Activist collective's leak of 18-minute discussion embarrasses authorities and raises questions over how security was breached

The hacking collective Anonymous has struck deep into the heart of one of its sworn enemies the police with the release of the recording of a conference call between the Metropolitan police and the FBI. In it, they discuss ongoing investigations and court cases against alleged British hackers; and now, courtesy of Anonymous, the world can listen in too.

For Anonymous, the posting on YouTube of the 18-minute audio from the call was a particular triumph, indicating that it can worm its way even into the most powerful organisations in the land. "The FBI might be curious how we're able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now," said one account controlled by the group on Twitter.

The call reveals British police and the FBI discussing the delay of court proceedings against two alleged members of the LulzSec hacking group, which attacked a number of sites in 2011 including the US Congress and UK Serious Organised Crime Agency.

It's worrying for anyone to discover that their email has been hacked but when it happens to the police in not one but two countries, and to the two most sensitive arms of those forces, dealing with hackers, it becomes a source for deep concern.

For Anonymous, though, it is a return to prominence after it burst into worldwide attention with its attacks on PayPal and Visa in January 2011 after those sites stopped allowing payments to WikiLeaks. Anonymous has no leaders and no clear membership, and forms decisions collectively. Its general ethos is to defend what members see as the "free" internet from repression and restriction of freedom of speech.

After a series of arrests in spring 2011, and a number of arrests relating to other hacking attacks through the year, the group seemed to have lost direction. But the rise of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement, and now its attacks on far-right and authority figures, appears to have revitalised it.

The police call, recorded on 17 January ahead of arraignment hearings for two Britons accused of a number of offences related to hacking, includes two British and two FBI police officers discussing the members of the groups and another British hacker who they describe as a "wannabe", and who is alleged to have leaked details of 32,000 users of the online game platform Steam.

"He's doing it for attention," one of the Met officers says. "He got arrested for DDOSing [knocking out the computers at] his school and then he hacked a credit union in Jamaica." The hacker, whose identity is known to the Guardian, denies having been arrested, and says he attended a police interview voluntarily.

For Anonymous, though, it is the latest in a run of triumphs over those it sees as its enemies. Early in January, the group targeted the leader of Gemany's far-right NPD party. Then they hit websites belonging to the US Department of Justice, Universal Music and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as part of a protest over the closure on criminal charges of the MegaUpload filesharing site.

The latest embarrassment for the authorities was recorded after someone hacked the email of at least one of the 44 recipients on an email headed "Anon-Lulz International Coordination Call" sent on 13 January by Timothy Lauster of the FBI. It detailed the conference call number and dial-in code to "discuss the on-going [sic] investigation related to Anonymous, LulzSec, Antisec and other associated splinter groups".

With the message having gone to police forces in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Sweden and the US, tracking down the hacked account or accounts will be a serious headache. Security experts said the interception is unlikely to have required a highly complex operation.

"Clearly looks like someone on that list has had their email compromised. It's very serious," a security expert, Graham Cluley, told the Guardian. "It is one thing taking down a website but to actually be listening in on the conference call where police are discussing charges ... there must be a lot of questions being asked right now."

Cluley said it was unlikely that the hacker collective had interfered with the systems of the company that hosted the conference call. The FBI said that its computer systems were not breached as part of the incident.

The solicitor for Ryan Cleary, who is charged with five offences of hacking websites, told the Guardian that the recording raises concerns that US authorities are seeking to extradite the Essex teenager. "My concern is whether the co-operation between officers [in the US and UK] was to assist them in an extradition request," said Karen Todner, the managing director of solicitors' firm Kaim Todner.

She warned that future breaches of security on this scale have the potential to "blow apart" criminal charges against those arrested in connection with previous hacks. "This is the FBI and the Met's e-crime unit [that have been breached] and the Crown Prosecution Service are in April about to go completely digital and the whole cases could be blown apart on it."

In the call the detectives can be heard discussing various members of the LulzSec group, and the progress of cases against Ryan Cleary, who has been charged with five offences relating to hacking websites, and Jake Davis, who has been charged over the hacking of the Soca website. Two people who are alleged to be members of LulzSec, who have previously been arrested and bailed by UK police, are also discussed in the call. Their names have been bleeped out by the person who uploaded the call to YouTube.

Smartphones outsold PCs and tablets combined, says research company but netbooks have had their day as sales fall by 25% year-on-year

Stick a fork in it: the netbook is done, with sales falling by 25% in the past year while smartphones and tablets are invading the computing space, according to new figures from the research company Canalys.

In 2011, tablets overtook netbooks in total sales while smartphone shipments exceeded those of tablets and PCs combined, at 487.7m against 414.6m.

Netbook shipments in particular fell from 39.4m in 2010 to 29.4m in 2011, a 25% fall, as the total number of tablets shipped rose almost threefold from 23m to 63m by Canalys's calculations.

Excluding tablets, the PC market barely grew overall, with 351.4m, or just 2% more, machines shipped. Even as shipments of notebooks, the largest segment, grew by 8% and desktops, the next biggest, by 2%, the drop in netbooks took the wind out of the business.

It was a different story in September 2009, when Canalys reported that "netbooks reshape the PC industry" after saying that 13.5m had been sold in the first half of 2009 as mobile phone and other companies began selling them. Sales grew substantially in the second half of that year to 33.3m in 2009, according to another research company, DisplaySearch.

Netbooks' brief lifespan, which began in late 2007 and peaked in 2010 with the 39.4m figure - about 11% of the total PC market that year - included a brief period early on when it looked as though they would mark the advent of desktop Linux. But Microsoft instead began offering Windows XP and then Windows 7, heading off the threat to its business.

By contrast shipments of media tablets such as the iPad are already equivalent to 18% of the PC market, and the share is expected to grow with the release in the autumn of Microsoft's Windows 8 for both desktop and tablets.

Smartphone sales have been booming, and grew by 63% in the year, with a slight slowdown in the fourth quarter when the sales of 158.5m were up 56% on the same period in 2010.

The figures for PC shipments excluding tablets agree closely with those from rival research companies Gartner and IDC, which put the total number of PCs shipped excluding tablets in 2011 at 353.5m and 349.6m, compared to Canalys's 351.4m.

Smartphones first outsold PCs (excluding tablets) in the fourth quarter of 2010, according to IDC and Gartner.

iCloud service could also be forced to turn off 'push' email as battle escalates with phone firm, which Google is acquiring

Apple briefly pulled several models of the iPhone and iPad from its online store in Germany after Android handset maker Motorola Mobility (MMI) won a court injunction over the phones in Germany. A separate ruling over its "iCloud" service means it might be forced to turn off "push" email for users in the country.

Apple has appealed the rulings. But the phones and tablets were removed from Apple's German online store after Motorola, which is due to be acquired by search giant and Android owner Google, won a court ruling in December relating to an alleged infringement of wireless patents for 3G connections by Apple handsets including the iPhone 4 and the 3G version of the iPad 2.

MMI won a separate court injunction against Apple on Friday that could force the US electronics giant to block a key function of its iCloud email system for users in Germany. That would require MMI first to post a 100m ( 83m) bond

to cover potential outcomes.

The court injunctions are the latest in a string of patent disputes between Apple and MMI, which Google is buying for $12.5bn.

The German court's ruling on Friday means that Apple must switch off the so-called "push" email service for users of iCloud and MobileMe in that country. German iPhone owners will still be able to access email, but the BlackBerry-like function that sends new messages automatically to the phone will be unavailable. Apple said in a statement that the patent was "invalid" and said it would appeal against the ruling.

The independent patent expert Florian Mueller, who first reported the rulings, told the Guardian that Apple would be forced to comply with the injunction if Motorola Mobility posts a 100m bond. "They will have to deactivate the feature if and when [Motorola Mobility] seeks enforcement," he said. "The ruling per se doesn't force them to do anything, but if [Motorola Mobility] posts another 100 million euro bond and demands that Apple comply with the injunction, then they'll have to do that."

Apple said that the separate removal of iPhones and iPads from its German website would not affect buyers from retail stores and other authorised outlets in the country.

A spokesman for Apple said: "All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple's online store in Germany shortly. Apple appealed this ruling because Motorola repeatedly refuses to license this patent to Apple on reasonable terms, despite having declared it an industry standard patent seven years ago."

Updated to show that MMI needs to post a 100m bond, not 100

BT Group reports 18% rise in profits and announces plan to roll out 330Mbps broadband on demand to business

BT Group took just over half of the UK's new broadband subscribers in the last three months of 2011 and cheered the City by indicating it would review its fibre broadband investment, with a focus on getting businesses to pay for installation.

The company won a 56% share of new retail broadband subscribers, adding 146,000 customers in the company's third quarter and taking its UK total to 6.1 million. The announcement came as BT chief executive Ian Livingston announced upbeat forecasts for the full year and a rise in third quarter earnings, prompting a 6% share price rise in morning trading.

A spokesman indicated BT would maintain its promised 2.5bn investment in rolling out fibre. But the commitment to running fibre cables to the doorstep of 25% of UK premises by 2014 is likely to be cut, with BT instead offering speeds of up to 330 megabits per second for businesses on demand, so long as they are willing to pay to be connected.

The new 330Mbps service will be available from spring 2013 and is likely to involve installation costs of up to 1,000. It will deliver fibre to workplaces on request in areas where BT already runs fibre to street cabinets.

It is expected to appeal to small businesses rather than residential customers, and is likely to be available to more than 10m premises from launch and about two thirds of UK premises from 2014.

"Fibre to the premises is a significant development for broadband Britain," said Olivia Garfield, chief executive of BT's Openreach division, which resells the BT network to other telecoms companies and BT Retail.

"This will be welcome news for small businesses who may wish to benefit from the competitive advantage that such speeds provide."

A spokesman for BT said of the original commitment to building fibre to 25% of UK premises: "That was only an estimate which we gave some years ago before we knew we could offer fibre on demand. We will have to sit back and review that following these developments."

BT is also doubling the speed of its standard fibre broadband product, from 40Mbps to 80Mbps, from this spring. This will as previously promised be available to two-thirds of the UK by 2014.

The take-up of super-fast broadband increased to 400,000 of BT's retail customers, with 95,000 added in the three months to 31 December.

Elsewhere, Ian Livingston brought forward his target of generating 6bn in annual underlying earnings by 2013 to the end of this financial year. However, BT said its pension deficit ballooned to 4.1bn due to high inflation and the knock-on impact of the government's quantitative easing measures.

Group revenue was 4.8bn for the quarter. Excluding the impact of cuts to mobile termination rates, revenue was down 1.8% in the first nine months, in line to reach BT's target of 2% to flat for the full year, and halting years of revenue slides by the end of next financial year.

Profit before tax was up 18% to 628m for the quarter, while earnings (before interest, tax, depreceiation and amortisation) rose by 3% to 1.5bn in the quarter. Net debt fell 11% to 7.7bn, in line with previous quarters which have seen BT reduce its borrowings by 3.3bn over three years.

There was no news from BT about the early payment some analysts had expected to reduce its yawning pension deficit, which has risen from 1.4bn in March 2011.

The company blamed inflation, saying: "The deficit includes the impact of particularly low real corporate bond yields partly reflecting the impact of quantitative easing and recent inflation being higher than the long term assumptions. This higher inflation will be applied to the annual pension increase in April and has contributed to increased liabilities."

Openreach helped boost BT's overall earnings by increasing revenues by 5% to 1.3bn and earnings by 7% o 591m. Capital expenditure reduced 1% thanks to lower investment in copper broadband as the focus switched to fibre.

BT Global Services, which provides networks to multinational, saw revenues fall 4% to 1.9bn for the quarter, with earnings up 2% to 144m.

Total order intake for the quarter was 1.6bn, after contract wins from Sainsbury's and Standard Life in the UK and Bristol-Myers Squibb and the European Parliament abroad. Orders were up 50% so far this year in Asia Pacific and Latin America.

BT Retail revenue decreased 5% reflecting a decline in calls and lines revenue and lower IT hardware sales. TV service BT Vision added 39,000 to BT Vision net customers in the quarter. Business revenue fell 6% because of lower IT hardware sales "reflecting tougher market conditions".

BT Wholesale revenue fell 8% due to a 64m reduction in transit revenue mainly driven by mobile termination rate cuts. Total order intake was 340m, including a three year extension to a calls contract with Virgin Media and a renewed six year outside broadcasting contract with Sky Sports.

David Molony, analyst at research company Ovum, said: "Openreach is delivering good results on the back of the company's fibre investment. However, the main focus must remain on BT Retail and BT Global Services.

"BT must keep innovating to deliver faster broadband speeds and more enticing bundles for consumers, as well as developing Global Services' capabilities through cloud services, professional services and further regional investment."

The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement could criminalise internet users globally. But it hasn't been ratified yet

Acta is the latest copyright enforcement scheme to cause alarm among digital activists. Given its reach, this is understandable.

The anti-counterfeiting trade agreement is, despite its name, effectively an international treaty that forces signatories to criminalise "commercial-scale" copyright and trademark infringement. Some of it covers knock-off merchandise, but most applies to the digital world as well. Many of Acta's provisions already exist in countries such the US and the UK for example, it makes sure courts can block or take down infringing websites and the idea is ostensibly to bring the rest of the world in line.

However, some elements would go further than existing laws in most of the countries that sign up. Acta criminalises activities such as breaking the digital locks on rights-protected files, or even distributing tools to help people do so. Stripping the artist information from a music file becomes a crime, as does decrypting content that has been scrambled for copyright protection. Acta also codifies the flawed idea, in calculating damages from so-called piracy, that every unlawful download represents a lost sale.

One reason for the heightened attention being paid to Acta is the recent derailing of the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect IP Act (Pipa) in the US. These bills were, in many ways, more dangerous than Acta Sopa wanted to alter the DNS, the core of the internet but the spirit is the same. After winning a round against the US bills, citizens and activists are raring to take on a new challenge.

Acta was the brainchild of the US and Japan. Its formulation began in 2007, outside the frameworks of the World Trade Organisation and without the involvement of China, India and other countries that are major sources of pirated goods. Because it was technically a trade agreement, negotiations took place behind closed doors, with the only look-in afforded to citizens' groups or even elected representatives coming via a series of leaks.

Through conduits such as WikiLeaks, it became clear that the US in particular was pushing for signatories to create "three-strikes" laws that could be used to kick repeat file-sharers off the internet. The EU pushed back and this provision was removed, along with a requirement that ISPs and other online service providers snoop on their customers. The criminalisation of camcorder use in cinemas is also no longer mandated in Acta.

But what remains is troubling on several counts. Acta ostensibly targets big players, but, when it comes to its application on the internet, its definition of "commercial-scale" infringement is loose enough to also cause trouble for individuals. According to Acta, criminal and civil enforcement procedures "shall apply to infringement of copyright or related rights over digital networks, which may include the unlawful use of means of widespread distribution for infringing purposes".

Given that "widespread distribution" is the essence of the internet, this could be interpreted as a go-ahead for cracking down on small-scale infringers, or even people who post a copyrighted image or parody of it on their blogs. Sites and blogs that carry Google Ads could arguably also be seen as "commercial activities for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage", another way in which Acta defines commercial scale.

Those defending Acta maintain that it would not bypass free speech and privacy safeguards in places such as the US and EU. The document itself regularly refers to a need for "freedom of expression, fair process, and privacy" in the way enforcement is carried out, but only in accordance with the laws of the signatory country. Some of those countries, such as Morocco, are not noted for providing a strong right to free expression. Even if Acta's apologists are to be taken at their word, the implications could be unpleasant for free-thinking citizens in many parts of the world.

It is no longer possible to change the contents of Acta, as it has been finalised. However, Acta is now, for the first time, in its democratic phase. Although 30 countries, including the US and UK, have signed Acta, no one has yet ratified it. The treaty may have been negotiated by governments and bureaucrats, but most of the signatories now have to get Acta through their legislatures. The process varies from country to country, but the document is finally in the hands of elected representatives.

Those who want to see Acta defeated need to go to their MPs, MEPs and congresspeople and ask them, facts in hand, to vote against its ratification. Even though elements of Acta may be needed to combat large-scale copyright and trademark infringement, it can be argued that the risks associated with the whole are too great. Elected representatives may be receptive they themselves were shut out of the Acta negotiations and, after the Sopa protests, they are well aware that voters dislike heavy-handed copyright enforcement.

Agreements such as Acta are entirely driven by one side: the rights-holders. These players have a genuine grievance, in that the internet poses an overwhelming threat to their old business model. The copyright-versus-technology debate is worth having, and soon. But resolution has to come through genuine discussion between the content industry, lawmakers and the public.

The structures to allow this open debate will hopefully come, but not before the debate is reset. Right now, citizens have a rare and possibly brief opportunity to call for that to happen.

If there's a subject you'd like to see covered on Comment is free, please visit our You tell us page

After reading Facebook's S-1 document, it's probably not worth $100bn, but at least one analyst has compared it to Google and Apple around the time of their listings, and has backed a $75bn valuation

So is Facebook worth it? After a fevered day and evening reading the S-1 document filed with the US securities and exchange commission (SEC) an event that proved so popular online that the SEC had to devote an extra server to handling demand the answer seems to be that it's not worth $100bn ( 63bn), but it might be worth $75bn.

The other message from the filing was that it is a robust business. Facebook hit its stride in 2009, when revenues grew from $272m to $777m, and a $56m net loss was flipped into a $229m net profit. Since then it has roared ahead, gathering users rapidly, and the number of people on Facebook rose 39% to 845m worldwide at the end of 2011.

For some, the idea that Facebook could be worth even $75bn is laughable. People are "going to probably be overpaying by a third because of the optimism related to just the name," said Michael Yoshikami, chief executive of YCMNET Advisors, a California-based wealth management firm.

"The numbers justify maybe $50bn," he said. The company's revenue growth rate up roughly 88% over 2011, though it slowed between the first quarter and the fourth would justify a $65bn valuation, Yoshikami noted, far short of the $75bn-$100bn the company is said to be looking for.

Facebook revealed a host of data, as it is obliged to, as it seeks to raise about $5bn on the stock market. Its members use more than 70 languages. An almost incredible 57% of users 480m people log in every day.

Analysts say it can't continue: "The hypergrowth is probably over," said Michael Pachter, head of research in the private shares group at Wedbush Securities. "The low-hanging fruit of the western developed world" has already been grabbed, he said. "It's just kind of obvious that they're not going to ever get every single person that lives on the planet."

But if Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, does harbour ambitions to reach everyone, then he will need to get them via mobile phones and that presents both an opportunity and a threat because Facebook does not yet have a means of carrying advertising to those people. If it can start making money off mobile users, through its targeted advertising, it could grow very quickly.

Advertising is key to Facebook's business, accounting for about 85% of revenues, with almost all the rest coming from Zynga, the maker of games such as Farmville.

The price of Facebook shares has not yet been set that will emerge from talks with bankers keen to underwrite its offering but some facts have become clear. Mark Zuckerberg will become a multi-billionaire, with his 28% stake worth up to $28bn. But he will control 57% of the voting stock through a two-tier system which UK investors would never allow.

The former Wall Street internet stock analyst Henry Blodget, now running his own news site Business Insider, calculates that Facebook which he calls "an awesome business" is worth $75bn.

Blodget compares it to Google (which was about the same size, in revenue terms, when it filed its S-1 in 2004) and Apple. He notes it is growing "much faster than Google and a little bit faster than Apple which is an extraordinary comment on Apple. So Facebook should trade at a significantly higher price/earnings ratio than either."

Some analysts believe that Facebook's reliance on advertising is a weakness. "I worry that the billions of dollars of revenue that they generated last year aren't as solid as they need to be, because the advertisers who spent the money aren't as thrilled with the results they got for it," said Nate Elliott, an analyst with Forrester Research.

And Facebook is now wandering among giants with one in particular eager to crush it. Google's annual revenues in 2010 were $38bn, ten times larger than Facebook's, and almost all of that comes from advertising. Google is setting up its own social network, Google+, and trying to tempt people away from Facebook through come-ons in its search results in the US which have pushed Facebook results down.

Google is also trying to formulate a coherent mobile strategy that will make as much money from mobile as the desktop PC. So far it hasn't achieved it, but the struggle between Facebook and Google may be one of the defining issues of the next few years.

People are more likely to give in to urge to tweet or check email than other cravings, say US researchers

Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.

They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other media.

A team headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School say their experiment, using BlackBerrys, to gauge the willpower of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 in and around the German city of W rtzburg is the first to monitor such responses "in the wild" outside a laboratory.

The results will soon be published in the journal Psychological Science.

The participants were signalled seven times a day over 14 hours for seven consecutive days so they could message back whether they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes, what type it was, the strength (up to irresistible), whether it conflicted with other desires and whether they resisted or went along with it. There were 10,558 responses and 7,827 "desire episodes" reported.

"Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success," said Hofmann. Sleep and leisure were the most problematic desires, suggesting "pervasive tension between natural inclinations to rest and relax and the multitude of work and other obligations".

The researchers found that as the day wore on, willpower became lower. Their paper says highest "self-control failure rates" were recorded with media. "Resisting the desire to work was likewise prone to fail. In contrast, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses, which seems surprising given the salience in modern culture of disastrous failures to control sexual impulses and urges to spend money."

The academics, who included one each from Florida State University and Minnesota University, said the subjective reporting of desire was relatively low for tobacco, alcohol and coffee, apparently challenging "the stereotype of addiction as driven by irresistibly strong desires".

They added: "Resisting the desire to work when it conflicts with other goals such as socialising or leisure activities may be difficult because work can define people's identities, dictate many aspects of daily life, and invoke penalties if important duties are shirked."

Hofmann told the Guardian: "Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not 'cost much' to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist.

"With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs long-term as well as monetary and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still 'steal' a lot of people's time.".

Hofmann added: "We made clear to participants that answering the BlackBerrys did not count. Also people really did not feel a desire to use them they only beeped once in a while and, if anything, that was more annoying than pleasing, I guess. And there was nothing else they could use the devices for."

W rtzburg had been the testing ground because he had worked there as an assistant professor until recently.

Social network revealed in SEC filing that Farmville, CityVille and Mafia Wars maker accounts for up to 12% of total revenue

Shares in the social games firm Zynga have soared after Facebook revealed in its $5bn initial public offering filing that the Farmville maker accounts for up to 12% of its total revenue.

Investor appetite in Zynga peaked in early trading on Thursday, sending the company's shares price soaring 16% to $12.60 the highest it has been since it went public in December.

Virtual goods, bought through hugely popular Zynga games such as CityVille or Mafia Wars, accounted for 12% ($445m) of Facebook's $3.71bn revenue for 2011, according to documents filed by the social network with the US financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission, late on Wednesday.

FarmVille, one of the most popular games on Facebook, allows users to harvest a virtual farm by planting and growing crops, trees and livestock. New gamers are given virtual coins to set up their farm, and revenue from matured crops can be used to maintain it. But gamers who are eager to progress can buy extra virtual coins using real cash.

Zynga made its New York stock market debut in December, but expectations failed to live up the hype as the shares enjoyed a brief rise before dropping below their initial pricing of $10 a share.

The company, which claims 60 million people a day play its games, has a market cap of $8.59bn a fraction of the potential $100bn valuation on Mark Zuckerberg's social network.

Although Zynga has enjoyed huge success on the back of its Facebook games the four-year-old company reported a net income of $31m in the first nine months of last year little had been known about its importance to Facebook's fortunes. Facebook revealed on Wednesday that 97% of its total revenue is generated by Zynga or advertising.

"If the use of Zynga games on our Platform declines, if Zynga launches games on or migrates games to competing platforms, or if we fail to maintain good relations with Zynga, we may lose Zynga as a significant Platform developer and our financial results may be adversely affected," Facebook said in its SEC filing.

Facebook said that less than 10% of its total revenue in 2010 and 2009 came from Zynga. Facebook keeps 30% of user payment made through Zynga.

The social network said that social gaming apps built by developers "particularly Zynga" generate "substantially all" of its revenue from its payments platform.

French court find Google guilty of abusing its dominant position after mapping company lodges unfair competition complaint

A French commercial court has found Google guilty of abusing its dominant position through its Google Maps application, and ordered it to pay a fine and damages to a French mapping company.

In a ruling this week, the Paris court upheld an unfair competition complaint lodged by Bottin Cartographes against Google France and its parent company, Google Inc, for providing free web mapping services to some businesses.

The court ordered Google to pay 500,000 ( 415,000) in damages and interest to the plaintiff and a 15,000 fine.

A Google spokesman said the company would appeal against the decision.

"We remain convinced that a free high-quality mapping tool is beneficial for both internet users and websites," he said. There remains competition in this sector for us, both in France and internationally.

"We have reviewed the French court's decision and have decided to appeal. We're confident that a free, high-quality map product is a great for websites and consumers and we continue to face strong competition in this field."

The French company provides the same services as Google Maps for a fee, and claimed that Google's strategy aimed to undercut competitors by temporarily swallowing the full cost until it gains control of the market.

"This is the end of a two-year battle, a decision without precedent," said the lawyer for Bottin Cartographes, Jean-David Scemmama.

"We proved the illegality of [Google's] strategy to remove its competitors ... the court recognised the unfair and abusive character of the methods used and allocated Bottin Cartographes all it claimed.

"This is the first time Google has been convicted for its Google Maps application."

Google has a dominant position in search in Europe, with more than 90% of search traffic. That means that it can fall foul of national laws over the use of that dominance if it is seen to exploit it in other areas.

Google Maps are not free for unlimited use. Earlier this year, Google announced that it would introduce charging for heavy use of the service. That in turn has led a number of sites to seek out alternatives such as the free OpenStreetMap, which has begun a campaign to encourage switching.

Google has previously faced other difficulties in France. Last March, the country's data privacy regulator imposed a record fine of 100,000 on it for collecting private information while compiling its Street View service.

Dell has sent Dennis Fornes a replacement hard drive for one that may be about to fail, and he wants to know how to make the swap

One of the drives in my Dell Studio laptop has been determined to be faulty (although it seems to work fine, it will not pass a maintenance test). Dell has sent me a replacement drive, under warranty. How can I replace this drive and keep Windows 7 and all my operating programs as an image so that I can remove the faulty drive and replace it with the new one? I already have a 149GB external drive, but I would have to reformat it to copy the laptop data to the drive. What is the safest way for a novice such as myself? Should I take my PC to a computer repair tech and spend 100 bucks or so?
Dennis Fornes

This is a relatively simple process with Microsoft Windows 7 because it already includes Windows Backup to do the job. Also, as you appreciate, you can do it by storing the original disk image on your 149GB external hard drive (EHD). However, I'd guess this is a few years old now, so you might prefer to invest in a new terabyte drive instead. You don't say how big your laptop's drives are, but they could be 320GB or 500GB each, so you'll eventually need a 1TB or larger drive for backups.

Either way, you will need something with enough space to back up your original drive. An EHD is probably the simplest option, though I'll suggest a couple of cheaper alternatives below. You will also need a blank DVD or CD to create a System Repair disc.

To begin, plug in the EHD and use Windows 7's search to find "Backup or restore your files" in the Control Panel utility. All you have to do is click the top left menu item "Create a system image" and a wizard will take you through the process. The wizard should find the EHD, so you just have to click Next.

The wizard will now tell you what it is going to back up. Usually it will only back up the system drive (C:), which is the point of the exercise. I suspect that your Dell laptop also has a hidden partition to enable you to return the machine to its factory condition (ie by overwriting the C: drive with a fresh copy of the operating system). If so, the wizard should show that it is backing up both partitions. If it doesn't, follow Dell's instructions to make recovery discs, if you have not done this already. After that, click the button labelled "Start Backup" and wait an hour or probably more for it to finish.

Once the backup is complete, the wizard will prompt you to "Create a system repair disc" on a DVD. This is the disc that you will use to restart your PC.

The next step is to remove the old hard disk drive and replace it with the new one. This involves unplugging the laptop, removing the battery, then unscrewing and lifting off the bottom of the case. The drive that you need to replace should be the one in the corner in a Dell Studio, not the one in the middle, but I hope Dell has included the location in its fitting instructions. (Most laptops only have one drive so it's rarely a problem.)

Assuming Dell has provided a raw drive, you will need to remove old drive from its caddy and replace it with the new one. You will also need to pull the SATA connector from the front of the old drive and push it into the opening in the front of the new one. (It only goes one way.)

Electronic parts are susceptible to damage from electrostatic shocks, so you must make sure you are not carrying a charge. Technicians are expected to wear an antistatic wrist strap, and it is a good idea, though I've never bothered.

When you have re-assembled your laptop and plugged in your EHD, start it using the system repair disc. Select the option that says: "Restore your computer using a system image you created earlier" and click Next. Again, the wizard should find the disk image and copy it to the empty drive. When it has finished, your laptop will reboot and everything should be exactly as it was before, except on a new drive.

Presumably, your new C: drive has the same capacity as the old drive. If you were swapping, say, a 350GB drive for a 500GB drive then you would find Windows 7 had created another 350GB drive. You would have to run Windows' Disk Management utility, select C: and choose Extend Volume to make C: take up the unallocated space (roughly 150GB in this case).

At the beginning, I suggested buying a new terabyte EHD. There are two alternatives. The first is to buy a cheap hard drive enclosure for a 2.5in SATA drive. An external hard drive is basically just an ordinary internal hard drive inside a small box. You already have a 2.5in hard drive from Dell, so you would just be buying a box to put it in. In this case, you'd simply clone the internal drive to the external one (in the enclosure) then swap the drives over.

The second alternative is to replace the second drive in your laptop (probably D:) with the new drive, then clone the C: drive to your new D: drive. Once that's done, you can move the D: drive to C:, then put the old D: drive back in the second slot. This is what we used to do in desktop PCs, where it was just a matter of swapping ribbon cable connections. I have not tried this with Windows 7 but I assume it will automatically recognise the drives and not throw the kind of hissy fit that sometimes happened with DOS-based versions of Windows.

If you don't have to return the old (faulty) drive to Dell, then wrap it in the new drive's packaging and keep it as an extra back up. If you do have to send it to Dell, then you can load it into the external enclosure and securely erase it using Heidi's Eraser. This will help prevent your personal information from getting into someone else's hands.

Incidentally, before you start the cloning procedure, it might be worth running the free CCleaner to clear out Temporary Internet Files, cookies and other unwanted files. Just make sure you have all the IDs and passwords that you need for any websites that use cookies for identification. Using CCleaner can avoid backing up and restoring loads of junk files.

The procedure for people still stuck on Windows XP is much the same, but the "ghost" utility is not built in. Instead, use one of the programs that can create a disk image, such as Acronis True Image Home 2012 (which makes a bootable image, offers continuous backup, and can synchronise data on different computers). Free alternatives include Runtime's DriveImage XML (free for personal use), Easeus Todo Backup Free and Paragon Backup & Recovery 2012.

Tsunami in Japan and Thai flooding help push losses to 1.8bn
Incoming chief executive Hirai admits to 'strong sense of crisis'

Sony has warned it is heading for a bigger-than-expected 220bn ( 1.8bn) annual loss, presenting a daunting task for incoming chief executive Kazuo Hirai, who has vowed to move quickly to turn things around.

Overtaken by more innovative rivals such as Apple and Samsung over the past decade, the Japanese electronics and media conglomerate posted a 159bn loss between October and December normally a strong quarter boosted by end-of-year holiday sales as it battled a strong yen, flooding in Thailand that ruptured supply chains and a weak economy.

It also took a one-off charge for exiting a flat-panel screens joint venture with Samsung, and reported that sales for the period had dropped 17% to 1.82 trillion ( 15.1bn).

The forecast for a 220bn net loss for the year to March, Sony's fourth straight year of losses, was close to double what the market expected, and revealed the task ahead for Hirai, who replaces Welsh-born Sir Howard Stringer as chief executive in April.

Hirai, a 51-year-old Sony veteran known for reviving the PlayStation games console business through aggressive cost-cutting, said he would not hesitate to scale back or withdraw from businesses if they were not competitive.

"I have a very strong sense of crisis about the environment surrounding us," Hirai told a news conference. "We cannot be afraid to make painful choices for the future of Sony. Our rivals and the operating environment won't wait for us."

There is unlikely to be a honeymoon period for Hirai, who is under immediate pressure to sort out Sony's ailing TV business after it fell behind South Korean rivals such as Samsung in a market where prices are tumbling.

Above all, Hirai will strive to recapture the innovative flair that led Sony to come up with the Walkman personal music player in the 1980s and the PlayStation in the 1990s, and regain ground lost since then to Apple and Samsung, whose iPhones, iPads and Galaxy smart devices are snapped up by consumers.

Some analysts believe that the tall and urbane Hirai can rekindle the flame, saying he has a good grasp of the overall business and is likely to know how to break down silos and integrate divisions.

Others are less optimistic about his chances.

"It won't be easy for Sony to regain its lost ground under new leadership, as its overall competitiveness has sharply weakened," said Kim Young-chan, analyst at Shinhan Investment Corp in Seoul. "It's got structural problems that will take years to fix. It's not just Sony Japanese IT firms have similar problems. They are failing to innovate and produce industry-leading products in almost every major area, from TVs to displays, tablets and smartphones."

Painful decisions

A major concept in Hirai's strategy is merging Sony's robust roster of entertainment properties including singer Kelly Clarkson, Michael Jackson's back catalogue, and the Spider-Man and Men in Black film franchises with its Vaio computers, Bravia TVs and other electronics brands, in an effort to boost sales.

He said the TV business would be crucial to this "convergence" strategy, brushing aside suggestions that Sony may need to pull out of the market.

"There's still a chance in home electronics and I don't think Sony should quit TVs, but unfortunately I can imagine the day may come when they will pull the plug on the business," said a former engineer and executive at Sony. "This is because when you keep making losses and you have no fresh ideas, that becomes the easy choice."

Chief financial officer Masaru Kato said Sony was aiming to halve losses on flatscreen TVs in the next financial year from April, when as a company it hopes to make an operating profit of about 200bn.

Hirai singled out medical as a potential core business for the future, but he declined to comment on any possible investment in the troubled camera and endoscope maker Olympus.

Troubled legacy

Outgoing chief executive Stringer, a former journalist who once ran US broadcaster CBS, was brought in as a rare foreign chief executive in Japan to shake things up, but many analysts see his major achievement as cost-cutting.

Sony's shares have lost nearly two-thirds of their value since Stringer, who turns 70 this month, took the helm as chief executive and chairman in 2005.

He sold off TV factories in Spain, Slovakia and Mexico and outsourced more than half of production to other companies, including Foxconn, the contract electronics maker whose key customer is Apple.

Recently, Sony exited an LCD panel joint venture with Samsung, enabling it to obtain screens for its TVs more cheaply. It also agreed to buy out Ericsson's half of their smartphone joint venture, Sony Ericsson, for $1.5bn to shore up its position in a market where Apple and Samsung have become leaders.

Hirai was effectively anointed as Stringer's successor last March when he was promoted to head Sony's consumer products and services businesses, which produce the bulk of Sony's 6.4tn in annual sales.

"They've been grooming him for a while," said Dan Ernst, an analyst for Hudson Square. "I think he will carry on the plan for Sony as difficult as it is."

The last year has been brutal for many Japanese companies, hit by the strong yen, which affects exports, and two natural disasters the March earthquake in Japan and the Thai floods.

Stringer said those disasters and the financial crisis of 2008 had hit Sony hard and masked much of the progress made during his watch. "If we hadn't reformed Sony as we did, can you imagine where we would be today?" Stringer said. "I rest my case."

Final Fantasy XIII-2
PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

If Final Fantasy XIII-2 were a film, it would be the worst you've ever seen, featuring an absurdly convoluted plot and sub-James Cameron dialogue.

But it's the game's mechanics that create interest, with fast moving, tactical battles and satisfying character customisation. Clearly stung by criticism that the last instalment was essentially one long beautifully illustrated corridor, this time you can hop among levels at will, exploring not only new areas but different timelines in your search for heroine Serah's missing sister and fiance. Get past the weird stylisation and you'll find a big, absorbing game underneath.

Square Enix, 49.99

Soul Calibur V
PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Part of a beat 'em-up lineage stretching back two decades, Soul Calibur's biggest point of difference is that all its characters are armed with swords, knives, a serrated metal whip and even the hidden blade of Ezio Auditore, hero of Assassin's Creed and this instalment's crossover guest star. Welcoming to newcomers, its new Street Fighter IV-style critical edge combos are powerful and easy to pull off, while further practice yields rich, balanced battles. Story mode may be a half-baked add-on, but everything else works beautifully.

Namco Bandai, 49.99

Resident Evil: Revelations
Nintendo 3DS

Pacing itself somewhere between the all-out mutant assault of Resident Evil 5 and the more atmospheric tension of its distant forebears, Revelations jumps among the stories of teams of agents investigating an outbreak of bio-organic weapons and the lurching beasts who supply both scares and cannon fodder. The claustrophobic feeling of its interiors is greatly enhanced on the small screen, although it's still impossible to induce any real sense of foreboding without using headphones. With its music, ominous creaks and protagonists' banal utterances piped directly into your skull it's a different matter, producing a decent sensation of dread.

Capcom, 34.99

Games news

With its time travelling and the fabulous complexity of battle options, few games benefit from a strategy guide as sincerely as Final Fantasy XIII-2, so it's handy that Piggyback's wonderfully complete book is published this week

Also out are Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, which generously packages together five games from the venerable franchise; charmingly offbeat organic action game PixelJunk Eden makes its way to PC after a warm reception on consoles and Gabrielle's Ghostly Groove 3D brings lightly spooky rhythm action to the 3DS

Meanwhile players of new Xbox Live Arcade word game Quarrel are starting to discover that in online mode there are some parts of the English language it just refuses to countenance. Along with double-entendre friendly standards "shaft" and "balls" are some inexplicable censorships such as "dice", "help" and "start", which even the most sensitive soul would be pressed to find offensive.

Distance learning has come far since the days of late-night TV lectures. We speak to students who have turned their lives around from the comfort of their homes

Win your Future: Study for free at the Open University

Andrea Goldshaw gets up at 5am, studies for three hours and then goes to work. She is in the second year of a law conversion course with Nottingham Trent University studying under its distance learning programme, an option that allows her to get to grips with the subject in her own time at home. It's hard work combining study, paid work and motherhood, but Goldshaw* has a very personal reason for wanting to change career.

Until a few years ago she was a teaching assistant, living with her husband and children in Wales. "I was a victim of domestic violence, fled my home with my children and ended up in a refuge," she says. "I didn't qualify for legal aid so I self-litigated in the case against my husband but was given some crucial pro bono legal advice. Now I want to become a lawyer specialising in domestic violence and child contact but my real desire is to give pro bono advice so that I can give back what was given to me."

Goldshaw completed her early childhood studies degree while in the refuge and then got a place on the Nottingham course. She now earns an income as a part-time Freedom Programme facilitator, working with women experiencing domestic violence as well as working as a debt counsellor. "Distance learning has been really hard in many ways, but because I'm passionate about what I want to do, that has kept me going," she says.

Goldshaw's circumstances might be an unusual motivation to study, but her drive and commitment to change her life are common among those heading back to university or college in their 30s, 40s, 50s and even older. The vast majority of those studying through distance learning have financial and personal commitments and cannot afford to give up paid work to study on campus.

The Open University is probably the best known name in distance learning, with 256,000 students worldwide, but it is not the only institution to offer degrees that can be completed at home. Most campus universities now offer at least some element of distance learning on a selection of courses, while others, such as the University of Liverpool, have developed postgraduate courses that involve no face-to-face interaction at all.

"We are at the stage now where we are a serious player in total online learning," says Alan Southern, director of e-learning at the University of Liverpool. "On some courses we have introduced some face-to-face contact, but our courses are predominantly built on the premise they are 100% online."

Further education opportunities are also available via distance learning, most notably from e-learning organisation Learn Direct but also from organisations such as Montessori, which has recently launched a distance learning website for those wanting to train to be a teacher.

"We wanted to make our teacher training accessible for more people," says Montessori's Amanda Gilchrist. "We get a lot of mums who discover Montessori through their own children but we also get quite a lot of people who want to change career from things such as the law or banking, because they want to give something back."

The idea of "giving something back" is a typical motivation for those returning to education. After the near collapse of the UK banking system and the subsequent economic downturn, newspapers and websites were rife with stories of redundant or soon-to-be-redundant bankers turning to teaching and other caring professions.

Christina Lloyd, director of teaching and learner support at the Open University, says that over the years there has been a noticeable trend towards people using the university's courses for a change in career or career progression, rather than studying for personal development or interest.

"The average age of Open University students has dropped," she says. "It used to be mid-40s to 50. Now students are typically in their mid-30s which makes sense when you think that career change is a strong motivating factor for taking a course."

Michelle Virtue and Vincent Fernandez have very different stories to tell, but both were driven by a desire to move into more people-focused careers. Virtue, 42, had worked in banking for 16 years when she took redundancy and turned to the Open University to study health and social care. "I am more of a people person and decided that my place was helping people to make the most of their life," she says.

She is a single mother, but with the help and support of her mum, managed to juggle running a home and looking after her daughter, with sticking to a strict routine to complete her assignments. Now she manages a sheltered scheme for her local authority.

Fernandez went straight from school into his father's profession of mining, but had to leave after 28 years because of a spinal injury. "I had been involved in training people on site and I got a buzz from imparting information and seeing that used and I knew I wanted to continue that somehow."

He saw an advert for Learn Direct, and went to one of its centres. "I was trembling like a kid when I went in, but they stuck with me and I did four certificates in maths and English." He is now a teaching assistant at his local school, working primarily with children with emotional and behavioural difficulties and is considering studying psychology online in his spare time.

The technological revolution has also made distance learning increasingly accessible and the materials more diverse. Gone are the days when most materials were printed and students tuned in to late-night lectures on television. Today, Open University students are still taught through printed materials but these are backed up by audio CDs, video DVDs, and online resources. The university even has its own channel on YouTube and students can download their materials from iTunes and listen to them on their MP3 players. Technology has also changed the nature of contact between students and their lecturers, as well as their peers.

"Students can now have realtime interaction with tutors via live online conferencing," says Lloyd. "It's quite a bit more sophisticated than Skype. Lots of people can log in at once and a tutor can see who wants to ask a question when a marker appears against that student's name."

This sort of technology has meant that courses such as those at Liverpool can dispense with human interaction altogether. However, most courses require, or at least strongly recommend, some sort of face-to-face contact.

"Most students want face-to-face contact and they are often surprised at how much difference a weekend of contact will make," says Shane Russell, programme leader for the graduate diploma in law distance learning course at Nottingham Trent. "Students do miss out on certain things that come with a campus-based degree, but you have to do what is practical and fits in with your circumstances."

In common with other higher education students in the UK, one of the hardest things to manage for those studying via distance learning is the cost, with undergraduate and postgraduate courses typically costing around 15,000. The vast majority of those going down this route are studying part-time and, up until this coming academic year, there have been no loans for fees for part-time students. From August this year, with tuition fees rising, part-time students will have access to loans that they will need to pay back only when they are earning a certain amount.

Many of those taking postgraduate, professionally focused degrees such as those offered online at the University of Liverpool are either working in professions where they are paid well and can afford to fund their study, or are part-funded by their employers. Others, such as Goldshaw, rely on a combination of bank loans and strict budgeting. "You have to be practical with money and very disciplined so that studying is affordable," she says.

It's not just money management that requires discipline for those studying from home. Distance learning requires real discipline in time management and, often, an understanding partner.

Kate Bressner, who studied for a life sciences degree with The Open University, and subsequently switched her career in business management to become a medical science researcher, says discipline was key. "You have to really plan your work. I studied from 8pm until 10pm or 11pm every evening at one point. Luckily my husband had also studied through Open University and so was very understanding and supportive."

While this sort of discipline, not to mention the loss of social life and family time, can be gruelling, The Open University's Lloyd says it really pays off. Employers do notice.

"In the past people were unsure about studying through The Open University because they weren't sure about the university's credibility," she says. "Now we are getting excellent feedback on the calibre of our students and our degrees. Students are particularly praised for possessing great time management and self-motivation. These qualities can really make someone stand out in a competitive employment market."

*Name has been changed

Why is Sam Wollaston approaching this Audi with some trepidation?

Regular readers of this column (hello, Mum) will know I haven't always got on brilliantly with Audis. Driving an A1 along the motorway during a heavy rainstorm, my driver's side wiper whooshed right off the windscreen and suddenly I couldn't see a thing. It "tried to kill me" I wrote, perhaps a little melodramatically. Another time, in an A6, the satnav tried to send me the wrong way round a major roundabout (on the A1 as it happens, confusingly). "This car is trying to kill me," I wrote again. Vorsprung durch bloody murder.

Perhaps you'll understand, then, why I approached this one with some trepidation. Is it going to try to finish what the others didn't quite manage? A high-speed blowout? Death by injector seat, perhaps?

I'm afraid not no near-death experiences to relate. So here's the dull bit about what this car is actually like. The Q3 is a baby SUV, sometimes known as a "soft-roader". You've got the higher-up position but without the screw-you-all-and-screw-the-planet hatefulness of an SUV proper. A happy compromise perhaps, or neither one thing nor the other, depending on where you stand on soft-roaders (I mean no one's really going to go off-road in one are they?).

It's nice to drive, refined and quiet, without being especially engaging or exciting. Not a car for someone who loves driving. I think it's pretty to look at, but it's not going to be turning any heads. Inside, as you'd expect, it's all very classy without being too flash. An Audi then, basically.

There are two natural rivals to this car and I'm putting the Q3 in the middle, in terms of desirability. It's certainly nicer than the BMW Dog's Dinner (also known as the X1). But I'd rather have the new small Range Rover, the Evoque. It's cuter, more Gucci, more Footballers' Wives. And that's a good thing, because footballers' wives, and wannabe footballers' wives, are exactly who these baby SUVs are for.

Perhaps they can even be compared to footballers' wives, hopefully without being too sexist. So the Evoque is well, it doesn't matter who she is, but she's got the heels, the hair, the make-up, the tan, the nails. And she's giving you the eye. The Q3, meanwhile, has been caught nipping out to the corner shop in a grey tracksuit and slippers. I mean, she's clearly gorgeous, but she's not how footballers' wives are supposed to be.

OK, so on the plus side, she didn't try to kill me. In fact, we got along pretty well. But it was always just a successful, professional working relationship; there was never a hint of anything more.

Audi Q3 2.0 TDI (177PS) Quattro

Price from 27,650
Top speed 132mph
Acceleration 0-62mph in 8.2 seconds
Average consumption 47.9mpg
CO2 emissions 156g/km
Eco rating 6/10
Cool rating 7/10

Moderating discussion forums is about more than being an internet policeman, says Dawn Kitchener. There are dark times, but plenty of laughs too

A vase containing two red gerberas sits on the window sill of Dawn Kitchener's home office. Behind the half-open slatted blinds, in the streets of Shepperton, south-west London, it's a cold, still morning. But on the laptop in front of us, an animated bulletin board discussion about dangerous dogs is rising to the boil.

"Michelle you are speaking a load of crap excuse the language!!" one poster writes. "I have a staff and she is the most lovable dog I know! By suggesting staffies need to be seized will only heighten illegal dog breeding Grow up woman, and think about what you write!" Another poster adds: "All I wanna say is that it's not the dogs it's their bloody owners look at these gangs just have dogs 2 attack people and they just hav [sic] a fine instead of going 2 prison." The laptop chimes soothingly as more and more comments appear on screen.

Kitchener observes this robust exchange of views, hosted on the website of the ITV1 programme This Morning, with a mild detachment, knowing that before long she will leave an indelible mark on the discussion, even if none of her opinions will be on view.

"This one that says 'crap'," she explains, matter-of-factly, "I know I'll just delete that straight away."

As a moderator, it is Kitchener's job to sanitise internet discussion threads on topics ranging from car dealerships to current affairs. Her employer, a company called eModeration, offers this service to some of the world's best-known brands, all of whom wish to join in with the social media revolution without exposing themselves to unwanted reputational damage.

It is a role she has been in for around five years, taking her neatly from the early days of social media use to the current proliferation of online networking, a world in which Facebook and Twitter collectively reach 1.1 billion users. Not so long ago, most of Kitchener's work would have involved intercepting comments on internet messageboards or forums before they could be seen publicly. "The nub of what I'm doing is making sure nothing libellous is said or illegal is posted," she explains, "So obviously from that point of view, premoderated forums were much better. You could keep them quite safe, quite clean. And they would develop into real communities."

Yet as she points out, sounding a little regretful, the social media explosion has moved things on. Comments now go up instantaneously and it is her job to remove anything contentious as quickly as possible. "Now people want responses straight away, don't they?" she reflects. "Part of what I do is about managing that for clients."

We peer at Kitchener's special moderator's view of comments, in which sensitive words are highlighted in red, such as "crap", "teenage" and even "hun" an abbreviation of "honey", I'm relieved to note, rather than a reference to wartime Germany.

Quickly it becomes apparent that, in the squeaky clean corporate world, anything contentious gets removed without a second thought. Only occasionally does Kitchener need to exercise judgment. "Maybe the word 'drugs' has been highlighted and it might be fine," she says. "But it might be that someone's said, 'Oh, one of the presenters looks like they're on drugs today.'" Momentarily I find it difficult to shake this image. "Obviously we'd have to remove that," she says firmly.

While most of her work is taken up with weeding out mild offence, there are also times, especially on a topical discussion show like This Morning, when the conversation can take a darker turn.

"It really depends on the news," she says. "If something happens and gets featured on the programme, you might get lots of racist comments coming in, for example."

Immediately I think of the recent Stephen Lawrence murder trial. In relation to that, was it necessary to censor many comments on racist grounds? "I don't know if you'd say a lot," she says picking her words carefully. "For something like the Lawrence case we'd probably have around 1,000 comments during the time it was being discussed on the TV, and you'd get maybe a couple of hundred that contained something unacceptable. But you'd get loads of arguing as well, someone sticking their neck out and saying something and then getting loads of support for it."

Often though, Kitchener points out, the most emotive topics have nothing to do with the news. One such example was a discussion about a man claiming to be "the vainest man in Britain", and here she cannot resist wading in and offering her own two penneth: "He got masses of abuse, because British people just don't like arrogance, do they? He was saying , 'I can have any woman I like', and people were going absolutely mad. That was probably one of the worst shifts." She shakes her head and laughs. "People were going on about this guy and what they'd do to him."

Her role in policing abusive posts goes no further than removing them and notifying the site provider that further investigation may be needed. Frequently abusive or baiting posters are warned and, eventually, have their accounts closed. "The problem with the internet is if you're banned, you can just recreate another user identity," she sighs. "That's why you constantly have to keep on top of it."

Crucially, Kitchener carries out all her moderating work from home. Prior to having children, she enjoyed a successful publishing career in London. But, as for many working mothers, child care and commuting became less and less compatible.

This led her to give up working altogether for a time, until a friend introduced her to eModeration. "They were looking specifically for a parent who could do five hours a week on a mother and baby site. So I thought that'd be perfect, just for a little bit of money on the side," she recalls.

The arrangement suited her well: "I loved it, reading this forum for pregnant mums and being able to do it from home. My youngest was about two at the time and I didn't really want to be working in town."

Since then she has taken on more projects, fitting them around the needs of her three children, all of whom are now established at school. Stacks of board games on shelves and brightly coloured drawings on the walls offer evidence of their existence, but otherwise the immaculately tidy house ("only because I knew you were coming," she insists) has a stillness to it that I find unsettling as one more accustomed to the buzz of an office.

I wonder if the anonymity and isolation can be lonely, but the solution, appropriately enough, lies in eModeration's network of 180 or so other home-based workers around the world. All are connected to instant messaging, Skype and email, as well as via a virtual office called Campfire, and actively encouraged to chat and support one another as though in a regular office environment. "Here," Kitchener points out, looking genuinely touched, "someone's put up a message saying Happy Peanut Butter Day!"

The humour and mutual support of her virtual colleagues is needed for the times when comments turn to sadder subjects such as child welfare or suicide threats, of which she says there are an increasing number.

"I have had two or three commenters saying, I don't want to go on any more," she says. "We would immediately escalate that. There's a procedure whereby we quickly flag it up to the client, so they can contact the user and get them some help."

Clearly there is good reason for many comments to be removed, but there also seems to be an aspect of this electronic hatchet work that goes against the community grain to which many discussion sites aspire.

Kitchener's anonymous interventions may, for example, be presented to by commenters without any explanation or context. One comment on her screen reads: "Why ask for our opinions if you're going to delete them how rude!"

Similarly, she says the hardest part of handling a suicide-related post is never knowing the outcome. "It does affect you," she admits. "You're just left there thinking, I hope that person is all right."

The rotas of hourly shifts she works are plotted sensitively, giving moderators the chance to recover from potentially stressful projects by interspersing them with lighter-hearted ones. "I've never had to sit for eight hours reading really horrible stuff," she says.

Still, it feels like the beautifully sunny children's pictures around her workspace cast a light of their own on her desk. Kitchener thinks moderating, from a parental perspective, makes her more open minded: "You learn how to keep your kids safe. Otherwise, I don't think I'd know what goes on."

Warming to the theme, she sounds as if she might even be composing a comment of her own. "Once people are behind a computer, they can turn into monsters, saying things I don't think they'd ever say in real life," she says, before pausing to reflect. "It's a different world. You just have to look at it like that, I think."

In a world abuzz with Facebook, Twitter and live TV, what is it about radio that keeps us tuning in?

A couple of weeks ago I was messing about on Twitter at home on a Friday night when a tweet from the Conservative blogger, publisher and talkshow host Iain Dale brought me up short. He was on the train on his way home to Kent, and posted a picture with the caption: "This is the drunk woman opposite me. I think she's about to puke. Disgusting slapper."

I didn't look at the photo and clicked on "unfollow" straightaway so I wouldn't see any more of Dale's tweets. Holding this woman up to ridicule in front of the 26,000 people who follow him was abusing his position, I thought.

The chorus of outrage now commonly known as a "Twitter storm" followed. Within about five minutes angry voices were calling for Dale to be sacked and I switched my computer off.

The next day Dale posted a blog defending his use of the word "slapper" and explained how, as a non-drinker, he is horrified by public drunkenness. But when I rang him up this week he agreed his comment had been "rude and unchivalrous" and suggested there is something about the spontaneous nature of microblogging sites such as Twitter that brings this out.

"Twitter and blogs are full of bile. A lot of people say things on these sites they would never say to your face or on the phone. I think on a blog, people think you have to be quite aggressive or abrasive," he told me.

This idea is not new. For years commentators, and particularly women, have complained about the personal abuse that often passes for debate on the internet. This style seemed to suit Dale, who launched his blog 10 years ago after failing to win selection as a Tory parliamentary candidate.

But more recently he has switched his focus to radio, where he adopts quite a different persona on his LBC evening talkshow. I asked him whether he thinks the gentler and more polite style of radio (with some exceptions) explains why its audience continues to hold up in the face of new media's continuing onslaught.

"I think people who have only ever known me from my blog and then listen to my radio show think, is this the same person? I cover a lot of subjects that traditionally would have been covered by female presenters how men react to miscarriage, living with an alcoholic. I've built up this audience of people who are prepared to ring me up and tell me these amazingly personal things. I think people have always regarded radio as a quasi-friend."

With an audience of around a million in the London area, LBC remains small compared with the national BBC and commercial stations. This week's quarterly figures, which showed a small drop-off overall from the previous quarter, but still more than 700,000 more radio listeners than at the same time two years ago, again showcased radio's remarkable resilience, a story that has become familiar over the past few years. Nine out of 10 of us listen to radio every week, with the three biggest BBC stations (1, 2 and 4) holding on to audiences above 10 million.

Overall, the BBC retains well over half the total market, with commercial stations including Talksport and Capital also performing well in a difficult advertising market. In the mornings, Radio 4's flagship Today programme is snapping at the heels of Radio 1's Chris Moyles in the same slot.

What is it about radio that has made it so durable, and able to coexist not only through the age of television, but the age of new media too? As social networking giant Facebook prepares to float itself and raise an astonishing 5bn, what has enabled radio to stand its ground?

The licence fee is the obvious first answer. Former Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer, now master of an Oxford college, says that ever since a crisis of confidence at the BBC in the 1990s, when people wondered whether the Radio 4 spectrum should be given over to rolling news and current affairs, backing for the station and for radio more broadly has been solid, and continued throughout the last decade in spite of predictions that its audience would shrink.

"When 5 Live was launched in 1994, Radio 4 was anxious, it looked like a challenge, but what happened was the reverse. It liberated Radio 4, which then didn't have to worry about breaking a story every five minutes."

Audiences may be booming, but the freezing of the licence fee is still a headache for BBC radio. Recent cuts have left many producers complaining of impossible workloads, and following the reprieve granted 6 Music after a public campaign in 2010 (the station has just recorded its largest audience, of 1.5m), a big row over proposed cuts to local stations is in the offing. But while commercial stations believe the BBC exploits an unfair advantage and is overly dominant, the security of the licence fee has undoubtedly enabled the BBC's radio stations to build and retain an enormous and loyal audience.

Another explanation for radio's staying-power is its cheapness. Radio can be made at a fraction of the cost of television, meaning that programme-makers, DJs and entrepreneurs can all have a crack at it. Commercial broadcasters as well as the BBC value it as an incubator for future TV talent. Added to which, radios themselves are cheap, and all over the place: by people's beds, in the bathroom, in the car.

"Despite the fact you think we're a visually saturated culture, there are all sorts of places where you get radio and nothing else. The technology of radio is cheap, simple and idiot-proof, and older listeners in particular are going to be very reluctant to let it go," says Damazer.

But this attachment on the part of consumers to low technology is also problematic. The switch to digital radio is proving much slower and messier than anyone expected. Digital listening stands at just under 30% and the analogue switch-off looks like being postponed for several more years, meaning more expense and inconvenience for broadcasters who must cater to different signals.

Is radio old or new media? The Wikipedia "new media" definition doesn't mention radio at all, perhaps uncertain whether to lump it in with printing presses or mobile apps. Radio has affinities with the current age of mobile gadgets. The wireless beaming broadcasts into the family living room in the 1920s was a forerunner of the wi-fi box streaming internet signals into the 21st-century home.

Podcasts, downloadable audio and websites such as Radioplayer have enabled radio to make a smooth transition to the computer age. It hasn't suffered the existential threat experienced by the music industry. But plenty of challenges remain, chief among them attracting younger listeners and persuading them to choose DJs rather than making their own playlists on their iPods, or streaming music through Spotify.

Journalists working in talk radio proudly point out that they were talking and listening to members of the public via on-air phone-ins long before newspapers and television began worrying about "mutualisation" and "open-sourcing" of content. James O'Brien, host of another LBC talkshow, says that while he would welcome a change to the broadcasting rules so that opinionated news shows such as his were allowed on TV, he would miss the intimacy of radio. "Television is more declamatory. It's as if you're addressing an audience rather than an individual, and it's the same with a newspaper column, which I think is the closest print equivalent to what I do.

"The image I always have in my head before my show is that I'm getting into the passenger seat of your car, and ideally I'm not going to get on your nerves enough in the next three hours for you to throw me out."

There is a confidence among many of those who work in radio that what they do will carry on. We remain attached to radio and its rhythms, to the hum and the sound of it. And we get attached to the people who present it, when we don't violently take against them. Radio is personal.

Media historian David Hendy says: "The thing about radio is that it's very clever at popping up in new spaces. In America there are groups of people who get together to listen to a programme, like a book group."

Hendy suggests that radio's sense of its own past will serve it well. Last weekend's opening up of the archive of 70 years of Desert Island Discs is a good example. But more than the richness of its back catalogue, or the new technologies that will make it ever more accessible, he believes that what is unique about radio is the place it accords to the human voice. "I think there is a deep, natural, human desire to be accompanied by sound, whether music or voices. It stops us from feeling alone. Radio has intrinsic qualities that give it a good chance of surviving."

Company won a 56% share of new retail broadband subscribers in the last three months of 2011

BT accounted for over half of the UK's new broadband subscribers in the last three months of 2011, as it indicated it would review its fibre broadband investment with a focus on getting businesses to pay for installation.

The company won a 56% share of new retail broadband subscribers, adding 146,000 in three months to take its UK total to 6.1 million customers. The announcement came as The chief executive, Ian Livingston, offered upbeat forecasts for the full year and a rise in third quarter earnings, prompting a 6% share price rise in morning trading.

An earlier commitment to running fibre cables to the doorstep of 25% of UK premises by 2014 is likely to be cut, with BT instead offering speeds of up to 330 megabits a second for businesses willing to pay to be connected.

"Fibre to the premises is a significant development for broadband Britain," said Olivia Garfield, chief executive of BT Openreach, the division which resells the BT network to other telecoms companies and BT Retail. "This will be welcome news for small businesses who may wish to benefit from the competitive advantage that such speeds provide."

BT previously said it would not offer fibre on demand, but after a trial with small businesses in St Agnes, Cornwall, it has changed tack. Individual customers will be able to request a personal fibre connection via its retail division and those of companies like TalkTalk and BSkyB.

The 330Mbps service will be available from spring 2013 and is likely to involve installation costs of up to 1,000. At that price, it is expected to appeal to small businesses rather than residential customers. It will only be available on streets that have fibre to the cabinet, likely to be over 10m premises from launch and about two thirds of UK premises from 2014.

The change is likely to delay fibre to the door for all but the wealthiest of households. So far only 10 of BT's 1,450 exchanges have fibre to the doorstep of the homes they serve. But BT has previously announced that it is doubling the speed of its standard fibre broadband product, from 40Mbps to 80Mbps, from this spring.

A spokesman for BT said of the original 25% commitment: "That was only an estimate which we gave some years ago before we knew we could offer fibre on demand and home broadband speeds of 80 megabits. We will have to sit back and review that following these developments."

BT's promise to invest 2.5bn of its own money in rolling out fibre is likely to be maintained, a spokesman said, although the spend could be shifted to reaching a greater number of cabinets and to targeting blocks of flats for connection to the network.

The take-up of super-fast broadband has increased to 400,000 of BT's retail customers, with 95,000 added in the three months to 31 December.

Elsewhere, Ian Livingston brought forward his target of generating 6bn in annual underlying earnings by 2013 to the end of this financial year. However, BT said its pension deficit ballooned to 4.1bn due to high inflation and the knock-on effect of the government's quantitative easing measures.

Group revenue was 4.8bn for the quarter. Excluding the impact of cuts to mobile termination rates, revenue was down 1.8% in the first nine months, in line to reach BT's target of 2% to flat for the full year, and halting years of revenue slides by the end of the next financial year.

Profit before tax was up 18% to 628m for the quarter, while earnings (before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) rose by 3% to 1.5bn in the quarter. Net debt fell 11% to 7.7bn, in line with previous quarters which have seen BT reduce its borrowings by 3.3bn over three years.

Our pick of the most eye-catching and innovative entries to the 2011 International Science & Engineering Visual Challenge

Struggling games retailer given temporary reprieve and cut in lending as banks continue to exert influence, say analysts

Video game suppliers have come to the rescue of struggling retailer Game Group, striking a backroom deal to allow the firm to secure revised terms with its lending banks.

However, the banks are still exerting considerable influence over the business continuing to press, in particular, for a sale of Game's overseas stores. As a result, the board has agreed to submit a planned strategic update to the lenders for approval. In addition, Game will take an unspecified cut to its lending facility.

New terms with suppliers and banks were broadly welcomed by analysts, despite a lack of detail. Shares in the group, which were trading at close to 170p in the autumn of 2010, yesterday closed up 1.31p at 6.64p.

Analysts were quick to warn that Friday's deal was likely to represent only a temporary reprieve for Game because the business needs substantial working capital in the runup to next Christmas. "Ability to trade through December 2012 will depend upon revision of facilities back to their full levels," said Gillian Hilditch at JP Morgan Cazenove.

Game chief executive Ian Shepherd said: "We're pleased to reach agreement with our lenders, but should be under no illusions about the challenges in our market or the hard work that is required to deliver our strategic plan."

Game's appeal for support from its suppliers echoed a similar arrangement between struggling HMV and its major music and film suppliers agreed last month. Like Game, HMV was able to use supplier concessions to gain revised terms from its lenders in its case Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group. HMV chief executive Simon Fox has made clear the group, like Game, is also under pressure to make further disposals.

Despite analysts believing Game this week finished its financial year with a net cash surplus, the business had nevertheless been heading for a breach of its borrowing covenants at the end of this month. Christmas trading had been poor with comparable sales down 15.2% and had been quickly followed by a large rent bill at the end of the calender year. On Friday the group said it expected to report an underlying pretax loss of 18m for the year to 31 January when it reports full-year results.

The company, which operates 1,274 stores around the world, including 610 in the UK, said that unspecified "stakeholders" have now stepped in to offer vital support. This is believed to be a reference to concessions from major suppliers, many of whom are desperate to stop Game going to the wall. Despite the rapid migration of many video game sales to internet and mobile devices, Game is still an important high street showcase for software products.

Last published accounts show Game owed 295m to suppliers at the end of January last year, normally settling its bills within 30 days. It is thought that suppliers have assisted Game through generous rebate payments, easing short-term pressure on the retailer's finances.

However, supplier concessions were not enough to assuage Game's banks entirely. These lenders consisting of Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, HSBC, Caixa, Allied Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland have demanded approval on certain elements of strategy, thought to include the possible sale of overseas stores.

A number of new games consoles are due for release in the coming months, including, this month, the PlayStation Vita. Later in the year Nintendo is launching its new Wii U. These are expected to provide a much needed boost to the sector, though some analysts suggest much of the benefit might go to supermarkets and online retailers.

A New Zealand court agrees with prosecutors that there is a risk Kim Dotcom may attempt to flee before his hearing

Sam Lowe jailed for 39 months for sending BlackBerry message telling 160 contacts to 'kick off' in Nottingham

A man has been jailed for 39 months for sending messages from his BlackBerry telling people to join in last August's riots in Nottingham.

Sam Lowe, 21, from Nottingham, had admitted a charge of encouraging violent disorder after he sent a BlackBerry Messenger instant message, or BBM, telling his 160 contacts to "kick off" during disorder in the city in 2011.

Nottinghamshire police said the message, which Lowe later deleted, read: "Girls, grannies, mums, dads, lads, grandads everyone meet on Sneinton Dale tonight at 9 o'clock as we are all going to kick off "

The message also urged his friends to show the police "what it's all about".

More than 141 people were arrested and 87 were charged after cars, pubs and shops were damaged in August 2011 in Nottingham. However, the court heard there was no evidence that Lowe's message had led to public disorder in the area.

He was arrested in the early hours of 9 August after he had hidden from police in bushes for two hours. Further examination of Lowe's phone messages found he had claimed to have "a bin full of bricks".

The judge acknowledged Lowe had previously done a lot of good in his community and had been given a "volunteer of the year" award.

However, he told Lowe: "What you did, potentially, you took a large amount away from your community."

But the sentence has caused consternation among rights organisations. Jodie Blackstock, director of criminal and EU justice policy at Justice, said: "We don't think that this is the right approach a harsher sentence isn't going to achieve what they [the courts] are looking for. In a case like this, a high level community sentence would be appropriate. Considering nothing occurred, and arguably it was carried out in the heat of the moment without any intention 39 months is a huge leap."

David Cameron has previously defended the sentences handed out to those involved in the riots, and said: "They've decided to send a tough message and it's very good that the courts feel able to do that."

Rich Henson, a detective with Nottinghamshire Police said: "BBM is not your standard mobile communication. It is much more secure. The fact that BBMs have advanced security and encryption means they are almost impossible to access by third parties.

"That is why Lowe's conviction is a particularly great result for the force, demonstrating some first-class work by our digital investigation unit."

He added: "Let this be a clear warning to those criminals out there who think they are safe using BlackBerrys."

Detective chief inspector Rob Griffin, who is leading the investigation into the August disorder in the city, said: "The judge today has handed down a sentence to reflect the seriousness of Lowe's actions. It is impossible to quantify the impact and effects of the messages he sent that night.

"It is clear, however, that this was an irresponsible and criminal act at a time when people were rising up against the police on a national scale."

This is an edited extract of the recording posted on YouTube by Hackers from the group Anonymous. The group has broadcast a private conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard exposing details of a major international cybercrime investigation

Follow us as we find out what the Guardian developers have built in their two-day hack day

Hello, world!

Hello, world!

3.41pm: Welcome back to the Guardian's hack day live blog. If you were around yesterday, you'll know that our software developers have had two days off their normal work. Instead they've been hacking and working on prototypes of what the future of the Guardian's webs site and digital services might look like.

3.44pm: The format of the presentations is as follows. Each developer or team of developers gets just ninety seconds to explain and demo what they've spent the last two days working on. So far it looks like 25 hacks have been registered. If the URLs are available on the wider web, not just internally, we'll be sharing the links on here.

3.45pm: Why have hack days? Well, firstly they are fun. But secondly, they provide the opportunity to prototype new ideas. Next week we'll have a Star Chamber meeting to assess the viability of the ideas. The best ones will get assigned to a Product Manager, and may end up in production.

3.49pm: I've actually rushed back across London, where I've been at news:rewired, a conference about journalism and technology. There were quite a few Guardian staff talking, including Alastair Dant talking about puzzles and games, Simon Rogers teaching people about data journalism tools, and John Domokos talking about video. I was talking about the Guardian Facebook app.

3.52pm: Also at the event was Nicola Hughes, who has joined us as part of the Knight-Mozilla news fellowship programme. She tells me her hack will be finished over the weekend, and wrote this blurb for it:

How Far Have We Come - measuring the sporting achievement of the human race

What would happen if you lined up all the track and field world record holders and got them to perform their sporting achievement back to back from your front door? How far would they go and how long would it take them?

We can all read world records and go oooh, but do we really comprehend the speed, the distance and how useless we are in comparison? For that we need spacetime relativity! In fact, we just need a hack.

I have repurposed code that makes videos of routes from Google Street View images. Instead of creating a video it builds a website where you can scroll through the images. I call it the Street View Flipbook. Code can be found here.

The idea is to build finer grained flipbooks from iconic locations and make the athletes relay (heading towards the Olympic site) where every time the Olympic torch is passed on you get information on that particular record, the locations they traveled from and in what time. There should be a a map of them going along the route and a time clock that expands where hovered over. And that can all be done by linking the JQuery events to the scroll position. Like on this page.

The ultimate hack would be to embed it in a site as an iframe and build the scroll bar to look like a video player where the play button is set to scroll through the events.

3.55pm: Jonathan and Joanna will shortly join me in live blogging. It is incredibly hard to keep up with continuous 90 second presentations. Last time we tried to do this we ended up posting a huge number of mistakes - spelling colleagues names wrong and outputting broken mark-up. So bear with us. And also, as a non-professional journalist, expect crimes against the Guardian Style Guide

4.04pm: Brilliant. The first hack is called "Live blogging bug fix"

4.10pm: Matt Andrews, a Guardian Hack Day veteran, is up next. He's asking everyone to get out their phones. I sense a big crowd participation moment coming here. We've been directed to a bit.ly url called 'Guardian Worm', here. Wow! The worm is a live voting tool. You can register our approval - or otherwise - of an event in real time. Clever, pretty, simple. This one has potential.

4.10pm: Next up is Ivan our dapper developer sporting 3D glasses. He's the first victim of Matt's live voting system.

Ivan has turned our Sport front page 3D. We've only got one pair of glasses though so I'm not sure what the effect is yet I'll let you know when I get my turn!

4.11pm: Rob Phillips and Andrew Mason have produced a variation on a hack that Matt Andrews did in October last year - it takes football data and plots the players on a pitch. Users can then share a URL to show their friends their squad picks. Rob has also added the ability to add Championship Manager style tactics on top of the squad.

4.16pm:Rupert Bates is next - he wants to make live football coverage better on mobile. On a tablet, he's demonstrating an app which lets you find out about today's matches, switch between different leagues - British, and European, and get current score and other match data from the Guardian API. Neat!

4.16pm:Rupert Bates is next - he wants to make live football coverage better on mobile. On a tablet, he's demonstrating an app which lets you find out about today's matches, switch between different leagues - British, and European, and get current score and other match data from the Guardian API. Neat!

4.19pm: Stephen Wells, otherwise known as "Swells" is now presenting his "Backchannel" (now, don't be cheeky!)

Actually it's a "second screen" app for when you're watching the telly. It brings together Twitter, Guardian live blogs and user comments on a particular topic in a way that's "all lovely" Swells says. It uses Twitter bootstrap and knockout.js.

I think Stephen might be bending the hack day rules a bit by taking up two timed slots. It's a interesting project though and amazing to see how quickly the tweet stream flows!

4.22pm: Haran Rasalingam and Nat Smith are up next, with a hack called "Trackmeister". They are project managers and wanted to make the most of our reporting tools. They have tied up Pivotal Tracker with Google's spreadsheets. It reveals how on track our tech team are with their projects. [Insert your own punchline about lazy programmers here]

4.24pm: Here is Ivan modelling 3D glasses for his hack.

4.27pm: It's Andrew Mason's turn. He wants to give readers something to do in between the gaps of live blog updates. (Readers, something for you in the next break, perhaps. OK maybe not quite so fast...) We're being pointed to a liveblog url on our mobiles...and...we're looking at a live visualisation of all the readers of this url (in this room) interacting with the page. It's amazing. It feels...very real-time, very participatory. Surely an application, somewhere, during live events, with a little more testing.

4.28pm: Now we have Martyn Inglis with "Annotate This" which takes the minute-by-minute on our football section and lets readers comment on each entry.

That means you can debate that foul 13 minutes into the game for the remainder of the match.

4.31pm: Two of our front-end devs are presenting now. Luca De Angeli and James Gorrie. Last hack day I got Luca's name wrong on the live blog, and he graciously waited a couple of days before pointing out I was an idiot.

This is a real-time view of comments being left on the articles in the sport section. The page has all the current stories, and then you can see as the comments are added by users in real time. You can scroll through entire threads as well, next to the stories.

It also featured a monkey wearing a sandwich-board saying "Keep it real". I have no idea.

4.34pm: Abdul Karim is up next - he's looking at sporting predictions, and in particular, how accurate Guardian journalists have been. He digs back through the season predictions for different years, aggregates them, and then sees how they went. For the 2010-11 season, we got 4 right. An improvement on 2009-10, where we seem to have only called 2 correctly!

4.35pm: Front end developer Chris Cross presents his "Olympic Grid" - a way of making sense of the 650 events that are taking place during the 2012 Games.

Each event is colour coded to show whether it's a men's or women's event and it appears on a timeline to show what time of day it's taking place.

4.36pm: Micheal Brunton-Spall, who organises our hack days, has just suggested everybody have a toilet break whilst the next demo gets set up. "He's like our dad", Lynsey Smyth from the UX team says.

4.39pm: Andrew Mason presenting his real-time mobile hack

4.44pm: A short pause so that we can sing "Happy Birthday" to one of our heads of product who has joined us via Skype. The atmosphere is nothing if not jovial...

4.45pm: Jenny Sivapalan and Sheena Luu are personalising Guardian content for you. You can like individual tags that are applied to stories and appear next to the image in an article (this one, for example, is tagged with things like software and programming), and next time you come back to the site a small component shows the latest content that matches those tags that you've liked. They picked 'Wildlife' as one of the tags, so now we've had our first sheep on screen, following the unexpected monkey earlier.

4.50pm: Robbie Clutton was the most prolific hacker last time around. Since then he has left us, moved to New York and joined Pivotal Tracker. "Which sucks", says Michael Brunton-Spall. I tell you what sucks even more - he's sent us a video of a couple of hacks he has done remotely in the US, and we can't get the video to work. Boo!

4.53pm: OK, the video is up and running. Robbie has built a dashboard which allows us to spot the most recommended comments in threads and go straight in there and respond. He thinks there is a real power in journalists going below the line and recommending and responding to users. Below the line is not a euphemism. Robbie has also scraped the comments from all the articles written by Charles Arthur, and converted them into an RSS feed reader so that Charles can subscribe to them and follow. The video finishes with a joke at the expense of the British weather.

4.54pm:Phil Wills has written a Chrome script which integrates with our authoring tools so that YouTube videos and comments which reference a particular hashtag can quickly be pulled into the draft version of an article. The journalist can then confirm or otherwise the videos' inclusion before launching the article. Looks like a handy addition to the CMS.

4.57pm: You're down the pub at 9.30pm on a Saturday and you're trying to decide if you should go home to watch Match of the Day.

But how can you tell without looking up the scores and ruining it all?

Well, Jerry Bate has an answer with "Watch or Not?" which takes stats and shows you total goals scored in a match; offers up a "watchability rating" based on attacks on goal and a "shock rating" using (I think) the likely predicted outcome versus the actual outcome.

If you're desperate to be put out of your misery, you can click and get the scores too. Nice.

5.01pm: Abdul Karim who works for our websys team is looking at football predictions. He doesn't care whether his predictions are right or not, but he wants to build a league table based on the predictions he has made during the course of the season. As the weeks go by, the league table builds up. Karim's prediction has put Liverpool top of the table. This hack is clearly flawed.

5.06pm: Michael Brunton-Spall (you know, the chap that's a bit like our dad) is now up to demonstrate A ROBOT!!

Not quite sport-related, but robot was an earlier project aimed at trying to program it to avoid objects, unfortunately the result was "it tries for a bit and then just steams through the object".

"Not unlike some football players," someone in the audience suggests.

So, "after a surprising amount of trigonometry" Michael has had a second attempt. The robot scans the local area and stores a map.

It then calculates the best route around the object.

We've been waiting a bit longer than 90 seconds...

AND IT'S OFF!

Errr backwards.

5.08pm: Jonathan Richards has done something with the 100 years of data that the Olympics 100m men's final has produced. He plotted the times of winners on a graph but that is a bit dull and rubbish. Instead he has made an animated thing where you can pit little running men against each other so you can see, for example, the difference between the times achieved in the 80s and Usain Bolt. He then consulted a zoologist to find out how fast a cheetah can cover 100m from a standing start, and you can add a cheetah into the mix. Spoiler alert: The cheetah wins.

5.14pm: David Vella presents his "Live Album" - a tool to make our community coordinators and moderators lives much easier.

It's designed for readers to submit photos to us in a simple way and then displays them in a lovely way for us (and maybe you) to see them all in a timeline. It also does some very cool things with the metadata in the pictures too.

5.16pm: Martin Belam is taking time out from the blog to demo his own hack - a way to read long-form articles in a more readable format. From a menu a reader selects articles of a type that they like (tagged 'Sport' etc.), and these are displayed in a less cluttered format in the browser. As a bonus, there's a readability widget which can send the articles to be read offline on your Kindle. Neat. And all this from a non-developer. Champion effort!

5.16pm: Wow. Here's omniscience for you. Grant Klopper and Graham Tackley seem to have found a way to track every click on every element, of every page on the entirety of the site. On each page in the app there's a box above every element showing its rank in a list of current clicks on that page. It's a little like the 'click heat map'-type application, only they've built it in 24 hours, and there's probably all kinds of customisations that can be explored. Brilliant.

5.17pm: Martin Reddington presented a hack last time around called "The Guardian Book of the Dead" - which was an iPad app based around our obituaries page. This time around he has worked with our fantastic designer Andy Brockie and the mysterious "Roger" to make an iPad app version of the "New band of the day" series. It includes the ability to play YouTube videos and Soundcloud uploads by the band. And you can go through to iTiunes to buy tracks and contribute to "the mobile software developers holiday fund."

5.21pm: Marc Jones and Iulia Alexandrescu want a way to come up with get better football predictions. Their hack trawls through historical results, does some buffin-y sums, and comes up with (hopefully) a more accurate sense of the result ahead of time. Applied to the last 4 weeks' games, their engine has correctly predicted between 3-5 games out of 10. Shows potential. Particularly if it invited readers' predictions alongside...

5.22pm: If you are a developer, and you've been enjoying reading about our hack day - you could be involved in the next one. Seriously. We are hiring. Our software team is 40-strong, but we are still looking for more. Not only do we need software developers, but we also have roles for product managers and technical project managers. More details here.

5.24pm: Developer Matt Andrews presents the Tour de Guardian, a project he has been working on with Alastair Jardine from our UX team.

They posted a topic on the Guardian Bike Blog asking what they should do for their hack. Most of the responses were related to tracking live races.

So the Tour de Guardian allows you to to hover over an update on the live blog and find our more detail about each cyclist in the race and the live positioning of the cyclists.

It needs a bit more data from race organisers to make it work, but it's a really amazing concept.

5.25pm: David Vella is up with hack 2. (How on earth has he done this as well as his excellent reader picture upoader?) It's a gorgeous, revolving picture wall which pulls images in from the API. The wall can either atomise a single picture into hundreds of parts, or pull in hundreds of different pics in thumbnails. Readers could also customise their own galleries and then share them. Fantastic.

5.27pm: Away from the room, Dan Catt has made a 24 hour drone voice radio station that automatically reads out our headlines, and marries it with ambient music. It is currently broadcasting live.

5.28pm: On Twitter, our mobile editor Subhajit Banerjee informs us that the mysterious "Roger" is one of our brilliant iPhone app developers, Roger Moffatt. I'm embarrassed to confess I've never met him.

5.30pm: Bill Thompson, once of this parish, and frequent writer on tech for the BBC and many other places, has gate-crashed the presentations. Michael Brunton-Spall apparently bumped into him randomly on a train this morning and invited him. He reminds us that the Guardian website used to be in a box on his desk.

5.36pm: Right, Martin here signing off for the day. Live blogging is exhausting. Fun, but exhausting. The presentations are over, and the developers have headed off to the pub for a well-deserved beer. I hope you got some sort of sense of what a hack day is like, and will join us again for the next one...

5.37pm: Right, Martin here signing off for the day. Live blogging is exhausting. Fun, but exhausting. The presentations are over, and the developers have headed off to the pub for a well-deserved beer. I hope you got some sort of sense of what a hack day is like, and will join us again for the next one...

From rap to 'radicalisation scores', today's e-jihadists are more than just consumers but they tend to keep it all online

Intelligence analysts remain vexed over the internet's role in radicalising tomorrow's terrorists. Some analysts point to the continued trickle of e-jihadists turned real-world terrorists attracting headlines throughout the west for their ambitions of bloodshed such as those involved in a recent plot to bomb the London stock exchange as proof that the internet is a contributing cause of terrorism. Other analysts point to that same small number of terrorists as proof of just how rare it is for one of the thousands of online al-Qaida cheerleaders to try and exchange their keyboards for explosives.

The reality of al-Qaida's online movement today is the result of a winding interplay between the supply of al-Qaida's propaganda, and the demand for it from supporters worldwide. In the early 2000s, al-Qaida supporters flocked to basic websites to get their fix of news about al-Qaida's latest plot, or recent martyrdom. Bandwidth was limited and accessibility constrained so most of the Arabic-speaking online al-Qaida supporters used the internet as library: they logged on, downloaded what they needed and logged off.

As al-Qaida's media specialists began to understand the power of the web, they began opening internet-based discussion forums. They also started centralising their big-think ideological and strategic texts, which they encouraged supporters to download, read and repost. The written word became a critical part of the process by which one came to invest in al-Qaida. In the way that most kids collect comic books or baseball cards, these radical books, monographs and training material became prized possessions among its followers something to stockpile, trade and read over and over again.

By the mid-noughties, bilingual adherents in the west began translating these written materials, making al-Qaida's ideas more accessible to more people in more places. Ideas, punctuated by operations, drove the movement's growth. But as al-Qaida's core group grew less relevant, due to attention shifting to the Iraqi insurgency, al-Qaida's global following began entertaining themselves in the robust number of discussion forums that had appeared. These forums became a bastion for intellectual, ideological and personal debate, like a jihadi version of salons. Importantly, they also provided a feeling of social connectedness with like-minded individuals, something few of them were able to find in their respective physical world lives.

They were not, however, any sort of assembly line for producing real-world terrorists. Most of these individuals craved blood on their computer monitors, but few were willing to shed it themselves. Those who were willing to sign off and sign up were mostly from Arab countries, interested more in travelling to Afghanistan to join the fight than staying home and blowing themselves up. The overwhelming majority of al-Qaida internet supporters were lurkers from the sidelines, afraid to jump into the online fray.

Then, by 2007, al-Qaida's senior leadership came roaring back and embarked on an aggressive media venture. Those long ideological treatises were falling out of fashion, supplanted by high-resolution, hour-long documentary videos. As al-Qaida released more videos, they began rolling out more personalities to adoring fans. No longer was it just Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri producing videos. Men like Abu Yahya al-Libi, Abu Layth, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid and a host of others became household names for al-Qaida's online fanboys.

Towards the end of the last decade, calls for Facebook, YouTube and blog invasions flooded the online discussion forums. They hoped that social media websites would be the next front for al-Qaida occupation. Facebook and YouTube were ideally structured for the more youthful supporters, less interested in engaging in the online fisticuffs of the discussion forums or reading drawn-out treaties on the meaning of jihad. They wanted action, dynamism and multimedia. Social media sites offered an easy and quick way to host, organise and display propaganda images and videos, the primary form of al-Qaida propaganda these days.

But most importantly, these kinds of sites allowed them to become complete producers of, not just consumers of, al-Qaida's global mission. They could record their own jihadi videos on their smartphones and upload them to YouTube. They could use a webcam in their bedroom to take Facebook profile shots and update their status every 10 minutes. Jihadi kids were recording pro-al-Qaida rap songs on their computers. Taken together with the call for grassroots violence being pushed by al-Qaida's English-speaking pied piper, Anwar al-Awlaki, the line between terrorism and media had been permanently blurred.

Thanks to the internet's 24/7 accessibility, one could spend countless hours online, downloading material, posting thoughts, watching videos or designing imagery. That kind of tireless activity would catapult an average individual through the various ranks of moderator and administrator. They can now acquire "radicalisation scores" and boost their "fundamentalism metres". Thanks to the internet, anyone can become a legend. But for some, even legendary status online is not satisfying. Only the taste of blood in the real world is enough.

In 2012, al-Qaida's senior leadership is several heartbeats away from extinction. Their affiliate groups in Yemen, Algeria and elsewhere remain embattled. What remains is a global support movement that is rabid, technologically empowered, but less concerned with the al-Qaida brand name or all that came along with it. Al-Qaida's global movement today is sloppy and self-centred. It is only the most zealous few who seek to live up to their legendary status in the virtual world these days. The problem for intelligence and law-enforcement professionals is identifying that needle in the online jihadi haystack.

Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree

Investigators can be heard discussing joint inquiry into cybercrime in 15-minute call released on the internet

Hackers from the group Anonymous have broadcast a private conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard exposing details of an international cybercrime investigation, the FBI has confirmed.

The FBI and Scotland Yard admitted that the security of the call had been breached.

Investigators can be heard discussing their joint inquiry into a cybercrime investigation going through the British courts, and linked to investigations in New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles and Ireland.

It is understood the breach occurred at the US end of the call. As the news broke, Anonymous began taunting the FBI, asking if it was curious about how the group could keep reading the bureau's internal communications.

Investigators can be heard on the broadcast talking about named individuals who have been charged in the UK with hacking into the website of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca).

In one lengthy exchange, the British contingent can be heard discussing a 15-year-old hacker as a "wannabe" and a "pain in the bum". The 15-minute call has been broadcast on the internet, but the names of some of the individuals being sought have been bleeped out by the hackers.

Scotland Yard said: "We are aware of the video which relates to an FBI conference call involving a PCeU [member of the e-crime unit] representative. The matter is being investigated by the FBI.

"At this stage no operational risks to the MPS have been identified; however, we continue to carry out a full assessment. We are not prepared to discuss [it] further."

The conference call was one that appears to be held weekly between officers from the Metropolitan police's e-crime unit and the FBI in New York and Los Angeles.

The law enforcement agencies are working together on a cybercrime investigation involving teenagers and young people from the UK, Ireland, Germany and the US, it is understood.

Six people are going through the British courts charged in connection with hacking into computers belonging to Soca. They include Ryan Cleary, a British teenager who is charged with five offences of hacking websites. Cleary, 19, from Wickford, Essex, was arrested in June last year. His arrest was linked to a series of cyber-attacks by a group called LulzSec.

Cleary was charged over cyber-attacks against British-based targets. He is due to appear at Southwark crown court with his co-accused, Jake Davis, on 11 May. Four other individuals, are due to appear at the same court in March as part of the same investigation. Cleary has been charged with three attacks on the London-based International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in November 2010, the British Phonographic Industry in October 2010, and on Soca.

The method he is alleged to have used is a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against all three websites. He was also charged with constructing a botnet, a network of infected computers that can be used remotely to direct attacks.

On the intercepted call, the British police officers joke with their FBI counterparts early in the conversation while they wait for others to join, and are heard making fun of Sheffield - where the Acpo cybercrime conference is being held next week. "It's a khazi - not exactly a jewel in England's crown," says the British detective. The call, which took place nearly a fortnight ago it is understood includes a conversation about the appearance of Cleary and Davis at Southwark crown court last Friday.

The FBI official expresses his gratitude to the British officers for "being flexible" and co-ordinating with them. "New York appreciates it," the FBI operative says.

In response, the British detective says: "We have cocked things up in the past."

The British detective then gives the FBI details of a 15-year-old who was arrested in the UK before Christmas. He calls the 15-year-old a "wannabe" and is connected with two other teenagers who are known as CSL sec "Cant Stop Laughing Security".

"He is just a pain in the bum," the officer says. The call ends with all parties agreeing to talk again the following Monday.

The events leading to the arrest of Cleary involved an investigation by British police and the FBI. The bureau's involvement, plus the nature of the targets, raised the prospect of Washington seeking the teenager's extradition to the US.

The conference call reveals that two other individuals are to be arrested in the future. It makes clear that the investigation is complex, stretching across international boundaries and focusing on teenage hackers in many different cases.

Karen Todner, a lawyer for Cleary, said the recording could be "incredibly sensitive" and warned such data breaches had the potential to derail the police's work. If they haven't secured their email it could potentially prejudice the investigation," she told Associated Press.Anonymous is a collection of internet enthusiasts, pranksters and activists whose targets have included the Church of Scientology, the music industry, and financial companies such as Visa and MasterCard.

Panasonic and Sony have been hard hit by weakening demand for TVs, a strong yen, and lower production following the Thailand floods

Japanese electronics firm Panasonic has nearly doubled its projected net loss for 2011 to 780bn ( 6.47bn) the biggest in the company's 95-year history as the global economic crisis dampens demand for TVs and mobile phones.

Panasonic reported a net loss of 197.6bn in the three months to December, following "significant sales declines" and ongoing restructuring costs following its purchase of Sanyo Electronics in 2009.

The company's grim outlook mirrors that of fellow Japanese electronics firm Sony, which on Thursday warned that annual losses would be almost twice as bad as forecast.

The embattled electronics companies have been hard hit by weakening demand for TVs, a strong yen, and lower production following the Thailand floods.

In October Panasonic forecast losses for the year to March of 480bn, but its revised estimate of a 780bn net loss (in the year to March 2012) would eclipse the company's previous worst full year loss of 427bn in 2002.

The company said sales fell 14% in the three months to December 2011 to 1.96bn, compared with 2.28bn in the final quarter of 2010. The fall contributed to a net loss of 197.6bn in the final quarter of last year, compared with a 40bn net profit in the three months to December 2010.

"The primary causes of this are the global economic slowdown and instability in the financial markets due to the European debt crisis, as well as the extensive supply chain disruption caused by the flooding in Thailand that occurred in October 2011," Panasonic said in a statement.

Sales of flat-panel TVs and mobile phones plummeted in the period, although sales of PCs and some home appliances enjoyed a small boost.

Panasonic moved to shake up its business following the purchase of Sanyo Electronics, including revamping its TV and chip operation and cutting jobs.

"At the core of our latest restructuring was to make our TV unit profitable," said the Panasonic president Fumio Ohtsubo on Friday. "Panasonic's TVs may one day be a case study of a recovery."

On Thursday Sony reported a 159bn net loss between October and December as sales fell 17% in a festive period that would usually bring a boost for consumer electronics. Sony increased its forecast loss for the 12 months to March to 220bn; in November it had predicted a loss of 90bn.

The results proved the scale of the challenge ahead for Kazuo Hirai, who will take over as Sony chief executive in April after Sir Howard Stringer announced he was to step aside.

Both Panasonic and Sony are in fierce competition with South Korean rival Samsung in the TV market, where prices have tumbled in the past year. Panasonic remains the

fourth-biggest TV maker in the world.

Far eastern electronics firms are still grappling to recover from the Thai floods in October last year, when many companies were forced to halt production at key manufacturing hubs in the region.

Top two banking software houses, Misys and Temenos, in talks about all-share merger but markets disappointed after takeover speculation pushed share prices up 40%

Misys, the British IT firm, has confirmed that it is was in talks with its Swiss rival Temenos about an all-share merger of the world's two leading banking software houses.

"Misys confirms that it is in preliminary discussions with Temenos regarding a possible strategic combination to be effected by way of an all share merger," the company said in a statement to shareholders this morning. "Discussions are continuing and there can be no certainty that a transaction will ultimately take place."

Markets reacted with disappointment, sending the shares down 0.5% by midday, as hopes were dashed that Misys might sell itself for a premium. The shares have risen more than 40% since mid-December as takeover speculation mounted. Analysts estimated Misys shareholders would own about 55% of a combined group, based on current market capitalisations. Misys is valued at 1.1bn, while Temenos is worth about 1.4bn Swiss francs ( 965m) after the announcement sent its shares up 18% to SFr18.85. The two companies compete to produce banking software, which accounts for about a third of Misys revenues. The balance comes from its treasury and capital markets division, which includes software for trading in currency, equities and futures. It is thought the merger could offer potential cost-savings of about 50m.

"After all the noise and rumours of a bid, the news that Misys is simply in talks with Temenos for an all-share merger is disappointing," said David Toms, an analyst at the brokers Numis. "Furthermore, it appears to us to be something of an admission that the only way for Misys to eat Temenos's lunch with its new products is to buy Temenos's lunch."

Misys had been in talks last summer to sell itself to an American suitor, Fidelity National Information Services, but the talks collapsed.

The likelihood of another suitor emerging was roundly dismissed. George O'Connor, analyst at brokers Panmure Gordon, said Fidelity would be "watching squeamishly" from the sidelines rather than making a fresh bid.

"Temenos notes the announcement made by Misys plc and confirms that it is constantly evaluating its strategic options," the Swiss group said. "Such process currently includes a possible strategic combination with Misys to be effected by way of an all-share merger."

Plants vs. Zombie and Angry Ninja Birds removed, but other misleading apps remain

Played Plants vs. Zombie yet? It's available for iPhone and iPad for 1.99 a snip, given its promise of "proffessional characters and levels design. Fun and colorful animation. Full retina display support. Very intuitive and addictive game with simple touch control. Many bonuses and extra points!"

It's strange to see a company as experienced as PopCap Games mis-spelling the word professional in an App Store listing, though. And hang on, isn't it Plants vs. Zombies? What happened to the rest of the undead?

As you may have guessed, this game has nothing to do with PopCap. Plants vs. Zombie is the work of a developer called Anton Sinelnikov.

He's also the man behind an array of other familiar-sounding iOS games, including Angry Ninja Birds, Temple Jump, Numbers With Friends, Tiny Birds and Zombie Air Highway. Not to mention non-game apps with alluring titles like Lovely Girls, Sexual Offenders HD, The Horse Woman ("Warning: Adults 21_ ONLY!") and Victorian Sexy.

It's the games that are causing a stir among mobile developers though, especially those whose games Sinelnikov's titles and icons have been clearly inspired by.

He's not the only iOS developer playing this game. Another firm, Top Best Adult Entertainment, boasts a portfolio including MoonCRAFT, Little Pet Pony, Bens 10 BattleTime and Talking Bunny Bugs.

Links to both these developers' portfolios have been doing the rounds among iOS developers in recent days, often accompanied by suggestions that Apple should be doing more to stop them.

There is evidence that the company is. Imangi Studios founder Keith Shepherd it makes Temple Run, which is the game that seemingly inspired Temple Jump has tweeted that "Apple has pulled 'Plants vs Zombie', 'Angry Ninja Birds', and 'Zombie Air Highway' from the same seller but not 'Temple Jump' yet."

In earlier tweets, Shepherd had pointed to reviews of the latter indicating that some people have bought it expecting Temple Run currently one of the most popular and lucrative games on iOS and posted one-star reviews on the App Store to express their disgust.

The existence of these kinds of apps is provoking an important debate about how Apple moderates its App Store, and by extension its rivals with their stores too.

Apple may have the reputation of being pretty hands-on with its approval process, but it has tended to leave IP infringement to be policed by developers. They make a complaint, and Apple removes the infringing apps from its store if that complaint is upheld.

The process has seen Atari criticised in recent months for forcing the removal of games like Vector Tanks, which it sees as too similar to its classic title Battlezone. Yet this is the same process that Imangi and other developers will need to use to petition for the removal of so-called "scam-apps".

There are safeguards built into the App Store chief among them its rating system. Temple Jump's average rating here in the UK is 1.5 stars from 18 ratings, while Temple Run's is five stars from more than 86,000 ratings. It doesn't seem that hard to spot which is the kosher title.

Should Apple be playing copyright cop before apps are released onto its store? It's a can of worms, especially when such moderation would pre-empt any legal process.

Far better to ensure that its takedown process is fair and speedy: although judging by our interview with P2 Games in December 2011 about its struggles with apps ripping off brands like Peppa Pig, there is still work to do on this front.

Plagiarism is a hot topic in the iOS development community at the moment, with a separate debate around Zynga's new game Dream Heights, and its perceived similarities to independent developer NimbleBit's Tiny Tower.

Rather than sue or demand a takedown in that case, NimbleBit chose to call Zynga out on Twitter with some side-by-side screenshots, sparking a return volley from Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus, who compared Tiny Tower to older (non-mobile) game SimTower.

That debate is ongoing, as is a lawsuit between Spry Fox and 6waves Lolapps over similarities between the former's Triple Town and the latter's Yeti Town.

Here's why apps like Temple Jump, Angry Ninja Birds and the rest are different, though. For developers, the Zynga/NimbleBit row is about harm that may be caused to the smaller developer, if it loses players (or potential players) to Zynga's new game. The players will likely have a good experience whichever one they play.

In the case of Temple Jump, it's not just Temple Run developer Imangi that is losing business. Apple's customers are being harmed if they pay for an app that isn't what they think it is from developers like Top Best Adult Entertainment or Anton Sinelnikov.

If, as Shepherd tweeted, these apps are disappearing from the App Store, that is likely to be the main reason: harm to consumers, rather than to developers.

With so much money swashing around the iOS ecosystem though $700m paid out to developers in the final quarter of 2011 alone Apple will need to keep its big red takedown button to hand for the forseeable future.

Which states have been hardest hit by unemployment? Where are jobs scarcest? We've mapped the official data