.6bn in 2006, alleging widespread copyright infringement of its content on the site, having filed more than 100,000 "takedown" orders against the video-sharing site the month before. The company complained that about 160,000 unauthorised clips from Viacom programs had been posted on YouTube, and viewed about 1.5bn times.

But YouTube appealed for a summary judgment in the case, on the basis that it cooperated with copyright holders to remove content from the site when they complained.

Viacom Inc. had alleged that YouTube built itself into the world's largest video-sharing site by promoting the unlicensed use of video taken from Viacom cable channels such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.

But Facebook, eBay and Yahoo were among the internet powerhouses that had rallied on Google's behalf, saying that the company should not be liable because the 1998 law offers immunity when service providers promptly remove illegal materials submitted by users once they are notified of a violation.

In his 30-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in New York said massive volumes of evidence submitted in the case had convinced him that YouTube did what it needed to do to fall under the "safe harbor" provisions of the copyright law.

In dismissing the lawsuit before a trial, Stanton noted that Viacom had spent several months accumulating about 100,000 videos violating its copyright and then sent a mass takedown notice on Feb. 2, 2007. By the next business day, Stanton said, YouTube had removed virtually all of them.

Stanton said there's no dispute that "when YouTube was given the (takedown) notices, it removed the material."

Viacom said it will appeal, calling the ruling "fundamentally flawed."

Most embarrassingly for Viacom, court documents revealed in in March that at the same time that it was suing Google and YouTube, Viacom was itself uploading its content in secret and trying to make it look stolen - so that people would be more interested in it.

One excerpt from the documents filed by YouTube was particularly notable for the embarrassment caused: "Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself."

The fallout from Google's collection of data from Wi-Fi networks while compiling its StreetView catalogue carries on

Google's gathering of data from open Wi-Fi access points in the UK as it collected its StreetView data now has a crime reference number: 2318672/10.

That doesn't mean it's definitely a crime, though; that's the investigation number issued on Tuesday by London's Metropolitan Police at the request of the pressure group Privacy International, which alleges that the search company carried out "criminal interception of wireless communications content" and that that constitutes an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Wireless Telegraphy Act.

Google has insisted all along that the collection of the data was an accident caused when code left in a production system kept the content being broadcast over the Wi-Fi networks as the Google StreetView car drove past.

It admitted to the collection in May.

Google was mapping the networks' location, names and MAC (Media Access Control) address, which is unique to each network and is broadcast by it and can be picked up by any passer-by equipped with a Wi-Fi receiver. It is not an offence to capture the latter details - but Google also captured content from messages being broadcast over the open networks, which French authorities say includes passwords from emails. Google did not try and would not have been able to access content on password-protected networks.

According to Privacy International, which has been briefed by police on the likely path the investigation will take, the next step will be initial inquiries into the essential facts of the case before deciding which (if any) law may have been breached. The police will need to seek advice on which legislation to focus on, as each involves a different prosecution process. The police estimate that this initial investigation will take eight to ten days, after which the case will be escalated to a specialist team working at the national level. No estimate has been given regarding the likely period of the main investigation.

Google has offered to delete the data relating to the UK. The UK's Information Commissioner acceded to the request, but Privacy International demanded that it be kept so that the police could carry out the investigation.

A number of different countries are investigating whether Google has broken any laws, because it used the same mapping/recording system when it carried out its StreetView sampling in other countries. The company has offered to delete the content data (though not the data about network locations)unread for every country, but only a handful, including Ireland, have agreed.

In some countries local laws have stymied further investigation. In Germany, its equivalent of the information commissioner, an arm of the government, has demanded to see the content - but there are strict rules against government agencies viewing private citizens' data without their permission.

In the UK, the police will need to interview Google staff to find out who the "responsible person" is for this matter.

Simon Davies, PI's Director said "We are pleased that the police have taken up this complaint for investigation. An evidence based approach to this complex matter is sorely needed now. We have already told police that we will cooperate fully with any inquiries. I know Google will want to do the same".

He added: "We hope that this difficult process will give Google pause for thought about how it conducts itself. Perhaps in future the company will rely less on PR spin and more on good governance and reliable product oversight".

This week, Guardian games contributor Keith Stuart joins Aleks Krotoski and Charles Arthur to dissect the big announcements from the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) the biggest computer games event in the English-speaking world. Keith weighs in on the Nintendo 3DS, Microsoft's Kinect and how the indies fare in a console world.

Also in this week's programme, Charles breaks down what the sale of social networking site Bebo for a huge loss to owners AOL means for the networking scene, and gives the heads up on a new scam directed at British computer users that could cost victims up to 200.

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

Spotify, Last.fm and We7 are old hat when it comes to innovation within the industry check these out

The music industry, as bemoaned ad nauseum, has been financially skewered by the digital revolution and consumers' new-found ability to share music freely. But green shoots are springing up everywhere and even Spotify, Last.fm and We7 are old hat when it comes to innovation within the industry. Here are five new digital music projects using crowd-sourcing, cool coding and collaboration to help the music industry rock out in the digital age:

No1: GigsWiz

GigsWiz is a site that generates analytics allowing bands to gather more accurate information about local fan demand for gigs. Based on a few questions, GigsWiz generates a piece of code that artists can embed on their websites, MySpace and Facebook pages. This piece of code then pumps out data about where visitors to their site come from. Bands can use this data to plan their next gigs. Based in Helsinki, Finland, GigsWiz was founded last summer by marketing professional Juuso Vermashein and entrepreneurs Joonas Pekkanen and Kai Lemmetty. It launched its invite-only beta site in May 2010 and is now open for all. GigsWiz aims to overcome the recorded music industry's financial challenges by allowing bands to maximise their revenues from live performances.

No2: MusicGPS

This iPhone app produced by musicDNA - not to be confused with MusicDNA, the possible successor to the MP3 which launched in January is focused on pairing music with maps. Users download the app to their iPhone and as they travel while listening to music, MusicGPS records which songs are listened to where. While the community is still small, at only just over 700 members, the potential applications for the sort of data collected are significant if it gained enough popularity. Similar to GigsWiz, MusicGPS collects local data about musical tastes, but is listener-driven rather than artist-driven. While it has huge potential for targeted advertising and local revenue generation, it is also a step in the development of the semantic web.

No3: Indaba Music

Ever wanted to start a garage band but without a garage and with band members stationed all over the world? Thought so. Indaba has created a very usable online music collaboration platform where multiple people can upload and remix with hundreds of other musically minded individuals. There are also community forums for everyone involved in music from engineers to producers to musicians. Wired used Indaba in May to take crowd-sourced music to the next level. 122 members remixed one single track, creating 85 new music files. Voting is underway to determine which of the top five of these tracks is king. At the end of the day, the project takes music production to the next level using crowd power and collaboration.

No4 fairsharemusic

Will people be more willing to pay for music online if they know it's going to a good cause? Maybe. Fairsharemusic's going to find out. Apple's iTunes store may have begun to get music consumers used to the idea of paying for their music online, but UK-based Fairshare adds a philanthropic element to this model. The site which launched Tuesday donates half the profit of every music file downloaded to one of 11 partner charities chosen by the listener. Fairshare takes the now ubiquitous idea of micro-payments, and turns them into "micro-donations".

No5: slicethepie

In digital years, slicethepie is actually pretty old at the ripe age of three, but it's got the right idea. Slicethepie, as we've talked about before, allows fans to fund the bands they like, cutting out the middle men between producers and consumers of music. Fans are also paid to review bands and scout out new talent. At slicethepie, anyone can invest in any band and every 1 chipped into the hat entitles the donator to a share in the band and subsequent royalties. Contracts can also be traded on the virtual exchange for the chance to profit from their good scouting abilities and get in on other bands from the ground up.

Video from BBC site sees internet traffic more than triple as almost 1 million people log on to watch from work

Was there a sporting fixture on yesterday? Why, yes, there was - but apart from the titanic struggle of John Isner and Nicolas Mahut (the longest-ever professional tennis match in the history of the solar system, which is 6bn years, so not bad) there also seems to have been some sort of football game going on in a distant land. It didn't last very long, but football doesn't compared to tennis.

But because the England v someone else match happened during office hours, many people were, well, in the office when it happened. Which meant that they had to take sneaky advantage of the streaming capabilities of modern networks to watch it.

Early figures from the BBC suggest the total number of 'concurrent streams' peaked at 800,000 although the total number of viewers will be many times higher. The BBC said this was a viewing record.

That, according to Demon Internet, which provided the graph above (click for a larger version), saw internet use increase by 55% solely during the game compared to an ordinary working Wednesday afternoon, compared with a 38% increase during the first World Cup game between Mexico and South Africa on 11 June.

But EasyNet Connect, a business ISP, says things got even heftier: it saw a 226% surge (that would be a more than threefold increase) in web traffic compared to the average day.

After kick-off, traffic more than doubled (up 114%) compared with the pre-match levels (from 0900 to 1400).

Chris Stening, the managing director of EasyNet Connect, said: "As the first England game to take place during work hours, this afternoon's match between England and Slovenia was the biggest test for businesses' internet connections so far. The data from our own network shows that streaming the game at work was a popular choice this afternoon, pushing many business connections to their limits."

Matt Cantwell, the head of Demon, states: "Customers see the internet as a utility and yet, their networks might not be able to cope with the demands like electricity can. The surge in internet traffic could cause problems for SME businesses, who are the lifeblood the UK's economy. If they can't run their business normally during a World Cup match and ban their workers from keeping an eye on games during working hours, then inevitably, the business will lose out both on productivity and customer satisfaction. Whatever happens, it's a lose-lose situation for those without the right network infrastructure and support."

And another business ISP, KC, says that the game triggered a 31% jump in web traffic, as users watched the game via the BBC's live online stream.

Not mentioned because it worked so well is the fact that the BBC's streaming has held up so well, while ITV's has been roundly criticised for failing to manage the load, notably during England's the tournament's first game, which also happened during office hours, but for which the demand was probably impossible to estimate. The BBC may have been better warned but even so, it can pat itself on the back for its success here.

Being second means that Microsoft is trying harder to add features that will keep users there, not moving away

You may have seen Microsoft's new adverts for Bing, which are currently beaming out from walls all over London's Underground: Bing, say the ads, is a "decision engine". It's about helping you decide what to do.

That's part of a big upgrade rolled out by the company today, in which the iPhone app has been upgraded (you can connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to it, and see friends' updates), and a number of new features - particularly a new search (um, decision?) category of "Bing Entertainment" has been added with "better ways" to search for music, movies, TV and games.

"We did travel, health, shopping and local last year," senior VP Yusuf Mehdi said - who says that now about 10% of all searches are "entertainment-related". (We wonder a little how he's defining "entertainment", but let that pass.), and that 90% of people do at least one entertainment search per month. Certainly you can see how the new way of watching TV - with a connected device such as a smartphone or tablet or laptop to hand - would play a big part there ("Who is the woman who plays Sue Sylvester? What else has she been in?")

Says Mehdi: "We are trying to remove all of those hurdles that block you from enjoying [entertainment]. You should be able to watch a show, listen to online music, or play a game with a few clicks."

Music searches will also return lyrics (an interesting one from the intellectual property standpoint: many lyric sites are, strictly speaking, using material without permission, though it's barely ever enforced), and will also - in the US (the UK position has to be clarified) - return playable streams from 5m songs licensed through Microsoft's Zune service. You can play a full stream once, and thereafter for 30 seconds. That's quite like Google's music search (launched last October), which was powered by MySpace and the music streaming service Lala; the latter though has now stopped streaming, having been bought by Apple for reasons as yet undisclosed.

Looking back at the iPhone app, there is the question of what the use of linking it to social networks is. Justin Jed, Bing for Mobile product manager, blogs about the benefits he perceives: you might search for a film, get screening times and then look to see what your friends on those networks have said about it. (Our reaction: is that really how people search for a film? Easier surely to find out what's on near you and see what people think about it - or to hear from your network about a film that people like and then find out when it's on.)

The key question will still remain on the advertising side, of course, in getting advertisers to buy ads with searches; but if this marketing and advertising campaign is successful, then more people come to Bing - which makes it more saleable to advertisers.

So the "decision engine" rebranding is an interesting piece of positioning vis-a-vis Google: clearly Microsoft and its marketers have decided that if they try to call Bing a "search engine", people will just say "Oh, you mean like Google?" Which is death, marketing-wise: you never want to be trying to take over the turf of the long-established brand.

And rather than going for the "Avis" formula (Avis always trailed Hertz in the US car market, but made a virtue of its second-place postiion by using the slogan "We try harder!" - playing on peoples' liking for the scrappy underdog), presumably because it's difficult for a company thought of as completely dominant in one market to be a pleasing underdog in another, it's gone for the other route: fight on different ground altogether.

In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here are the nine key steps to understanding the most powerful tool of our age and where it's taking us

A funny thing happened to us on the way to the future. The internet went from being something exotic to being boring utility, like mains electricity or running water and we never really noticed. So we wound up being totally dependent on a system about which we are terminally incurious. You think I exaggerate about the dependence? Well, just ask Estonia, one of the most internet-dependent countries on the planet, which in 2007 was more or less shut down for two weeks by a sustained attack on its network infrastructure. Or imagine what it would be like if, one day, you suddenly found yourself unable to book flights, transfer funds from your bank account, check bus timetables, send email, search Google, call your family using Skype, buy music from Apple or books from Amazon, buy or sell stuff on eBay, watch clips on YouTube or BBC programmes on the iPlayer or do the 1,001 other things that have become as natural as breathing.

The internet has quietly infiltrated our lives, and yet we seem to be remarkably unreflective about it. That's not because we're short of information about the network; on the contrary, we're awash with the stuff. It's just that we don't know what it all means. We're in the state once described by that great scholar of cyberspace, Manuel Castells, as "informed bewilderment".

Mainstream media don't exactly help here, because much if not most media coverage of the net is negative. It may be essential for our kids' education, they concede, but it's riddled with online predators, seeking children to "groom" for abuse. Google is supposedly "making us stupid" and shattering our concentration into the bargain. It's also allegedly leading to an epidemic of plagiarism. File sharing is destroying music, online news is killing newspapers, and Amazon is killing bookshops. The network is making a mockery of legal injunctions and the web is full of lies, distortions and half-truths. Social networking fuels the growth of vindictive "flash mobs" which ambush innocent columnists such as Jan Moir. And so on.

All of which might lead a detached observer to ask: if the internet is such a disaster, how come 27% of the world's population (or about 1.8 billion people) use it happily every day, while billions more are desperate to get access to it?

So how might we go about getting a more balanced view of the net ? What would you really need to know to understand the internet phenomenon? Having thought about it for a while, my conclusion is that all you need is a smallish number of big ideas, which, taken together, sharply reduce the bewilderment of which Castells writes so eloquently.

But how many ideas? In 1956, the psychologist George Miller published a famous paper in the journal Psychological Review. Its title was "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information" and in it Miller set out to summarise some earlier experiments which attempted to measure the limits of people's short-term memory. In each case he reported that the effective "channel capacity" lay between five and nine choices. Miller did not draw any firm conclusions from this, however, and contented himself by merely conjecturing that "the recurring sevens might represent something deep and profound or be just coincidence". And that, he probably thought, was that.

But Miller had underestimated the appetite of popular culture for anything with the word "magical' in the title. Instead of being known as a mere aggregator of research results, Miller found himself identified as a kind of sage a discoverer of a profound truth about human nature. "My problem," he wrote, "is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution."

But in fact, the basic idea that emerges from Miller's 1956 paper seems to have stood the test of time. The idea is that our short-term memory can only hold between five and nine "chunks" of information at any given moment (here a chunk is defined as a "meaningful unit"). So, when trying to decide how many big ideas about the internet would be meaningful for most readers, it seemed sensible to settle for a magical total of nine. So here they are.

1 TAKE THE LONG VIEW

The strange thing about living through a revolution is that it's very difficult to see what's going on. Imagine what it must have been like being a resident of St Petersburg in 1917, in the months before Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. It's clear that momentous events are afoot; there are all kinds of conflicting rumours and theories, but nobody knows how things will pan out. Only with the benefit of hindsight will we get a clear idea of what was going on. But the clarity that hindsight bestows is also misleading, because it understates how confusing things appeared to people at the time.

So it is with us now. We're living through a radical transformation of our communications environment. Since we don't have the benefit of hindsight, we don't really know where it's taking us. And one thing we've learned from the history of communications technology is that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies and to underestimate their long-term implications.

We see this all around us at the moment, as would-be savants, commentators, writers, consultants and visionaries tout their personal interpretations of what the internet means for business, publishing, retailing, education, politics and the future of civilisation as we know it. Often, these interpretations are compressed into vivid slogans, memes or aphorisms: information "wants to be free"; the "long tail" is the future of retailing; "Facebook just seized control of the internet", and so on. These kinds of slogans are really just short-term extrapolations from yesterday's or today's experience. They tell us little about where the revolution we're currently living through is heading. The question is: can we do any better without falling into the trap of feigning omniscience?

Here's a radical idea: why not see if there's anything to be learned from history? Because mankind has lived through an earlier transformation in its communications environment, brought about by the invention of printing by movable type. This technology changed the world indeed, it shaped the cultural environment in which most of us grew up. And the great thing about it, from the point of view of this essay, is that we can view it with the benefit of hindsight. We know what happened.

A thought experiment

So let's conduct what the Germans call a Gedankenexperiment a thought experiment. Imagine that the net represents a similar kind of transformation in our communications environment to that wrought by printing. What would we learn from such an experiment?

The first printed bibles emerged in 1455 from the press created by Johannes Gutenberg in the German city of Mainz. Now, imagine that the year is 1472 ie 17 years after 1455. Imagine, further, that you're the medieval equivalent of a Mori pollster, standing on the bridge in Mainz with a clipboard in your hand and asking pedestrians a few questions. Here's question four: On a scale of one to five, where one indicates "Not at all likely" and five indicates "Very likely", how likely do you think it is that Herr Gutenberg's invention will:

(a) Undermine the authority of the Catholic church?

(b) Power the Reformation?

(c) Enable the rise of modern science?

(d) Create entirely new social classes and professions?

(e) Change our conceptions of "childhood" as a protected early period in a person's life?

On a scale of one to five! You have only to ask the questions to realise the fatuity of the idea. Printing did indeed have all of these effects, but there was no way that anyone in 1472, in Mainz (or anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be.

I'm writing this in 2010, which is 17 years since the web went mainstream. If I'm right about the net effecting a transformation in our communications environment comparable to that wrought by Gutenberg, then it's patently absurd for me (or anyone else) to pretend to know what its long-term impact will be. The honest answer is that we simply don't know.

The trouble is, though, that everybody affected by the net is demanding an answer right now. Print journalists and their employers want to know what's going to happen to their industry. Likewise the music business, publishers, television networks, radio stations, government departments, travel agents, universities, telcos, airlines, libraries and lots of others. The sad truth is that they will all have to learn to be patient. And, for some of them, by the time we know the answers to their questions, it will be too late.

2 THE WEB ISN'T THE NET

The most common and still surprisingly widespread misconception is that the internet and the web are the same thing. They're not. A good way to understand this is via a railway analogy. Think of the internet as the tracks and signalling, the infrastructure on which everything runs. In a railway network, different kinds of traffic run on the infrastructure high-speed express trains, slow stopping trains, commuter trains, freight trains and (sometimes) specialist maintenance and repair trains.

On the internet, web pages are only one of the many kinds of traffic that run on its virtual tracks. Other types of traffic include music files being exchanged via peer-to-peer networking, or from the iTunes store; movie files travelling via BitTorrent; software updates; email; instant messages; phone conversations via Skype and other VoIP (internet telephony) services; streaming video and audio; and other stuff too arcane to mention.

And (here's the important bit) there will undoubtedly be other kinds of traffic, stuff we can't possibly have dreamed of yet, running on the internet in 10 years' time.

So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it's just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it.

Understand this simple distinction and you're halfway to wisdom.

3 DISRUPTION IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG

One of the things that most baffles (and troubles) people about the net is its capacity for disruption. One moment you've got a stable, profitable business say, as the CEO of a music label; the next minute your industry is struggling for survival, and you're paying a king's ransom to intellectual property lawyers in a losing struggle to stem the tide. Or you're a newspaper group, wondering how a solid revenue stream from classified ads could suddenly have vaporised; or a university librarian wondering why students use only Google nowadays. How can this stuff happen? And how does it happen so fast?

The answer lies deep in the network's architecture. When it was being created in the 1970s, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, the lead designers, were faced with two difficult tasks: how to design a system that seamlessly links lots of other networks, and how to design a network that is future-proof. The answer they came up with was breathtakingly simple. It was based on two axioms. Firstly, there should be no central ownership or control no institution which would decide who could join or what the network could be used for. Secondly, the network should not be optimised for any particular application. This led to the idea of a "simple" network that did only one thing take in data packets at one end and do its best to deliver them to their destinations. The network would be neutral as to the content of those packets they could be fragments of email, porn videos, phone conversations, images The network didn't care, and would treat them all equally.

By implementing these twin protocols, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn created what was essentially a global machine for springing surprises. The implication of their design was that if you had an idea that could be implemented using data packets, then the internet would do it for you, no questions asked. And you didn't have to ask anyone's permission.

The explosion of creativity in the form of disruptive applications that the world has seen since the network emerged in the 1980s may have taken a lot of institutions and industries by surprise, but it was predictable, given the architecture. There are a lot of smart programmers in the world, and the net provided them with a perfect launch pad for springing surprises. What kinds of surprises? Well, the web itself. It was largely the creation of a single individual Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1991 put the code on an internet server without having to ask anyone's permission.

Ten years after Berners-Lee started work, a disaffected, music-loving teenager named Shawn Fanning spent six months writing software for sharing music files and, in 1999, put his little surprise on an internet server. He called it Napster and it acquired over 60 million delighted users before the music industry managed to shut it down. But by that time the file-sharing genie was out of the bottle.

While all this was going on, plenty of equally smart programmers were incubating more sinister surprises, in the shape of a plague of spam, viruses, worms and other security "exploits" which they have been able to unleash over a network which doesn't care what's in your data packets. The potential dangers of this "malware" explosion are alarming. For example, mysterious groups have assembled "botnets" (made up of millions of covertly compromised, networked PCs) which could be used to launch massive, co-ordinated attacks that could conceivably bring down the network infrastructure of entire industries, or perhaps even countries. So far, with the exception of Estonia in 2007, we haven't seen such an attack, but the fear is that it will eventually come, and it will be the net's own version of 9/11.

The internet's disruptiveness is a consequence of its technical DNA. In programmers' parlance, it's a feature, not a bug ie an intentional facility, not a mistake. And it's difficult to see how we could disable the network's facility for generating unpleasant surprises without also disabling the other forms of creativity it engenders.

4 THINK ECOLOGY, NOT ECONOMICS

As an analytical framework, economics can come unstuck when dealing with the net. Because while economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, the online world is distinguished by abundance. Similarly, ecology (the study of natural systems) specialises in abundance, and it can be useful to look at what's happening in the media through the eyes of an ecologist.

Since the web went mainstream in 1993, our media "ecosystem", if you like, has become immeasurably more complex. The old, industrialised, mass-media ecosystem was characterised by declining rates of growth; relatively small numbers of powerful, profitable, slow-moving publishers and broadcasters; mass audiences consisting mainly of passive consumers of centrally produced content; relatively few communication channels, and a slow pace of change. The new ecosystem is expanding rapidly: it has millions of publishers; billions of active, web-savvy, highly informed readers, listeners and viewers; innumerable communication channels, and a dizzying rate of change.

To an ecologist, this looks like an ecosystem whose biodiversity has expanded radically. It's as if a world in which large organisms like dinosaurs (think Time Warner, Encyclopaedia Britannica) had trudged slowly across the landscape exchanging information in large, discrete units, but life was now morphing into an ecosystem in which billions of smaller species consume, transform, aggregate or break down and exchange information goods in much smaller units and in which new gigantic life-forms (think Google, Facebook) are emerging. In the natural world, increased biodiversity is closely correlated with higher whole-system productivity ie the rate at which energy and material inputs are translated into growth. Could it be that this is also happening in the information sphere? And if it is, who will benefit in the long term?

5 COMPLEXITY IS THE NEW REALITY

Even if you don't accept the ecological metaphor, there's no doubt that our emerging information environment is more complex in terms of numbers of participants, the density of interactions between them, and the pace of change than anything that has gone before. This complexity is not an aberration or something to be wished away: it's the new reality, and one that we have to address. This is a challenge, for several reasons. First, the behaviour of complex systems is often difficult to understand and even harder to predict. Second, and more importantly, our collective mindsets in industry and government are not well adapted for dealing with complexity. Traditionally, organisations have tried to deal with the problem by reducing complexity acquiring competitors, locking in customers, producing standardised products and services, etc. These strategies are unlikely to work in our emerging environment, where intelligence, agility, responsiveness and a willingness to experiment (and fail) provide better strategies for dealing with what the networked environment will throw at you.

6 THE NETWORK IS NOW THE COMPUTER

For baby-boomers, a computer was a standalone PC running Microsoft software. Eventually, these devices were networked, first locally (via office networks) and then globally (via the internet). But as broadband connections to the net became commonplace, something strange happened: if you had a fast enough connection to the network, you became less concerned about the precise location of either your stored data or the processor that was performing computational tasks for you. And these tasks became easier to do. First, the companies (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft) who provided search also began to offer "webmail" email provided via programs that ran not on your PC but on servers in the internet "cloud". Then Google offered word-processing, spreadsheets, slide-making and other "office"-type services over the network. And so on.

Here was a transition from a world in which the PC really was the computer, to one in which the network is effectively the computer. It has led to the emergence of "cloud computing" a technology in which we use simple devices (mobile phones, low-power laptops or tablets) to access computing services that are provided by powerful servers somewhere on the net. This switch to computing as a utility rather than a service that you provide with your own equipment has profound implications for privacy, security and economic development and public perceptions are lagging way behind the pace of development. What happens to your family's photo collection if it's held in the cloud and your password goes to the grave with you? And what about your documents and emails all likewise stored in the cloud on someone else's server? Or your "reputation" on eBay? Everywhere one looks, the transition to cloud computing has profound implications, because it makes us more and more dependent on the net. And yet we're sleepwalking into this brave new world.

7 THE WEB IS CHANGING

Once upon a time, the web was merely a publication medium, in which publishers (professional or amateur) uploaded passive web pages to servers. For many people in the media business, that's still their mental model of the web. But in fact, the web has gone through at least three phases of evolution from the original web 1.0, to the web 2.0 of "small pieces, loosely joined" (social networking, mashups, webmail, and so on) and is now heading towards some kind of web 3.0 a global platform based on Tim Berners-Lee's idea of the 'semantic web' in which web pages will contain enough metadata about their content to enable software to make informed judgements about their relevance and function. If we are to understand the web as it is, rather than as it once was, we need more realistic mental models of it. Above all, we need to remember that it's no longer just a publication medium.

8 HUXLEY AND ORWELL ARE THE BOOKENDS OF OUR FUTURE

Many years ago, the cultural critic Neil Postman, one of the 20th century's most perceptive critics of technology, predicted that the insights of two writers would, like a pair of bookends, bracket our future. Aldous Huxley believed that we would be destroyed by the things we love, while George Orwell thought we would be destroyed by the things we fear.

Postman was writing before the internet became such a force in our societies, but I believe he got it right. On the one (Huxleyan) hand, the net has been a profoundly liberating influence in our lives creating endless opportunities for information, entertainment, pleasure, delight, communication, and apparently effortless consumption, to the point where it has acquired quasi-addictive power, especially over younger generations. One can calibrate the extent of the impact by the growing levels of concern among teachers, governments and politicians. "Is Google making us stupid?" was the title of one of the most cited articles in Atlantic magazine in 2008. It was written by Nicholas Carr, a prominent blogger and author, and raised the question of whether permanent access to networked information (not just Google) is turning us into restless, shallow thinkers with shorter attention spans. (According to Nielsen, a market research firm, the average time spent viewing a web page is 56 seconds.) Other critics are worried that incessant internet use is actually rewiring our brains.

On the other (Orwellian) hand, the internet is the nearest thing to a perfect surveillance machine the world has ever seen. Everything you do on the net is logged every email you send, every website you visit, every file you download, every search you conduct is recorded and filed somewhere, either on the servers of your internet service provider or of the cloud services that you access. As a tool for a totalitarian government interested in the behaviour, social activities and thought-process of its subjects, the internet is just about perfect.

9 OUR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REGIME IS NO LONGER FIT FOR PURPOSE

In the analogue world, copying was difficult and degenerative (ie copies of copies became progressively worse than the original). In the digital world, copying is effortless and perfect. In fact, copying is to computers as breathing is to living organisms, inasmuch as all computational operations involve it. When you view a web page, for example, a copy of the page is loaded into the video memory of your computer (or phone, or iPad) before the device can display it on the screen. So you can't even look at something on the web without (unknowingly) making a copy of it.

Since our current intellectual property regime was conceived in an era when copying was difficult and imperfect, it's not surprising that it seems increasingly out of sync with the networked world. To make matters worse (or better, depending on your point of view), digital technology has provided internet users with software tools which make it trivially easy to copy, edit, remix and publish anything that is available in digital form which means nearly everything, nowadays. As a result, millions of people have become "publishers" in the sense that their creations are globally published on platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube. So everywhere one looks, one finds things that infringe copyright in one way or another.

This is a disagreeable but inescapable fact as inescapable in its way as the fact that young adults tend to drink too much alcohol. The only way to stop copying is to shut down the net. There's nothing wrong with intellectual property (or alcohol), per se, but our copyright laws are now so laughably out of touch with reality that they are falling into disrepute. They urgently need reforming to make them relevant to digital circumstances. The problem is that none of our legislators seems to understand this, so it won't happen any time soon.

Postscript

It would be ridiculous to pretend that these nine ideas encapsulate everything that there is to be known about the net. But they do provide a framework for seeing the phenomenon "in the round", as it were, and might even serve as an antidote to the fevered extrapolation that often passes for commentary on developments in cyberspace. The sad fact is that if there is a "truth" about the internet, it's rather prosaic: to almost every big question about the network's long-term implications the only rational answer is the one famously given by Mao Zedong's foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, when asked about the significance of the French Revolution: "It's too early to say." It is.

John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University. He is currently working on a book about the internet phenomenon.

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.

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

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.

Actor Naoko Mori loves all things Apple except for the iPhone

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
There's a lot. I'm Japanese, I'm a gadget freak I like anything with buttons. I want to say my computer, but if I had to choose one, I'd say my mobile phone. This is almost sacrilegious, because I'm a complete Macophile, but I actually still have a BlackBerry I just prefer the buttons. I'm still on the fence with the iPhone because of the buttons and the texting.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
Eight minutes ago, checking emails.

What additional features would you add if you could?
I travel so much I'm in the US a lot, and in Japan that I currently have three phones. So what I would really like to see is a phone that holds three Sim cards, so you have different numbers in different territories. So what it can do is choose the best network, depending on what country you're in.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
I don't think so, I hope not. I think it will just be newer and better.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
When it breaks down, or runs out of juice. It's just that dread that it can go wrong, and it often does.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
I've had a rotten time with shredders.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
I believe you should always buy the best that you can afford at the time. Also, be clear about what you need, and read the instructions. I know everyone hates to do it, but I think that to get the best out of whatever you buy, you have to. It's a bit boring, but it's worth it.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
Both. I'm Japanese, so it's in our blood to be geeks. But for certain things I'm old-skool I love technology, and I love what it does, but I think it should enhance and not take over your life. Emails are great, texting is great, but for the right purposes. Also, I miss peoples' handwriting we never write letters any more.

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I guess it would be my laptop, my Macbook Pro.

Mac or PC, and why?
Definitely Mac. Everything about it, it just feels right. For me it's like the difference between coffee and tea I'm a coffee person. But I'm not sure about the iPhone yet.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
CDs not so much, but DVDs definitely. I recently re-bought The King of Comedy, because I lost my old one I love that film. I like having the physical thing not just DVDs, but even books. I like the smell and the feel of the paper. I'd much rather read a newspaper something like a Kindle wouldn't be a big pull for me.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
I don't need a butler what I do want a robot. But I don't want one of those human-looking robots, I want like an old-skool one with the square head almost like a companion, or a pet.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
If it was something not real, I would like a time machine/transporter. With the amount of travelling I do, that would be a lot quicker and greener. In real terms, a helicopter or a massage chair.

Naoko Mori stars as Yoko Ono in Lennon Naked, screening on Wednesday 23 June at 9.30pm, on BBC4

Sending mobile data over your broadband with paid-for femtocell will count against monthly tariff

Vodafone has a nasty shock in store for would-be users of its "femtocell", which boosts patchy mobile signals indoors by sending the voice and data signal over the customer's home broadband. Any mobile data sent over the home broadband connection will still be charged against customers' monthly usage, the company has told the Guardian.

Outlining plans for future deployment, Vodafone senior marketing manager Lee McDougall said Vodafone is confident that consumer uptake of femtocells will be high. However he declined to give figures for sales since the launch in July 2009, or to say what increase in mobile use had been seen by femtocell users.

Femtocells whose name comes from the prefix "femto", meaning one millionth of a billionth are designed to improve mobile network coverage by plugging into a home broadband network and providing a 3G connection to attached phones.

Vodafone remains the only UK mobile operator in the UK to offer femtocells, through two different price plans. The current range dubbed Sure Signal boxes are retailing at 50 for existing customers on contracts over 25 per month, or 120 5 per month for two years for those on smaller contracts or pay-as-you-go contracts.

But though femtocells effectively relieve load on the mobile network, and send them via the broadband paid for by the customer, any minutes used calling via the femtocell will be taken from a customers monthly allowance, despite having already paid for the bandwidth in the original package. And mobile data sent via Sure Signal and through the customer's broadband will count against the data tariff for the contract as though the customer were outside using a mobile mast.

In Japan, mobile corporation SoftBank offers free femtocell packages to existing customers. Asked why Vodafone would not be following its lead, McDougall said: "Different markets have different drivers. We know we've got a competitive product."

At a time when data traffic is doubling every four months, according to O2, femtocells are an inexpensive solution to rapidly growing demand. Data transfers over femtocell are also far less expensive to the network operator than other means, as Dave Nowicki of mobile technology firm Airvana confirmed. "The marginal cost of delivery per gigabyte is much lower," he said. "Femtocells are complementary to Wi-Fi."

The Advertising Standards Authority last week upheld four complaints from rival mobile operators who said that advertising for the product was "misleading".

Vodafone's poster campaign pictured a man leaning out of his apartment window, apparently struggling to get a mobile signal, headed: "Only Vodafone can guarantee mobile signal in your home."

The most pointed complaint came from rival mobile operator O2 which said Vodafone did not make clear users would have to pay additional costs for a femtocell device. On this, the ASA said it was reasonable for people to infer that a guaranteed signal was part of the original mobile package but because this was not the case, the advertisement was likely to mislead.

McDougall told the Guardian the campaign would be modified to take into account the ASA ruling, maintaining that Vodafone Sure Start boxes would not be a hard sell to would-be customers.

"Customers have told us the product is lifechanging for them," McDougall told the Guardian. "They said it had made a significant difference to their life. The more they hear about them the more they're interested."

Although he said he couldn't put a figure on it, internal reports showed a higher-than-predicted uplift in data usage for customers trialling the Sure Signal boxes.

"Feedback from an 8m-leaflet door drop indicated that 90% of potential customers were willing to pay up front; unsurprisingly the desire to boost mobile signal was the biggest driver," he said.

In the US, AT&T is taking the same approach to mobile data sent through femtocells as Vodafone, and counting it against the customer's bill. AT&T argues that it is costly to install the systems at ISPs which will collect the voice and mobile data being sent by broadband and route it through its own network.

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.

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

Australia's biggest telecoms firm agrees to convert old copper-wire network to superfast optic fibre and lease it to the state's broadband company

The Australian government and the country's biggest telecoms company yesterday agreed a US$37bn ( 25bn) deal to build a national superfast broadband network.

Under the deal, Telstra agreed to convert its old copper-wire network into a superfast web of optic-fibre and then rent it out to the government's National Broadband Network company (NBN) in return for A$11bn ( 6.5bn) in long-term payments.

Australia has slower and more expensive internet services than many rich nations a problem viewed as a serious economic bottleneck. But Telstra a former state-owned monopoly like BT had been reluctant to become involved with such a costly, political and state-planned project.

Last year, that changed when the government threatened to split up Telstra and force it to sell one of its crown jewels, a stake in Foxtel, a pay-TV firm, unless it co-operated. Since then, Telstra shares have underperformed.

In the UK, the coalition government has asked BT to share its infrastructure in a similar fashion to boost speeds in regions, but has stopped short of offering public funding. A planned telephone bill levy of 6 a year to pay for superfast broadband has been scrapped.

Announcing the deal with Telstra yesterday, the Australian communications minister, Stephen Conroy, said: "The war is over."

The details of the non-binding deal have yet to be finalised, but it envisages NBN effectively leasing Telstra's fixed-line network. Telstra will not take equity in the broadband network, which still faces an uncertain future, given the conservative opposition has promised to scrap it if they defeat the Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, at general elections expected to be held in October.

Rudd hopes the Telstra deal will remove the last major roadblock for the broadband network, which he promised on assuming power in 2007.

The agreement at least eliminates uncertainty over Telstra's share price. By signing up to the government's plan, Telstra can now keep its stake in Foxtel.

"This agreement reflects a commitment by all parties to reaching a mutually beneficial outcome for Telstra investors, customers, employees and the industry," the Telstra Chairman, Catherine Livingstone, said in a statement.

The Telstra agreement must still be vetted by the competition regulator, which will want to be sure that the government-controlled NBN is a neutral body that allows private operators to compete fairly over the new network.Under the overall network plan, the government plans to invest A$26bn over seven years to develop the network and then look to fully privatise it five years after it is launched.

Once crucial details of the deal are hammered out, shareholder approval will also be needed. "Should those [detailed] agreements be finalised, Telstra expects they would be put to shareholders in the first half of calendar 2011," the company said.

Updated: Google (NSDQ: GOOG), which had hinted for nearly a year now that it was working on building some sort of paid content system for publishers, is reportedly set to launch such a system by year-end. According to a report in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, Google is now reaching out to publishers to get them to sign up for the system, which it is calling Newspass.

Photo by Gauravonomics on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Google wouldn't confirm the La Repubblica report, saying "we don't pre-announce products and don't have anything to announce at this time." But the Newspass system - at least from the translation of the La Repubblica article - appears to have many elements of a paid content proposal Google made to the Newspaper Association of America last fall. Back then, Google said it was "uniquely positioned to help publishers create a scalable e-commerce system via our Checkout product and also enable users to find this content via search - even if it's behind a paywall."

La Repubblica says that, with Newspass, people will be able to log-in to the sites of participating news publishers using a single login. Publishers will be able to designate what type of payment they want to accept, including subscriptions and micropayments. People who find content from participating publishers in Google search will see a paywall icon next to that content and be able to purchase access directly from there using Checkout.

La Repubblica doesn't specify what countries Google is planning to launch Newspass in, although from the statement Google provided to us - which is included in full below - it sounds like Google would launch any system like this globally and not just in Italy.

Google has had some of its uggliest confrontations with the news industry in Italy, where publishers have complained loudly that they are not making enough money online and have talked about a lack of transparancy on Google's part in the way it handles both its search engine and Google News. Those complaints have in part prompted other actions by Google to improve its relationships with news publishers, including its recent disclosure of the percentage of AdSense revenues it shares with publishers.

Here's Google's full statement: "We've consistently said we are talking with news publishers to figure out ways we can work together, including whether we can help them with technology to power any subscription services they may be thinking of building. Our aim, as with all Google products, would be to reach as broad a global audience as possible.

We don't pre-announce products and don't have anything to announce at this time."

More to come as we learn more.

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."

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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As a football competition for robots kicks off in Singapore, organisers predict they'll soon eclipse real players

At corners, they pose as much threat as a Hobbit would against a team of Orcs. Their passing and shooting are laughable while their ability to keep the ball from reaching the back of the net is only mariginally better than that of an English goalkeeper. Robot footballers have a long way to go, it would seem.

Yet great things are expected of them, it transpires. According to the organisers of RoboCup, the international football competition for humanoid players which kicked off in Singapore yesterday, the skills that are being built up through the design and manufacture of robot players for the tournament are performing a vital role in helping engineers and scientists perfect a team that will have the prowess and the ability to take the official World Cup trophy away from humans.

That target has been set by RoboCup's organisers for the year 2050 and was established following the success of the artificial intelligence chess challenge that was fought out in the 90s. That clash was eventually won in 1997 when IBM's Deep Blue computer program beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

Now RoboCup wants to repeat that success with the beautiful game though a quick glimpse at a few YouTube videos of robot players in action will reveal just how difficult that task is going to be. Metre-high players scuttle crabwise across the pitch. They lash out but miss the ball. Occasionally one falls over for no discernible reason. It sounds like a typical England training session, in other words, and suggests that the designers of robot footballers have a great deal of work ahead of them before they can create players that are able to beat humans.

Improvements are constantly being made, however. For example, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have developed a program that lets robots predict where the ball will go, rather than merely reacting to its movement. Tests show that such robots outperform rivals, allowing them to bend it, not so much like Beckham, but like R2-D2. Indeed, Manuela Veloso, a computer science professor at CMU, is convinced this programme will bring success for his team at RoboCup. "I don't see any reason why we won't win," he says.

So the day of the robot football player may not be that far off. And in any case, most of them are already blessed with one major advantage over their human counterparts: they look more lifelike than Peter Crouch when they celebrate after scoring a goal.

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.

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."

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.

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".

A single weekend plus Transport for London's API was enough to produce a live, self-updating map of where Underground trains are. What else is possible? (Updated)

If you haven't already spotted it from yesterday's Newsbucket, you can now see a fascinating animated Google Map (requires Javascript) showing where London Underground trains are - live. Built by Matthew Somerville of MySociety at Science Hack Day over the weekend, it uses the new Transport for London API (via the London Datastore) - combining the train predictions service plus "a bit of maths and magic.. As Somerville says on the page, "It's surprisingly okay given this was done in only a few hours at Science Hackday and the many naming/location issues encountered, some unresolved. A small number of stations are misplaced or missing; occasional trains behave oddly due to duplicate IDs; some H&C stations are missing in the TfL feed..."

Given that the API has only been available for just over a week, you've got to applaud Somerville and his (very) small array of helpers. It is fascinating (not least for the occasional "ghost train" which whizzes across the map at supersonic speeds, reckoned to be a software reset). Since its launch on Sunday, it's also got colour-coded lines and Underground symbols.

Somerville has also built a similar live-updating map for network trains from all the major termini (it defaults to Birmingham New Street, but there's a menu offering all the choices). Again, splendid stuff, using data pulled - scraped, actually - from the National Rail website. (National Rail doesn't offer an API.)

Then again, if you were going to be difficult, you might ask: why is it that we've had live feeds for aircraft positions all over Europe (created in November 2009, but launched in Sweden in 2007) for longer than we've had live feeds of the Underground? (The simple answer: aircraft have transponders which detail their location to the world. Then again, buses now have GPS units which indicate their positions to bus stops.) One (outside) developer I've spoken to says that for years TfL has been "a black box that the Greater London Authority pours money into which generates outputs, but nobody can see inside".

It looks like that is changing, though, and one has to say that the efforts of Emer Coleman, head of London's Data Store have been instrumental in getting TfL to open up its data in this way.

For example, you can find out about traffic on your commute to work.

Or you can see the locations of traffic cameras on an OpenStreetMap

In fact they're so good that the page of inspirational uses of London Datastore data is already getting rather long.

She can also take pride that the Greater London Authority is one of only four local authorities across the whole of the UK which is judged "truly open" according to Openly Local (the others are Lichfield District Council, Salford City Council and Warwickshire County Council.

However, OpenlyLocal points to another 7 authorities which are "semi-open". So that's 11 which are open or semi-open - out of a total of 434 across the country.

That's an enormous amount of work to be done by those 423 authorities - which have only until January before they should have all sort of extra data made available for free.

Yet look at the possibilities: if opening up just the first tranche of TfL data can mean this, then there could be enormous potential for other local government data applications. What would you do if you could get your hands on that data?