Parliament not doing enough to investigate privacy invasion by internet companies, Rob Halfon tells debate

A "very dangerous shift" towards a "privatised version of Big Brother" is on the horizon if UK authorities don't wake up to the invasion of privacy by internet companies, an influential Tory MP has warned.

In a debate about Google and privacy hosted by the pressure group Big Brother Watch, Rob Halfon, who is the Conservative MP for Harlow, said he believed there are many cases of privacy invasion by internet companies yet to be uncovered, and that parliamentarians need to be much more alive to the issue.

Google is facing criminal investigations around the world including in the UK for its interception of personal data about home wireless networks, taken from the company's StreetView mapping cars. The search giant admitted to accidentally intercepting extracts of personal data in May.

"The problem with Google and other big internet companies is that, despite having produced great technological advances, they have forgotten that people are individuals too," Halfon told Tuesday's debate. "We're getting into a situation where just as we're starting to get rid of the previous government's surveillance society we're now replacing it with another one: dare I say it, a privatised kind of surveillance society."

Halfon pointed to allegations of companies "trawling Facebook looking for customers saying negative things that's something worthy of the secret police. If this happened in Soviet Russia you could quite understand it."

While pointing out that he's not against private companies, the MP said more needs to be done to protect the individual: "I suspect there's a lot of privacy encroachment going on which is yet to be uncovered and that these are just a couple of stories we've just seen in the media. The reason I believe there should be an inquiry into the role of the internet and its relationship to individual liberty is because there is so much going on under the surface, tracking what we do on the internet, tracking what we say on the internet, all for commercial purposes.

"There's danger that no one will have any privacy whatsoever. And this time the threat is not from the state, it's actually private companies who have acquired the right to photograph what goes on in people's gardens. That is a very dangerous shift because we will be living, dare I say it, in a privatised version of Big Brother. That's the scenario slowly creeping up upon us."

The Metropolitan Police launched a criminal investigation into Google last month on the request of Privacy International, which alleges that the search company carried out "criminal interception of wireless communications content," constituting an offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Wireless Telegraphy Act. Last month, Halfon put forward an early day motion formally requesting a House of Commons debate on "the new threat of a surveillance society".

So far, 24 MPs have signed Halfon's Commons motion, with the most prominent of them being the former shadow home secretary David Davis.

In May this year, the UK's information commissioner said he did not want to "declare war" on Google over its breach of the Data Protection Act by collecting data about home wireless networks - despite Germany, Spain, France and Italy all launching investigations under the same European legislation.

The commissioner's reaction was criticised by both Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, and Alex Deane, director of Big Brother Watch, Deane saying: "If an investigation is warranted to the criminal standard I'm not saying anyone's guilty of anything so far how can you possibly say our information commissioner should not have been looking into what was going on in this company?

"That's why I think our information commissioner has been asleep on the job, on that point. His international fellows have really put him to shame. We've got to make sure not only the people responsible for the technology are awake but also the watchdogs are awake."

Davies went further, saying the commissioner's office is "both spineless and gutless", adding: "That, unfortunately, has been the legacy of the office for a long time."

Sarah Hunter, Google's head of UK public policy, attended the event but was restricted in what she could say by ongoing legal proceedings. Hunter did say Google had taken on board privacy concerns that have arisen in the past six months and that concerns expressed at the debate would be relayed back to colleagues, adding: "The answer to a lot of these concerns is finding ways to give people control over their own personal data that's got to be at the heart of solving this conundrum.

"I think Google, or any of the responsible internet companies, understand the concerns that are expressed - how could we not be? I don't think it's true to say Google top brass don't get this. I think the last six months have been a real I think everyone's noted it, shall we say. I think we are very mindful of the challenges that the internet poses as a whole.

"At the heart of solving those challenges, we think, is giving people control over their data - giving people the capacity to both take their information away from the services, and to give people the real sense of what their information is being used for, because I don't think the internet as a platform works on an everyone-opting-in-on-every-service basis."

Steve Jobs says tech firm had enjoyed 'phenomenal quarter' after revenues rise 88%, with net profit up 78% at $3.25bn

Record sales of Mac computers and strong demand for the iPad has helped Apple post its highest ever quarterly earnings.

Steve Jobs declared last night that Apple had enjoyed a "phenomenal quarter", after it smashed analyst forecasts. Revenues rose 88% to $15.7bn ( 10.2bn) in the three months to 26 June, with net quarterly profit up 78% at $3.25bn.

Jobs also insisted that the iPhone 4 was the most successful launch in the company's history despite the well-documented problems with the handset's antenna.

Shaw Wu, analyst at Kaufman Bros, said the results were "spectacular".

The company sold 3.47 million Macs worldwide, and 3.27 million iPads. "iPad is off to a terrific start, more people are buying Macs than ever before, and we have amazing new products still to come this year," said Jobs.

Apple's results were released after the close of trading on Wall Street, and its shares jumped by more than 2.5% in after-hours trading. Apple's Mac computers have taken something of a back seat in recent months, with attention being mainly devoted to the iPad tablet computer and the new iPhone.

Last night's results suggest a growing trend. "There is a virtuous circle going on with Apple, as customers who are exposed to the iPhone and iPad also want a Mac," said Colin Gillis of BGC Partners in a research note.

Tim Cook, Apple's chief operating officer, said that around half the Macs sold during the quarter went to new users. He also revealed that 50% of Fortune 100 companies in America are either testing or deploying the iPad.

Apple has deferred revenue of $175m to cover the cost of providing cases to address antenna problems with the iPhone 4, but denied that the issue had hit sales.

"Let me be clear about this we are selling every unit we can make currently," said Cook. "My phone is ringing off the hook with people who want more supply."

Sales of the iPhone fell slightly quarter-on-quarter, to 8.4 million from 8.75 million, as customers waited for the launch of the iPhone 4 in late June. The figures also suggested that the iPod's best days are well behind it. Apple sold just over 9.4 million units, the lowest figure since the summer of 2006.

Apple predicted that revenues in the current quarter would hit $18bn, which is higher than analyst forecasts.

Some critics have claimed Apple has been deliberately restricting the availability of the iPad and iPhone 4 to push up demand, a charge Cook robustly denied: "We are selling both products as fast as we can make them, so we are quoting longer lead times than we'd like, and we're working round the clock to alleviate this."

Soft-drinks giant reviews relationship with firm that created Dr Pepper campaign featuring 'offensive' Facebook status updates

Coca-Cola is considering cutting ties with the agency that created a Facebook campaign that parents accused of targeting children by using references to a notorious pornographic movie.

The soft-drinks giant, which has come in for heavy criticism after running a racy Facebook campaign for the Dr Pepper brand, has told the agency that it must stop all advertising work on Coca-Cola brands until a decision is reached on whether to terminate the relationship.

"We have stopped all our ongoing work with [digital agency] Lean Mean Fighting Machine and are currently reviewing our relationship with the agency," said a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola GB.

The company was forced to pull a Facebook campaign for its Dr Pepper brand, in which users allowed their Facebook status box to be taken over by the company. Users could choose from three levels of "embarrassingness", and the contract with Facebook stipulated that all content had to be moderated by Coke before going live.

However, the promotion backfired when a Mumsnet user saw her 14-year-old daughter's Facebook page or rather the Dr Pepper campaign she had joined had been updated with a message that made direct reference to a hardcore pornographic film.

Coca-Cola apologised and announced an investigation into its promotion procedures.

It said the offending line had been approved by them, without them realising its true meaning.

Other examples of embarrassing statuses used as part of the promotion included: "Lost my special blankie. How will I go sleepies?", "What's wrong with peeing in the shower?" and "Never heard of it described as cute before."

Coca-Cola is now reviewing its relationship with the agency behind the campaign, Lean Mean Fighting Machine. The move could result in the agency losing one of advertising's juiciest accounts a bitter blow, especially as it had just won the digital ad account for Coca-Cola's Coke Zero brand.

Dr Pepper is no stranger to flirting with social media controversy in its marketing activity, which uses the strapline "What's the worst that can happen?". For April Fool's Day the brand launched a push on Chatroulette featuring a cheerleader.

 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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There are still loose ends which we need to tie up about the call centres that try to con people out of money for doing 'PC repairs' against 'malware' that you've 'downloaded'

The response to our stories about people being scammed by cold calls from Indian call centres has been remarkable. (A quick reminder: people get cold-called and told there's a "problem with your computer" and talked into handing over remote access, and then 185 or so for "remote support". It's not worth taking up the offer, and the police took action against a number of sites used for this scam in April.)

It's worth noting that there have been complaints for ages about this business; one of the biggest locations where comments have gathered is at Digital Toast, where a blogpost warning of these scams, first written in January 2009, has drawn (at the time of writing) 785 comments - the most recent from three days ago. (And they aren't spam, unless you count the attempts by people linked to the scammers to insist that they got a great service).

Among the links there are some to recordings of the scammers at work, which range from the dire to the sweary.

What's also notable is the huge number of site names that are being used in association with this scam. Every time I think I've come close to some sort of roundup, I find that another one is being named in the comments.

That is certainly a key problem here: if you can view a site, you can grab its source and make a copy and set one up yourself. What's really interesting, though, is the fact that the people who are doing this

- have never, in any of the many, many examples that I've seen, installed malware on anyone's machine; so they're not malicious

- seem to be quite well-trained in dealing with Windows systems (though they get flummoxed at any mention of Linux or Apple Macintosh machines).

Both these details are interesting: possibly the first one means that they have the chance of arguing that because they haven't done anything criminal (though I don't know whether India has an equivalent of the UK's Computer Misuse Act) there hasn't been any crime. Unfortunately, the fact that the calls always begin with people being told there are "problems with your machine" when there aren't means that this still falls under "obtaining money through deception", which is section 2.1 of the Fraud Act.

The second detail is just as interesting: it implies that there's a big pool of people with Microsoft training who haven't got anything better to do than work in call centres where they have to cold-call (almost certainly on commission - if you were running a business like that, that's how you would do it, isn't it?).

There's a very interesting comment by @LosBravos on the earlier story, which is worth repeating here:

"These aren't always "cold" calls. My mother called her telephone/internet provider about an intermittent problem with her phone line - it was an Indian call centre. 15 minutes later she received one of these calls - obviously her information had been passed on by an insider - claiming to be a follow-up as they had spotted a problem with her broadband. She was thoroughly bamboozled by the caller (she's in her mid -70s), but had enough presence of mind to put the phone down when he started demanding money. Fortunately, this was before the dodgy software had been downloaded.

"Of course, her phone provider denied that this was possible..."

That is indeed one of the key threads that we haven't been able to unravel yet: how do they get the names? Are they (as some of the people on the Digital Toast comments suggest) getting them from sales of new computers or broadband signups? From the phone book? Or something else? Are these people somehow going 'freelance', or is there a business going on which passes on the likely contacts?

As always, we welcome all your insights and information on this - especially if you've experienced this, or know someone who has and who has paid money: what company did the payment go to?

And meanwhile a big hand to Digital Toast for keeping the fire lit under this topic for so long.

Amazon US says it has sold 143 digital books for every 100 hardbacks in the last three months

It is an announcement that will provoke horror among those who can think of nothing better than spending an afternoon rummaging around a musty old bookshop. In what could be a watershed for the publishing industry, Amazon said sales of digital books have outstripped US sales of hardbacks on its website for the first time.

Amazon claims to have sold 143 digital books for its e-reader, the Kindle, for every 100 hardback books over the past three months. The pace of change is also accelerating. Amazon said that in the most recent four weeks, the rate reached 180 ebooks for every 100 hardbacks sold. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said sales of the Kindle and ebooks had reached a "tipping point", with five authors including Steig Larsson, the writer of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, and Stephenie Meyer, who penned the Twilight series, each selling more than 500,000 digital books. Earlier this month, Hachette said that James Patterson had sold 1.1m ebooks to date.

Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller, said the figures from Amazon were "eye-catching", but added a note of scepticism. He said that while ebooks had outnumbered hardbacks in volume, they were likely to be some distance behind in value. Some of the bestsellers listed on the Kindle top 10 list today were retailing for as little as $1.16 (75p). Free downloads of books no longer in copyright were excluded from the figures.

It does not appear that the growth of ebooks is damaging sales of physical books. According to the Association of American Publishers, hardback sales are still growing in the US, up 22% this year.

The association says that ebook sales in the US account for 6% of the consumer book market. One publisher in London said the US is "two or three years ahead of us. But there is no reason to suppose we won't see the same thing happening here."

Kate Pool, deputy general secretary of the Royal Society of Authors, said most authors would be "delighted" to sell large numbers of digital books. "If you speak to most authors, they couldn't bear to get rid of their old bookshelves, but if their readers want to read on an e-reader, then great. They are in it to earn a living after all."

The market is still relatively small in Britain. Digital sales were around 150m last year, says the Publishers' Association, over 80% in the academic-professional sector, with only 5m in consumer sales.

The Kindle has been available in the UK since October, although customers still need to visit the US site and get the device delivered from America.

The books catalogue is also available only through the American site and the titles priced in dollars. A spokesman said there are 390,000 titles available for UK readers to download. The company will not release figures on the number of Kindles sold. "We are nowhere near the same level as the US," Denny added. "I have never seen anyone using a Kindle in Britain. The iPad is more interesting."

Amazon cut the price of its device in June in response to the launch of Apple's iPad, which many believe could provide a substantial threat to the Kindle's market. Waterstones has sold ebooks from its website for the Sony Reader since September 2008 and will sell its one-millionth title this year, a spokesman said.

Pool said she had yet to invest in an ebook reader. "I have played around with one, but I haven't read a full book on one. It is not that I am a Luddite, more of a scrooge, which I think is the same for many people. I am waiting for the price to come down, for the amount of content available to go up and I want to be sure I am not buying the wrong thing. I don't want to be left with a Betamax when everyone else is watching VHS."

Watchdog says Cardiff councillor John Dixon's Twitter message 'likely' to have breached code of conduct for local authority members

A councillor is facing a disciplinary hearing after calling the Church of Scientology "stupid" on Twitter, it emerged today.

The Welsh public standards watchdog investigated Cardiff councillor John Dixon's short message and decided it was "likely" to have breached the code of conduct for local authority members.

News of the ombudsman's decision prompted a flood of messages of support on Twitter for Dixon, the council's executive member for health, social care and wellbeing.

Tweets included an offer to find a lawyer to fight his case pro bono and many others defending his right to free speech.

The case centres on a message posted by the Liberal Democrat councillor during a visit to London.

It said: "I didn't know the Scientologists had a church on Tottenham Court Road. Just hurried past in case the stupid rubs off."

The message was posted on an account called CllrJohnDixon. He has since set up a second account, JohnLDixon, for his "more personal musings", in which he describes himself as a "microbiologist and web developer, into science, rugby and web geekery".

By 3pm today, Dixon's number of followers on Twitter had trebled.

One supporter said: "Instead of a disciplinary hearing, they should canvas all the electorate to see if they agree with you. I think they just might."

Another wrote: "We're all behind you mate, if any disciplinary action goes ahead it will be because the stupid rubbed off on someone."

Dixon later tweeted: "Just seen all the retweets about my ombudsman's judgement. Um... Wow... Thanks."

A spokeswoman for the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales confirmed there had been an investigation into Dixon.

The investigation had found there was likely to have been a breach of the code of conduct local authority members must follow.

The ombudsman has referred the case to Cardiff council's standards and ethics committee, which will consider it in the autumn. It will have to decide if there has been a breach and, if it finds there has been, consider any sanctions.

A spokesman for the Church of Scientology said: "The complaint was made by an individual Scientologist who was personally offended by the comments."

The spokesman suggested people go to their website to find out about the church and its founder, L Ron Hubbard.

Dixon argued that the remarks were made in a personal capacity rather than as a councillor, and said his Twitter name was CllrJohnDixon only because JohnDixon had been taken.

He told the Guardian he was in London in June last year to buy a wedding ring for his wife-to-be which he also tweeted about. Other postings made at the time included remarks about visiting a relative in Richmond and going to a musical.

Dixon said he thought the remark about the Church of Scientology was "whimsical" and had thought nothing more about it until he began to suspect that members of the church were following him on Twitter.

He posted another message: "Just realised the Scientologists are following me. Quick everyone, pretend you're out."

But he said that, in December, the ombudsman received a complaint about the remarks. Councillors are obliged to carry out their duties with due regard to the principle that there should be equal opportunity to all, regardless of their religion.

Dixon said that even if he had been speaking in an official capacity which he maintains he was not he was surprised at the complaint going so far.

"As a Liberal Democrat, I'm used to having things said about me. You take it on the chin," he said.

He said he did not have very strong opinions on Scientologists before the saga. "Having done some research on them, I take a harder line now," he added.

The first Mafia game showed promise but ultimately failed to eclipse its crime-sim rivals. Will the sequel fare any better?

For the franchise's devoted followers, it's been a long two years since Grand Theft Auto 4 came out. DLC add-ons aside, Rockstar focusing attentions on Red Dead has meant it's been quite a while since gamers have had any high-end urban sandbox fun to sink their teeth into. Crackdown and Saints Row, for all their good qualities, just weren't in the same league.

This, publisher Take 2 will hope, is where Mafia 2 steps in. Take GTA's polished gameplay, weave in classic American gangster-movie mythos, and add-in state-of-the-art graphics and meticulous attention to detail, and you have a recipe for something that's worth getting pretty excited about.

Set in a fictional American city, the game's "mature, believable" story spans two decades, as twentysomething Vito Scarletta returns home from the second world war and begins his ascent within an Italian crime syndicate.

Comparisons with its illustrious rival are inevitable, with near identical controls and gameplay mechanics, but the many ways in which Mafia 2 borrows from GTA are as much of a boon as a drawback. The absence of tricky new controls to master allows you to get stuck straight in to the action.

I was shown both the 40s and 50s Empire City in my viewing of the game - the story is split into two parts - and it's easy to see how this clever dynamic will add a great deal of depth to the experience. Cosmetically, the city changes drastically in those ten years, with the familiar streetplan reinforcing the differences - and highlighting the incredible attention to detail seen in the game as it attempts to immerse you in its iconic period setting.

Cruise around in your vehicle of choice and you're struck by just how authentic and of its time everything feels. The cars, though not actual vehicles, have been carefully designed to mirror their real-life counterparts. Meanwhile, over 100 licensed classic tunes are on offer on your suitably fuzzy sounding car radio, offering everything from Bill Haley to Frank Sinatra.

Even Vito's house, which works as a save point and garage throughout the game, has been lovingly crafted with 40s and 50s interior design, kitchen appliances, clothes to choose from and so on.

The graphics are incredibly impressive at times, and although this may have been aided somewhat by the cinema screen our preview was shown on, it looks like they're going to be amongst the best ever seen on home consoles. Much like those early, awe-inspiring panoramics over Liberty City that so impressed back in 2008, the wintry cityscape on offer at the beginning of Mafia 2 just begs to be explored.

It's this beguiling mix of attention to detail, beautiful graphics and ingenious, thoughtful touches (I noted a pair of WW2 biplanes flying overhead as you're driven from the airport in the game's opening sequence) which begins to show how Mafia 2, despite the aforementioned similarities, is a game that offers far more than a mere retro-fitted "Niko in the 50s" GTA-clone.

First off, the tone is much darker and much more serious than GTA 4. The action and set-pieces offer gritty realism rather than the more cartoony aspects of Niko's adventures in Liberty City. You certainly won't be flying off motorcycles onto helicopters at any point (well, I very much doubt it).

Towards the end of the mission I played, a gun is thrust into the mouth of one character, and you can't help but grimace as you hear his whimpers and moans before the trigger is pulled.

Meanwhile, hand combat is an altogether more challenging experience - and much more sophisticated than the punch-button jabbing of your standard GTA skirmish.

The shooting mechanics too have a more realistic feel about them. Chunks of pillar fly off as you shoot at enemies in cover, and the weaponry feels weightier, more real, somehow. Mafia 2 wants, above all else, to make you feel like you're a part of its world.

To aid this, the voice acting is, in the small section I've seen, amongst the finest ever seen in a video game. Close your eyes and you could be listening to a deleted scene from Goodfellas.

There is, however, a reason I've said you'd need to close your eyes. By opting for realism in the characters facial animations, developers 2K Czech have taken an unfortunate wrong-turn into the uncanny valley.

Although this was an unfinished version of the game, I found the static, inscrutable facial expressions featured in the cutscenes very offputting. Mouths and eyes barely move when characters are talking, lending the scenes the air of a very strange ventriloquist's act. If this prevents players from getting attached to their character, the overall game experience is really going to suffer.

This one problem aside, Mafia 2 has the makings of a blockbuster release, and is a potential must-have for your late summer shopping lists. Who knows, by the time Grand Theft Auto 5 comes out, the comparisons may be the other way around.

Look out for our full review on the Games blog in a few weeks' time.

Mafia 2 will be released on August 28th for Xbox 360, PC and PS3

No date yet, but at least we know that Microsoft is admitting there are 40m Xbox 360s out there

Microsoft has announced the pricing for the Kinect bundle - you know, the you-move-it-moves system that Peter Molyneux has brought to fruition (possibly with a little bit of help).

Sitting down? OK:

"Kinect for Xbox 360, which will include the Kinect Sensor and the video game "Kinect Adventures," will retail for US$149.99 when it launches Nov. 4 in North America, the company revealed. The Kinect Sensor will work with each of the 40 million Xbox 360s currently in households worldwide."

(Useful stat, Microsoft: we'll note that 40m figure for the future.).

Oh, the UK price? 129.99. Yes! Welcome to Treasure Island - again! At the prevailing currency exchange rate, that would be 98; add on VAT at 17.5% and you get 115.40 (though once you get 20% VAT, it would be 117.60. (We're not sure what magic has been woven on the product to make the price go up as it passes over water, but make sure not to wave it over the bath.)

OK, executive quote time: Josh Hutto, director of product marketing for Xbox, said that Kinect represents a great value for new and existing Xbox 360 customers. "Kinect truly is a revolutionary product," he said. "We're bringing controller-free entertainment into the living room. With one purchase, families get Kinect and the most complete and affordable way to have fun."

So - now you know how much it is going to cost, are you going to buy one? Or are you preferring the Sony Move?

Facebook has been brewing its 'half a billion users' announcement for months, it seems, waiting for that 500 millionth user to click the 'join' button and sign away their digital soul.

Facebook has chosen a US TV interview to mark the moment, putting forward founder Mark Zuckerberg for a prime-time interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC News in the this Wednesday at 18.30 ET (22.30 GMT). Zuck is far more relaxed and confident in interview these days than he was even two years ago, though he never seems particularly comfortable in the spotlight unless talking tech to a tech crowd.


Photo by jolieodell on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Sawyer interviewed Zuck two years ago on 60 Minutes, but this year's interview is likely to be far tougher, fielding questions on Facebook's intensifying battle with concerned users over privacy, use of data and on the safety of younger users too.

It is a phenomenal achievement to reach the 500 million users landmark, particularly because most of those users spend a good deal of time on the site, and it is that engagement that gives Facebook its value to advertisers. But Facebook's next 500 million users will be far harder, as we have written before, and the pressure on Zuck will only get more intense.

Perhaps to bolster Zuck a little, the ABC News interview will be conducted at Facebook's headquarters after a guided tour, putting him on home turf. It's hard to imagine that he could say powerful enough to reverse the Facebook backlash (even if that backlash only really exists in the tech community), so perhaps it is rather more about just not ballsing up.

Officially, Facebook will announce the milestone with 'Facebook Stories', as revealed by AllThingsD last week. Selected 420-character text stories from users sum up Facebook's role in finding love, coping with grief and experiencing a natural disaster, amongst others. The idea is to give some personality to what is basically a numbers story.

Recet figures taken from Google's AdPlanner service add a little more detail. That puts Facebook at 540 million users each month with 630 billion page views. That's 34.8% reach of the world's internet population, with an average 34 visits per month of 23 minutes in total. Facebook's last user milestone was 250 million - almost exactly one year ago.

Early experiences by various testers show growing interest in new interface experience from Microsoft - but excitement is restrained

The early previews of Windows Phone 7 - for which reference hardware has started shipping to developers - are in. What to make of them? I think the best way to describe them would be a crouching ovation: people who've tried it like the fact that Microsoft is trying something different with the mobile experience, but they really can't decide if it's going to be a success or not.

Engadget's in-depth preview (an intriguing concept) is sort of positive: "Microsoft still has a few months before it intends to get the first volley of Windows Phone 7-based products to the marketplace, but we've recently been provided with reference hardware -- a not-for-retail Samsung called "Taylor" that's closely modeled on the Symbian-based i8910HD -- to get a feel for where they're at as the clock ticks down."

Quick briefs: "We were extremely surprised and impressed by the software's touch responsiveness and speed. In fact, this is probably the most accurate and nuanced touch response this side of iOS4. It's kind of stunning how much work Microsoft has done on the user experience since we first saw this interface -- everything now comes off as a tight, cohesive whole. It really put one of our major fears about Windows Phone 7 to rest. We haven't seen any substantial lag while using the device, and the short transitions between applications or pages are well suited to the overall experience."

Although: "the controversial cut-off text is still present, and while we happen to like the way it looks, it's definitely an acquired taste, and there are times when it just doesn't work, like in the Office hub where PowerPoint looks like it reads "PowerPoir." And two other things: "There are two big omissions here, in our opinion. The device won't support copy and paste, and won't support third-party multitasking of apps. We knew this would be the case given what we heard at MIX10, but it doesn't stink any less now. The former really doesn't make any sense to us, especially since Microsoft did a good job of nailing text editing and selection (at least in Word, and really... you guys make Word), and it looks like it would only be a short walk to a contextual pop-over for copy and paste functions. The latter is practically inexcusable in this day and age -- even Apple (which has been a complete laggard in this area) now supports basic multitasking."

But they like the keyboard ("the keyboard in Windows Phone 7 is really, really good. We're talking nearly as good as the iPhone keyboard, and definitely better than the stock Android option. It's one of the best and most accurate virtual keyboards we've used on any platform -- and that's saying a lot") and screen resolution ("the Windows Phone 7 standard 480 x 800").

Then again, there are points where Engadget's not so happy, which tallies with some of the doubts I expressed earlier (though I must point out that I've not held a WP7 phone, nor seen it demoed): "Windows Phone 7 doesn't have "contacts," per se -- it has a People app, and there's quite a difference. This is a thoroughly social platform, and it doesn't really seek to make any sort of differentiation between people you talk to / text / email, those you just casually observe, and those with whom you're "friends" in name only. If that kind of philosophy reeks of Motorola Blur or Palm Synergy, you're on the right track; as soon as you add a Windows Live, Exchange, or Facebook account, it pulls in every contact associated with that account and disperses associated content throughout your entire phone -- there's nothing you can do about it. That means, for example, that your Pictures app could have a bunch of shots of your ex's aunt's new boyfriend's dog in it (more on that in a bit), and there's not a whole lot you can do to stop that behavior without completely removing your Facebook account from the phone.

"With Exchange, this strategy is probably fine in most cases -- contact sync is one of the main reasons you use Exchange ActiveSync, really -- but seriously, Facebook is another matter altogether. If you've got a lot of Facebook friends, this renders your People app all but useless as a traditional phone contact list."

Over at ZDNet UK, there's another preview which goes (like Engadget) into plenty of detail: "Microsoft has stripped away all unnecessary information (almost too much, actually the status bar displaying battery life, signal strength, and so forth goes into hiding after a couple of seconds) and soft buttons, and created a Start screen that consists of 'live tiles', which are essentially dynamic widgets to your favorite apps, contacts and hubs, and also display alerts, such as new email and missed calls. You can rearrange the order of the tiles and remove them by doing a long press on the screen. You can also 'pin' new tiles, but to do so, you must first navigate to the list of apps or the People hub, find the item that you want to add and then pin it to the Start screen."

OK, and those hubs... "The names of the hubs are pretty self-explanatory. For example, the People hub merges contact information from your various accounts and then displays them in one long list. A swipe to the right will show you Facebook status updates (unfortunately, Windows Phone 7 will not have Twitter or MySpace integration at launch) and lets you add comments, while another swipe will brings up the people you've contacted most recently."

"This type of panoramic UI runs across all the various hubs with bold, attractive text splashed across the top to identify different subsections (a.k.a. Pivots) and in some cases, a small contextual toolbar along the bottom of the screen to help you perform app-specific tasks."

"Some might complain that this type of navigation requires too much scrolling and can be overly complicated. Admittedly, this is true when compared to Apple's iOS 4 and Google's Android, and may be a turn-off for consumers. On the other hand, we appreciate the ability to do so many things from one place without having to launch several different apps, so we have to give Microsoft kudos for thinking of this kind of organisation. We also like the consistent UI, which makes it easy to work the other hubs."

Another point which has been made elsewhere: "What's interesting about Windows Phone 7, though, is that at times it feels as though you're getting two completely different experiences on one phone. The Start screen/menu list and some apps such as the phone dialer, email inbox and calendar are completely minimalistic, while other aspects of the phone, including the aforementioned hubs and multimedia features, are more sophisticated and elegant. It doesn't hurt the navigation, as such, but is doesn't make the phone feel like a cohesive unit either."

And the big question: "Will this resonate with users? Frankly, we think it'll be a hard sell initially. Despite all the improvements made to the UI, it's still more involved than other operating systems. That said, we'd also caution you not to dismiss it completely, simply because it's different. Change is scary, but it can also be a good thing."

It's a long review, which you're urged to read in detail.

Meanwhile the Wired Gadgetlab has put its sticky fingers all over the screen: here's the video. Their principal comment: "Still the lack of any kind of real app store is a major hindrance. Also, Microsoft just will not give up on the Zune marketplace. It's admirable, but maybe they should re-examine their reasoning for keeping it." But surely the Zune Marketplace is Microsoft's leg up to an App Store? Abandoning it would look weird.

Can you trust measurements of online readership that don't have access to backstage data? The 'social news' site is fuming over low-ball estimates of its visitors

Some web metrics companies will tell you there's nobody here. Photo by UW Digital Collections on Flickr. Some rights reserved

There's annoyance over at reddit, where its blog takes issue with the companies that measure web visitors: it shows that, first of all, Google Analytics (its own backstage measurement) shows more than 8m unique visitors in the last 30 days, and 400m pageviews. "This is a typical month for us. In fact, our number would have been even higher if not for some site issues at the end of June."

Unique visitors are the key metric for any purely ad-supported site: if you can get lots and lots of different people looking at the ads you're showing, then you have a greater chance of getting money in.

So with that in mind, they look at the suggestions made by the external measurement sites such as Compete.com, Quantcast and Alexa - which give wildly varying estimates for how many people are visiting reddit's sites.

Compete suggests 927,000 uniques per month - about one-eighth of the true figure as measured by Google's Javascript, which sits on every Reddit page.

Quantcast suggests that the visitor count has dropped to 10m from 13m, to which Reddit responds: "It isn't. It's two to four times as much, and we haven't had two consecutive months of declining traffic since spring 2007."

And Alexa? "Just plain weird. They don't seem to like tallying actual totals, and instead seem to prefer to rate sites by their "percentage of total Internet traffic." If I could find their guess for last month's total global Internet traffic, I could multiply those two numbers together and calculate what they think our pageviews were, but since I can't find that key statistic, I can only look at their graphs comparing us to competing sites. Those graphs seem to indicate that Alexa, too, is drastically underrepresenting the size of reddit."

And indeed the Alexa "stats" on reddit are confusing in the extreme, but probably because Alexa wants you to sign up for its information.

And finally there's Nielsen: "someone with a subscription to their ranking service tells us that they estimate our "Online Market Size Estimate" (whatever that is) to be 652,000."

To some extent the mystery is why this misunderestimation (as reddit characterises it) is a mystery to the folks at reddit. Companies such as Alexa rely on people installing browser toolbars which feed back data about which sites they're visiting to build up their picture of the web. The problem is, how can you be sure that your measurement is statistically valid? How do you cater for all the people who haven't and don't want to install a toolbar, and the many more who can't (because they're using a machine in a locked-down environment, such as students using university systems, people in libraries, people in companies with managed systems and so on)?

Short answer: you can't. That's why online newspapers (yes, oxymoron) in the UK subscribe to the ABCe system, which means they share their data about users according to an agreed method to measure unique users and so on.

Ironically, this harks back to the "Mac malware" scare of last month, when "PremierOpinion" - which is in fact a browser-tracking toolbar owned by a subsidiary of a subsidiary of, wait for it, comScore, another metrics company - was identified (arguably, wrongly, or at least over-excitedly) by the anti-virus company Intego as "adware/spyware". Well, it's sort of spyware, except it asks your permission and shows you an explanation of what it's going to do. Permissionware?

When I asked comScore about this - and particularly Intego's claim that the PremierOpinion application injects code into browsers such as Safari and Chrome, and also into the instant messaging application iChat, and "copies personal data from these applications", comScore responded: "In order to collect market research data, our application reviews communications being made between the computer with software installed and the internet. This includes communications being made through various browsers. Numerous filtering steps are taken on the users machine to make sure that PII is scrubbed before being sent to our servers."

Basically, the metrics companies are in an impossible position. They're trying to sell something that people aren't willing to give them, so they have to take roundabout routes to get to them.

In its way, it's very like polling: every so often Ipsos MORI will ask 1,000 people randomly chosen to be representative of the UK population whether they think the government is doing a good job, who they'd like to have as Prime Minister, and so on. If - if - they've got the right sample, then the polls will fairly accurately reflect peoples' views.

But if they do the poll by phone and key people aren't anwering phones, or the sample gets otherwise upset, it won't work. And that's what is at work here: the sampling companies, with their browser toolbars and other "permissionware" (let's be generous) simply can't be representative of the wider internet - which means that companies like reddit get frustrated by being perceived as falling off, when all their server stats tell them that things are rosy.

Some companies use other methods: Experian Hitwise uses traffic data from ISPs (about how many hits there have been to domain name servers): even as of December 2006 it has 10m US and 25m worldwide users - nothing like "all", but statistics means, if you get it right, that samples do the work for you. (We used Hitwise data to calculate that the Times has lost 90% of its online readers since making registration compulsory for access its website.)

It's also a reason why stories built around a single statistics company's measurements should not be relied on. If all the stats companies agree on a trend, that's one thing - so we're pretty sure that MySpace and Bebo are on a downer. But one measure alone? Nope.

And all this discussion leaves out another key input: mobile. Most measurement companies haven't worked out how to track mobile users visiting sites; those which rely on browser toolbars are stuffed straight away (unless they were to get an agreement with a mobile carrier or handset maker to include their code in the browser, which is always possible). Those which rely, like Hitwise, on ISP data would need to negotiate. For now, most sites are simply tracking their own mobile data, and waiting for the metrics companies to catch up.

That's no help to reddit, of course. But at least they can take comfort from not being alone.

Google backs wind energy with 20-year renewable power purchase

Google is officially in the green energy business. The search giant announced on Tuesday that its Google Energy subsidiary signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with NextEra Energy. Google will begin buying 114 megawatts of electricity from an Iowa wind farm on July 30.

Google, of course, cannot directly use the clean green energy generated by the wind farm; that power goes into the local grid. So Google Energy will sell the power on the regional spot market, where utilities and electricity retailers go to buy power when demand spikes and they have a shortfall. Google will use the revenue from spot market sales to buy renewable energy certificates (RECs) which will offset its greenhouse gas emissions.

Many companies buy RECs in an attempt to be carbon neutral, obtaining them from third-party brokers. But by purchasing RECs directly tied to the renewable energy it is also buying, Google is getting a bigger bang for its buck.

"By contracting to purchase so much energy for so long, we're giving the developer of the wind farm financial certainty to build additional clean energy projects," Urs Hoelzle, Google's senior vice president for operations, wrote on a blog post Tuesday.

"The inability of renewable energy developers to obtain financing has been a significant inhibitor to the expansion of renewable energy," he added. "We've been excited about this deal because taking 114 megawatts of wind power off the market for so long means producers have the incentive and means to build more renewable energy capacity for other customers."

In a statement on its site, Google also noted that its motivations for signing long-term renewable energy contracts are not entirely altruistic.

"Through the long term purchase of renewable energy at a predetermined price, we're partially protecting ourselves against future increases in power prices," the company stated. "This is a case where buying green makes business sense."

It remains to be seen how big a green power purchaser Google will become. (The company has also invested directly in a wind project built by NextEra Energy, the biggest American wind power producer.)

But Dan Reicher, Google.org director of climate change and energy programs, told me earlier this year that finding clean ways of powering Google's massive data centers led in part to the establishment of Google Energy.

 "This interest in procuring green electrons is part of what's driven Google Energy," he said.

Lawyers for Ministry of Sound and other music labels are seeking compensation, threatening court action unless file sharers pay

Solicitors for dance music label Ministry of Sound have sent letters to thousands of internet users it believes have illegally downloaded music and says it is determined to take them to court and extract substantial damages unless they immediately pay compensation, typically around 350.

Ministry of Sound's move marks an intensification of the legal battle against file sharers, which is seeing more and more lawyers send out what critics call speculative invoicing of downloaders suspected of pirating anything from music tracks to films and games.

Soho firm Gallant Macmillan last week completed a mailout to 2,000 individuals it claims infringed Ministry of Sound's copyright after downloading and sharing music. It follows in the steps of ACS:Law, which has sent many thousands of letters demanding compensation from alleged file sharers, sometimes billing in excess of 1,000. Luke Bellamy, above, contacted Money this week after receiving a 295 demand from ACS:Law, which alleged he downloaded and shared a track from dance music group Cascada.

Some recipients of the letters, concerned about forking out huge damages, have paid up. Others have been mystified they claim never to have downloaded the tracks. Meanwhile, some legal specialists say the threats are largely unenforceable. Unless a user confesses to illegally downloading a file, or a court order is obtained to seize a computer and the file is then located on its hard drive, consumer groups say, it's hard to see how such an action will succeed.

Even the body that represents the UK recorded music industry, the BPI, which is keen to stamp out illegal filesharing, says it does not condone the mass-mailing of alleged internet pirates. "Our view is that legal action is best reserved for the most persistent or serious offenders, rather than widely used as a first response," it says.

Most recipients of the letters have binned them and, to date, avoided any further action. But Gallant Macmillan says it is taking a different approach to the other legal firms that pioneered this business, and that its sole client, Ministry of Sound, is serious when it threatens legal action. Until now, none of these cases have ended up in UK courts. A Ministry of Sound spokesman says that actions have been won in German courts, and it is confident that it can do the same in the UK.

Bellamy, 23, a lifeguard from Dudley, West Midlands, lives with his parents, but pays for the O2 broadband connection into the family home. The letter sent to him by ACS:Law claims his internet account was used to download Evacuate the Dancefloor by Cascada, from the filesharing website uTorrent.

The letter, which runs to nine pages, goes on to claim that this was in breach of ACS's clients' copyright, and offers to settle its potential claim if Bellamy pays nearly 300 in compensation.

"Getting a letter like this is extremely worrying. I have never downloaded anything from this website and yet I am being chased for this money. My parents have been worried by this, and frankly I've got better things to do with my time than deal with this."

And he is by no means alone. The internet is awash with similar complaints from anxious web users - many of whom who did download the files where they have been accused of infringing copyright, but also from plenty who insist they didn't. The letters demand anywhere between 300 and 1,200. The law firms sending the letters obtain the names and addresses of the downloaders from internet service providers (ISPs). To get access, they usually seek a high court order, and ISPs have no choice but to hand over the details.

In November 2008, Money first reported that solicitors were sending out threatening letters to net users. We featured a Hertfordshire couple sent a demand to pay 503 for "copyright infringement" or face a high court action. The 20-page "pre-settlement letter" from legal firm Davenport Lyons demanded money on behalf of German pornographers, who claimed the pair had illegally downloaded a porn film. The couple said they had no idea how to even download a film, even if they had the inclination, which they didn't.

Michael Coyle, solicitor advocate and MD of the Southampton-based law firm Lawdit, who has represented hundreds of people who have received these letters, says none of his cases have gone to court.

"A significant number of cases were connected to porn, seeking to embarrass porn users into paying up, and it developed from there. Perhaps as many as 10% of those receiving letters have paid up, but the rest have just disappeared. These firms are trying to argue that just because you pay for the internet connection you are somehow responsible for everything that is downloaded on it whether you were responsible or not. It just doesn't stand up in law," he says.

"It seems to me that the only way a claim can be upheld is if you admit it or if they inspect your hard drive."

He is so confident that a claim by the likes of ACS:Law would not succeed that he has offered to defend anyone in court for free providing they didn't download the offending file.

Following a complaint by consumer group Which? (and others) Davenport Lyons, the law firm which pioneered the approach in the UK, is facing a probe by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Which? says it has had 200 complaints from the public on this issue, and has several pages on his website advising consumers what they should do if they receive such a letter.

"Remember that you have to be actively involved to be guilty of copyright infringement," it says.

"If you're not, explain why and ask for the proof that positively identifies you as the culprit. They may make counterclaims or raise other issues when they reply but concentrate on making them prove it was you." Which? recently warned those affected not to reply to a request by ACS:Law to fill in a questionnaire the company apparently sends to all those who deny any involvement.

Deborah Prince, head of legal affairs at Which?, says people are under no obligation to fill in these questionnaires. "Which? believes it is outrageous that ACS:Law is asking consumers to provide evidence to support the claims that it is making on their clients' behalf. It should have all the evidence it needs before making these allegations. If it doesn't, then it shouldn't be asking unrepresented consumers to provide that evidence."

Andrew Crossley, head of ACS:Law, says his letters do not accuse the recipients of "downloading".

"We have written to your reader, as with everyone else we have written to, informing them that we have evidence one of our clients' copyrighted works was made available through a filesharing network to others from the internet connection they have.

"In other words, the work was uploaded, not downloaded, and is distributed many times over and given to others who in turn make it available to many others.

"All this is done without reference to the copyright owner, who receives no payment for this often repeated transaction, denying our clients income."

He says the amount demanded in the letters is a fraction of the damages that would be awarded in a successful civil action for copyright infringement, and claims illegal filesharing has been devastating to the creative industries.

He declined to comment on how many cases had gone to court, but said: "I can confirm proceedings have been issued and that more proceedings are to be issued in increasing numbers.

"The amount we request in compromise is a token payment to reflect some small amount of the losses of our clients to illegal filesharing."

UK housewives spend 47% of their leisure time on the internet and it's not all cosy, mumsy surfing

I would never open my boyfriend's post. He wouldn't let me, for one thing. I'm not even allowed to open his copy of Paws the Battersea Dogs Home newsletter until he gets home. And I'd never open his emails either, but I don't have the same privacy taboo about emails that have already been opened. I have picked over the cobbles of past boyfriends' email trails. It starts with a simple over-the-shoulder visual eavesdrop. When you walk up behind somebody, and they're in the middle of an e-conversation, they hunch. Everybody does this, colleagues do it. It doesn't mean they're cheating on you, it just means it's personal. But this tension, the email that isn't a betrayal but is nevertheless private, is a micro-version of the surveillance debate "Why do you want privacy, if not to commit crime?"

Back to this hypothetical boyfriend who, if I'm honest, was actually a real boyfriend. He hunches when I walk past. So I want to see what he's writing. I can't, he's closed his browser. It does not feel evil to go into his inbox afterwards, although I would strongly dis-recommend that initial breach of couple-protocol. Of course, it's an email to a woman. What are the odds? Fifty-fifty, unless he's a mathematician, or a nitwit. Say it's someone you know (it was), it's probably an ex (it was). Say it's someone you don't know, then it's a strange woman. This is a mug's game; now I'm checking all the time. My nearly ex and his ex chat intermittently. Nothing incriminating happens, but the easy familiarity is annoying. And I'm reading everything I can get away with now, so naturally I catch stuff I'd rather not have seen. It's physiologically compelling (high risk, sweaty palms) and intellectually boring, like reading a Dan Brown novel. Unlike a Dan Brown novel, nothing happens, except I can't stop. I never got caught doing it. But we did split up, for maybe 1,000 reasons, some of which were: well, most obviously, this is an act of war. It also creates confusion you're having your regular relationship with your regular boyfriend, and a secret, antagonistic relationship with the boyfriend as expressed in his correspondence. Those are two different people, not least because one of them doesn't know you're there.

Women snoop a lot more than men a joint study by the LSE and Nottingham Trent University found that 14% of wives read their husbands emails, and 10% checked their browsing history (for men, those figures are 8% and 7%, respectively). I know what you're going to say, you'll say, "That's because men look at porn all the time. Women are just looking for evidence of porn, and maybe if they spent more time looking at their own porn instead of spying on their husband's, these figures might be reversed." That's what I'd say.

Still, we often talk about the nefarious things men get up to on the internet. You hear about porn addicts. You hear about men who lie to teenage girls on Bebo, men who sit on Chatroulette all day. The things you hear about men make them sound so profoundly primitive, you wonder how they hit the space bar without an opposable thumb.

There's no doubt the internet creates a new territory of misdemeanour, but not all of it particularly male. When people talk about predatory men, or naive and/or bullying teenagers, they miss the major UK demographic, the one in which we outstrip internet usage anywhere else in the world, which is among housewives. That definition is pretty loose, these days; you don't have to be married, and you're allowed to have a job. It just means women of a certain age. Any given woman who, 10 years ago, would have been out binge drinking: women like me, and possibly you.

UK housewives spend 47% of their leisure time online (according to a study by global market information group TNS), which is higher than the Chinese national average (overall theirs is the highest in the world). Our national average is 28%. Some of this is entrepreneurial (almost half of all UK housewives make some money online one in 20 "mousewives" makes over 200 a week), but a lot of it is pointless messing about.

And because we're women, and many of us have children, this messing about is billed as an incredibly positive, cooperative force. Indeed, Mumsnet has become the byword for mothers on the internet, as if all we do is have warm, helpful conversations. It's true that Mumsnet has a lot of users (20 million monthly page impressions), and everything its founder, Justine Roberts, says about it makes perfect sense: "It's become a very handy, convenient and efficient replacement for real-life communities. People just don't have time for leisurely conversations over the garden fence any more. Women and parents in general don't have time to have a lot of social engagements in the traditional sense and Mumsnet fills that void."

There is an unspoken point, though, isn't there? Not having time for social engagements is the same as being lonely. Virtual conversations aren't really the same as real ones: they're so conditional, so easy to pick up and drop, they don't carry the weight of a concrete connection in the world. It's a community and yet the succour isn't real, the responsibilities users feel towards one another are quixotic, evanescent. It's suspended between life and a computer game.

Contrary to popular presentation, Mumsnet is not the only site women visit. There are acres of girly chat. Not very much chat-traffic is criminal or exploitative, but check out the Facebook groups for a flavour of how unpleasant some of the supposedly mumsy stuff is. There's a proliferation of vigilante rage directed at child abusers: "jamie bulger's killers should never have been released!"; "i bet i can find a billion people who are against jon venables and r thompson!!!!"; "Don't forget about Maddie"; "Justice for Baby P". The numbers of signatories are enormous sure, at over 37,000 names, the Venables/Thompson page loses a bet with itself about finding a billion. But 37,000

There are 245 groups calling for the death/life sentence/dismemberment of Vanessa George, the nursery worker who took pornographic photographs of her charges and exchanged them with a man and woman she'd met on Facebook. It is taken as a paradox of George's case that, when you track her Facebook history, before she got involved in online paedophilia, she would sign up to groups like Action Against Abuse. In fact, I don't think it's paradoxical. There's something zealous and savage about the anti-paedophile rhetoric on Facebook that doesn't seem to have anything to do with children, or sex with children it seems to be about whipping yourself to a pitch of fury that is in itself arousing, it's like rage-porn. The comparison is instructive: like regular porn, this self-generated anger might be elemental, but previous to the internet, it was something you might glance past in the Sun; 37,000 people wouldn't be devoting their leisure time to hating paedophiles.

Which brings us back to Vanessa George. The first time she and her co-defendants met was in the courtroom. In her first police interview, George tells how she went from Facebook buddies with the man to sharing images of paedophilia. "I was, like, What would you do for me, if I done that for you? You'd have to put a ring on my finger to make me do things like that." The fact she already had a husband of 20 years standing is the least bizarre element of this self-presentation as just another young woman, looking for love ever after, who'll do anything for a ring on her finger.

Apparently, members of the investigative team privately doubted all three when they claimed to have met on Facebook, thinking it too much of a coincidence that people with such depraved tastes would just chance upon one another on a mainstream networking site. It certainly pushes the boundaries of credulity that there are paedophiles ambling the corridors of Facebook, waiting to meet one another to scale up their perversion. But if you look at the Facebook application these three met on, Are YOU Interested?, you would have no trouble believing it to be just heaving with incredibly lonely, violently angry people, just sitting there, ripe for a toxic relationship with other incredibly lonely, violently angry people.

It's a Honeymoon Killers clich : if you want to find a lonely person, look at the lonelyhearts ads. But the modern version is so blunt, the disappointment and vulnerability so poorly disguised, it's a con-artist's fairground. There's certainly a small-time criminal element, recognising this lonely constituency and tapping them for cash. Joann Wood, 53, caught the tabloid imagination last year due to the fact that she's a lesbian and focused her efforts on lesbian and gay sites. Wood lied to suit every occasion, starting with "I love you" and ending with anything from cancer to an expertise in the gold trade. She made about 100k before she was discovered (and sentenced to four-and-a-half years in prison). But the internet is just the facilitator to Wood; 15 years ago, she would no doubt have found some pre-internet strategy, like working in Nationwide, befriending pensioners with big savings.

The Jihad Jane case in America, by contrast, could happen only now, with this timely confluence of global communication and a terrorist movement whose targets are international. Jihad Jane, whose real name is Colleen LaRose, was arrested last year over her plan "to do something, somehow, to help suffering Muslims": it stretched, in the end, to a conspiracy to murder the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks. The 46-year-old has been accused of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, and kill a person in a foreign country. She is also suspected of having trawled the internet looking for other women with US passports who could more easily go about the skirmishes of Jihad undetected. Her boyfriend of five years had no idea of these activities. "She was a good-hearted person. She pretty much stayed around the house," Kurt Gorman told the press. She was active on the site revolutionmuslim.com, and this is not a place you'd stumble into. What led her there is unknown, but behind the sudden veil-wearing and talk about eternal bliss, this looks like a sad story about grief. In 2005, following the death of her father, LaRose tried to commit suicide. Obviously the causal links are complicated, but she wasn't trying to kill cartoonists before then. If LaRose had conceived an irrational hatred against a neighbour, this would have been a containable affair. But there's an Alice in Wonderland effect on the internet, where a person taken out of his or her context can take on epic proportions in an unfamiliar landscape, usually not in a good way. When physical space is collapsed, people can find themselves a long way from home.

The main point is Morrissey's: the devil will find work for idle hands. There's nothing idler than people on the internet, wanting nothing in particular, just wanting to be nearer the centre of things.

Reports that phone-maker Nokia has launched top-level search as it struggles with falling profits and declining market share

Nokia is reported to be searching for a new chief executive as its CEO for the past four years, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, struggles with the company's falling profits and market share, notably in the smartphone market.

The report in the Wall Street Journal of the top-level search follows reports on Bloomberg at the end of last week that the board of the Finnish company was calling for changes after seeing the company's value slump by $77bn ( 60bn) about 67% in the three years since 2007, when first Apple's iPhone and then Google's Android platform have transformed the smartphone market.

Although Nokia is the world's largest phone-maker, and has the largest market share in smartphones at about 41%, it has issued two profit warnings in the past three months and seen its stock fall by 25% this year alone as it was forced to delay newer smartphones.

Nokia's last big success in the smartphone market came four years ago with the N95, which boosted profits in its smartphone division to 21%. But since then Apple, Android and RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, have eaten away at Nokia's profitability, so that the division's profit in its most recent figures was just 12%.

James Kelleher, an analyst at Argus Research in New York, told Bloomberg that a new chief executive is "the first order of business". Nokia's share price has dropped to 6.83, from 20.81 on June 29, 2007, when the iPhone went on sale.

The Android platform also poses a considerable threat to Nokia: Google announced earlier this year that it was activating 160,000 Android phones every day.

An analysis by Goldman Sachs earlier this month comparing smartphone companies' profitability in 2007 with 2009 suggests that Apple has grabbed a growing slice of profit from the handset industry. While total profits remained static in total at about $14bn since 2007, the American company took up to $8bn in 2009, and is expected to take more than half the industry's profits in 2010 and 2011 despite selling far fewer handsets than its rivals.

Earlier this month the new head of Nokia's Mobile Solutions division, Anssi Vanjoki, wrote a combative blogpost on Nokia's "Conversations" blog in which he declared that "the fightback starts now" and said that "I am committed, perhaps even obsessed, with getting Nokia back to being number one in high-end devices. Achieving this will require performance and efforts over and above the norm."

He also insisted that there were no plans to adopt Google's free Android software platform; Nokia will instead remain with its own open-source Symbian and Meego mobile operating systems: "Symbian and MeeGo are the best software for our smartest devices. As such, we have no plans to use any other software. Despite rumours to the contrary, there are no plans to introduce an Android device from Nokia," he wrote.

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.

But Siobhan O'Dowd says her page titled RIP Raoul Moat You Legend could be launched again soon

Police made two further arrests in connection with their investigation into crimes committed by gunman Raoul Moat today, bringing the total number to 15, as a Facebook page that portrayed him as a "legend" was removed.

The social networking site said it had not removed the RIP Raoul Moat You Legend page, which attracted more than 30,000 contributions and the condemnation of David Cameron in the Commons. The prime minister described Moat as a callous murderer.

The page's creator, Siobhan O'Dowd, deleted it voluntarily as a public backlash grew. She said she was considering whether to revive the page. Asked why she removed it, she said: "I don't know really. A few of us came to a decision but it's going to be up again running. We don't condone what he did, as what he did was wrong. I feel sorry for the families but he was still a human being at the end of the day."

Two men aged 28 and 36 were arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender over Moat's days as a fugitive. They have been released on police bail. So far two people have appeared before magistrates charged with conspiracy to commit murder and possession of a firearm in connection with Moat. They were remanded in custody until 22 July when they will appear at Newcastle crown court. All others have been arrested on suspicion of assisting an offender and released on bail pending further inquiries.

Moat had sought psychiatric help months before his spree, according to recorded conversations with social workers.

He shot his former girlfriend, Samantha Stobbart, killed her boyfriend Chris Brown and shot PC David Rathband in the face, before he apparently killed himself following a six-hour standoff in Rothbury that ended on Saturday.

The recordings, obtained by ITV News, were made between July last year and April this year. They raise further questions about whether the authorities could have done more to prevent the shootings.

On the tapes Moat described himself as unstable and repeatedly asked for help. "I'm quite emotionally unstable you know, I get myself over-the-top happy sometimes you know," he said. "The more you block things out the more numb you become in the heart you know, you get to a point where happiness to you is just like, you know, neither here nor there."

In a meeting with Northumbria police on 12 October 2009 Moat refers to actions that seem paranoid. He told police he had installed CCTV cameras around his property in Fenham, Newcastle. "There's cameras everywhere, erm, to be honest it was to do with yous," he told the officers.

"I was getting accused of a lot of things and when I had what about eight cameras on the property hidden in hedges and everything to make sure I could pinpoint where I was in any particular time."

Newcastle city council, whose social workers dealt with Moat's case, said it commissioned a report from a psychologist to examine whether it was safe for Moat to live with his two older children.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission is examining the actions of Northumbria police, in light of the warning given about Moat by Durham jail before his release, as part of its investigation of the case.

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

Text, text, text, that's all they think about: but are all those hours on the phone and Facebook turning teenagers into screen-enslaved social inadequates? Jon Henley finds out

"I'd rather," deadpans Philippa Grogan, 16, "give up, like, a kidney than my phone. How did you manage before? Carrier pigeons? Letters? Going round each others' houses on BIKES?" Cameron Kirk, 14, reckons he spends "an hour, hour-and-a-half on school days" hanging out with his 450-odd Facebook friends; maybe twice that at weekends. "It's actually very practical if you forget what that day's homework is. Unfortunately, one of my best friends doesn't have Facebook. But it's OK; we talk on our PlayStations."

Emily Hooley, 16, recalls a Very Dark Moment: "We went to Wales for a week at half term to revise. There was no mobile, no TV, no broadband. We had to drive into town just to get a signal. It was really hard, knowing people were texting you, writing on your Wall, and you couldn't respond. Loads of my friends said they'd just never do that."

Teens, eh? Not how they were when I was young. Nor the way they talk to each other. Let's frighten ourselves, first: for a decade, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has been the world's largest and most authoritative provider of data on the internet's impact on the lives of 21st-century citizens. Since 2007, it has been chronicling the use teenagers make of the net, in particular their mass adoption of social networking sites. It has been studying the way teens use mobile phones, including text messages, since 2006.

This is what the Project says about the way US teens (and, by extension, teenagers in much of western Europe: the exact figures may sometimes differ by a percentage point or two, but the patterns are the same) communicate in an age of Facebook Chat, instant messaging and unlimited texts. Ready?

First, 75% of all teenagers (and 58% of 12-year-olds) now have a mobile phone. Almost 90% of phone-owning teens send and receive texts, most of them daily. Half send 50 or more texts a day; one in three send 100. In fact, in barely four years, texting has established itself as comfortably "the preferred channel of basic communication between teens and their friends".

But phones do more than simply text, of course. More than 80% of phone-owning teens also use them to take pictures (and 64% to share those pictures with others). Sixty per cent listen to music on them, 46% play games, 32% swap videos and 23% access social networking sites. The mobile phone, in short, is now "the favoured communication hub for the majority of teens".

As if texting, swapping, hanging and generally spending their waking hours welded to their phones wasn't enough, 73% use social networking sites, mostly Facebook 50% more than three years ago. Digital communication is not just prevalent in teenagers' lives. It IS teenagers' lives.

There's a very straightforward reason, says Amanda Lenhart, a Pew senior research specialist. "Simply, these technologies meet teens' developmental needs," she says. "Mobile phones and social networking sites make the things teens have always done defining their own identity, establishing themselves as independent of their parents, looking cool, impressing members of the opposite sex a whole lot easier."

Flirting, boasting, gossiping, teasing, hanging out, confessing: all that classic teen stuff has always happened, Lenhart says. It's just that it used to happen behind the bike sheds, or via tightly folded notes pressed urgently into sweating hands in the corridor between lessons. Social networking sites and mobile phones have simply facilitated the whole business, a gadzillion times over.

For Professor Patti Valkenburg, of the University of Amsterdam's internationally respected Centre for Research on Children, Adolescents and the Media, "contemporary communications tools" help resolve one of the fundamental conflicts that rages within every adolescent. Adolescence, she says, is characterised by "an enhanced need for self-presentation, or communicating your identity to others, and also self-disclosure discussing intimate topics. Both are essential in developing teenagers' identities, allowing them to validate their opinions and determine the appropriateness of their attitudes and behaviours."

But, as we all recall, adolescence is also a period of excruciating shyness and aching self-consciousness which can make all that self-presentation and self-disclosure something of a perilous, not to say agonising, business. So the big plus of texting, instant messaging and social networking is that it allows the crucial identity-establishing behaviour, without the accompanying embarrassment. "These technologies give their users a sense of increased controllability," Valkenburg says. "That, in turn, allows them to feel secure about their communication, and thus freer in their interpersonal relations."

"Controllability", she explains, is about three things: being able to say what you want without fear of the message not getting through because of that humungous spot on your chin or your tendency to blush; having the power to reflect on and change what you write before you send it (in contrast to face-to-face communication); and being able to stay in touch with untold hordes of friends at times, and in places, where your predecessors were essentially incommunicado.

But what do teenagers make of this newfound freedom to communicate? Philippa reckons she sends "probably about 30" text messages every day, and receives as many. "They're about meeting up where are you, see you in 10, that kind of thing," she says. "There's an awful lot of flirting goes on, of course. Or it's, 'OMG, what's biology homework?'. And, 'I'm babysitting and I'm SOOOO bored.'" (Boredom appears to be the key factor in the initiation of many teen communications.)

Like most of her peers, Philippa wouldn't dream of using her phone to actually phone anyone, except perhaps her parents to placate them if she's not where she should be, or ask them to come and pick her up if she is. Calls are expensive, and you can't make them in class (you shouldn't text in class either, but "lots of people do").

Philippa also has 639 Facebook friends, and claims to know "the vast majority" (though some, she admits, are "quite far down the food chain"). "I don't want to be big-headed or anything, but I am quite popular," she says. "Only because I don't have a social life outside my bedroom, though." When I call her, 129 of her friends are online.

Facebook rush-hour is straight after school, and around nine or 10 in the evening. "You can have about 10 chats open at a time, then it gets a bit slow and you have to start deleting people," Philippa says. The topics? "General banter, light-hearted abuse. Lots of talk about parties and about photos of parties." Cred-wise, it's important to have a good, active Facebook profile: lots of updates, lots of photos of you tagged.

Sometimes, though, it ends in tears. Everyone has witnessed cyber-bullying, but the worst thing that happened to Philippa was when someone posted "a really dreadful picture of me, with an awful double chin", then refused to take it down. "She kept saying, 'No way, it's upped my profile views 400%,'" says Philippa. It's quite easy, she thinks, for people to feel "belittled, isolated" on Facebook.

There are other downsides. Following huge recent publicity, teens are increasingly aware of the dangers of online predators. "Privacy's a real issue," says Emily. "I get 'friend' requests from people I don't know and have never heard of; I ignore them. I have a private profile. I'm very careful about that."

A 2009 survey found up to 45% of US companies are now checking job applicants' activity on social networking sites, and 35% reported rejecting people because of what they found. Universities and colleges, similarly, are starting to look online. "You need to be careful," says Cameron Kirk, astute and aware even at 14. "Stuff can very easily get misunderstood." Emily agrees, but adds: "Personally, I love the idea that it's up there for ever. It'll be lovely to go back, later, and see all those emotions and relations."

Pew's Lenhart says research has revealed a class distinction in many teens' attitudes to online privacy. "Teens from college-focused, upper-middle-class familes tend to be much more aware of their online profiles, what they say about them, future consequences for jobs and education," she says. "With others, there's a tendency to share as much as they can, because that's their chance for fame, their possibility of a ticket out."

The question that concerns most parents, though, is whether such an unprecedented, near-immeasurable surge in non face-to-face communication is somehow changing our teenagers diminishing their ability to conduct more traditional relationships, turning them into screen-enslaved, socially challenged adults. Yet teens, on the whole, seem pretty sensible about this. Callum O'Connor, 16, says there's a big difference between chatting online and face to face. "Face to face is so much clearer," he says. "Facebook and instant messaging are such detached forms of communication. It's so easy to be misinterpreted, or to misinterpret what someone says. It's terribly easy to say really horrible things. I'm permanently worrying will this seem heartless, how many kisses should I add, can I say that?"

He's certain that what goes on online "isn't completely real. Some people clearly think it is, but I feel the difference. It's really not the same." Emily agrees: "It's weird. If I have a massive fight on Facebook, it's always, like, the next day, did it actually matter? Was it important? I always go up to the person afterwards and talk to them face to face, to see their emotions and their expressions. Otherwise you never know. It's complicated."

Emily is fairly confident that social networking and texting aren't changing who she is. "I'm the same online and in person. All this is an extension to real life, not a replacement." Olivia Stamp, 16 and equally self-aware, says she thinks social networking actually helps her to be more herself. "I think of myself as quite a shy person," she says. "So it's actually easier to be myself on Facebook because you can edit what you want to say, take your time; you don't feel awkward. I definitely feel more confident online more like the self I know I really am, beneath the shyness."

These new communications technologies, Olivia says, are "an enhancement, an enrichment actually. They bring people even closer, in fact, without replacing anything. We're not socially abnormal. Look at us!" And the experts seem to back that up. Valkenburg says: "Our research gives no reason at present for concern about the social consequences of online communication but it's early days. What if the constant self-confirmation teens experience online turns into excessive self-esteem, or narcissism? We don't know yet."

Lenhart puts it another way. "Our research shows face-to-face time between teenagers hasn't changed over the past five years. Technology has simply added another layer on top. Yes, you can find studies that suggest online networking can be bad for you. But there are just as many that show the opposite."

We should, she suggests, "Step back. The telephone, the car, the television they all, in their time, changed the way teens relate to each other, and to other people, quite radically. And how did their parents respond? With the same kind of wailing and gnashing of teeth we're doing now. These technologies change lives, absolutely. But it's a generational thing."

Teenagers: how addicted to Facebook are you? How much do you use technology and what for? Post below or email g2feedback@guardian.co.uk

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?

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"

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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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...

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.

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."

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.

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.

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