Deadline for broadband in all UK homes by 2012 put back by Tory culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, who says Labour's plan was impractical

The battle to close Britain's broadband divide suffered a blow today when the government pushed back the UK's target for universal access to high-speed networks by three years.

Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, said that it was not practical to meet the previous government's target of universal broadband coverage by 2012 a commitment he had previously dismissed as "paltry". Instead, Hunt said it would take until 2015 before every home in Britain had at least a 2Mbps (megabits per second) connection.

Speaking at the start of an industry day that was meant to find solutions to Britain's broadband coverage problems, Hunt claimed the previous government had not funded its 2012 commitment properly.

"I have looked at the provision the government had made to achieve this by 2012. And I'm afraid that I am not convinced that there is sufficient funding in place," Hunt told a gathering of telecoms operators. "So, while we will keep working towards that date, we have set ourselves a more realistic target of achieving universal 2Mbps access within the lifetime of this parliament."

Sebastien Lahtinen of telecoms site Thinkbroadband.com, described Hunt's move as a shock and a "significant setback for rural broadband users".

Jillian Pitt, broadband expert at Consumer Focus, said the decision was a blow. "Often people living in these remote communities are amongst the most disadvantaged in our society, so there is also a wider issue about suppliers ensuring that broadband is not only available, but also affordable," she said.

At present, 99% of homes can get some form of broadband connection but about 11% or 2 million homes cannot get speeds as high as 2Mbps. This limits their ability to use bandwidth-intensive services such as video streaming and television-on-demand. About 160,000 rural and remote households still cannot get any form of broadband, more than 10 years after the first services were launched.

Labour had assigned about 250m from the digital switchover fund to pay for its universal service obligation. It had also planned to introduce a 50p-per-line levy on all phone lines to fund the rollout of superfast networks in rural areas, but this tax was shelved before the election and then abolished by George Osborne in June's budget.

Hunt's message to the telecoms industry was that it was essential that the next generation of broadband networks, which offers speeds upwards of 40Mbps, were made available to "virtually every household". He wants Britain to have the best superfast broadband in Europe by 2015.

However, the government also expects the communications sector to take the lead, even though companies such as BT have warned that it is not economically viable to extend superfast broadband across the whole country.

BT Openreach's chief executive, Steve Robertson, has predicted that 2bn of state funding would be needed to achieve universal fibre-optic coverage in the future, and avoid a new divide in the future between those who can get the fastest services and those who cannot.

Hunt, though, said that innovative solutions were the answer. "I don't want to hear about how to roll out a fibre-optic pipe to every home in Wales," said Hunt, who suggested the water mains and sewers could be opened up if this would cut the cost of building new networks.

He also conceded that commercial operators could not solve the problem alone. "There is market failure now so I believe there will be market failure in the future, but I would be incredibly pleased to learn that this is not the case."

BT has committed to spending 2.5bn to extend its new fibre network to two-thirds of homes, but has warned that it cannot go further without government support.

Broadband is an important subject for many politicians, especially those whose constituencies are riddled with blackspots. Rory Stewart, Conservative MP for Penrith, suggested that telecoms operators should be given access to networks run by state bodies such as the Ministry of Defence, the NHS or the education sector.

Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, said that this idea would raise security issues, but agreed that public-private partnerships could be set up to make better use of public infrastructure.

The government also said today that it would start three trials of super-fast broadband networks in rural areas this autumn. These pilots should identify ways of bringing broadband to areas where it is not economically viable through partnerships, funding support, or by relaxing legislation.

Martha Lane Fox, the UK's digital champion, also attended the industry day. She said it was essential that Britain achieved universal broadband coverage at 2Mbps as soon as possible. "I know fibre rollout is important, but I personally think we can do a lot by hitting the universal service commitment," she said.

Microsoft's Kevin Turner takes a swipe at the company's much-maligned OS while having a dig at Apple's iPhone 4 problems

Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer, took aim squarely at the iPhone 4's problems in a speech yesterday.

"One of the things that I want to make sure that you know today is that you're going to be able to use the Windows Phone 7 and not have to worry about how you're holding it to make a phone call," he told Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, adding: "It looks like iPhone 4 might be their Vista."

Certainly, Apple chief Steve Jobs could be said to have invited hubris with his fulsome description of the iPhone 4's antenna layout, now reckoned to be a key source of the problem.

But what else has Turner had to say about Vista about which he's now apparently so dismissive? Looking back at his speeches, he seems to have thought it was a great idea.

Just before it was demonstrated live on stage at the Microsoft Small Business Summit in 2007, he sounded enthusiastic: "I'd really like John Stroiney to come up and really help me demonstrate for you Windows Vista, Microsoft Office, and Office for Small Business 2007, because when you see these products, and the innovation in these products, I think you'll be as excited as I am."

He certainly liked it afterwards: "You know, you saw a lot of functionality, and you saw a lot of ease of use that we put into that technology, and a great user interface, and all the different things. Windows Vista and the 2007 Office System is about safe, secure, a great experience, and improving your productivity."

His mood had apparently changed by April 2009, ahead of the launch of Windows 7: "The toughness, the tough launch that we had with the release of Vista was very brutal. The first 18 to 24 months in market was tough. Why was it tough? Because we locked that product down to fix a lot of the security problems."

And he added: "The reason that Windows 7 will be successful is because of the pain we took on Vista."

So on that score, will Apple's soon-to-be-available iOS4.1 software update be it's Windows 7, the "number one product [they've] ever put out from a quality standpoint"?

Or, possibly, it's just dangerous to make comparisons with products that you once feted.

SiteOnMobile service developed by HP Labs India offers internet functions on basic mobile phones, via voice and SMS

Tens of millions of Indian mobile-phone users could gain a gateway to the internet through a cloud-based service developed by Hewlett-Packard's research division in the country.

HP Labs' SiteOnMobile allows access to the internet using only SMS text messages and voice commands potentially opening it to India's 600 million users of mostly low-end mobile phones. By issuing commands to so-called TaskLets the servers of which are based in the cloud users can perform tasks such as checking the status of an order, requesting a quotation or booking a doctor's appointment.

Sudhir Dixit, director of HP Labs India, said SiteOnMobile aims to fill a void left by the high cost of mobile bandwidth and relatively low levels of tech literacy.

"We felt people consume a lot of content the newspaper market here is booming, for example and people are very interested, but they don't know how to consume it" Dixit said. "So we asked how to simplify web access for mobile users how can we get these mobile users to access the web?

"That was the biggest challenge we faced, we felt the fastest way would be to use SMS and voice. The web, as we approached it, should be not of pages but of tasks you go to the web because you want to want to accomplish a task."

SiteOnMobile allows website owners to quickly and easily build applications around these TaskLets, potentially expanding their reach from 60 million registered internet users to more than 600 million mobile phone users, HP says.

Dixit adds: "In countries like India and Africa, where as a business owner I have a website but the folks that have the PCs are the only ones that can access my website now I can generate more business for myself with a bigger mobile market."

The product does not yet have a long-term business model, but Dixit is confident of its commercial potential he suggests partnerships between mobile networks, small business owners and HP. Three companies are currently testing the product.

The apparent spat between the Number 10 and Facebook over the Raoul Moat tribute page has poured a little cool water on the Cameron/Zuckerberg love-in.

During Prime Minister's questions yesterday, David Cameron agreed that Facebook should take down the 'RIP Raoul Moat You Legend' page and said he "cannot understand any wave, however small, of public sympathy for this man". Facebook has refused, saying the page doesn't actually violate its terms of use.


Photo by smemon87 on Flickr. Some rights reserved

But Number 10 think it's rather good not to be seen to be too close to Facebook, we have been told, and that they need to be seen to be critical of the site from time to time as well as playing the down-with-the-youth/afternoon-tea-with-Zuck card when it suits.

So this 'anger' over Facebook's refusal to remove the page is just another convenient ebb in the ebb and flow of public perception of Mr Cameron, and his meticulously orchestrated PR effort. Splendid.

Update: The page 'RIP Raoul Moat You Legend' has been taken down. Facebook said it had not removed it, but indicated that a page creator can delete that page at any time. Perhaps the criticism got to them, or they tired of the responsibility of looking after it.

German minister proposes data privacy rules

Meanwhile the Facebook privacy row rumbles on, not because of any specific change by Facebook but because Ilse Aigner, Germany's consumer minister, has suggested that the internet community should club together and compose an 'internet honour code'.

We all know how much 'the internet community' loves drawing up lists of rules. Because the success of the internet all comes down to rules, doesn't it?

It doesn't? Oh. You might remember the carnage the last time someone proposed rules about blogging after this Kathy Sierra episode. It doesn't work, in large part because most of us have a strong feeling about what Supernanny would call 'ceptable behaviour' online and slightly resent someone else's version being imposed on us - especially when it is only a tiny minority that act irresponsibly. That wouldn't work in the real world, but hey.

Aigner wants ten "short, sharp and clear" golden rules, she told Die Welt. "It would be good if users themselves made suggestions. We could base them on social networks that already have a 'netiquette'."

Who writes down manners? Can courtesy be legislated?

Timothy Stroud's hamlet can't get broadband, but there are wireless options. And because he lives in France, WiMax is one of them.

Have you any ideas for a suitably reliable and inexpensive technology for "the last mile" to a French hamlet where six out of the seven houses are desperate for fast internet? We are blocked from the local WiMax signal by a hill, and the 3G option is dreadfully slow and outrageously expensive for anything except checking your mail once a day.
Timothy Stroud

What the communications industry calls "the last mile" typically from the closest exchange to your front door is a problem because the cost of installing a wired connection is high and the number of users is generally low. It's also risky because installing the connection is a sunk cost for the operator and there's no guarantee you'll keep paying for the service. This means rural broadband users will often have to find some kind of wireless solution, which probably means 3G or GPRS, WiMax, or satellite. (There are also lots of more focused alternatives such as microwave towers if you have enough money or enough users.)

In your case, the two most likely approaches are some sort of WiMax repeater or a satellite connection. If you know who supplies WiMax locally, they might be able to put a small mast in a position where it would pass on the signal, if it brings them an economically viable number of customers. There are certainly products that will set up a Wi-Fi hot spot for your hamlet, using WiMax as the "back haul" technology, one example being the Alvarion BreezeMAX Wi2. (Technically, Wi-Fi is IEEE 802.11 and WiMax is 802.16. Intel is developing chips that support both standards at the same time.) I'm not an expert in this area, so I don't know if this is viable, but you could ask.

The other option is to have a two-way satellite internet connection that should work almost anywhere in Europe. (You need line-of-sight to the Astra satellite, if that's not behind the same hill.) It might be possible to have more than one connection, given that prices have come down, but if not, you can share one via Wi-Fi, up to a point. The main drawback with satellite is latency: there's a delay while the signal makes its way into space and back. However, while latency makes satellite broadband hopeless for gaming, it's certainly OK for business use.

I don't know exactly where you are, but France has relatively advanced broadband services. Viveole might be worth a look. It offers "Internet haut d bit par Satellite & Wimax sur 100% du territoire". Nordnet also offers satellite access.

In the long term, a 3G or 4G mobile phone system such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) might offer a viable broadband connection. However, rural coverage is likely to remain poor, costs will remain high, and bandwidth will always be limited. Right now, WiMax is a cheaper and more efficient wireless solution, and doesn't require the same sort of high-priced spectrum which may explain why most carriers are not interested. (See the LTE v WiMax Shootout infographic.)

Tim Stroud replied to my email answer: "We had investigated satellite connections but found that, though generally reliable, they became remarkably expensive for the use we would need to make of them. However, I have contacted the supplier you suggested with regard to a repeater station (or whatever it is called) and they are putting together a proposal. In the end it will depend on how much money we would be prepared to contribute measured against the income they can make from it. Of course, getting administrative permission to construct the thing and finding somewhere geographically suitable and rentable might be a very different kettle of poissons!"

We talk to WoW's lead designers about the history and future of the Warcraft universe

Designing an MMORPG is a unique creative challenge. The initial game universe can take up to five years to build and often requires the formation of a complex mythology to provide and maintain its narrative thrust through future add-ons and expansion packs. In this sense, it's more like working on a TV series than a game the design team just keeps writing new content, expanding the story, while hopefully attracting newcomers and it can go on for years.

So how does a development studio remain fresh, engaged and creative on such a lengthy and precarious production line? And where do they get their ideas? To find out, I spoke to three WoW veterans: lead designer Tom Chilton, lead content designer Cory Stockton and lead systems designer Greg Street. Here, they talk about the influences behind World of Warcraft, and some of the concepts they're taking onboard for the future of the game...

So what were the key influences behind World of Warcraft when Blizzard started out on the project?
Tom Chilton: It was most heavily influenced by the early MMOs. At the time, a lot of people at Blizzard were playing games like Ultima Online, Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, and were really into that kind of game. The WoW team originally started off with a different project they were making a game called Nomad, a role-playing game, but the decision was made that it was not making the progress we wanted. So one day we announced: "You're no longer working on Nomad, now you're going to make World of Warcraft!"

And what are your key inspirations for the mythology and narrative elements on the game?
TC: It's a combination of a lot of things. We're absolutely influenced by Dungeons and Dragons, and Tolkien, we're influenced by movies and not just movies with fantasy settings, we're influenced by contemporary and sci-fi movies. All that plays a role.

Cory Stockton: We all look to film, we look at the grand sets and think, "wow, that's crazy, how could we translate that?" Seeing something like Avatar or Lord of the Rings, it's just the way they can take a space and make it feel alive. We're influenced by tons of games and not just MMOs. I've always been a console gamer, so for me, I see Metroid, which has lots of exploration and discovering new things, and I see a lot of Zelda in WoW.

Look at some of the boss fights we're doing nowadays compared to way back. One of our first raid boss fights, Ragnaros he's stuck in a room and barely moves, the room never changes. But you look at the fights we do now, we have bosses who break down walls; you can break off parts of their limbs, then that falls through the floor, and the player jumps through too. If you think of the Zelda bosses, they interact with the whole environment. When I look at WoW, that's what I think of, the action adventure genre. You've got to get the MMO part of it out of your head. For a player, when they're doing a dungeon or a quest, there's no reason that you can't do things you can do in a console game. It's the idea of erasing those barriers.

There are definitely some areas that have reminded me of Super Mario 64 and Prince of Persia the way you need to plan your way through the environment
TC: Exactly, and I think you're going to see more of that in Cataclysm, and that's because our toolsets have got so much better. We tried to do some of that stuff in the past, but it probably wasn't as polished as we would have liked; now, with our vehicle system, we can do so many more things. And they're not even just vehicles; we can use the system to have you grab a rope and swing on to a pirate ship that's done using the vehicle system, but to the player that's all invisible, it just feels like a cool mechanic.

And just like Nintendo's games, the idea of balance is vital?
Greg Street: My background prior to Blizzard was working on real-time strategy games and that was 100% about unit balance, making sure characters felt unique but not over-powered. I approach it like a maths puzzle. Things need to have a budget if a spell is too expensive no one is going to want to use it, or if a spell does the exact same thing as another one it's not going to be attractive. It's almost like bringing the economy of an RTS into an MMO.

We've talked about games and genres that you've all been inspired by, but are there any star game designers you look up to? Maybe the likes of, say, Richard Bartle or Raph Koster?
CS: I look up to Miyamoto, I look up to Sid Meier. It's not just their games, it's their philosophies on game design. With Miyamoto, it's the idea that control is king whatever crazy ideas he has for games what always matters is that the controls are unbelievable.

We have the same design philosophy at Blizzard. When we do something in WoW, it's got to feel instantly reactive, it can't feel laggy, it can't feel confusing. Something as simple as the jump you see people jumping about in WoW all the time and the reason they do that is because we tuned the living crap out of it. The animations are tuned exactly right, the way we send those commands over the server, we have prioritisation on stuff, so certain animations will play smoothly. And we have randomness built into that, in the way the night elf does an occasional front flip. A jump animation isn't just that, it has multiple alternatives. And no one would think that a jump animation matters that much, but we put in so much effort because we knew players would be doing it all the time.

With Sid Meier, you get the influence on the overall game as a whole. He's got this theory of each game taking one third prototype, one third crazy ideas, one third proven ideas, and you put those together and you see a game evolve.

How would you describe the development process on WoW these days?
GS: We tend to work from these very long task lists of ideas. When we have a new idea, we put it on the list then we spend time either bumping them up or bumping them down. In the software we use to track our tasks we're in numbers like 20-30,000 ideas. And we'll see an item at number 5,000 that's just been bumped for years and years, and maybe some day we'll do it, of if the game has gone in a different direction, we just delete it. So for every patch we'll get the list out and say, "okay, is there anything on here we want to try to get in?" Often it just takes a designer who's very passionate about something. People have a lot of power on the team to just push something they're very excited about, to get it in the game. Often all it takes is one champion to get the ball rolling.

How do new features get implemented is the process led by the programmers or the design team?
CS: Basically, we come up with a crazy idea, and then it comes down to, can [the coders] implement it?! If they can't then we ask, "what can we get?" And then it's down to time how long will it take to get this done? We come up with a bit list and just see if we can implement it. A great example would be when we added flying to Burning Crusade that was the biggest addition to WoW at that point it was a huge programming task. We knew we had to have it, it was the key back-of-the-box feature, but it was clear we'd take a super long time to get it, which meant there were a couple of other things we couldn't do. But we had to decide, what will make the biggest impact for the players?

How much of the current design work is based on watching emergent player activities in the game world and thinking, "hey we should actually support that more fully?"
CS: It totally happens, both from playing the game ourselves and watching other people play. A good example would be Wintergrasp, which was our open-world PvP zone in Northwind. It was the first time we'd ever done something like that, it was PvP but it wasn't in an instance, so any one could come. And it was really crazy, getting it into the game, and it turned out to be one of the most popular parts of the Wrath of Lich King overall.

But we made a massive number of changes to it after it went into the game because people were playing it in very different ways than we expected. We had a system where you had to get a certain amount of honourable kills to get vehicles, but the players ended up doing something completely different to get vehicles so we modified the whole system. The way that they were attacking the bases was way different to how we had planned. The problem with something like that is, with the beta it's hard to get critical mass of people to play it, but when it goes on the server and you have a thousand people going on there at one time, a group mentality works very differently to a small number of players. Definitely, with things like that, we just make updates with every patch. Now we haven't touched it for a while, because it's running exactly how we want.

TC: I'd say most of what we do now is driven by player feedback. It might be feedback we've been hearing since six years ago and we only now have an opportunity to do it, and sometimes it's things that have come up recently. And as you'd expect there are way more ideas than we ever have time to do.

Part two tomorrow

Demise of UK gaming magazine was inevitable given its low circulaton and the dominance of the internet

The news that PC Zone magazine is to close was no real surprise, given the low ABCs (11,000) and general decline in PC games sales.

That won't stop many shedding a nostalgic tear or two, of course. Zone was especially relevant in the mid 90s. The games industry was increasingly becoming the professional gargantuan beast we know today, but Zone's tone and humour harked back to the more anarchic at least in the UK industry of the 80s and early 90s.

Writers like Charlie Brooker actually, shouldn't he be writing this? made their names on Zone, but the internet and the growth of console gaming saw sales rapidly decline.

PC Zone's launch publisher, Tim Ponting, who is now director of the videogame PR company Renegade, told us he was incredibly sad to see the magazine fold.

"It's magnificent that it lasted 17 years given that this is predominantly a market now dominated by the internet, and has been for some time," he said.

"There were some great writers who got their start on the magazine, like Charlie Brooker and David McCandless, who have gone on to bigger and better things. It always managed to have that distincitve voice, like all great magazines."

Brooker had this to say: "PC Zone was a cross between Viz and Which? magazine. It never took anything too seriously, least of all itself. It was also where I learned to write, so if you hate my flippant, manic-depressive 'style', blame PC Zone.

"Often the reviews were quite long: you'd have to write four or five pages on Tomb Raider, say, which offered plenty of scope for going off on tangents or penning lengthy nonsensical screeds. There was an attitude of 'anything goes provided it's funny'. It was as much comedy mag as games mag.

"I guess its demise is inevitable. Actually, I'm impressed it lasted as long as it did, given the dominance of consoles, and the sheer wealth of reviews and so forth you can find for free online. The mag itself may have died, but the general tone and character of PC Zone lives on in British gaming sites and forums, and in Ben Croshaw's Zero Punctuation pieces and the like."

The sad thing is that the PC mags generally are probably more interesting now than they have been for at least five years. With PC releases less plentiful than they once were although rumours of the death of PC gaming are hugely exaggerated there tends to be at least one or two features a month worth reading.

The console magazines, on the other hand, tend to be dominated by reviews understandable given their younger audience and the sheer volume of releases.

I'll miss PC Zone. What about you? And what about games mags generally do you still read them?

Survey finds internet listening is on the up thanks to mobile devices

Radio audience measurement body Rajar says new figures show that 20% of smart phone users have a radio app installed on their device.

Its most recent survey also shows that 31% of listeners listen to the radio online and 16% have downloaded a podcast. It appears that radio habits are adapting well the arrival of not just streaming internet but catchup services.

13% of the adults questioned have listened to radio by a mobile phone, with the majority using a specific FM preset on the app, with a only small proportion running a station-centric app.

Out of those 20% with a radio app, more than half use their apps at least once a week. On the internet radio front, 25% use time-shifted services to catch up on programmes they have missed. The vast majority said that the "listen again" services had no impact on the amount of live radio they listen to, with the average listener just the services twice a week.

The awareness of personalised online radio services has increased to 14%, with frequent users up to 11%. Personalised radio services (such as Last.fm) create a streaming radio station based on your listening habits and artists you enjoy.

Podcast listening figures are also on the up, with 15% of the adult population listen to a podcast once a week but only 25% of the users listen to the entire recording. The typical listener subscribes to less than five podcasts, mostly in the comedy and music genres. Those surveyed listen to podcasts home and on the way to work, with 36% claiming that podcasts have introduced them to new radio shows.

Have you listened on a mobile device or do you fancy the internet over the air? Check out TuneIn Radio for the iPhone, Android Online Radio or iheartradio for BlackBerry to tune into your favourite station.

Be aware that unless you are on Wi-Fi, radio stream over the air will zap up your data usage faster than you can say Radio 2.

Chinese micro-blogging sites appear to have become the latest target of Beijing's internet police

Dozens of blogs by some of China's most outspoken users have been abruptly shut down in an apparent crackdown.

The move comes amid unexplained changes to popular Twitter-like websites that have users worried the government is trying to restrict them, too. One microblog site is down for maintenance, and the other three now show a "beta" tag as if they are in testing, though they have been operating for months.

The companies that run the websites aren't saying why, fueling suspicions.

China maintains the world's most extensive internet monitoring and filtering system. Google's refusal to continue censoring search results was one of the reasons it moved its Chinese search engine offshore earlier this year.

Chinese officials fear that public opinion might spiral out of control as social networking and social protests boom among the world's largest internet population, which hit 420 million this year. The government unplugged Twitter and Facebook last year and has kept domestic versions under scrutiny.

The blogs of well-known writers, lawyers and others were shut down abruptly yesterday on the popular Sohu portal, which hosts both regular and microblogs.

"I was writing a new post and suddenly my blog couldn't open," lawyer Pu Zhiqiang told AP.

Legal expert Xu Zhiyong said his blog was also shut down on Wednesday, a day after his Sohu microblog was closed. Both men are well- nown for taking on sensitive issues.

Blogger Yao Yuan listed at least 61 blocked Sohu blogs, including his own, on a separate, unblocked blog today. He called the closings mass murder.

"If internet users don't speak out, all sites will be cracked down on in the future," said Yao, who owns an internet promotion company in Shanghai. "Ordinary people will forever lose their freedom to speak online, and the government can rest without worrying anymore."

More and more bloggers are using microblogs as their primary publishing tool. Microblogs can quickly aggregate critical voices, which is why authorities have been increasing controls, said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California-Berkeley.

"However, given the speed and volume of microblogging content produced in Chinese cyberspace, censors are still several steps behind at this stage," he said.

China's government actually embraced microblogs earlier this year, with the Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, launching a microblog of its own.

The People's Daily microblog showed no sign of new restrictions. Meanwhile, Beijing's public security bureau announced it would set up a microblog for the city's police, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported yesterday.

But privately run microblogs are having a tougher time. The Netease.com microblog is down for maintenance, while the Sina, Sohu and Tencent microblogs display a beta tag.

Sina president Chen Tong responded last night to speculation that the site could be shut down. "Of course not," he said on the site's microblog. "I've said that sentence more than any other one today."

Government officials could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, another possible move against bloggers surfaced this week. Human Rights in China, a New York-based group, released comments it had obtained by Wang Chen, director of the State Council Information Office, calling for requirements that people use their real names when going online.

"As long as our country's internet is linked to the global internet, there will be channels and means for all sorts of harmful foreign information to appear on our domestic internet," Wang said in April. "Many weak links still exist in our work. These problems have weakened our ability to manage the internet scientifically and effectively."

Technologically savvy users can still jump China's "Great Firewall" with proxy servers or other alternatives. And they can just keep posting. Pu, the lawyer, said he has already set up a new Sohu blog his 13th so far.

There's more to the unemployment data than the headline figures. Here's our guide to the rest
Unemployment where you live

The unemployment figures give a unique picture of the state of Britain's economy - all thanks to the Office for National Statistics.

While all the attention focuses on the headline data, the full release from the ONS includes a wealth of other information. Here is our pick of the best.

1. Overall unemployment is going down - slightly

The latest figures show unemployment has gone down by 34,000 people - or 0.1%. But that still leaves 2.74m people unemployed, 1.46m of whom claim unemployment benefit. These are the kind of levels not seen consistently in the UK since the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of recession then. Unemployment always goes up after a recession - a 'douple-dip' GDP fall would mean higher numbers of unemployed in the future

2. But more people are working part-time

A million people now work part-time because they can't get a full-time job. And, while there are 283,000 less full-time jobs than there were a year ago, the part-time sector has grown, with 279,000 more people employed part-time. Most of that growth, some 205,000, has been in women working part-time - women's full-time jobs are down 143,000 on last year. Many more women work part-time than men - 5.9m, compared to 1.9m

3. There are less public sector jobs

There are 7,000 less jobs in the public sector in the latest figures - after two years of rises which have kept unemployment numbers steady. Nationalising large financial institutions, growths in education and health have all played a major part - with 6m people (21.1% of the workforce) now in the public sector. The latest figures, however, show every public employment falling in every industry - apart from the NHS, which has grown by 66,000 people in the last year - the military and the police

4. Unemployment has gone up in Northern Ireland

The biggest percentage increases in benefit claimants have been in Northern Ireland, scene of riots this week. Constituencies in Belfast, Armagh and South Down have seen rises of 17-26% in benefit claimants. 5% of Northern Ireland's working population signs on and it is the only region to have seen a growth in claimants. Overall unemployment is up too - by 7,000 on the quarter - the largest proportional rise across the UK, albeit a small one at 0.6%

5. Some towns are recovering

Swindon suffered with the close of major manufacturing plants in the recession. But now, the latest figures show the claimant count going down there. In the South Swindon constiteuncy, 4.1% of the working populaiton is still signing on - compared to 5.7% a year ago - down by nearly 1,000 people. There have been similar drops in South Swindon (down from 5.7% to 4.1%), Redditch (5.7% to 4.1%) and Sedgefield (4.9% to 3.8%)

6. There are more long-term unemployed

The number of people unemployed for more than twelve months increased by 61,000 to reach 787,000 the highest figure since March 1997. Conversely the numbers of short-term unemployed people (under six months) has fallen by 54,000 - which is now 1.16m. The number of people who've been unemployed for over two years is also higher than it's been for some time - 293,000, up by 26.3% on the year

7. Youth unemployment is going down - slightly

Or rather, it is for 18 to 24 year olds - there were 19,000 less people in that age group unemployed (707,000), compared to the first three months of the year. But for 16-17 year olds, unemployment is higher - 216,000 of them were unemployed, up 13,000 on the beginning of the year. 10% of them were unemployed for more than a year

8. Birmingham has the highest rates in the country

The data shows the UK's worst unemployment blackspots are relatively unchanged by talk of recovery. The highest jobseekers allowance claimant rates are in two Birmingham constituencies: Ladywood (10.8% of the working population, 15.4% of men) and Hodge Hill (9.6%). Another consituency, Erdington, has the fifth highest rate in the country - behind Hull West and Hessle, where 8.6% of the working population - including 12.2% of men - are signing on and Middlesbrough (8.6%)

9. Foreign workers are suffering more than those from the UK

The 3.7m workers born outside the UK have seen their jobs fall by 2.7%, compared to 1% for UK-born in the last year. The worst hit, proportionally, are the workers born in Africa - with a decrease of 5%. Seemingly unaffected by the recession are those from the USA - who have seen a rise of 28,000 (38.3%) to 103,000 and from India, whose jobs have risen by 21,000 (6.3%) to 361,000

10. It's worse in other places

At 7.9%, the UK does not have the worst unemployment rate in Europe - that accolade belongs to Latvia which has 20% of its workforce unemployed and Spain, at 19.9%. The EU average is closer to the UK at 9.6%, as is Canada's at 7.9%. However, many developed countries are better off than us - including Denmark (6.8%), Germany (7%) and the Netherlands (4.3%)

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Mobile firm understood to be considering signing up to BBC-backed venture to bring VoD to Freeview and Freesat

Mobile phone company Orange is understood to be considering signing up to Project Canvas, the BBC-backed venture to bring video-on-demand to Freeview and Freesat.

If a deal can be secured the number of Project Canvas partners will rise back to seven after Channel Five dropped out last week.

Last year Orange looked at buying the technology behind Project Kangaroo, the defunct broadband TV joint venture between ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC, to bolster its Orange broadband service and offer a more attrractive package to customers.

The company pulled out and Arqiva sealed a deal, subsequently using it to launch online TV service SeeSaw. Arqiva is also a partner in Project Canvas.

"Orange has definitely held talks with them, they have been keen to be involved for some time although I think it went cold [for a while] when they decided to wholly focus on the integration with T-Mobile," said one industry source. "Last year they looked at Kangaroo."

The company is one of the big five broadband players in the UK but is the only major one not to be able to offer some form of VoD service to entice customers with bundled packages of products.

BT, which runs the BT Vision VoD service, and TalkTalk are Project Canvas partners, while both BSkyB and Virgin Media have their own conventional pay-TV and VoD offerings.

"Orange have for a long time been trying to come up with a TV strategy in the UK," said an industry source. "They wouldn't want to be the only 'to consumer' provider of fixed broadband without a TV component. It shows that triple play [offering a bundle of products to consumers] is so important in this market."

In May the Project Canvas director, Richard Halton, said that the venture was seeking another partner for a company that can add "scale and expertise to the platform ... it is a question of finding an organisation that shares the aims of the venture".

Observers believed that the partner could be Virgin Media, which has said that it is not opposed to Project Canvas in principle but does have a number of issues with the venture. Virgin Media is expected to lodge a complaint with the media regulator Ofcom arguing that the project breaches competition laws.

An Ofcom spokesman said: "We have not received a complaint about Canvas, but if one were to be made to us on competition grounds we would consider it carefully working closely with the OFT."

A spokesman for Orange declined to comment.

 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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Culture secretary Ed Vaizey tells Develop Conference that he backed the axing of the tax credit propsal

Culture secretary Ed Vaizey has reiterated his support for the video game industry, but is backing George Osborne's decision to remove proposed tax incentives from the budget.

Speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Vaizey told a packed audience of game developers and publishers that he remains "a committed champion of this industry" and that Osborne's plan to support the private sector through macro initiatives, rather than targeted measures, would make the UK games business more competitive.

Introducing Vaizey to the audience, veteran video game designer Charles Cecil praised the minister's decision to walk into "the lion's den" and Vaizey's opening gambit was a rush of conciliatory rhetoric.

"This industry ticks every political box going," he said. "It's high tech; it's regional, covering the nation from Brighton to Dundee; it attracts graduates from what we like to call the difficult subjects, such as computer science and maths; it covers a huge range of sectors, it's not just the leisure industry, it's health, education, defence; in almost any area you think of, video games have a role to play."

Vaizey also talked about the sea change in attitudes to gaming the fact that politicians have stopped blaming games for all of society's ills (although no one seems to have mentioned this to Keith Vaz), and that the wider media are now taking the sector seriously. "I think a reason for this change is that video games are becoming as essential to the home as television," he said. "Their influence can be seen in the way we learn as well as the way we play a third of this country's population classify themselves as gamers."

After conceding that "Britain is slipping down the world rankings" of game developing nations, Vaizey asserted his intention to help the industry compete effectively on the global stage. Assuring delegates that he had supported the tax credit proposals put forward to the treasury by the games industry trade body Tiga, he saidthat the budget still offered opportunities to the sector.

"George Osborne passionately believes in the power of the private sector to pull us out of recession, so there are a range of measures in the budget to help business," he said. "There's a major package of reforms to business taxation, reducing the corporation tax main rate to 24% by 2014; and reducing the small profits rate of corporation tax to 20% from 2011."

He also mentioned proposed changes to the R&D tax credits scheme to help innovation, as well as the coalition's decision to reverse Labour's plans to increase national insurance.

As for specific incentives to aid the games industry, Vaizey mentioned the funding competitions run by the Technology Strategy Board for collaborative R&D projects which have, since 2004, "put in over 4m into games projects."

He also reeled off the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's 6m funding of the new centres for Digital Entertainment at Bath and Bournemouth universities, and support the industry has received from NESTA. He also formerly launched a new 2m fund to support new games IP run by the University of Abertay in Dundee, which is open to applications from any digital entertainment company in the UK.

When questioned about the possibility of tax incentives being supported in the future, Vaizey was non-committal, but offered a glimmer of hope. "I can't emphasise enough that I'm not the chancellor; it's just that in my view the treasury is always open to rational argument.

"If you take the opportunity after the budget to look very hard at the kind of incentives you think the industry needs, particularly in order to attract foreign investment and also to compete across the world, then its up to you to decide the right focus and make that case."

However, talking to the Guardian after the speech, Tiga chief Richard Wilson expressed his disappointment at the government's stance. "It's good to hear that Ed Vaizey is still supportive of the games industry. What's disappointing I think is to see how negative the treasury is toward sector-specific tax break.

"The treasury says it wants to show that the UK is open for business, but until we get our tax break against production, as far as the games industry is concerned, we're not going to have that sign above the UK economy.

"We demonstrated in our research which the treasury accepted before the change of government, so the arguments must have been pretty convincing that with a tax break against production we'd have another 3,500 graduate jobs, another 457m investment and above all the tax break would actually pay for itself. Can't they add two and two together?"

Earlier, Vaizey had suggested that Tiga's case to the treasury hadn't been strong enough an argument that Wilson vociferously countered: "It was included in the March budget, for goodness sake. We convinced the treasury pre-election and we apparently convinced the Liberal and Conservative parties while they were in opposition in fact, Ed Vaizey's on record saying that George Osborne agreed with him about tax breaks against games production, before the election. It would be fascinating to find out what happened between the March budget and the emergency budget."

Despite providing no real assurances on the future of tax credits, Vaizey was given a relatively easy ride by the assembled industry insiders. There was no doubt an acknowledgment that the culture minister's support remains a valuable asset indeed, those at the conference were reminded of this fact by Charles Cecil as he took to the stage to announce the speech.

During the Q&A session at the end of the keynote, the question that drew the loudest response from the audience was: "What game are you playing at the moment?" Amid the laughter, Vaizey replied: "Super Mario Galaxy." Perhaps his most resolute and satisfying response of the day.

Russian Alexey Karetnikov, deported form the US as part of a 'spy ring', was working at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters

Call him the 12th man: but this one was unusual, because according to the US authorities, Alexey Karetnikov who was deported to Russia as part of the "spy ring" earlier this week was working for Microsoft.

According to details released by the US, Karetnikov entered the US in October and had been living in Redmond, the city in the north-western state of Washington where the software giant Microsoft has its headquarters and according to his Facebook page, he was working for Microsoft and for Neobit, a Romanian-based software company.

The US Department of Homeland Security said the suspect was "just in the early stages; had just set up shop" when he was detained in the sweep that led to the biggest spy swap since the Cold War.

Karetnikov, a Russian citizen in his early- to mid-20s, was held over immigration violations in the absence of enough evidence to charge him with a crime. But he had been monitored almost as soon as he arrived in the US, and the DHS was confident that he obtained "absolutely no [useful] information".

At a court hearing on Monday, the Russian admitted being illegally present and agreed to the deportation in lieu of further court proceedings.

Microsoft said it was looking into questions about Karetnikov, but had no further information.

It is unclear whether Karetnikov was part of the same spy ring that included Anna Chapman, who was based in the country's capital. One official told the Washington Post that Karetnikov had obtained a job in the US and was "just doing the things he needed to do to establish cover".

PayPal systems use information shared in confidence, claims XPRT Ventures

The online auctioneer eBay is being sued for $3.8m over six alleged patent infringements and breaking a confidentiality agreement relating to its PayPal payment service.

According to Reuters, XPRT Ventures claims that eBay incorporated information shared in confidence into the "PayPal Buyer Credit" and "Pay Later" services, and used it in a 2003 patent application.

Photo by Sam Howzit on Flickr. Some rights reserved

"This involves a trade secret theft, along with sheer patent infringement," said Steven Moore, a partner at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP representing the plaintiff. "It is bad enough to take someone's technology, but it is a bit much to use it in your own patent application."

The payments division of eBay generated $2.8bn in 2009, 32% of their $8.73bn total for the year. XPRT seems to be looking for a chunk of this, seeking a minimum of $3.8bn in monetary damages. It is also seeking treble damages resulting from eBay's alleged "willful and malicious conduct", punitive damages, among other claims.

Much like Facebook in the case brought by Paul Ceglia that we reported yesterday, eBay dismissed the complaint as "without merit". A spokeswoman said: "We intend to defend ourselves vigorously."

The news had little imapct on eBay's share price, which closed 3.9% up at $21.01 last night.

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, may just represent the future of news reporting, but he's not a journalist

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to avoid US
WikiLeaks to release video of deadly US Afghan attack
Pass notes: Wikileaks
Who watches Wikileaks?

Everything about this is odd. Julian Assange, the founder, director, frontman, guiding spirit of global whistleblowing service WikiLeaks looks a bit odd for a start. Tall, cadaverous, dressed in ripped jeans, brown jacket, black tie, battered trainers. Somebody says he looks like Andy Warhol with his prematurely white hair, but I can't remember who, which will bother the hell out of him because accuracy is everything. He detests subjectivity in journalism; I fear that part of him detests journalists, too, and that WikiLeaks which describes itself as an "uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking" is essentially a way of cutting out subjectivist idiots such as me.

If Assange was producing this article, he would post the rambling hour-and-a-half-long talk he delivers at the Centre for Investigative Journalism's summer school at London's City University online, plus the 10 minutes we spend talking on the way to a restaurant I almost get him run down by a speeding BMW, which would probably have changed the course of investigative journalism and the additional 20 minutes of chat in the restaurant before it's politely suggested I've exhausted my time. "When you're dealing with any secondary sources [about me], be extremely careful," he says as we walk, even picking holes in a recent New Yorker piece, enormously long, detailed, no doubt majestically fact-checked, but in which the writer makes an assumption about one of his supporters based on little more than the T-shirt she is wearing.

"Journalism should be more like science," he tells me in the restaurant. "As far as possible, facts should be verifiable. If journalists want long-term credibility for their profession, they have to go in that direction. Have more respect for readers." He likes the idea of a 2,000-word article backed by 25,000 words of source material, and says there is no reason why you can't provide that on the internet. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that car was a BMW, or even that it was speeding.

Assange unveiled wikileaks.org in January 2007 and has pulled off some astonishing coups for an organisation with a handful of staff and virtually no funding. It has exposed evidence of corruption in the family of former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi, published the standard operating procedures for the Guant namo Bay detention centre, even made public the contents of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account. But what has really propelled WikiLeaks into the media mainstream is the video it released in April of a US helicopter attack in Baghdad in July 2007, which killed a number of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters personnel, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen.

The video, posted in a 39-minute unedited version and as an 18-minute film called Collateral Murder, gives a chilling insight into US military attitudes: sloppiness in identifying targets (the helicopter pilots mistook the Reuters employees' cameras for weapons), eagerness to finish off a grievously wounded man as he attempts to crawl to safety, and lack of concern even for two children in a van that arrives to pick up the bodies and is immediately attacked. "It's their fault for bringing their kids to a battle," says one of the pilots. "That's right," replies his colleague matter-of-factly. This, though, is one of the most one-sided battles you will ever witness. Very few cameras can bring down a helicopter gunship.

My thesis, soon to be exploded by Assange along with pretty well everything else I have predetermined on the basis of what I have read about him, is that this remarkable video is a transformative moment for WikiLeaks. But just before I can put that to him, a handsome, bearded student who was at the talk springs forward. "Julian, before you go, can I just shake your hand," he says, "because I really love what you do and you're like a hero, you really are." They shake hands. The icon and the acolyte. The Warhol parallel becomes ever stronger: Assange as impresario of a new form of news.

So the thesis. "Did the April video change everything?" I say. This is a rhetorical question, because I am quite sure it must have. "No," he says. "Journalists always like an excuse for why are they talking about something now when they didn't talk about something a week ago. They always like to say something is new." He does, though, accept that the scope of WikiLeaks is expanding rapidly. At the beginning of his talk, he said his head was "full of so many things at the moment", as if to excuse the faltering, unstructured nature of his presentation. What things? "We have been trying to raise funds for the past six months," he says, "so we've been doing very few releases and now we have an enormous queue of submissions that has piled up. We're working on those and working on engineering systems to speed up our publishing pipeline."

WikiLeaks has just five full-time staff and about 40 others who, he says, "very frequently do things", backed by 800 occasional helpers and 10,000 supporters and donors an amorphous, decentralised structure, which might become the model for many media organisations in the future, as what might be called "journalism factories" become both outmoded and unfinanceable. This is a delicate moment in the development of what Assange prefers to think of as a "movement". "We have all the problems that a growing startup organisation has," he says, "combined with an extreme adversarial environment and state spying."

The danger of penetration by the security services is acute. "It makes it hard to get new talent quickly," he says, "because everyone has to be checked out, and it makes internal communication very difficult because everything has to be encrypted and security procedures put in place. And we also have to be ready to respond to lawsuits." On the plus side, the recent fundraising drive produced $1m, mostly from small donors. Large trusts, though, have steered clear of WikiLeaks because of political suspicions, worries about the legality of posting leaked material on the internet, and the common failing that western-based funding bodies are happy to underwrite expos s of malpractice in the developing world but less willing to look into the murky corners of so-called first world countries.

Is WikiLeaks the journalistic model for the future? He gives a characteristically lateral answer. "All over the world the barriers between what is inside an organisation and outside an organisation are being smoothed out. In the military, the use of contractors means that what is the military and what is not the military is smoothed out. Newswise, you see the same trend what is the newspaper and what is not the newspaper? Comments on websites from the general public and supporters . . . " His point trails away, so I press him to make a prediction about the shape of the media in a decade or so from now. "For the financial and specialist press, it'll still look mostly the same your daily briefing about what you need to know to run your business. But for political and social analysis, that's going to be movements and networks. You can already see this happening."

Assange has to be careful about his personal security. Bradley Manning, a 22-year-old US army intelligence analyst, has been arrested and charged with allegedly giving WikiLeaks the footage of the Baghdad attack, and the US authorities believe the organisation has another video of an attack on the Afghan village of Granai in which many civilians were killed. There have also been disputed reports that WikiLeaks may be holding 260,000 classified diplomatic cables, and the US authorities have been quoted as saying they want to interview Assange about all this material, publication of which would they say breach national security. Some sources with links in the intelligence agencies have warned him he is in danger and advised him not to travel to the US. He refuses to confirm that Manning was the source of the Baghdad video, but says whoever did leak it was "a hero".

At the talk I heard a man close to me say to his neighbour: "Do you think there'll be spooks here? The US are after him, you know." And of course it's possible. But giving a public talk to 200 students in the centre of London does not suggest someone who is in fear of extraordinary rendition. On the other hand, the organiser of the lecture tells me Assange tends not to stay in the same place two nights in a row. So is he taking the threats seriously? "When you first get them, you must take them quite seriously. Some very senior people advised me that there were significant problems, but there's a clarity now. The public statements from the [US] state department have mostly been reasonable. Some statements made in private have not been reasonable, but the demeanour of those private statements has changed over the past month and have become more positive."

Assange, despite his faltering manner, exudes self-confidence, immodesty even. When I ask him whether the rapid growth and increasing significance of WikiLeaks surprises him, he says no. "I was always confident the idea would succeed, otherwise I wouldn't have spent my time on it or asked other people to spend their time on it." He has spent a good deal of that time recently in Iceland, where freedom of information is protected and he has high-level supporters. It was here that the complex work of decrypting the video of the Baghdad attack was done. But he says he has no real base. "It's just like a war correspondent, I'm everywhere," he says. "Or like anyone setting up a multinational corporation, where you go visit all the regional offices. We have supporters in many countries."

Assange was born in Queensland in 1971 into what sounds a highly unconventional family here one is relying on those secondary sources he warned me about, and it really would be useful to see the documentation. His parents ran a touring theatre company, and he went to 37 different schools (though some accounts suggest his mother thought school encouraged deference to authority, so educated him mainly at home). His parents divorced, his mother remarried, there was a bustup with her new husband, which led to her, Julian and his half-brother going on the run. It all sounds too Warholian to be true, but I suppose we have to trust it. There is no time to ask him for his life history, and I don't suppose he'd be very interested to tell it if there was. His replies generally are brief and a little hesitant, and when I ask him whether there is anything that WikiLeaks wouldn't publish he says, "That isn't an interesting question," in his soft Australian accent, and leaves it at that. Assange is not someone who feels the need to fill dead air.

He fell in love with computers in his teens, became a skilled hacker and formed a group called International Subversives, which broke into US defence department computers. He married at 18, and he and his wife soon had a son, but the marriage broke down and he fought a long custody battle, which, it is said, entrenched his dislike of authority. There are also suggestions he felt some people in the government had been conspiring against him. So we have a neat journalistic picture: computer expert with two decades of hacking experience, hostility to authority, conspiracy theorist. Setting up WikiLeaks in his mid-30s looks like an inevitable move.

"That's more a journalist sees something now and then tries to find a rationale for it," he says. "This is how history is produced in general. We see something now and we try and make a story that is cohesive to explain it. But that's not what I see. It is true that there are certain abilities that I had, and I was also fortunate to be in a western country with access to financial resources and the internet, and there are very few people who have the particular constellation of abilities and connections that I did. It is also true that I have always been interested in politics, geopolitics, and possibly secrecy to some degree." This is not really an answer, but it's all I'm going to get. Again like Warhol, there is an air of cultivated vagueness.

In his talk, Assange had said that he is neither of the right nor the left his enemies are forever trying to pin labels on him in order to undermine his organisation. What matters first and foremost is getting the information out. "First the facts, ma'am," is how he summarises his philosophy to me. "Then we'll get down to what we want to do about it. You can't do anything sensible until you know what the situation is that you're in." But while he rejects political labels, he says WikiLeaks does have its own ethical code. "We have values. I am an information activist. You get the information out to the people. We believe a richer intellectual and historical record that is fuller and more accurate is in itself intrinsically good, and gives people the tools to make intelligent decisions." He says an explicit part of their purpose is to highlight human rights abuses, no matter where they are carried out or who perpetrates them.

He has described the provision of a safe platform for whistleblowers his key tenet is the protection of sources as a calling, and I ask him whether this will now always be the core of his life. His reply surprises me. "I have many other ideas, and as soon as WikiLeaks is strong enough to flourish without me I'll go on with these other ideas. It is strong enough to survive quite well without me now, but I don't know that it would flourish."

Is WikiLeaks's impact in the four years since it was founded an inherent criticism of conventional journalism? Have we been asleep on the job? "There has been an unconscionable failure to protect sources," he says. "It is those sources who take all the risks. I was at a journalism conference a few months ago, and there were posters up saying a thousand journalists had been killed since 1944. That's outrageous. How many policemen have been killed since 1944?"

I misunderstand him, thinking he is bemoaning so many journalistic deaths. His point, though, is the reverse not how many journalists have been killed in the line of duty, but how few. "Only a thousand!" he says, his voice rising a little when he realises I haven't grasped his point. "How many have died in car accidents since 1944? Probably 40,000. Police officers, who have a serious role in stopping crimes, far more of them die. They take their job seriously." But journalists take their job seriously," I protest. "They don't take their job seriously," he says. "Nearly all of the thousand who've died since 1944 have been stringers in places like Iraq. Very few western journalists have died. I think it's an international disgrace that so few western journalists have been killed in the course of duty, or have been arrested in the course of duty. How many journalists were arrested last year in the United States, a country of 300 million people? How many journalists were arrested in the UK last year?"

Journalists, he says, let other people take the risks and then take the credit. They have been letting the state, big business, vested interests get away with it for too long, and a network of hackers and whistleblowers hunched over computers, making sense of complex data and with a mission to make it freely available, is now ready to do a better job. It's an incendiary argument, and one I'd stay and contest if he wasn't sipping white wine and about to order dinner. But one thing I would point out. The number of journalists killed since 1944 is closer to 2,000. After all, remember, accuracy, getting the facts straight, presenting the truth unvarnished, is everything in the brave new media world.

Xbox 360/PC; 34.99; cert 16+; City Interactive

In a strange way, Sniper: Ghost Warrior feels in tune with these credit-crunched times. Whereas most modern games vie to outdo each other in terms of providing a cinematic, complex experience, it takes a more modest approach. A first-person shoot-em-up set in an impressively rendered South American jungle environment, it eschews unnecessary frills such as arcane storylines and co-operative modes, in favour of the all-important basics.

For most of the game, you play as Tyler Wells, a sniper in an (unspecified) elite US military unit. By far the game's best aspect is its sniping engine: along with the expected cross-hairs, you're given a red dot which shows where your bullet will end up after being affected by wind and distance. Pull off a head-shot and you're treated to a very satisfying bullet-cam view of your kill. Your ghillie-suited character is also required to crawl around stealthily at times, which should please those anxious for another instalment of Metal Gear Solid. But the downside is that the impatient will find Sniper: Ghost Warrior intensely frustrating, particularly given that it is pretty unforgiving, with AI enemies seemingly able to detect you even when hidden, and enemy snipers just as well trained as you.

As the game progresses, it throws in some more conventional run-and-gun passages, in which you take over the character of one of Wells' colleagues, armed with an assault rifle rather than sniper. These appear to be unnecessarily in thrall to Modern Warfare 2 (one sequence is even set on oil rigs), and aren't enormously convincing. Things are more challenging when you play as Wells and enemies get up close and personal, forcing you to fall back on a silenced pistol and grenades. He can also throw knives and use a grappling-hook to abseil down cliffs but only at prescribed points.

Technically, Sniper: Ghost Warrior isn't great movement is a bit clunky, and you can get stuck between tree-roots or boulders, necessitating a return to the previous checkpoint. Multiplayer-wise, up to 12 people can take each other in snipe-fests in some decently thought-out maps.

While Sniper: Ghost Warrior has its faults, betraying the fact that it was created by an obscure Polish company rather than one of the big beasts, it will still satisfy those who naturally gravitate towards any opportunity for sniping when playing first-person shooters. And its no-frills, straight-up approach is curiously refreshing it certainly doesn't promise more than it delivers.

Rating: 3/5

Gartner report suggests that 'Symbian foundation is just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic'

Despite being touted as the world's most widely used mobile operating system, the folks over at Gartner believe the future for Symbian fans is not a happy one.

Forecasts to be published at the end of the month show Symbian is losing market share at an ever-increasing rate.

Symbian is still way ahead of the other players in terms of market share, and may be for some time to come, but the others (particularly Android) are catching up fast. (See Wikipedia's graphic of the 2009 end-of-year share, which shows Nokia/Symbian at 44%, RIM at 19%, Apple at 15%, Android at 10% and Windows Mobile at 7%. Since then, Android has probably overtaken Apple.)

The reason behind the downward drift appears to lie in a lack of design and purpose. RIM, Apple, Google and Microsoft have all tailor-made their latest operating systems for high-end devices with large touchscreens, providing excellent user experiences.

On the other hand, Symbian software targets a much wider variety of phones, many at the lower end of the spectrum, with different interfaces and screen sizes to encounter.

User experience has never been a high point of the development for the Symbian Foundation and little seems to be changing in the future. Although it is planning to bring a fresh new look for applications, the refresh is not due until next year.

Says Gartner's Nick Jones: "So if the weak UI [user interface] is threatening Symbian's very survival the Foundation ought to be seriously worried, right? Wrong. I just looked on the Foundation web site and blogs at the roadmap and features for future releases. What I see is too much effort on stuff that really doesn't matter." Everyone would love HDMI output or an audio policy on their mobile phone but is this really necessary?

With the three big players in smart phones each attempting to up the ante with each new release, the competition in the smart phone market is still very alive. The release of iOS 4, BlackBerry 6 and Android 2 have all brought impressive overhauls to the user interface. Whether Symbian can remain competitive and relevant in this evolving market yet is to be seen.

Why is a company that insists its partners will announce a slew of tablets and slates asking to find out how Apple users interact with theirs?

Here's an intriguing one: Microsoft User Research wants to find out more about iPad users - in detail, via a two-hour, in-depth study that it's going to carry out at its campus over the next week or so.

Remarkably, the company openly advertised its desire to connect with iPad owners "for an upcoming study to get feedback" on a Facebook page - though within hours of going up, the page was shut down.

Mistake, or was the quota filled rapidly enough to satisfy everything that the company wanted?

Given that it shut down its Courier project, which to some had looked like a viable (or at least interesting) alternative to the iPad, and that HP is reported to have shifted away from Windows 7 for its tablet/slate offering to its newly-acquired Palm OS (though a slide on Steve Ballmer's presentation the other day suggested that HP is back in the Windows fold for tablets/slates: we shall see), this doesn't look promising.

Why? Because if Microsoft has to study how people use the iPad at this juncture, it is going to take it a very long time - six months? Nine months? - to embed whatever it learns into software. Then that software has to go out to the hardware manufacturers, who have to test it against their prototypes, refine, tweak... and then get out to market.

Obviously, we'd love to hear from any readers who are based up in Redmond and have been accepted for the study. What did they want to know? What did they test? Tell us everything, by email (charles.arthur@guardian.co.uk is a good one).

And if you were at Microsoft User Research, what lessons would you be looking to learn from the iPad?

Celebrity nutritionist Gillian McKeith is embroiled in an online identity crisis as her spat with Bad Science writer Ben Goldacre hots up

Oh Gillian.

Gillian, Gillian, Gillian.

An almighty brouhaha has arisen over on Twitter. And it appears we could yet be at the calm before the storm. Here's the story (for the history see here):

Gillian McKeith, of You Are What You Eat fame, appears to have taken umbridge umbrage at a relatively innocuous tweet from Rachel E Moody:

McKeith, currently promoting ahem a new book, was incensed or at least the person operating what has previously been described as her official Twitter feed was. Scienceblogs caught the reaction before the angry missives were taken down:

Note the word "lies" in reference to Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. Enter Mr Goldacre, who tweeted: "hi @gillianmckeith, i'm writing a piece about you libelling me in the context of #libelreform, can you pls contact ben@badscience.net thnks". UPDATE: Goldacre later said he regards McKeith's comment as "a very serious and undefendable defamation".

And that's when the whole situation turned plain weird. Evolving miraculously into third-person mode just days after a first-person verification the McKeith feed sought to take apart those questioning her qualifications.

But it wasn't long before the collection of McKeith tweets were taken down, replaced with an odd volte face: "Do you actually believe this is real twitter site for the GM?" Er, yes? In large part because it was linked from your official website:

As it stands, McKeith is trending alongside Raoul Moat and Thierry Henry. As with everything on the internet, trending topics can't be deleted so how do you solve a PR problem like McKeith?

Blogging is not on the way out it's just that other social media have taken over many of its functions

A report last month in the Economist tells us that "blogging is dying" as more and more bloggers abandon the form for its cousins: the tweet, the Facebook Wall, the Digg.

Do a search-and-replace on "blog" and you could rewrite the coverage as evidence of the death of television, novels, short stories, poetry, live theatre, musicals, or any of the hundreds of the other media that went from breathless ascendancy to merely another tile in the mosaic.

Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.

When all we had was the stage, every performance was a play. When we got films, a great lot of these stories moved to the screen, where they'd always belonged (they'd been squeezed onto a stage because there was no alternative). When TV came along, those stories that were better suited to the small screen were peeled away from the cinema and relocated to the telly. When YouTube came along, it liberated all those stories that wanted to be 3-8 minutes long, not a 22-minute sitcom or a 48-minute drama. And so on.

What's left behind at each turn isn't less, but more: the stories we tell on the stage today are there not because they must be, but because they're better suited to the stage than they are to any other platform we know about. This is wonderful for all concerned the audience numbers might be smaller, but the form is much, much better.

When blogging was the easiest, most prominent way to produce short, informal, thinking-aloud pieces for the net, we all blogged. Now that we have Twitter, social media platforms and all the other tools that continue to emerge, many of us are finding that the material we used to save for our blogs has a better home somewhere else. And some of us are discovering that we weren't bloggers after all but blogging was good enough until something more suited to us came along.

I still blog 10-15 items a day, just as I've done for 10 years now on Boing Boing. But I also tweet and retweet 30-50 times a day. Almost all of that material is stuff that wouldn't be a good fit for the blog material I just wouldn't have published at all before Twitter came along. But a few of those tweets might have been stretched into a blogpost in years gone by, and now they can live as a short thought.

For me, the great attraction of all this is that preparing material for public consumption forces me to clarify it in my own mind. I don't really know it until I write it. Thus the more media I have at my disposal, the more ways there are for me to work out my own ideas.

Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling says: "The future composts the past." There's even a law to describe this, Riepl's Law which says "new, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms."

That was coined in 1913 by Wolfgang Riepl. It's as true now as it was then.

Digital publishing deals locking writers in for the duration of copyright risk damaging industry, says Society of Authors chair

The chair of the Society of Authors, Tom Holland, has hit out at publishers' attempt to seize control over electronic rights, calling ebook deals that lock authors in for the duration of copyright "not remotely fair".

Speaking at the Romantic Novelists' Association's annual conference last week, Holland urged authors to push for ebook royalties that are "considerably higher" than the standard of around 25%. Although Holland said the market for ebooks is only about 1% of the total UK market, it is "growing fast" and the Society of Authors believes that, given publishers will eventually have much lower warehousing and distribution costs for ebooks, royalties should be divided 50/50.

"Most publishers are insisting they should control ebook rights and this will be written into standard contracts. I think it's an entirely reasonable position to take, so long as the royalties and returns on ebooks are fair and proper and reasonable. If they are not, I suspect we may well find very big-name authors, such as JK Rowling or Dan Brown, will go their own way," said Holland. "It's a danger publishers need to recognise and a danger for writers as well. If JK Rowling controls her own ebook rights [then] there's less money for her publisher to invest in new authors. We could face a situation of very big-name authors pulling the ladder up after them [and] we have a stake in seeing a healthy publishing industry."

Although publishers "are inclined to dismiss the argument that costs are reduced on ebooks", Holland said: "Once a system has been set up, publishers won't be paying for warehousing, distribution and printing, and we have to ask ourselves what are they spending the money on?

"We accept that publishers have been investing heavily in digital infrastructure and at the moment they are losing money on ebooks because sales are so low. I can sort of understand their reservations over higher royalties at the moment, but nevertheless a contract that lasts for the duration of copyright is a hugely long time. Publishers in negotiations with Amazon, or whoever, say they want two-year contracts because there's such flux, but at the same time are asking authors for the duration of copyright. It has to be wrong it's not remotely fair," he said.

"Twenty-five per cent might be reasonable as the infrastructure's set up but only for two years. The risk if we don't do that is that the rate will essentially be set in concrete, it will freeze and be taken as the norm, not just for two to three years but for two to three decades. If we don't fight it now, we will lose our chance to present and make our case, and that will be it."

Katie Fforde, bestselling novelist and chair of the Romantic Novelists' Association, agreed that a 25% ebook royalty "would be perfectly fair if it was for two years, or a limited period, and then could be renegotiated". "We don't want to go on and on paying for the set-up costs," she said. "I think a 50/50 split is greedy, but if you don't ask you don't get, and I imagine that might raise the negotiations."

The Samuel Johnson prize-winning historian Antony Beevor believes the Society of Authors is "absolutely right". "To begin with, publishers were trying to set a royalty of a lot less than 25%, they were trying to get around 12.5-15%. Fortunately the agents have taken a pretty strong line and so has the Society of Authors, and I fully support it," he said. "Publishers are suffering badly themselves [at the moment] but it's a bit like Tesco and the farmers the author as the producer will be squeezed the most."

Judge says punishment is 'still severe' after reducing filesharer's fine from $675,000 to $67,500

A graduate student who was ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs has had the fine reduced by 90%.

Lawyers acting on behalf of Joel Tenenbaum said they felt "vindicated" after the fine was slashed to $67,500 by the same judge who presided over his original trial in 2009. Tenenbaum was successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) last year after he admitted downloading songs between 1999 and 2007.

"There is no question that this reduced award is still severe, even harsh," said judge Gertner. "Reducing the jury's $675,000 award also sends another no less important message: the due process clause does not merely protect large corporations, like BMW and State Farm, from grossly excessive punitive awards. It also protects ordinary people like Joel Tenenbaum."

In July 2009, Tenenbaum was ordered to pay the equivalent of $22,500 per song for illegally sharing 30 tracks through the peer-to-peer site KaZaA. The case came to court after Tenenbaum contested a fine imposed on him by the RIAA in the late 1990s, while he was still a teenager. He is now a postgraduate student at Boston University. Following the original ruling last year, Tenebaum said he would be forced to file for bankruptcy.

Speaking about the latest ruling, Tenebaum said that although he was happy that the fine had been reduced, he would still not be able to pay: "I don't have $70,000, and $2,000 per song still seems ridiculous in light of the fact that you can buy them for 99 cents on iTunes."

Tenenbaum's defence said: "We feel vindicated that judge Gertner agreed that $675,000 was an unconstitutional award. But it is only a step along the way toward recognising the abusiveness of the RIAA's litigation campaign. The next step is to demonstrate that Joel was denied a fair jury trial when judge Gertner told the jury in her instructions that it could award an unconstitutionally excessive amount."

The RIAA has expressed its dissatisfaction with the latest turn of events, saying that it will contest the reduction.

The ruling coincides with the prosecution of a father and son in north-east England, who were charged with profiting from unlicensed digital jukeboxes. Malcolm and Peter Wylie were sentenced to three years and nine months in prison respectively for supplying, installing and distributing jukeboxes to pubs and clubs across the north-east.

Experiments like 'Please Rob Me' indicate that what people reveal via location-sharing apps could potentially be harmful to them - and survey finds concerns among users

More than half of people with geolocation-capable mobile devices worry about "loss of privacy" from using their location-sharing features, a survey has found - even though location-sharing apps such as FourSquare and Gowalla have millions of users checking in every day.

Among UK respondents, 52% said they were "very or extremely concerned" about loss of privacy from using location-sharing applications - even though the same proportion said that they geotag photos, indicating where they were taken, when uploading them to the internet.

The survey, commissioned by security company Webroot, interviewed 1,500 owners of devices with geolocation capabilities, including 624 people in the UK.

Yet other data shows that there are more than 1m lonely hearts now looking for location-based love via an iPhone application, and touching two million users checking-in with Foursquare, sharing whereabouts is the social currency du jour.

But that can be risky, as a trio of developers showed earlier this year, grabbing the headlines when they launched Please Rob Me, a live stream of people sharing their location on Twitter, the site playing on the fact these people were out of their homes. After doing what it set out to do - bring attention to the risk associated with location sharing - the stream was turned off.

Yet FourSquare and Gowalla have continued their upward trajectory of users, investors and commercial partners, such as Dominos Pizza, the Huffington Post, MTV and the Wall Street Journal.

But according to David Bennett, director for Webroot in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, "It's not about securing the hardware anymore, it's about securing the person as mobile internet-connected devices become widespread." He reiterates the challenges associated with attitudes towards publishing personal information online: "If you look over the last year, it takes about a year for people to be educated about putting stuff on Facebook - I think it'll take that same amount of time for geolocation applications."

This, Bennett says, gets to the nub of the concern: "A lot of people don't necessarily know what they do or what the implications are of these services. Of the half that thought there was a problem, how many people know that the pictures they're taking can be geotagged? Say if you move into a new house, and you say 'Here's a picture of my house', you then take a picture of you and your family on holiday - this is where cybercrime really expands. What's to stop a certain segment of the marketplace burgling your house? That's the challenge as we go forward."

"I think it's the new version of the telephone directory," Bennett says of the presence of food chains on Foursquare. "Can you be sure the company you're interacting with is really the company? That's one of the biggest challenges. when you rang them up you knew it was them - if it's online how can you be sure? But that's the way the business marketplace is going to go - the next generation of bringing people to the doorstep."

And to the doorstep goods and services will come. Skout is a location-based "social dating application" that connects singletons within metres or miles of your exact location. Last week Skout welcomed both profitability and its one millionth user. But news like this is anathema to the cause of "securing the person". Bennett continues the refrain: "When you're online it's so easy to pretend to be someone you're not. Everyone's hidden behind the keyboard if you start going into some of these dating areas.

"There are certain parts of our information that should always be private. It comes down to people understanding what they're doing."

The research

Webroot commissioned a survey of 1,645 social network users (including 624 UK-based) who own geolocation-ready mobile devices on June 7 and June 8 2010.
- 39% (around 600 of the sample) of mobile device users use location-tracking applications on their mobile phone
73% of those use a "geo-tracking application" to do so
Of this 73%, more than a quarter used location-based services to share their whereabouts with "strangers" and 14% use them to meet new people
55% of respondents said they worry over loss of privacy incurred from using geolocation data
One in 11 respondents have used geolocation applications to meet a stranger, either digitally or in person. This is predominantly within the 18-29 age group
64% have accepted a friend request from a stranger
41% are "aware or extremely concerned" about letting "potential burglars know when they are not at home"
In the UK, 46% of women are "highly concerned" about "letting a stalker know where they are," compared to 27% of men
52% of UK respondents tag their whereabouts in a photograph online
In the past year, 30% of UK respondents have shared their geographical location with "people other than their friends"

Composer David Cope has spent the last 30 years teaching computers to create classical music

Hear an example from David Cope's Emily Howell project
Download an Emmy Bach-style invention

Where does music come from? If pressed on this question, many of us would say it comes from the "soul", or from the "heart" of the person who composed it. That music is the clearest expression of human emotion, one person to another; that certain chords, certain melodies seem to communicate a whole language of feeling. When we listen to a Beethoven symphony or a Chopin sonata, we are hearing, we might say, the authentic expression of the composer's inner harmonies and discords, carried magically across the centuries. Could we ever be so moved by a piece of music written by a computer? We'd probably like to think not. David Cope, emeritus professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, would beg to differ. "The question," Cope tells me, "isn't if computers possess a soul, but if we possess one."

Cope, now 69, has devoted the past 30 years of his life to what amounts to an obsessive examination of that particular question. He began, almost by default, back in 1980, with a severe case of writer's block. One of America's most acclaimed young composers, whose music had been performed at Carnegie Hall, and won great critical praise, Cope had been commissioned to write an opera. For weeks and months he sat at his piano, or stared at a blank piece of sheet music; nothing came. He had a wife and four children to support. In desperation he started playing with a computer.

What he found there changed his life and, perhaps, the course of musical history. Cope had long held the belief that all music was essentially inspired plagiarism. The great composers absorbed the music that had gone before them and their brains "recombined" melodies and phrases in distinctive, sometimes traceable, ways. We all have an internal database of musical reference; composers were those with the ability to manipulate it in new patterns. With the aid of an early computer, he realised he could put this to the test.

His first experiments with artificial musical intelligence were clunky, synthesised pieces, pastiches of easily identifiable work; but slowly, programming and reprogramming, inputting vast amounts of coded reference, he came to see how he might begin to shape a musical memory. The Eureka moment came one afternoon in 1983 after he had been working for a while trying to take apart and put back together chorales (four-part vocal hymns) in the style of JS Bach. He had a rules-based program, complicated and code-heavy, but it never produced anything approaching life or surprise.

That afternoon, on the way to the local store, he came to realise that Bach didn't exist in his predictability, but in the minute, multiple places where he broke his own rules, where he defied expectation of a particular progression. Cope developed "a little analytical engine" that could insert some randomness within the predictability. He began to analyse Bach's music not just mathematically but with a sense of narrative tension and surprise, weighting different components according to his own feel for the music's "storytelling" power. His program, at this point, seemed to develop a personality of its own; "Experiments in Musical Intelligence" became Emmy. When fed with enough of a composer's work, Emmy could deconstruct it, identify signature elements, and recombine them in new ways. One day Cope pushed a button on Emmy, went out to get a sandwich and when he returned his workaholic creation had produced 5,000 original Bach chorales. In 1993, Cope released an album, Bach by Design, and waited for the response.

When you listen to that album now and those that followed, including Virtual Mozart and, triumphantly, Virtual Rachmaninoff, you are discomfited and surprised in equal measure. Cope's work is far more than copying, it carries the recognisable DNA of the original style and fashions it into something recognisable but entirely new. The musical establishment reacted at first with alarm, and then with vitriol. Cope found it difficult to get any serious musicians to play Emmy's work, though it made many of the same demands as the "real thing". Critics convinced themselves that they heard no authentic humanity in it, no depth of feeling, Cope was characterised as a composer without a heart; his recent memoir is called Tin Man.

One of the problems that the music highlighted was the fact that in Cope's terms, the music of Mozart, say, was endless in its possibilities. As he suggested when I spoke to him last week: "Because my program was continuing to pump out music like a spigot, it became a problem of: 'Why play this sonata and not that one?'" Cope has no doubt that Mozart in particular, with his structural genius, would if he'd had the means have utilised computerised intelligence in exactly the same way. When you remove the "human" element of the work, however, Cope recognised, you also lose a great deal of its urgency. "When you had the database figured out it was really a one-stroke deal: you pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas or whatever."

He realised that what made a composer properly understandable, properly "affecting", was in part the fact of mortality. Composers had to die, and the ending made sense of what had gone before. With this in mind, Cope unplugged Emmy six years ago; her work which he limited to 11,000 chosen pieces, was done. Emmy housed on an ancient Power Mac 7500 (discontinued in 1996) now sits idle in the corner of his office. Cope has subsequently been at work, nurturing Emmy's "daughter", Emily Howell, (the first name from her mother, the second from the Christian name of Cope's own father) with whom he has a far more "equal" relationship.

Emily Howell has a compendious memory that involves an intimate understanding of the works of 36 composers "starting with Palestrina, [an Italian court musician of the 16th century] and ending with David Cope in the 21st century". Their output is far more collaborative than that of Emmy. Cope will ask Emily a musical question, feeding in a phrase. Emily will respond with her own understanding of what happens next. Cope either accepts or declines the formula, much in the way he would if he was composing "conventionally".

"It is," he says, "a bit like dealing with a small child; the program is an empty pot and I dribble small bits of music into it, and it responds to what I have put in it's a process of carrots and sticks, really. I think it is producing good results but it takes a lot of time."

Cope's ambitions remain exactly what they were, when, as an asthmatic child in Phoenix, Arizona, he was moved to wonder by Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet, and knew he had to be a composer himself. "My two goals are an original style and to create something I love," he says. "The program is a cat not a dog, it keeps itself to itself, you can't take it for walks. I can only generally pick it up and point it in the direction that I want it to go "

Emily Howell's first album, From Darkness, Light, composed in six movements and performed on two pianos, was released earlier this year. It was met largely with silence; the critics who were moved to respond did so with the usual sniffy constructs about "an absence of genuine humanity". Cope remains undaunted.

"People tell me they don't hear soul in the music," he says. "When they do that, I pull out a page of notes and ask them to show me where the soul is. We like to think that what we hear is soul, but I think audience members put themselves down a lot in that respect. The feelings that we get from listening to music are something we produce, it's not there in the notes. It comes from emotional insight in each of us, the music is just the trigger."

Emily is still a work in progress for Cope. He thinks she is getting towards a mature style. "Five years from now I believe she will really be somewhere," he says.

It must be a curious process, like watching an external mind working, I suggest. What has it taught him about himself? "Two things. That the mechanisms of the brain are incredibly simple, but that its ability to create extraordinary complexity should constantly amaze us."

Will Emily survive him? "She needs a provocateur," Cope says, "but then so do humans. You cannot create music without reference to other music. Like us, she needs to be turned on to something."

He can't imagine the possibility of going back to writing with just his own intuition and a pen and paper. "The programs are just extensions of me. And why would I want to spend six months or a year to get to a solution that I can find in a morning? I have spent nearly 60 years of my life composing, half of it in traditional ways and half of it using technology. To go back would be like trying to dig a hole with your fingers after the shovel has been made, or walking to Phoenix when you can use a car."

When he began, though he was confident that what he was embarking on represented the future, Cope felt all the loneliness of the pioneer. Now, he suggests there is a growing interest in the possibilities. Not least the commercial ones. He was recently approached by a headline pop band he won't say which to see whether Emily could be persuaded to produce some hits. Though "recombining" elements of popular music is a court case in the making, there has, he suggests, not surprisingly been an enormous interest in creating music for ringtones and for games. "In the next 10 years," Cope says, "what I call algorithmic music will be a mainstay of our lives."

The perception that we might identify the particular musical combinations that stir our individual souls suggests many other potential applications. Until now online music stores have based recommendations for future purchases on what a customer has bought before, but Cope's kind of musical analysis suggests a more intimate understanding of our particular desert island discs might be possible. It was reported last month that separate teams of researchers at universities in San Diego and in S o Paulo are refining different ways of analysing musical genres and rhythms, to enable predictions of what we are likely to buy to be far more precise (see panel below).

If music can be reduced to formulae and equations, does it begin to undermine notions of what music might mean to us? Douglas Hofstadter, author of the key book on the fundamentals of cognition, G del, Escher, Bach, has long lectured on the implications of Cope's work in understanding how the mind and music works. "In 20 years of working in artificial intelligence," he says, he has encountered "nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope's experiments." Hofstadter has distilled his thoughts on Cope's work into a full-length lecture performed in rhyme that begins with a question that might prove fundamental to future understanding of composition:

Is music a craft
Or is it an art?
Does it come from mere training
or spring form the heart?
Did the tudes of Chopin
reveal his soul's mood?
Or was Fr d ric Chopin
Just some slick "pattern dude"?

Hofstadter is very fond of Cope's remark that "Good artists borrow, great artists steal," though he is troubled that some of the mysteries of the creative process might be lost along the way, and with them a part of our understanding of what it means to be human. Cope, for his part, retains all of his sense of wonder at the composers geniuses of recombination who have gone before. Does he still dream of creating a masterpiece? I wonder.

He says he has no idea what that word means.

Have Emmy and Emily at least short-circuited the angst and musical block that led him to create them in the first place?

"No," he says. "Not at all. I still get anxious and despairing. It never turns out as well as I hope it will. Every morning I wake up with the notion that I have failed at everything and I have to create some reason to exist." He and Emily then get back to work.

Can anyone explain why Labour's deputy leader shadow Cabinet Office/Olympics minister now appears on Google Maps? (Updated)

No, your eyes do not deceive you: Google Maps appears to think that Tessa Jowell is a landmark in the same way as Big Ben.

You can do it too: put the postcode SW1A 0PW into Google Maps (here's the link) and scroll in a bit. Pop! There's Ms Jowell.

No, we don't know how she got there, and the person who pointed this out to us promises he didn't. "I'm not aware that she's been mounted on a plinth or any such thing - any idea what's going on?" he asked.

We don't know either, though our call to Google is going through...

Interestingly she doesn't appear on Bing's Maps, using the fabulously authoritative and free Ordnance Survey maps. Make of that what you will.

Update: Google tells us: "the reason for this is that the information and listings contained in Google Maps are provided by a third party and this is included in that database." However, it doesn't know who.

Although we managed to find this entry in the Thomson Local Database. Could that be it?

Thanks too to DoctorFegg for the link to the Google Maps Fail blog. Ideal for passing the time while you wait for the tube to arrive at Jowell Squa.. Westminster. Thanks too to everyone who pointed out my foolish error in calling her the Labour deputy leader. That's next October, of course. (As in my favourite apocryphal Peter Mandelson joke, in which he's on the phone to a journalist who is being 'difficult' about suppressing a story: "So sorry to hear about the broken leg," Mandelson says. Journalist: "I haven't broken my leg." Mandelson: "Oh, of course, that's next week, isn't it.")

Jimmy Doherty tells us all about his life as a luddite who looks like a nerd

What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
That's an easy one for me it's my iPhone. It allowes me to email and receive email wherever I am. You suddenly realise: how did I ever live without it? You can also listen to music with it and play games.

When was the last time you used it, and what for?
This morning to have a look at these questions.

What additional features would you add if you could?
A lie detector would be quite good that would be awesome.

Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
Only if people stop lying. But the phone? I hope not, because it's one of the great design classics.

What always frustrates you about technology in general?
There's always something new coming out. You buy something and then they launch a new, better model. They always get you hooked like that.

Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
Not really. The only thing I could think of is those hands-free kits. Very practical when you're driving, but I hate people walking down the street using them it looks like they're talking to themsevles, and it drives me nuts.

If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Read the instructions, which I never do. Or ask the wife, who always does read the instructions.

Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
I'm a luddite who looks like a nerd. Or should that be the other way around?

What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
I try not to buy expensive kit because I lose it or break it! But I suppose my tractor was quite expensive. I bought a new one and had it sprayed Barbie pink. I bought it for my wife, but she never uses it because I'm always on it.

Mac or PC, and why?
Probably PC, because all the Mac owners say they're no good. And Mac owners all seem a bit smug.

Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
I love buying books, because there's something tangible about books. DVDs I buy, but music I download. The last DVD I bought was Zombieland.

Robot butlers a good idea or not?
As long as it came in a 4-by-4 verson, otherwise it would be useless on the farm.

What piece of technology would you most like to own?
A litte personalised submarine, which would be perfect on holidays. Everyone should have one it beats snorkelling.

Watch Doherty's new BBC series, The Private Life of...

The Flip range of camcorders puts 8GB of film time in your pocket. But where should you go to get the best price?

Video cameras have caught up with digital cameras when it comes to ease of use and reduced size, and the latest Flip range has taken amateur movie making by storm.

Fitting easily into your pocket or handbag and weighing only 170g, the miniature size does not impact on quality: the UltraHD range lets you shoot stunning 720p video that will look crisp and clear on your HDTV, even in low-light conditions.

There is a "flip out" USB arm that directly connects to your computer and instantly launches FlipShare. This software allows you to upload your footage instantly on to YouTube or MySpace. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface also offers organising, emailing and editing options covering everything from creating custom movies to sharing your favourite snapshots.

Below are the best prices available at the time of publishing for a black Flip Video Ultra High Definition Camcorder with 8GB Memory (RRP 159.99). It films approximately two hours of HD video, perfect to capture those great holiday moments. Readers who have found better deals should post the details below.

Online

Deltatronics is cheapest online charging 114.50 plus 4.50 postage, followed by Comet at 119.99 with free postage if you are prepared to wait around a week, otherwise postage varies between 5.82 and 7.78.

If your preference is for a white Flip camcorder then Amazon is charging 124.

In store

For those of you eager to take the camera away this weekend, then John Lewis is best priced at 149.95 with a two-year guarantee, followed by Argos at 152.39.

Cheaper alternative

If HD is not required and you are happy with 4GB of high-quality recording then the Flip Ultra (II) Camcorder at 89.99 plus postage from Misco.co.uk is a price-busting equivalent, or you could collect in store at Tesco (subject to availability) for 99.97.

Whichever version you choose make sure you register your Flip and enjoy 2 for 1 entry at some top UK attractions.

If you want to link the Flip to your television then buy an HDMI cable with a mini HDMI connector for 2.28.

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

Twitter finally explains new EarlyBird promotional account to distribute exclusive offers to users

Despite reeling in $160m in venture capital funding and worth an estimated $1bn, Twitter is still on the hunt for sustainable revenue sources to support the company.

Early indications on Promoted Trends and Promoted Tweets appear to have been successful, and are part of a larger strategy to avoid paid accounts yet gain financial security.

After what seems like a lifetime, the company has now officially announced EarlyBird, which aims to inform users of special promotions that are unique to Twitter and the account. Selected advertisers will pay to distribute offers to the thousands of users present on the network, although none of these has yet been named. The offers will be time sensitive, so fast action will be needed to catch that particular worm.

EarlyBird functions in the same way as a normal Twitter account for the offers to appear in your follow feed. Unlike Promoted Trends, however, they do not appear automatically on your front page and it is an opt-in service, as opposed to the opt-out follow that had been mooted. EarlyBird tweets can also be retweeted to pass them onto your followers.

What's the catch? Initially, EarlyBird offers will be US-centric, although Twitter has said this will likely change: "We're starting with US-wide offers but will explore location-based deals in the future."

The opportunity for EarlyBird to go viral is huge, with offers potentially spreading around like internet like wildfire if they are deemed worthy enough. As I type, the account has 9,545 followers, something that will need to multiply infinitely for the scheme to be successful. Thanks to the joys of trends and retweeting, this seems likely. Assuming the followers flood in, Twitter will be closer to long-term sustainability.

On this week's podcast, we'll be finding out more about Facebook's new safety features for under-age users: some are calling it a "panic button", but the social networking service says it's not.

We chew over Google's announcement of a mobile phone application development tool that could open up the lucrative market to non-techies.

And joining Aleks in an outdoor edition of the programme is Kristian Sagerstrale, vice president and general manager of web game company Playfish, who discusses the success of the games industry through a recession.

Also taking a soft drink in the summer sunshine is the Guardian's new media correspondent Jemima Kiss and the European editor of TechCrunch, Mike Butcher.

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Three computer experts reveal how their office lives compare with the TV comedy

Wondered what the real-life counterparts of Jen, Moss and Roy make of Graham Linehan's much-loved sitcom? We asked three tech-heads to tell us what they think.

IT project manager Shaheen, 38, is married with two children and lives in Cheshire. Technical architect Harry, 34, is separated with two children and works in Greater Manchester. Account manager Bob, 31, works for a major IT outsourcing firm in Greater Manchester.

Do people like Moss, Jen and Roy really exist?

Shaheen: People like Jen exist there's one in our department, who was hired to translate between the geeks and the management but she doesn't have a clue what she's doing.

Harry: People like Moss and Roy exist less and less, because the competencies you need tend to mean you're multi-skilled, so you can't just ignore people and sit in front of a screen all day.

Bob: The Jen figures aren't exclusively female. There are plenty of men with top jobs in project managing who don't know the first thing about IT.

Can you spot IT people by their clothes?

Bob: Yes. One guy I work with has a utility belt. It's got his PDA, his personal GPS unit and multiple phones on it. He's got his pants dead short, and he never speaks to anyone.

Harry: T-shirts [Harry shows his Darth Vader T-shirt with the caption: "I Am Your Father"].

Shaheen: I think it's generally a guy thing. Though I have been known to wear the occasional rock T-shirt to the office.

Are IT people treated with contempt and hidden in a basement, as they are in the show?

Shaheen: When I've worked on site, IT people have a godlike status. I've had factory foreman shouting at staff, telling them what they can and can't do, based on my word and whim, so I've seen the opposite.

Harry: It's quite central to The IT Crowd that the department is stuffed away somewhere, and that isn't the way we work. Going back a few years, it was like that, and people used to complain that we were obnoxious, a bit prickly, difficult to talk to when they needed something sorted out. Now, it's moved, and it's very much integrated with the rest of the business.

Bob: More and more businesses are getting rid of their IT departments. It's all about self service now, and any technical needs are outsourced. In that respect, I think the show is documenting a dying culture. I think it was dying even when the show started.

Do IT people lack social skills?

Harry: There's quite a few stereotypical geeks in our department, but only one or two with no social skills.

Shaheen: One guy I worked with built a wall of box files around the edges of his desk so that people wouldn't look at him. I think IT does attract a few obsessive, slightly odd personalities, definitely.

Bob: Less and less, though what's happening to these people is perhaps a mystery. I think a lot of them have been forced to take on more business-focused roles.

Are IT people particularly into geeky pursuits?

Bob: There's people in the office who spend 20-30 hours a week on Warcraft. But I think you'd find people like that in the rest of the male population.

Harry: Guys on the coding team go home and work on open source stuff in their spare time, and I must confess, one of my hobbies is to build virtual machines when I'm not at work.

Shaheen: I think the only way I can relate to a lot of the stuff that goes on is that I'm into metal and rock that subculture is massive among IT types.

Does the IT sector respect diversity?

Bob: There is sexism in IT. There are very few women in technical roles.

Harry: Where I work, there is a representative number of ethnic minorities and two women on the configuration team.

Shaheen: I've sat in meetings where senior consultants said: "She's not going to do anything" and "She doesn't know about it." I took it at the time, because I was new, but sexism is a very real thing in IT.

Does the advice "turn it on and off" really work?

Bob: With surprising regularity. From an outsider's point of view, that is everything that we do.

Harry: It solves 80% of problems. You've got to know when to switch it on and off. Switch it off, wait 10 seconds, then switch it on, that's the trick.

Shaheen: It does, but IT people dress it up. They'll say, "Have you given it a service reboot?" There's quite a few euphemisms they've developed because it's often effective. Like a "power recycling", "refresh" and things like that.

A web designer-cum-wood pellet distributor who says a previous contract entitles him to 84% of the company - and Facebook can't get more venture funding until the case is settled. By Jemima Kiss

Facebook is in court to defend yet another claim to ownership, this time from a web designer cum wood pellet distributor who says a previous contract entitles him to 84% of the company.

Filed in the Supreme Court in New York's Allegany County last month, the lawsuit details how Paul Ceglia signed a contract with Facebook in April 2003 to design and develop the website TheFacebook.com for an agreed $1,000 ( 665) fee and a 50% stake in the site.

The contract stipulated, Ceglia claims, a further 1% stake for each day until the site was finished on 4 February 2004. Facebook is valued at an estimated $6.5bn, so an 84% share would be worth around $5.46bn.

Following Ceglia's lawsuit, acting New York Supreme Court justice Thomas Brown issued a temporary restraining order that blocks Facebook from transfering assets. That means that the company cannot raise any more venture capital by selling shares until that order is lifted. The case has now transferred to a federal court and Facebook is trying to have it annulled.

Facebook dimissed the case as "frivolous" and "outlandish", said it will fight it vigorously and pointed out that a lawsuit over a contract broken in 2003 is "almost certainly barred" by the statute of limitation.

There are a number of reasons that success for Ceglia sounds unlikely not least waiting until the site reaches 500 million global users before bringing his case, waiting until the outcome of the (successful) Winklevoss claim and the rather bizarre sidenote that a restraining order was granted against him in 2009 by an attorney who alleged Ceglia had defrauded customers of his wood-pellet fuel business to the tune of $200,000.

But imagine, for a minute, that Ceglia succeeded, and moved in to take 84% of Facebook. We might have a new entrant in the MediaGuardian 100...

Lucy Cooke's Vimeo film is just what the Sheffield Doc/Fest judges are looking for

Within a week of visiting the world's only sloth orphanage in Costa Rica last year, Lucy Cooke had made a rough-and-ready 90-second clip that was being watched by more than 160,000 people a day. Her decision to "go and shoot a bunch of sloths" put her at the epicentre of online viral video.

With her original footage still attracting thousands of eyeballs daily, Cooke is now in final talks with broadcasters about producing a full-length documentary. "I posted the 90-second video on my Vimeo site and very quickly it was favourited [sic] and pushed by Vimeo staff," she explains. "I then put the word out via my personal Facebook page and also my Amphibian Avenger Facebook and Twitter feeds. The video was then tweeted and retweeted by a few key friends who have a lot of fans."

Cooke's clip really took off after being tweeted by Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry."It was watched by 1 million people in the first 10 days," she says. "The video has now been watched by over 2 million people if you include YouTube and all the people who ripped it and posted it as their own work on YouTube and other sites."

Cooke gained insight into marketing video last year at a workshop by the digital media organisation Crossover, which will host public workshops around the UK in the run-up to the Sheffield Doc/Fest in November. Cooke is just the kind of person that this year's competition, which is supported by MediaGuardian, is hoping to attract. Entries for the Digital Revolutions category open today.

Says the Doc/Fest director, Heather Croall: "This time we're taking the computer age into a new world. We're going to get people to put their video up on YouTube or Vimeo and really get creative in the digital landscape. As well as producing a great three-minute video, judges will be looking strongly at how film-makers have gone about engaging their audience and building a community around their film."

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is providing a cash prize of 10,000 to be won by a non-professional film-maker at Doc/Fest who can deliver more than just clever video editing.

And Cooke's advice to this year's entrants? "Choose a popular subject look online at what videos and what subjects go viral," she says. "My video is essentially strong, cute and funny animals cut to music one of the most popular genres of viral.

"Look for internet sites which collect videos like yours and send them your link asking them to plug it. Definitely use Twitter and Facebook. Half the job is making something good, the other half is working the marketing of it."

To enter, go to sheffdocfest.com. You can watch the sloths at vimeo.com/11712103

This article was amended on 12 July 2010 to clarify that BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, is providing the 10,000 prize at Doc/Fest

This car will give you driving ambitions

A small confession: I think BMWs are overrated. Actually, that's overstating the overrating. What I think is that the 3 Series is not the car that many seem to think it is, and sometimes I'm inclined to extrapolate from that about other BMWs, which is unfair.

It's particularly unfair in the case of the 5 Series. Whereas the 3 Series is just an executive saloon, the 5 Series is the executive executive saloon. The latest update, although not radically different, is such a consummate piece of managerial machinery that as soon as you clap eyes on it, you want to go out and get a senior-ranked job with ICI or Unilever. Or at least get a job as a driver, delivering senior executives from ICI and Unilever to vital business meetings and golf matches.

The interior all cream leather and comfort room (it's slightly longer than its predecessor) is perhaps the most attractive aspect of the car. From the outside, it's not stunning or sumptuous, nor will it trigger an instant craving in watching pedestrians. But it is handsome blandly handsome, perhaps, like some well-turned-out faceless European bureaucrat, yet substantial and sleek with it. Although there may well be no solution to the economic crisis in the eurozone, this is nonetheless the car in which you'd want to set out to find one.

Lacking a critical meeting, or indeed a noncritical one, I instead drove around aimlessly. Except you can't really drive around aimlessly in a BMW 5 Series, any more than you'd chill out in a suit on your day off. It simply packs too much punch and embodies too much sense of purpose to allow faffing around.

The acceleration, for a start, has a way of focusing the attention. Who'd have thought, even just a few years ago, that a diesel automatic could ever leave your stomach in the boot? Fortunately there's plenty of room there for your stomach and many other stomachs besides. It's the kind of car in which you want to receive an urgent phone call just so you can tell the driver, or indeed yourself, to step on it.

I found I got a lot more done in the day, driving around in the 530d SE, than I would otherwise. I'm talking about picking up the dry-cleaning, buying postage stamps and collecting a parcel from the sorting office.

In other words, it revolutionised my productivity, taking it to the kind of executive levels of activity that previously seemed unimaginable. A few more weeks and I would have mastered French, become a parent governor, moved into property speculation and perhaps even started opening my bank statements. I felt almost relieved when it was taken away.

BMW 530d SE

Price 37,100
Top speed 155mph
Acceleration 0-62mph 6.3 seconds
Average consumption 44.8mpg
CO2 emissions 166g/km
Eco rating 5.5/10
Bound for Canary Wharf
In a word Purposeful

Interead, the UK firm that launched the Cool-er electronic book reader to much fanfare last summer, has been quietly wound up

A Reading-based startup company that claimed to have sold tens of thousands of e-readers in its first three months of trading last summer, reputedly catapulting the business to the number two spot behind Sony, has quietly gone bust.

Despite a winding-up order being issued by the high court in Liverpool against Interead more than four weeks ago, the firm's 189.97 Cool-er product is still being sold by Argos and Tesco. Neither retailer is informing prospective customers that the firm behind the Cool-er has gone bust.

In a statement Argos said: "We took the commercial decision earlier this year to phase out this product range. We no longer have an active working relationship with this supplier and were unaware of the suggested recent developments within their business."

Earlier this year Interead reportedly said it had 20% of the e-reader market in Britain and before Christmas claimed it had already broken into profit. Since then, however, the business has failed to win essential support for its expansion from its bank, HSBC, under the government's enterprise finance guarantee, according to sources close to the company.

Meanwhile, Interead claims an order for 17,000 Cool-ers from a high-profile American retail group was cancelled at the 11th hour, plunging relations with its Taiwanese manufacturers into crisis.

A source close to the business said: "From our point of view we would rather keep things quiet than have a story ... that Interead is in liquidation. What we want to do is maximise what we can get for creditors." The source claimed 37,000 e-readers had been sold in more than 30 countries and the business continues to flourish outside the UK.

Neil Jones, the Marbella-based British entrepreneur who founded Interead in March last year, has told friends he is the firm's biggest creditor, claiming to have put about $1m ( 660,000) into the business. The company has not filed any accounts and is being wound up following an outstanding claim from public relations advisers. Jones is still involved in a website called Coolerbooks.com, which sells ebooks for the Cool-er and other electronic readers. The site is owned by a separate company, registered in the British Virgin Islands, called Interead.com. It claims to be "the first ebookstore outside the US to partner with Google Books".

Asked before Christmas how many units Interead would have to sell to break even, Jones said it was already in profit. More recently a source close to the company clarified: "On a month-by-month basis we were trading profitably ... We were looking to hit break-even within the first year following the trading cycle that we'd been following. We had the orders but we didn't have a bank that would finance them for us."

Millions of us have no access to the internet. The UK's Digital Champion explains why that matters - and introduces the data that shows how
Get the data

Ten million of us in the UK have never used the internet.

Try to picture it: it's the equivalent of the entire populations of our five biggest cities combined - London, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow and Sheffield - all being left without the tool that we now heavily rely on every day.

Four million of those who are offline are society's most disadvantaged: 39% are over 65.38% are unemployed - 19% are adults in families with children.

Think about what that means. Thanks to technology's near-ubiquity and our close to universal use of it, we now live in a world defined by constant communication 40m adults in the UK use the web, and 30 million of us do so daily.

Worldwide, we send 55m tweets via Twitter a day. In the UK alone, 25m of us are on Facebook. 16m people watch TV or listen to the radio via the web. Millions of us now use sites like Meetup.com to get together offline in our local communities.

3.1m over-65s go more than a week without seeing a friend, family or neighbour and half of all internet users say the web increases contact with friends who live further away. Yet 6.4m over-65s have never used the internet, with 63% of them saying they 'see no reason' to get online.

21st century leisure and social interaction on and offline - increasingly rests on technology and it can be a powerful tool in combating social isolation in our ageing population.

90% of new jobs require computer skills. Seven million job adverts were placed online in the UK last year. Without web skills you're increasingly cut off from the labour market. Yet 270,000 of the 1.5m people claiming Jobseekers Allowance of 0.8bn a year are without these basic skills.

There is a wage premium for those with web skills, digital literacy is increasingly a basic requirement for employability, and internet access can unleash enterprise by letting people launch small businesses.

58% of us buy goods and services online in the UK and the average household saves 560 a year by shopping and paying bills online. To give over-65s the same amount that the average household saves from shopping and paying bills online via the State Pension would cost Government 6bn a year.

Remaining offline carries a penalty. Only 14% of people cite cost as a reason they don't get online and 41% of those completing a foundation computer course go on to get home access once the considerable benefits of online interaction becomes clear.

For reasons of social justice and economic necessity, we must act now.

In spite of the many benefits in getting online, 59% of non-internet users attribute their failure to go online to a lack of motivation, rising to 63% of those 65-74 and over.

Which is why we are calling on organisations in every sector and in every corner of the UK to join us to try to forge a stronger, networked UK in which millions more of us are online by the end of the Olympic year.

We are asking them to make pledges to inspire people to try the net, to encourage and reward people for going online, and to support those groups that might need a helping hand because they lack the skills, financial resource or because of disability.

We are calling on industry to advertise the benefits of connectivity rather than broadband speeds, to come up with compelling incentives and affordable, entry-level broadband starter packs, and for Government to play a key role in nudging the final 10million of us to go online by thinking internet first when it delivers public services. Nine out of ten people who are offline know someone who is online we just need to join up our skills so that if a fraction of those 40m people got out there and passed them on to a friend or family member, we would we forge a very much stronger networked UK by the Olympic year. Make your pledge here.

raceonline2012

In June, Martha Lane Fox was appointed by The Prime Minister as the UK Digital Champion. She co-founded lastminute.com and the private karaoke chain Lucky Voice. In 2007, she launched Antigone, a grant-giving foundation that supports education, health and criminal justice charities to reflect her commitment to social justice. She is non-executive director at Marks & Spencer plc, Channel 4 Television and Mydeco

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Google, which has a 30% market share of Chinese search traffic, given renewal despite recent strained relations

China has renewed Google's licence to operate in the country, the search giant announced today.

Writing on the company blog, chief legal officer David Drummond said: "We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China."

Google which has a 30% market share of Chinese search traffic recently began directing Google.cn visitors to its uncensored Hong Kong site, saying the new approach ensured it stayed true to a commitment not to censor searches from internet users in China.

Relations with authorities in China have been strained since Google said it no longer wanted to cooperate with government internet censorship. The announcement was prompted by cyber attacks the company traced to China.

Google stunned markets and consumers in January when it warned it might quit the country, saying it would not provide the censored search results that China requires.

However, the Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, said yesterday the company was confident of being granted an ICP licence extension.

Google is due to report its second-quarter financial results next week. Google's search business in China accounts for a tiny slice of the company's 15.82bn in annual revenue. Analysts' estimates of Google's annual revenues in China range from $300m to $600m, but long-term growth prospects are key.

There was no immediate word from China's Information Ministry about the renewal.

Giffgaff has rewarded its customers with their first payout for acting as its sales and technical staff

A new "community-run" mobile phone company, which is offering the chance to earn hundreds of pounds a year by spreading the word about it, has announced its first payments to customers.

One Giffgaff user received 654, and more than 40 others earned at least 200 apiece. Payouts are earned by recruiting and by helping other customers with their technical problems.

Giffgaff, which went live in November as a "sim-only" service (you use your existing handset), is the latest example of a web-based business that gives people the opportunity to make money by, in effect, becoming a salesperson or troubleshooter. The scheme therefore allows the company to save on advertising and call centre costs.

Who's behind the company?

Giffgaff an ancient Scottish word that means "mutual giving", apparently describes itself as a mobile phone company "where the community is at the heart of it", and which does things differently to the "faceless" big networks. It is online only, with "no wasteful shops or excessive call centres".

So some might be surprised to discover Giffgaff is wholly owned by 0₂ and runs on its network.

While some potential customers might be disappointed that this isn't a truly mutual, member-owned organisation, others may feel more comfortable signing up with a company backed by a big name.

Mike Fairman, the chief executive, says that while 0₂ provided the capital for the business to start up, Giffgaff operates independently, with its own offices and staff. "It's very much an arms-length arrangement this is very different from 0₂."

The company declined to divulge its customer numbers, but says it has a 6,000-strong online community.

Is it worth signing up as a customer?

If you are looking for a cheap pay-as-you-go service, Giffgaff's pricing is quite competitive. UK calls are 8p and texts 4p this matches Asda Mobile's pricing with free UK web browsing on your handset until 1 October. After that, mobile internet will be charged at up to 50p a day for most people, says a spokesman. Customers can get free calls to one another.

As the company points out on its website, 0₂ charges 25p for calls to other networks and 10p for texts.

It is offering a range of "goodybags" a mix of UK minutes, texts and mobile internet that last for a month.

You can order a free sim card online and top up by card or voucher.

What about those payments to customers?

Promoting the company and helping out other customers in Giffgaff's online forum earns rewards. Promoting the company could include giving sim cards to friends or even making your own video and putting it on YouTube.

One point equals one pence. Sending your friend an email about Giffgaff would earn you 50p. If you send Giffgaff sims to several people, you get 5 for each one that is activated.

The rewards for helping with customer queries vary depending on criteria, such as how the person who asked the question rated the answer.

How is the money paid?

The points earned are converted into pounds, and the cash paid out twice a year in June and December. You can have the cash paid into a PayPal account (you can't have it paid direct into your bank account), get it as airtime credit for your phone, or donate it to Cancer Research, the charity chosen by members.

How much can people make?

Giffgaff claims the amounts people can earn are "limitless". It says more than 40% of members were rewarded last month. The average user received 14, while 42 people earned more than 200.

One 19-year-old Londoner received 206 for spreading the word among his friends and helping on the community forum. He is putting the cash towards a new laptop for when he starts university in September.

Liam Salomone (pictured), 30, of Northolt, Middlesex, earned 654 for sending emails to contacts, answering queries on the forum, and encouraging friends to sign up.

"It's much better that a mobile firm pays its customers to market their product than to waste money on advertising," he says, adding: "I'm saving the money for a trip to South Africa with my mum. We've both spoken about visiting there for years, and now we have an opportunity to do it."

Does anyone else do this sort of thing?

Mobile network 3 runs the "Free Agent" scheme, where 5 is paid into your PayPal account every time a friend with a 3G phone orders a sim from you and tops it up by 10 or more.

You don't have to be a 3 customer to sign up to the scheme, and the company is offering a number of online tools to help people promote the offer.

Education equipment company Promethean has backed a landspeed attempt that aims to hit 1,000mph

Education equipment company Promethean, which floated in March and entered the FTSE 250 last month, is backing a British attempt to smash the world landspeed record.

The Bloodhound supersonic car (SSC) team, led by former land speed record holder Richard Noble, hopes to break through the 1,000mph barrier. That would see it smash the current land speed record of 763mph, which was set in 1997 by former RAF pilot Andy Green, who will also pilot Bloodhound. The attempt on the record will be made in South Africa next year.

The car, which will have two engines and a rocket, currently only exists as a model within a bank of computers that are more powerful than those used by the Met Office for weather predictions. It has gone through numerous redesigns but the team believe that with the current configuration its tenth they have cracked it.

The car's Eurofighter Typhoon jet engine and its rocket should deliver the same power as 180 Formula One cars. A second engine is needed to ensure that the rocket gets enough fuel. A mock-up will be unveiled at the Farnborough Air show next week.

But the 15m project is not just about fast cars, it is also about inspiring the next generation of engineers and is being used to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics to children in more than 3,700 schools worldwide.

Promethean, the world's second largest maker of educational whiteboards, has become the project's official interactive education technology partner, supplying classroom equipment as well as equipping the legion of volunteer "Bloodhound Ambassadors" who are visiting schools and colleges as part of the programme. It will also put a wealth of educational materials on Promethean Planet, the world's largest teaching website. It has over 650,000 members in over 150 countries.

Neither Noble nor Green are strangers to record breaking. Green set the current landspeed record with ThrustSSC at Black Rock Desert, Nevada while Noble was behind the original Thrust2 programme which brought the world landspeed record back to Britain in 1983.

As well as holding the current land speed record, Bloodhound SSC's driver Green was also involved in the JCB DIESELMAX project, which aimed to find out how fast a pair of digger engines in close formation could travel. Green clocked up 350mph.

Despite improved quality and more content, streaming television has yet to make it out of the study

In a bid to introduce it's content to a wider audience, YouTube has launched two new services to deliver video straight into the hands of viewers in the form of Leanback and the new YouTube Mobile site.

Following from the announcement of Google TV back in May, the launches from the internet's favourite video site come as no surprise. But where did we begin?

With the launch of YouTube in 2005, the video streaming phenomenon truly began and, for the first time, users could view clips of skateboarding dogs or cats falling about without the hassle of installing third party applications. Internet providers baulked at the increased strain on their capacity and rapidly started expanding their bandwidth to cope.

The launch of the BBC's iPlayer in 2007 upped the ante again, providing full length television shows any time of the day. Despite shows only being available for seven days after broadcasting, the service has been a tremendous success, with the BBC reporting more than 18 million users streaming videos each week.

The caveat is that you have to sit in front of your computer. Instead of lounging on the sofa to gaze at your 42in plasma screen, internet streaming entails perching in front of a considerably smaller screen, inevitably producing an inferior experience.

However, the push out of the study and into the living room has already begun iPlayer is available on many games consoles as well as numerous digital TV set-top boxes, of which the implementation works rather well. The golden magic box we are waiting for streaming music from Spotify and streaming television from YouTube and iPlayer has yet to appear.

The little-known Apple TV and SlingCatcher devices give us a glimpse at how these eventual devices may work.

Who wins out of the providers having new mediums to pump out content? The consumer of course. Instead of sitting through adverts and hours of irrelevant programming, on-demand television provides what you want, when you want.

The barrier of the personal computer still exists and the jump needs to be made for streaming to become a mainstream technology. Do you think online television streaming will reach the mainstream mindset any time soon? Will it rival the content of the main television channels?

Not since the heady days of the 1990s has an internet IPO caused such excitement or controversy

Ocado's audacious plan for a 1bn stock exchange listing is generating the kind of hoopla in the City not seen since the dotcom boom, when ponytailed graduates burned through investors' cash quicker than you could dial up the information superhighway.

Ten years on, the internet has changed shoppers' habits forever but a debate still rages over whether the future of retail lies in "bricks" or "clicks". Investors want to know if Ocado is the new Amazon, which after 15 years has sales of 16bn and is selling everything from books to bikes. Or is it Buy.com, the electronics retailer whose UK business was swallowed up by John Lewis in 2001 and used as the basis for its own, now very successful, website?

"You have to be aware that the way you make money online is completely different to the physical store model," explains Michael Ross, the internet entrepreneur who started lingerie website Figleaves. His experience is bittersweet: Figleaves was sold last month to home shopping group N Brown for a modest 11.5m, having lost its competitive advantage as the big chains followed it onto the internet. "In 2002 we had 90% of the online lingerie market," he says. "By 2005 M&S, John Lewis and Debenhams were all in there."

Ross, who now runs technology business eCommera, thinks the future for retail is a "mixed economy" the "click and connect" model pioneered by the likes of Argos, where customers can employ a number of methods to make purchases, including the time-honoured one of going into a shop.

Over the last decade many e-commerce taboos, such as selling clothes online, have fallen: internet fashion store Asos has defied the doomsayers who remembered how one-time internet sensation Boo.com ended in tears and who thought women would never buy their outfit for Saturday night from their desk at lunchtime.

Indeed, Asos's chief executive Nick Robertson is targeting sales of 1bn and is in talks with Boots the Chemists over letting customers pick up Asos parcels in their local pharmacy.

But the debate fuelled by Ocado's bold charge for the London Stock Exchange is whether being an internet-only retailer is a blessing or curse. Most people take the middle ground offered by multi-channel retailing, as although some 70% of purchases start online, it turns out shoppers still need somewhere to go even if it is just to pick up something they paid for on their home computer the night before.

Last week, Marks & Spencer said its home shopping sales rose 49% in recent months on last year. But the consensus is that, after several years of breathtaking growth, online sales have started to slow. Analysts are becoming divided as to the extent to which the internet can penetrate the psyche of a nation of shopkeepers. Robert Clark, the director of consultancy Retail Knowledge Bank, thinks the internet will eventually account for some 15% of the UK's 275bn retail sector at present some 10bn is spent online. "Clearly internet sales will continue to increase, but it is not taking over the world in the way some had predicted," he says.

Last week Amazon surprised analysts by launching a groceries service in the UK selling 22,000 products. Amazon does not disclose overall UK sales, but Clark puts them in the region of 1.1bn at the last count. He suggests the company's relentless march into new sectors smacks of desperation as growth in its core area of books, CDs and DVDs dissipates: "There is an element of maturity in their core markets book sales aren't going barmy."

Even if Amazon is spreading itself thin these days, few would deny that it has changed UK retail forever. Some believe Ocado has the potential to do the same for the grocery market as its sales roll up at 20% a year and its customer base approaches a quarter of a million. There is no question that there is a substantial market for it to attack some think food shopping will eventually be the biggest online retail sector but estimates as to the exact size vary. Market research firm IGD predicts internet grocery sales will almost double to 7.2bn by 2014.

Some City scribes argue that, ironically perhaps, Ocado's biggest problem is not having existing store network to spread the cost of a low-margin and labour-intensive enterprise. Its biggest rivals on the web Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda all pick internet orders off their own supermarkets' shelves. Ocado, by comparison, has invested hundreds of millions of pounds in one state-of-the-art warehouse in Hatfield and estimates that a second one, planned for the Midlands, will cost 210m to build.

Analysts point to the fact that Tesco.com was a profitable enterprise in its own right by the time sales got to the 400m level Ocado has reached today; Ocado, by contrast, has yet to make a profit. Analysts at stockbroker Collins Stewart say one of the difficulties investors have is finding a comparable company to benchmark it against. Amazon, US online movie rental service Netflix and Asos have all been suggested, but the analysts thinks Ocado is more "complex" and cash-hungry. Of the 200m it plans to raise in new shares at this month's IPO, 80m will be used to improve the Hatfield warehouse.

After meeting potential European investors last week, Ocado's directors are now heading to the US, banging the drum for what would be the biggest float London has seen this year. The company was started by three former Goldman Sachs bankers, Jason Gissing, Tim Steiner and Jonathan Faiman, and their undoubted ability to attract high-profile investors is a testament to their presentational skills.

But the internet has created both kings and paupers, with success in the end often coming down to the entrepreneurial talents of founders such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

"A lot of it is about the quality of the execution," says Ross. "Amazon's was flawless, while at Boo which was an idea ahead of its time it was poor. Ocado has done an enormous amount of things extremely well. The only thing they have failed to do so far is make money."

Online hits and misses

Asos

Pitch: Celebrity-inspired fashion

Founders: Nick Robertson, who still runs it, and Quentin Griffiths

History: Started life as Entertainment Marketing, which aimed to get brands featured in films and television shows and then sell them online "as seen on screen". Clothing sales took off and it was later renamed Asos. It floated on Aim in 2000 and has gone from strength to strength. It has a market value of 650m and recently set a sales target of 1bn. Hit

Adili

Pitch: The green Asos. "Adili" is the Swahili word for "ethical"

Founders: Former Dixons executive Adam Smith and Quentin Griffiths. Other investors included Jersey-based entrepreneur Bob Morton and Peter Davies, the multimillionaire former boss of Warehouse.

History: Started in 2006 and floated on Aim the following year. Sales initially took off as upmarket brands such as Edun, started by Bono's wife Ali Hewson, won plaudits in the fashion press. But the business was hit hard by the credit crunch, and changed its name to Ascension, because shoppers were confusing it with German discounter Aldi. After going back to shareholders several times for more money, the shares were suspended in February and it was bought by entrepreneur Luke Heron for 1. Miss

Ocado

Pitch: Waitrose, but without all of the stores

Founders: former Goldman Sachs bankers Jason Gissing, Jonathan Faiman and Tim Steiner

History: Started in 2000 but the company did not make it first grocery delivery until two years later. It operates from a hi-tech warehouse in Hatfield, which is supposedly superior to running the vast store networks built by rivals. In eight years of delivering groceries it has never made a profit but it has 240,000 customers and annual sales of more than 400m. It plans to list on the stock exchange and its directors think it is worth up to 1.37bn. Hit?

Webvan

Pitch: an earlier, Californian version of Ocado

Founder: Louis Borders, who also co-founded the bookseller Borders. Other investors included Goldman Sachs and Yahoo.

History: Its 1999 IPO raised some $400m and at its zenith the service reached 10 US cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. Customers liked it for its pledge to deliver within a 30-minute time slot, but investors were less impressed. The company burned through $1bn in 18 months, earning it a place in the dotcom hall of infamy. It filed for bankruptcy in 2001 and lives on only in name: the brand is owned by Amazon. Miss

Local authorities are about to release a real tsunami of data - but campaigners are already worried it could be going wrong. How useful will it really be?

We all thought Coins was going to be the government's promised "tsunami of data", but the real data storm is going to come when local government (under Downing Street duress) will release every spending item over 500.

This should be a moment to celebrate, for developers, journalists and everyone concerned with how councils spend our council tax. Instead, campaigners are united in anxiety that what we might get could just be more of the same.

And it all started so well. Local government secretary Eric Pickles told councils that:

"I don't expect everyone to get it right first time, but I do expect everyone to do it".

Well getting it wrong might be the default position for some local authorities. CountCulture's Chris Taggart is concerned about data company Spikes Cavell's SpotlightOnSpend muscling in on local government data (you can see his latest post on the issue here).

The upshot seems to be this, councils hand over all their valuable financial data to a company which aggregates for its own purposes, and, er, doesn't open up the data, shooting down all those goals of mashing up the data, using the community to analyse and undermining much of the good work that's been done.

Paul Bradshaw reports that a Help Me Investigate page has been set up over the issue, to see how widespread it really is.

Spikes Cavell has been stung by the furore - chief executive Luke Spikes has pledged to allow raw data downloads, according to Information Age.

As it is, there is a real fear that councils could get it clangingly wrong. Openlylocal's data scoreboard shows that only 15 out of 434 local councils are publishing open data at the moment - only seven of them in a truly open format.

There seems to be a panic up and down the country among councils suddenly faced with releasing data they've previously kept to themselves - presumably combined with beffudlement over why they have to do it at all. If that panic translates into a default position of outsourcing the task, then we have real problems.

The thing is, there are no shortage of official guidelines showing exactly how to release the data. The Local Data Panel has a concise and clear set of principles for local data release - worth reading for their clarity alone. The Open Knowledge Foundation does too.

Essentially, they boil down to some pretty simple ideas:

1. Make it open

No T&Cs about not using the data for commercial use, no restrictions on access. Make the data available to anyone to do whatever they want to with it. That's the only way that the data information revolution is going to work.

2. Make it readable for computers

The data needs to be in a format that any computer can use - no more PDFs, thank you very much. If developers can't build applications and campaigners can't analyse it, what use is it?

3. Make it granular

The days when we only wanted official statisticians to just put the numbers together in a way we could understand are gone. Now we also want the full, disaggregated data too. It's the only way it will ever be useful for someone wanting to gather the true local picture of local spending. Let us worry about whether the dataset is too big or not. It's not your problem anymore.

4. Make it quick

Just get the stuff out there. We'd rather have it as it is - and then get it revised later than have to wait months for it to be finalised. The government has provided express permission for local authorities to do this. So just do it.

5. Make it easy to find

There's no point hiding this stuff away. If we can't find it, it may as well not exist. It should be easy to discover and simple to access.

That's a manifesto we can sign up to. What do you think?

Can you do something with our data?

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Internal memo said Twitter tribute to Hezbollah's spiritual leader had compromised senior Middle East editor's credibility

Twitter, with its strict 140-character limit, was never going to be the best medium to make a nuanced point about Middle East politics. But Octavia Nasr gave it a go.

The cost was great: Nasr was fired as CNN's senior Middle East editor after 20 years with the US-based news channel.

The offending tweet was sent on Sunday morning following the death in Beirut of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who was instrumental in the establishment of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Using her official CNN Twitter account Nasr wrote: "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah. One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot."

The tweet was immediately picked up by supporters of Israel, to which the Islamist group is bitterly opposed. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in the US released a statement demanding Nasr "apologise to all victims of Hezbollah terrorism whose loved ones don't share her sadness over the passing of one of Hezbollah's giants".

The text was swiftly removed from her Twitter feed, but by then it had been heavily circulated, with criticism mounting.

Nasr responded on Tuesday with a blog on the CNN website, calling her initial message "simplistic" and "an error of judgment". Her respect for the ayatollah, who she had interviewed for Lebanese television in 1990, was owing to his stance on women's rights, notably his demands that "honour killings" stop, she explained.

But this was not enough. The next day, Nasr was reportedly called in to see her bosses at CNN's headquarters in Atlanta. The New York Times quoted an internal memo from a senior vice-president, Parisa Khosravi, which said: "We have decided that [Nasr] will be leaving the company."

The memo added: "At this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward."

The company has not confirmed the news, saying only that the tweet "did not meet CNN's editorial standards". A spokesman added: "This is a serious matter and will be dealt with accordingly." Nasr's Twitter account has fallen silent.

Fadlallah, 74, was Hezbollah's spiritual leader when it formed after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, though he later distanced himself from the group's ties with Iran.

Nasr, who appeared on camera and worked behind the scenes at the TV station, soon realised her mistake, writing on her blog: "Reaction to my tweet was immediate, overwhelming and provides a good lesson on why 140 characters should not be used to comment on controversial or sensitive issues, especially those dealing with the Middle East."

While her tweet attracted controversy, a tribute to Fadlallah came from another seemingly unlikely source: the UK ambassador to Beriut.

Frances Guy, who has headed the mission since 2006, wrote on her official Foreign Office blog: "Lebanon is a lesser place the world needs more men like him, willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace."

Comments beneath the post were mainly positive, although one read: "Her esteemed predecessors, such as Sir John Gray, lived in mortal fear of being blown up by Fadlallah's Hezbollah hoods. So much for the 'admired Shia leader' she refers to above."

Nasr is one of the more high-profile victims of a phenomenon known as "twittercide". A notable UK casualty was Stuart MacLennan, a Scottish Labour candidate deselected a month before the election for using Twitter to call old people "coffin dodgers" and David Cameron "a twat".

Last month an Irish exam supervisor was dismissed after using his phone to tweet: "I do pity the girls that have me supervising, im young, handsome & probably very distracting ha ha". Meanwhile a columnist for Australia's Age newspaper lost her job after tweeting her wish that an 11-year-old child TV star "gets laid".

Temporary halt put on newly-introduced API feed as implementations catch the London open data experiment unprepared for demand

Stop all the tubes, cut off the API. Transport for London has had to stop its supply of data about the movements of Underground trains due to "overwhelming demand" from demonstrations of what can be done with that data such as Harry Metcalfe's Matthew Somerville's maths-and-magic live tube map. (If you try to go to that site now it just hangs.)

The reason: after opening up the API, requests for data ballooned from 180,000 to 10m. Consequently, TfL found itself a bit underprepared.

As the London Datastore - which has been the throughway for those API requests - notes,

"Owing to overwhelming demand by apps that use the service, the London Underground feed has had to be temporarily suspended. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible but this may take some days. We will keep everyone informed of progress towards a resolution."

Our understanding is that the London Datastore is now encouraging TfL to serve API requests directly, rather than proxied through the data store, because that will mean that TfL gets a clearer idea of who the customers and developers for its data actually are, and where they're based.

In the comments to the blogpost, there are some useful suggestions for TfL about how to improve the service while easing the strain on its (well, the LDS's) servers: more partitioning of feeds with less data per feed, and more caching. Obvious to developers - not so obvious to an organisation which has lived its life functioning, as one developer described it to me, as "a black box that people pour money into and which then spits out travel".

But for TfL, the lesson is clear: there's real, eager demand for its data via an API. There are people who have positive, helpful suggestions for how to improve its servicing. And it's being advised to hold those customers/developers closer, rather than at arm's length. It's going to be interesting to see how it progresses.

Now, can we have the live tube map back please? Soon?

Nick Clegg's 'Your Freedom' project basically a bonfire of the inanities should start on the act passed in the wash-up, especially given the example of Finland

Finns now have the legal right to broadband access, as a law passed in October comes into force today. Under the law, telecomms providers are obliged to offer always-on high-speed internet connections to all of the country's 5.3 million citizens, with a minimum speed of at least 1 megabit per second.

It makes an interesting contrast with the UK where Nick Clegg's announcement of the "Your Freedom" project, aiming to repeal laws seen as onerous or unnecessary came with a new website where people can suggest laws that they want repealed. Basically, a bonfire of the inanities.

And one of the first laws that got put up there by annoyed citizens as a candidate for repeal? The Digital Economy Act, passed in the "wash-up" period at the fag-end of the last Parliament, opposed then by the Liberal Democrats (in particular Don Foster) and the occasion for his first-ever revolt by Labour MP and former Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson.

Indeed, Clegg himself called during the election for the DEA to be repealed. Can't see his name in the comments. Yet.

The contrast between Finland and the UK could not be more stark. Where Finland is treating broadband as being essential to its infrastructure, the DEA offers the potential for strictures where people could, in theory, be cut off if they are judged to have broken copyright law. (The Labour government insisted that this would only happen in the most extreme of cases, and there is no mention in the Act of any "three strikes" methodology, but the threat still remains. It's just a question of process.)

Finland, of course, has good reason to want to make sure that all its citizens can get broadband. They're not solely about high-tech. It's also because Finland has some incredibly rural areas, as well as its cities. And it gets extremely cold in winter, which means that it's preferable to stay where you are than to travel long distances to work, if your work can be done via a computer.

Partly for that reason, Finland is already one of the world's most connected countries, with 96% of citizens online - but in October the communications minister, Suvi Linden, said that the mandate was necessary in order to improve the availability of internet in Finland's remote rural areas. In an announcement in September, Ms Linden committed to making 100Mb internet access - one hundred times faster than the connections mandated under the current law - available to all Finnish residents by 2015.

In the UK, the government is aiming at 2Mbps for 99% of the population by 2012 - but there's no law to back it. Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, declared early in June that he wants the UK to have the best superfast broadband network in Europe: "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."

Unfortunately we're miles behind in that race, and without any legal force to make telecomms companies provide that sort of connectivity, and no clear subsidy to encourage them to connect the rural areas (which are most expensive to wire, and produce the lowest return, because you have few customers far apart, compared to cities where you have many customers close together) it looks like we're going to continue to lag.

Even so, we can be hopeful about the DEA. It would be interesting if the Lib Dem arm of the coalition manages to get the DEA repealed. As sheredom, who suggested it for the bonfire, pointed out, the reasons for killing it are:

"1. Misguided bill that will not combat the issues that it claims to. Puts unnecessary strain on ISPs that do not wish to enforce the law; 2. To stand up to these lobby groups and say 'No, we are not going to do things because big business tells us to.'"

Apple iPhone 4 - good for Apple, bad for Apple PR, bad for mobile operators, good for HTML5 developers. And the customers? Well they're not exactly fully paid-up members of the Apple fan club either, according to a new report on the mobile web.


Photo by Sroown on Flickr. Some rights reserved

The unique selling point of the iPhone - it's App Store - will dwindle in appeal within two years as HTML5 becomes the standard for browsers and mobile web applications become increasingly feature-rich, says the 2010 Mobile Web Usage Forecast by mobile internet firm Volantis. And it will be gaming and social networking that provide the biggest pull towards the mobile web, the YouGov poll of over 4,000 US and UK consumers aged 18+ found.

Fifty-five percent of UK-based respondents said social networking would encourage them to use the mobile web more, while 17% were keen to access games on their mobiles. Those findings certainly correlate with this year's GSMA Mobile Media Metrics report which found that Facebook accounted for almost half of the 4.8bn minutes UK folk spent browsing the mobile web in December 2009. Over a third (38%) of all respondents felt that an iPhone was inconsequential as part of having a good mobile web experience, with just one in ten Americans thinking that an iPhone was essential to enjoy the mobile internet.

Volantis chief executive Mark Watson said the findings were good news for developers turned off by Apple's more restrictive approach to mobile apps: "The arrival of HTML5 will release developers from the constraints of Flash, making the user experience more varied and allowing the development of entertainment, lifestyle and business apps which are optimised to provide the same experience across all devices. Freeing developers from having to focus on either 'Apple' or 'Other' applications will further drive the mobile web market.

"Mobile internet users want compelling web experiences that will allow them quick and seamless access to the services that matter to them most," he said. "With the advancement of HTML5 the limitations of web apps for mobile are declining; inch by inch, function by function, handsets are becoming more web accessible."

In January this year, Gartner predicted mobile app downloads would surpass 21.6bn by 2013. By the same year, the analyst said, mobile phones would replace PCs as the most common device for web access.

An unrelated report by Denmark-based Strand Consult say Apple's latest mobile offering is "really bad news" for carriers, warning that mobile operators could well be issuing profit warnings due to large subsidies for the iPhone 4. Invoking its almost countercultural September 2009 report, The Moment of Truth - a Portrait of the iPhone, Strand Consult argue that any evaluation of iPhone 4 success should be based on six parameters:

How does the iPhone 4 differ compared to previous iPhone models?

Does the iPhone 4 have a new form factor that makes it attractive to new customer segments that did not purchase previous iPhone models due to the design?

Which customers will primarily purchase the new iPhone 4, new customers or existing iPhone customers that want the new model?

How will a massive upgrade of the iPhone base influence the economy of operators that have large customer bases that want a new subsidised iPhone 4?

What will happen with all the old iPhones when people purchase a new iPhone 4? Will they destroy them, or will they try to sell them to friends and family?

How big is the iPhone market? Is it so big that it deserves the uncritical attention it is receiving?

On each of these scores, Strand Consult contends, the iPhone 4 leaves much to be desired from mobile operators, while leaving the door open for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to deal in SIM-only strategies.