The latest in our series of technological dilemmas involves an anonymous blogger who strikes a bit too close to home
For some time you've been watching the progress of a notorious - but anonymous - blogger who has been writing posts that have ridiculed and embarrassed organisations you don't like, with exposes of bad corporate behaviour - toxic waste dumping, featherbedding, that sort of thing
In return there have been threats of libel proceedings and worse made against him - or is it her? - but they come to nothing because their tracks are covered too well. You've been rather enjoying the spectacle. Free speech is such a gift.
As it happens, you have suspicions about who it is because of certain patterns of words, and a few details around this person (the pattern of posting, some personal details they seem to know about their targets). In fact, you have met the person you suspect a few times socially. But you've never had a reason to confirm if they're the Mystery Blogger.
Until today: you go to their blog to find a vituperative attack on your organisation, your department and you (with your name): it's claiming just the same sort of bad behaviour as others.
You're certain that it's untrue, but search engines won't wipe these claims from their caches for the next time you're seeking a job.
Do you use your knowledge and suspicions to try to expose the blogger - which might end that free speech you've so enjoyed before? Or laugh it off and await the next attack on someone else? Or something else?
What do you do?
Why do we just accept that any minor software update takes precedence over whatever we're doing on our computer?
I was staring at a computer screen, as usual. But instead of a mess of half-read and half-written articles the screen was displaying graphic representations of my wife's labour pains and our soon-to-be born baby's heartbeat. And not just to me: this being a Swedish hospital, the computer was hooked up to a network where these vital signs could be monitored by a whole team of midwives and obstetricians.
Exhilarating, diverting and occasionally useful. I love computer technology.
The feeling's hardly mutual, though. For according to the computer itself, its business of reporting my small family's vital signs was a merely incidental affair. It soon transpired that Microsoft Windows had actually been getting on with the much more pressing business of installing some "very important" security updates. These now successfully installed, the computer would soon be restarting. In 30 seconds. OK? Help!
As luck would have it our midwife came back at that moment and unplugged the monitors because everything was in any case, according to Swedish idiom, "giant well". But where does Windows get off thinking a software update – which probably only consisted of a patch to verify the licences on the computer – is more important than reporting on my health of my family?
I have long suspected that computers are primarily designed for the amusement of those who programme them rather than for the convenience of we who use them. I've lost count of the times my machine's desire to keep up with the latest fashions in software patches has prevented me doing what I want do with it, either by slowing everything down to the speed of glue, or by simply switching itself off for whatever is the silicon equivalent of a Kit Kat. I don't even know why I call it "my" computer anymore.
For some reason we simply accept this situation, doormat-like, as if we didn't have anything better to do with our time. But what if computer programmers designed cars? The road system would be grid-locked with vehicles that have simply stopped because they want to adjust the rear windscreen-wiper or recalibrate the climate control. Instead of telling you where to go, road signs would be crammed full of the same meaningless advice, all ending with "Ctrl-Alt-Delete".
Worst of all, when Ctrl-Alt-Delete failed to work, you'd have to call for roadside assistance. They might fix the car for you but they'd certainly have no qualms about deleting your passengers. "What, you didn't have them backed up?" I've never met an IT support engineer who didn't view the contents of my computer as an unsightly inconvenience, to be erased at all costs in the interests of the proper functioning of the machine.
All this might not matter but for the fact that it has become usual to use computers as metaphors for the human brain. It is axiomatic to cognitive scientists that the brain be thought of in terms of "hardware", "software", "applications", "multi-tasking"; the phrase "hard-wired" has become so embedded in everyday usage that apparently we must be hard-wired to parrot it all day long.
I don't know how many of you have been to see a shrink, but one of the most comforting things about them is that they tend to be so ineffectual. Imagine, though, when the self-fulfilling brain computer prophecy is complete. They'll have no trouble fixing us, of course – but what, you mean to say you didn't have it backed up?
Anyway, we had a baby girl. She's the most beautiful thing in the world. But then I suppose I'd have faulty wiring if I didn't think that.
Xbox 360/PS3/Wii/DS, £29.99 - £39.99, cert: 7+, Warner Bros
Someone at Lego really deserves a bonus. They're not the most obvious toy company to embrace the world of video gaming but not only have they done it, they've done it well and continue to put their own highly endearing spin on family gaming.
After the successful film franchises, they've now turned their attention to the Rock Band genre. The results are typically Lego: cute, funny, involving and with an emphasis on (e)quality. Those expecting a dumbing down of the frantic fretwork won't be surprised to hear that you can complete the game just by strumming. However, that's only on Super Easy mode. Select Medium and above and even the most adept Guitar Hero will find something to challenge their hand/eye coordination. This means, of course, that the Rock Band dexterous can play alongside smaller siblings / less competent parents without anyone getting frustrated.
The other obvious difference between Lego's interpretation and the existing titles is the music. Thrash metal is notable by its absence and, instead, you've got crowdpleasers, mainstream rock and straightforward pop, from Queen to KT Tunstall, via the likes of Tom Petty, Bon Jovi, Lostprophets and the Ghostbusters theme. They've clearly missed a trick – what, no Blockheads? – but make up for it in Free Play mode with their Lego interpretations of the original artists. Like the movie franchises, these are charming and oddly accurate – particularly Lego Iggy Pop, Blur and Let's Dance era David Bowie. Iggy even gets to voice the Tutorial stages.
Story Mode is the main event here. Create a character, choose your instrument, recruit a band, then take them from humble beginnings to stadium success. You do this via a succession of gigs and challenges where you earn "studs" – Lego bricks – to spend on transport, management, clothes, instruments, record production, etc. This comes with a sensible learning curve, great variety, daft challenges – from being the entertainment at a birthday party to saving a ship from an angry octopus with the power of Rock – and, as you'd expect from these chaps, very funny cut scenes. Even the random facts on the loading screens provide frequently silly laughs: for example, did you know that if you stack Lego bricks in a certain way, you can spell the word Lego?
The obvious downside is that you have to focus so hard on the game that you can't watch the lovely accompanying animation. Still, that's another reason to get more friends / all the family involved. Chalk up another success to Lego then. Any chance of a football sim next? Just think how satisfying brick-crunching tackles would be.
Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online
Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.
The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.
Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.
The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.
The files, which in total amount to 160MbB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."
A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry."
In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified. The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.
"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."
In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change sceptic by saying "in an odd way this is cheering news".
Ward said that if the emails are correct, they "might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public." But he added, "Let's separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way."
The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. "Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data," he said. "At the heart of this is basic physics."
Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. "It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that."
Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: "I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."
When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.
The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is "value added" by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.
Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, "Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world's leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we're experiencing is not down to natural variation."
"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."
A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organisation's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."
Comedian Rich Hall hates most gadgets – especially mobile phones – but is very fond of his automatic guitar tuner
What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
I don't really own many gadgets – I tend to lose them right away. I lost my wedding ring last week, so compare that to any gadget. The one I've held on to the longest is an automatic guitar tuner – I don't even know the name of it. It's pentagonal in shape – it's a satanic guitar tuner. You put it on the end of your guitar, turn it on and it tells you when your guitar is in tune. I find it astounding because I have a tin ear.
When was the last time you used it, and what for?
I used it last night to tune my fucking guitar – what else would I use it for? It can't even help you find lost keys.
What additional features would you add to it if you could?
I would add a pitch corrector to it, and some laser devices that would shoot light out of the end of the guitar. And for long shows, a device with which you could watch movies on it.
Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years?
Nope. As far as keeping the world's guitars in tune, I think this will be de rigeur, if it isn't already.
What always frustrates you about technology in general?
The planned obsolescence. Right now I am promoting a DVD, and this is my life's work up till now. In 10 years, will there even be DVDs? At that point, people will be watching shows off the back of their eyelids, or something.
Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
The mobile phone – I really do loathe them. I hate 'em. Not for the technology, I just hate that they make you accessible. This whole mentality of having to be a finger-touch away from somewhere is a load of shit. You should be able to be out on a river with a fishing rod and nobody will be able to get you. I'm not against technology, I just find it very frustrating.
If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
It's never really going to get any easier, is it? It's just more stuff to learn. My tip is to pick one password and use it for everything, because you're never going to remember them all.
Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
I'm neither – I'm a technosceptic. I avoid being loaded down with stuff – I've never even owned a watch. I'm afraid I'm going to lose stuff. I carry a mobile phone, because I'm married and have a kid. But you don't really need one – you're always around people with mobile phones. But I do need a good guitar tuner.
What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned?
Probably an ADAT digital recorder. It was about 10-15 years ago, and you needed to use Super VHS tape with it. They were fucking expensive too, but they were excellent. I bought two of them and hooked them up.
Mac or PC, and why?
Mac – because it's the first computer I ever bought and I got used to it.
Robot butlers – a good idea or not?
Sure – great idea. Are those out yet?
What piece of technology would you most like to own?
I would like a device that would jam up everybody else's mobile phone in a public place – that would fucking be great.
• Rich Hall's new DVD, Hell No, I Ain't Happy, is out on 23 November
Companies offering online storage know that they can be used to store illicit files. But they don't need extra powers to root them out.
The first question is simply: why? What's wrong with the existing copyright laws, and the powers that they offer, that Lord Mandelson think they need tweaking so that anyone can be given powers to hunt down someone thought to be infringing copyright, and new powers have to be given so that certain acts are deemed to be illicit?
If you're not up to speed, Lord Mandelson wants sweeping new powers, which involve changing the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act of 1988.
Let's pause for a moment and look at the single part of the letter to Harriet Harman where he actually cites some particular problems. He talks about "cyberlockers" – online digital storage – which he acknowledges have perfectly legal uses, but which he says are also used by people to share files illegally.
Well, he's right. This is true. You may recall Apple's "iTools" service – which is what its online cloud service was called when it was launched in January 2000 for free (20 whole megabytes of storage!) and before it was made paid-for in July 2002 and rebranded as ".Mac".
Part of the reason for shifting to paid-for, I learnt from an Apple employee (who for obvious reasons must remain nameless), was that Apple discovered rather quickly that if you offer people free storage on the web, then while lots of people will use it for good, honest reasons, a small percentage will use it for bad ones.
Chasing the people who were storing warez such as cracked copies of Photoshop on the iTools servers became a cat-and-mouse game where there were rather more mice than cats. That was part of why Apple turned it into a paid-for service.
However, at no point did the US government step in and try to close Apple down. Nor did it find it necessary to create new laws nor offences to criminalise the warez-storers (who were perfectly aware that what they were doing wasn't legal), nor did it find any need to give Apple new powers to stop its service being abused.
So the question over this proposal is: what isn't working at present in our laws that means we need changes to strengthen copyright and delegate powers to "any person as may be specified with or for the purposes of facilitating prevention of reduction of online infringement of copyright"?
It's especially ironic during a week when Gordon Brown and Tim Berners-Lee pledged to loosen the ties of copyright on government-collected map data, as the government recognised that public data ought to belong to the public.
The particular objection that Mandelson seems to have to "cyberlockers" (can't we just say "cloud storage"?) is that someone can share a private URL with someone else, and nobody on the outside is any the wiser that the file exchange has taken place. In its way, it's like a very slow peer-to-peer system; certainly there's no real way that it threatens to become anything like the volume of file-sharing, because sending people URLs and getting them to download stuff puts noticeable load on the servers of the storage company. If it's anything like Apple, it's going to notice the demand. Believe me, every company that offers cloud storage knows about the warez problem: they run all sorts of tests against uploaded files, and even files that traverse their networks: thus I discovered, for example, while cleaning out the Free Our Data site from a hacker attack, that I couldn't email a hacker control panel I'd discovered to someone who was helping: Google analysed the file and blocked it from passing over its servers.
Yet it seems to be that aspect of the invisibility of the URLs that's really troubling the people who are lobbying Mandelson (because this is obviously not something he's discovered from surfing the net; I do, a lot, and I've not seen anyone complaining about the Evil of Cyberlocker Copyright Infringement). Search engines aren't allowed into those "cyberlockers" to index their content; it's as private as robots.txt can make it.
Yet in my subsequent conversation with Stephen Timms, the minister who is now the financial secretary to the Treasury but oversaw much of the drafting of the digital economy bill while at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, I didn't get any clear answer to what part of the existing Copyright Act doesn't work against cyberlockers. Is there some concern that hackerz are going to put cracked copied of Photoshop onto Amazon's S3 and run it as a web app? If they can manage that, they deserve to be hired by a Microsoft-killer, not hunted down by what BoingBoing is calling "The Pirate-Finder General".
All in all, I'm left severely puzzled by the consultation process that hasn't gone on here. The DBIS says it has had its public consultation on the Digital Britain plans. So where, and when, did this cyberlocker business come from? It's said to be a last-minute insertion by Mandelson into the bill, published earlier today. Who came to him with it?
And finally, Timms says that any suggestion of changing the copyright act would first go through a "very, very public consultation". Is that like the "big debates" that we hear so much about from the government? Fat lot of good they've done for things like the status of cannabis. While I think we can all agree that cracking software isn't ethical, legal, or moral, neither is taking on powers that could be used in entirely unpredictable ways.
And I still come back to the self-correcting nature of the internet, and businesses. What's been killing file-sharing? Not the action of record labels or ISPs; it's been the action of businesses like Spotify and We7, offering better models for access to music of guaranteed quality. What's been stopping cracked software being uploaded to online storage sites? The self-interest of the companies owning the sites, which know that the crackers will use above-average amounts of bandwidth and storage (indeed, that's almost the metric for finding cracked stuff on one of those sites: investigate the busiest, most demanding users).
We could do with similar action to cut out botnets and spam, but there aren't any big-money lobbyists coming to Mandelson pleading loss of business through those. Perhaps if the banks were forced to bear all the costs of online fraud, they'd suddenly discover an interest in handing out properly secure systems – such as Linux systems on memory sticks which you'd be obliged to boot into if you wanted online banking via a PC.
But for now, the logic behind this government's desire to take on more powers than it can demonstrate any need for is worrying. As Tony Hirst of the Open University observed on Twitter, we haven't needed to alter the law on murder, despite the invention of electricity and other means of carrying out the act: it's still illegal in itself. The mechanisms of copyright infringement are irrelevant to the act. So what is it exactly that Lord Mandelson actually wants?
BBC News website to feature longer headlines on story pages, making them easier to find on search engines
From today, the headlines of the BBC News website will become longer to make its stories easier to find on search engines.
"We estimate that about 29% of BBC News website UK traffic comes from search engines.", says Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC News website.
The BBC will therefore allow its journalists to create two headlines for a story. While the shorter one between 31 and 33 characters appears on the front page and the website indexes as well as on mobile phones, the longer one – up to 55 characters will appear on the story itself – and in search engine results.
Search engine optimisation has become a standard practice for most online organisations over the past couple of years, guardian.co.uk included. As users began to find stories more and more via search engines or Google News, via personal recommendations on social media or in email, via links on Twitter or their RSS readers, news publishers wanted to be sure of reaching them.
"The practice of 'search engine optimisation' – making content in such a way that it is easily retrieved via search engines – is an important area for us and for others across the web," explained Steve Herrmann to the BBC news users in a blogpost.
So does the justification damage the use of language? Or does it only stop journalists from inventing too complex phrases that were not understandable anyway? Since search-optimised headlines will tend to include all the key words a user might type in when he or she is searching for a topic, the headlines may even be more useful.
In fact, in the news sector, the changes are minimal – as the BBC shows in an example: "Possible counter-bid for Cadbury" becomes "Ferrero and Hershey in possible counter-bid for Cadbury". Might be a bit harder to scan on a front page, but the longer headline is definitely more informative.
GCHQ to run ad campaign within Xbox Live online games to attract 18- to 34-year-olds to its ranks
Government intelligence organisation GCHQ is to run an ad campaign within Xbox Live, to attract quick-thinking 18- to 34-year-olds to its ranks.
The campaign marks the first time that GCHQ, which reports to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, and works with MI5 and MI6, has run ads through Microsoft's internet-connected Xbox Live platform, which connects gamers all over the world.
GCHQ's recruitment campaign will run on the Xbox Live platform, home to games including Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Assassin's Creed II.
The government agency is running the six-week campaign using recruitment firm TMP Worldwide and said that many of its recruiting criteria are "reflected in game-play experiences on Xbox, such as quick thinking, problem solving and team work".
Xbox Live's main demographic, 18- to 34-year-olds, is also a good fit for GCHQ.
The campaign will include ads on the Xbox Live "dashboard" and within games through streamed video banners.
"As well as tackling 'traditional threats' GCHQ's work is also about helping government departments, such as the Ministry of Defence, to protect their information and communication systems," said a GCHQ spokeswoman.
"This means we can offer excellent training and careers for people with specialist technical skills. However, the fact remains that many potential candidates remain unaware of GCHQ and what we do. Using video on Xbox LIVE helps carry our message to the right people in a creative and innovative manner," she added.
GCHQ ran an ad campaign with Microsoft in 2007, although this was only in online games on PCs.
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So how's Twitter going to make any money? One of its biggest fans, British actor and polymath Stephen Fry, gave co-founder Biz Stone one idea when the pair shared a Nesta panel in London on Thursday…
"Supposing I was to say to someone: 'you can have my Twitter identity for an hour on Wednesday if you pay me x pounds and you can speak to a million people direct'," said Fry, whose follower count just passed seven figures.
But Fry wasn't being deadly serious, and Stone is content persevering with Twitter's cautious, softly-softly monetisation plans. He said plans to start selling corporate accounts, first hinted at in August, are on-course. A pay-for package offering verified streams and an analytics package will be available by year's end, he said.
"This takes advantage of some of the commercial use of Twitter we've seen from businesses like airlines and big box stores… we want to present to them a layer of features that allows them to become better at Twitter, show them some of the analytics."
Fry, whose own popularity has skyrocketed still further on the back of his tweets, is now closely associated with the service. With that, comes an appreciation for Stone's monetisation issue. Fry added: "He knows that, if Twitter became annoying to users with flashing banners and there was a sense it was being guided by a big corporate brother, (users) would go off and found their own."
—Competition for Twitter?: "There are other companies inspired by what Twitter is doing and I think that's great… We're seeking to release our data and form partnerships." Quoting Google CEO Eric Schmidt speaking about search competitors at an in-house Google meeting years ago, he says: "We should look in the rear view mirror, but if we stare in the rear view mirror we're going to drive right off the road."
—What future direction?: His colleagues have said it before, but he'll say it again: Stone very much sees Twitter's future in mobile: "When we look at where we can grow we look to the more than four billion active mobile phone accounts in the world, opposed to the 1.65 million active web accounts."
—The future of media?: As Twitter grows its users, reader and viewers are straying from TV news and newspapers—can Stone help their plight? He says he can: "As we begin to add thing such as the ability to geo-tag an individual tweet and recognise which users have higher reputations than others, that will feed into the culture of news organisations."
—Grand ambitions?: When Stone says Twitter's changing the world through mass social interaction, he really means it: asked how he wants the service to be remembered, he says hopefully it will be "not as a triumph of technology but a triumph of humanity".
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Almost 30 years on from his arcade debut, the plucky Italian plumber's still going strong
The creation of Mario was, most likely, one of those moments of accidental genius which warrant little scrutiny or examination. A small sprite needs a few distinguishing features to mark him out from the plethora of similar arcade characters, red and blue clothes with a natty 'tache is easy to represent in pixels - hey presto, you have everyone's favourite mycophile.
In fact, the plumber's humble origins are just as prosaic. And it's this simple genesis that marks Mario out from so many of his platform-navigating colleagues - what game series today could launch with a character so simply devised, or set in a world with such bizarre charm.
Jumping on turtles in order to kill them, smashing blocks with your head to retrieve golden coins, eating huge mushrooms with eyes to gain power - all gaming lore we're more than familar with, yet all ideas which, devoid of context, would seem more appropriate for a Clive Barker novel than a universally popular videogame series.
Even the likes of Sonic reflect some level of crass pandering to valued demographics. He's a hedgehog, with attitude. He rescues cute animals from an evil robotic genius. Charmless, irritating and ultimately doomed. Crash Bandicoot, Zool, Rayman, Bubsy the Bobcat, Spyro - the list of similarly failed attempts to wrestle away Mario's crown just goes on and on.
While we could try and analyse Mario's success on a deeper level - I'm sure he taps into some kind of hirsute water supplying male archetype - he has, of course, been helped by the astounding consistency and success of the games in which he's starred.
Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy - all been held up as the greatest examples of their genre, not just on Nintendo consoles but of any platformers ever made.
My first Mario experience was, in fact, with Super Mario Bros 2 on the NES - a regrettably rushed, though often fondly remembered, port of a Japanese platformer called Doki Doki Panic. It was, with hindsight, really quite rubbish.
What this meant however is that I succumbed utterly to Mario 3, and all the hype that preceded it. Warp whistles, racoon ears, Toad's minigame - all distinctive facets of a gaming experience I look back on just as fondly as any childhood book, or film.
With the release of New Super Mario Bros Wii today, a new generation can fall under his moustachioed charms. Meanwhile the classics are still more than playable, and Nintendo can rest assured in the fact that there will likely never be a gaming hero more well-loved or endearingly idiosyncratic.
I can forgive Mario is Missing. I can forgive Hotel Mario, Mario Paint. Hell, I can even forgive Bob Hoskins. Mario, I salute you.
Now you've read Jack waffling on why not add your own fond Mario memories beneath the line there? Go on. It's good to talk
Chrome OS won't be on sale on hardware for a year, but Google aims to introduce a new and better model of computing with specified netbook hardware, and then… Tomorrow, the World!
Google dominates the web and is already making a big impact in the smartphone business with its Android operating system. The netbook computer is next in line, and Google is targeting this fast-growing market with Chrome OS, a stripped down operating system designed to do everything inside its own Chrome web browser.
Chrome OS is a year away from launch, but Google said it was talking to leading manufacturers and hoped to have systems on the market for the Christmas selling season. Today, however, it released an early version of the code to the open source development community.
At a press conference webcast from Mountain View, California, Google staff said their aim with Chrome OS was to make the computer work like a TV set, so the user turns it on and within a few seconds is on the web. Also, all the computer's applications and data are on the web, and users cannot install programs themselves. As with Android, it seems likely that Chrome OS will effectively feed traffic to Google's search engine, Gmail, mapping services, online applications, social network and other properties, where Google makes its money by showing advertisements.
Netbooks that run Chrome OS will not work if there is no internet connection, though they will be able to access data on USB memory sticks, if it can be viewed in a browser. "Everything that works in Chrome works in Chrome OS," said Sundar Pichai, a Google vice president of product management.
"There are some applications that are not available on the web. There are some things that this machine will not be able to do," said Sundar. "It's a companion device. Most users we expect to have another machine at home."
Chrome OS is based on open source software components, including the Linux kernel and the WebKit browser engine. Google says it plans to be a good open source citizen and feed its developments back to the development community.
However, Sundar said Chrome OS was not designed to run on existing hardware, though geeks handy with a screwdriver should be able to convert a netbook to run it. Google was "specifying reference hardware that it would support" with Chrome OS, including "specific wireless cards" for use with Wi-Fi internet connections, he said. Hard drives will not be supported, but cameras and other gadgets would be handled as storage devices. The company is still working on ways to offer printing.
Desktop operating systems that run Microsoft Windows and Linux can be built using tens of thousands of different components, and they can connect to tens of thousands of devices. Google is planning to simplify all of that by stripping down the operating system to work only with a browser and a defined number of hardware components.
Although Google won't manufacture hardware, it will have a very large degree of control over what hardware manufacturers can offer -- less than Apple, perhaps, but much more than Microsoft.
Against that, Google points out that other companies can take the open source Chrome OS code and use it develop a similar system that uses a different browser. They could also support different chips and hardware devices.
The idea of a browser-based operating system was floated by Netscape, when it dominated the browser software business in the 1990s. At the time it wasn't practicable because there were very few web applications, and users didn't have permanent broadband internet connections. Today, Google believes that web is powerful and available enough to support netbooks. In the future, it could become powerful and available enough for most users of portable and desktop computers.
At that point, there could be a rapidly diminishing need for traditional computer operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, and for desktop applications such as Microsoft Office.
As Google recognises, there's nothing much that's new about Chrome OS, since it only does what users can already do with Chrome on their current computer. But as Sundar says: "We're trying to offer a different model of computing."
Labour colleagues are concerned business secretary could set precedent that would allow Tories to help Murdoch take on Google
Lord Mandelson is seeking to amend the laws on copyright to give the government sweeping new powers against people accused of illegal downloading.
But Labour colleagues are concerned that if he succeeds it could give a future Tory government the ability that Rupert Murdoch wants to quash Google.
In a letter to Harriet Harman, the leader of the house and head of the committee responsible for determining changes to such legislation, Mandelson says he is "writing to seek your urgent agreement" to changes to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act "for the purposes of facilitating prevention or reduction of online copyright infringement".
By writing to Harman, the business secretary is seeking to get the change made through a "statutory instrument" – in effect, an update to the existing bill that the government can push through using its parliamentary majority.
That can be done with the minimum of parliamentary time, which is already at a premium.
The letter, which is circulating inside the government, comes as ministers prepare to publish the digital economy bill at 7.30am tomorrow. That is expected to set out a "three strikes" policy under which people who are found to be illicitly downloading copyrighted material have their internet connections withdrawn after three warnings.
Internet service providers have warned that the scheme is unworkable and unlawful.
The proposed alteration to the Copyright Act would create a new offence of downloading material that infringes copyright laws, as well as giving new powers or rights to "protect" rights holders such as record companies and movie studios – and, controversially, conferring powers on "any person as may be specified" to help cut down online infringement of copyright.
The changes proposed seem small – but are enormously wideranging, given both the breadth of even minor copyright infringement online, where photographs and text are copied with little regard to ownership, and the complexity of ownership.
Mandelson says in his letter that he is concerned about "cyberlockers" – websites that offer users private storage spaces whose contents can be shared by passing a web link via email.
"These can be used entirely legitimately, but recently rights holders have pointed to them as being used for illegal use," Mandelson writes in the letter.
But the proposal to alter the Copyright Act in this way has caused alarm within government, where some fear that an incoming Tory administration could use it to curry favour with Murdoch, head of the News International publishing group.
"They've seen that file-sharing is essentially unpoliceable, but the net effect is that a future secretary of state could change copyright law as they see fit," said one Labour insider.
In his letter, Mandelson sets out the expected reaction from the three groups who would be affected by the changes: rights holders such as record companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and consumers.
"I expect rights holders to welcome this and to support it. ISPs are likely to be neutral until it is clear what effect it will have on them in terms of costs." Consumer groups "are likely to oppose [the move] but will see it may lead to further unquantifiable measures against infringing consumers."
He also expects "a great deal of scrutiny" of the idea in parliament.
Murdoch has recently said that he believes that copyright is being abused, particularly by organisations such as Google, which uses short extracts from online newspapers to create its Google News page, and the BBC, which he has accused of "stealing from newspapers".
Earlier this month Murdoch was vituperative about how search engines have aggregated news. "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them," he said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... They shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."
By giving the business secretary the power to amend the Copyright Act at will, Labour fears Mandelson could be creating a Trojan horse that under a Tory administration would allow Murdoch to be rewarded for his support for David Cameron over Gordon Brown, for example by making it illegal to use such extracts from a news site for profit.
A spokesperson for the Department for Business said the department could not comment on correspondence between ministers.
UK section to host full-length episodes of Peep Show, Hollyoaks and other shows from providers including Channel 4 and ITN
YouTube has launched a new shows section for UK users as it taps into rising online demand for full-length television programmes.
The new section provides the first shows from a landmark deal with Channel 4 announced last month and will include full-length episodes of Peep Show, Hollyoaks, Gordon Ramsay's F Word and Jamie at Home. Shows from other media partners include Dead Ringers, ITN News and Baywatch.
At launch, YouTube is posting around 5,000 videos, of which almost 4,000 are full-length programmes, from more than 60 partners. YouTube said it "expects this to significantly increase in the coming months" and the full range of Channel 4 shows will be available in early 2010.
For established broadcasters, including Channel 4, partnering with YouTube is a response to the trend of both viewers and advertisers leaving television channels for the internet. Channel 4 is hoping that posting content on YouTube can bring in new advertising revenues.
All programmes on the shows section will be available free of charge and, where the content owner has enabled it, they will carry advertising. Channel 4's shows will feature advertisers including Virgin Media, Universal, Orange, Samsung and Pepsi.
Patrick Walker, YouTube's video partnerships director, said the launch would bring more big-brand programmes to viewers on top of the site's home-made clips.
"The shows section of the site will make it easier for users to discover videos from the biggest names in British broadcasting, and help our content partners reach new audiences and generate new revenues," he said.
Google, YouTube's parent company, has been working hard to convince the rights holders of music, film and TV shows to make advertising revenue from their content rather than remove it from the video-sharing site for breach of copyright.
By putting advertising with clips, YouTube makes money from revenue sharing deals with the rights holders.
That trend is bringing YouTube a badly needed increase in revenues. Three years after Google bought the video sharing site for $1.65bn, it has yet to turn a profit and there are concerns the division is devouring the internet group's cash reserves.
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.
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Landmark proposal on OS mapping and postcode area information is victory for Free Our Data campaign
The Free Our Data campaign has scored a major victory, with the announcement by the government that it intends to make Ordnance Survey maps free for use online by any organisation – including commercial ones – at resolutions more detailed than commercial 1:25,000 Landranger maps from April next year.
The announcement of the opening of a consultation on the plan by Gordon Brown at Downing Street on Tuesday, as part of a seminar on making public data public – set in the wider context of public service reform, under the "Smarter Government" umbrella – indicates that the ideas underpinning the campaign have now been taken on board at the highest levels of government.
"Mid-range" maps, with resolutions from 1:10,000 upwards, will be made available for re-use, under the plans announced by the prime minister, along with information on postcode areas and electoral and council boundaries.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, who was recruited by the prime minister in June to help open up government data, said that the revised terms for use of OS maps would also remove the "derived data" problem, under which OS claims full copyright on any intellectual property that is created with reference to an OS map.
Berners-Lee said that within government there had been repeated complaints about the derived data issue stifling the freeing up of data. "As we went around [government departments] to ask them about data sets we got consistent pressure from them … people would say, 'I've got this great data set but I can't put it up because the OS won't allow me to.' People were coming back to me about it again and again."
The issue appears to have gone to the top of government to be resolved. "I have to thank the prime minister for pushing this through," said Berners-Lee.
Although OS maps are enormously respected for the quality of their cartography, the price of using them online – and the associated problems with licensing, which has in the past been onerous – has been a thorn in the side of many would-be web entrepreneurs.
The Free Our Data campaign, which began in Guardian Technology in March 2006, has reported on multiple examples in which companies have cited costs and derived data as a reason for refraining from using OS maps. Tuesday's announcement should also douse speculation about whether OS was in line for privatisation – an option that some had thought was being considered by the Shareholder Executive, the arm of the Treasury which officially oversees it. "I'm dwelling on the OS data because it's a jewel, and in fact OS is a jewel in government – it has tremendous expertise," said Berners-Lee.
The decision to move forward with the consultation with so little parliamentary time left indicates that the Labour administration recognises the value of making data free as a potentially vote-winner. Although the Conservative party has made a number of indications that it sees the value of free data – such as the espousal by Boris Johnson of crime mapping (quickly taken up by the home secretary Jacqui Smith at the end of 2008) and David Cameron's announced intention to make councils provide standardised XML feeds of expenditure and decisions – it has not yet made any manifesto commitments to making public sector data free.
The announcement is subject to a consultation period which begins in December so that OS customers can comment on the proposals. In a brief statement on its website, OS says it "is committed to working with colleagues across government on developing these proposals." OS did not have a representative at the seminar.
Government sources at the seminar at No 10 indicated that the concept of making non-personal government data free is now a standard consideration when examining datasets that have been collected. Gordon Brown said that the provision of free data meant that "we are on the verge of a revolution that can transform public services and the public sector" and that opening up the OS data was "one of the first recommendations made by Sir Tim".
He also cited the Highways Agency's release of accident data for London, which had led to cycling blackspot maps, and information about where to find dentists. "This is information that should always have been [the public's] but there wasn't a way to get it out there," he said.
The moves indicate that the government has absorbed the lessons contained in a report written for the Treasury by a team at Cambridge University and published with the budget last year. That found that making OS's data free for everyone to use would cost government £12m but bring commercial benefits worth £156m in total – which would thus make up in tax revenue the "lost" income to OS.
The Guardian understands that the latest move has come through efforts by Liam Byrne, the chief secretary to the Treasury, who before he became an MP worked for a dot-com startup.
Michael Nicholson of Intelligent Addressing, which has lobbied over OS's licensing practices relating to online and other maps, gave the news a cautious welcome: "It's not the crown jewels [of mapping]. It's a real step in the right direction, but not quite far enough." A key issue, he said, would be that in future OS data "should be made available to commercial companies in a way that's fair, and at a price that's fair".
Earlier this year OS had suggested a different strategy, after claiming in May that a "free data" model would cost the government "between £500m and £1bn" over five years. It said that these figures emerged from an "international study" carried out internally, which compared costs and funding models at other mapping agencies in different countries.
Sir Rob Margetts, recently appointed chair of OS, said that the calculations had been done with "outside help". OS said that its report was examined and agreed by an "international expert". But the text of the report, obtained by the Guardian under Freedom of Information requests, does not back up the claims of cost. A leaked presentation made to the previous minister in charge of OS which appeared on Wikileaks seems to show how the figures were arrived at – but those numbers are also open to doubt. OS has refused to comment on the leaked presentation.
OS already makes maps available for use online, but any commercial use means substantial charges. Making "mid-range detail" OS maps available for free online use by commercial organisations is the most significant step in the government's use of online maps in many years.
• Join the debate at the Free Our Data blog
Filtering is keeping more unwanted messages from our inboxes – but provoking more sophisticated scams on social networks and elsewhere
When Luis von Ahn gives talks on his work fighting spam, he likes to start by asking the audience a question. "How many of you have had to fill out one of those web forms that asks you to read a distorted sequence of letters or a word?" he asks. "How many of you found that annoying?"
As the hands shoot up, he breaks into a grin: "I invented that."
Von Ahn is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and was the recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant" worth $500,000 in 2006. His work on the "captcha" – those irritating automated tests that help distinguish humans from computers – is probably one of the most important advances in spam-fighting since the birth of email.
Since he helped invent it nine years ago, the system has helped prevent countless billions of spam messages. And as captchas are now combined with advanced filtering techniques, von Ahn suggests that, at least from his point of view, email spam is now a problem more or less contained.
"Maybe five years ago there was a crapload of spam I got in my inbox because the filters were so bad," he says. "But it's changing a lot – spam email seems to be much less of a problem than it was, because filters have become a lot better … I personally see very little actual email spam."
Not everybody feels so certain, however. While users are probably exposed to fewer spam emails than ever, thanks to the rapid improvement of services such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail, the picture behind the scenes is not so rosy.
"It is worse than ever," says Richard Cox of Spamhaus, which tracks the world's worst spammers and runs blacklists to help block them. "The fact that it's growing, I don't think anyone can exactly miss out on … we're getting to the stage now when any email containing a .cn [Chinese] domain is likely to get rejected. Is that good for China at the commercial level, internationally? No, it is not, but they don't seem to recognise that."
The totality of spam is hard to gauge, but Cisco produced an estimate late last year of around 200bn junk emails a day.
That number is growing rapidly, with Symantec suggesting incidence of spam has almost trebled in the past year. This year will break records for spam sent, even though growth has slowed.
But if email filters can catch the messages before they reach you, does spam even matter any more?
Experts believe so. In Technology Guardian over the past two weeks, we have examined the current state of web security and computer security, but it remains the case that spam – in all its forms – is the main method of transmission for a wide variety of attacks.
Emails loaded with malware, where users click on a link that downloads a virus to their computer, are becoming more common, with many such attacks creating networks of compromised computers to send out yet more spam. Phishing emails, designed to solicit logins or other personal details, are getting more convincing every day. And then there are the fraudulent products and illegal offers that most of us associate with unwanted email.
Perhaps it remains crude, but the near-zero cost of sending spam messages by the billion has turned it into an intractable problem.
Though China and Russia continue to rise up the charts, the worst offender remains the US. Despite passing a law on unwanted email, the CAN-SPAM act, as long ago as 2003, it is still responsible for around 30% of all junk messages.
But with improvements in filtering technology, the more pressing concern could be that spammers themselves are moving into new territory.
Some of the most damaging attacks are happening in other areas of the web, as criminals apply their experience to potentially more lucrative new arenas.
"There's an increase in spammy behaviour," says von Ahn. "We're talking about things like comments on blogs, or in social networking sites … even friend requests can be spam."
Spammers have spent recent years discovering a variety of new tools. Fake websites, or even networks of fake sites, are constructed in order to help them boost criminal activity, while great effort goes into polluting search engines and invading your social networking profile. Spammers have learned not only that there is more to be gained from such activities, but also that they are harder for users to fight.
"There are a few really large email providers and as long as they do a good job of stopping email spam, everybody's happy," says von Ahn. "But with these other type of things like comments on blogs, that's a little harder because it's much more decentralised – all these different services, each of which can be spammed in their own little way."
He believes that the more intimate nature of social networks means that the chances of a spam message succeeding are higher. If receiving a spam email has become the equivalent of junk mail landing through your letterbox, social network spam is somebody ringing the bell – or even walking into your house and planting their junk mail in your hands.
The large social networks are working around the clock to fight the problem, but it is difficult.
"We're a very big target right now," says Simon Axten, who works on privacy and public policy for Facebook. Fighting spam is "absolutely integral" for the company, he says, and around 120 people work on its anti-spam efforts. "Our whole business is based on trust," Axten says. "People give us a lot of information and share it through us; we have a real incentive to take this very seriously."
The good news, if there is any, is that social networks have had unprecedented success in hitting spammers where it hurts: their pockets. In the past 18 months both MySpace and Facebook have won spam cases – including an $873m fine against a Canadian, Adam Guerbuez, and a total of more than $1bn against Sanford Wallace, who in the 1990s dubbed himself the "spam king". The awards vastly outstrip the $4m fine that Wallace received for email spam in 2006.
These fines have given campaigners some renewed hope that a political solution may still be possible. "Wallace was referred for prosecution for criminal contempt, so he might face some jail time," says Axten. "That's an even stronger deterrent than the fines."
Spamhaus's Cox suggests that other countries should follow the lead of Australia and New Zealand, which have tough, strictly enforced anti-spam laws and have won a series of cases against high-profile offenders. "It's not insoluble – there are various things that can be done that will reduce the risk and reduce the impact," he says. "If the UK and US would actually follow the Australia and New Zealand example, this would set up a pretty strong coalition across the world … all of a sudden there would be a standard."
He recognises the difficulty of making it happen, however. A House of Lords report on computer crime two years ago suggested the British government had an approach to spam and security that was "inefficient" and "outdated" – but pressure from campaigners has so far failed to have any impact on government policy.
Meanwhile, political will seems more focused on glitzier subjects such as online piracy and illegal downloading – protecting the interests of big industries.
"Peter Mandelson wants to disconnect people for three strikes – is that really more serious than hosting downloads for malware?" asks Cox. "We don't think so: one is a commercial issue, and one is causing criminal harm to millions of people's computers. Mandelson needs a reality check."
Read the previous features: • Security on PCs • On the web
Our standalone print section is coming to an end next month – but that's far from meaning we're abandoning the subject
What you're holding in your hands – assuming you're reading this in print form, which a substantial number of you are – is a collector's item. Guardian Technology, in its print incarnation, is to cease publication. The last edition will be on 17 December.
This does not mean the Guardian is abandoning its technology coverage; far from it. For example, our award-winning games coverage (the 2009 winner, for the third year running, of the Games Media Awards for coverage in a national newspaper) will continue with reviews, blogposts and features. So will our coverage of gadgets, and the Ask Jack column (which has been running online as a blog since 2005), and our in-depth features and coverage of all the important issues in technology.
The final issue will mark just over 26 continuous years since Futures Micro Guardian had its first edition, on 20 October 1983. (It was a Thursday; the publication date of this section has remained unchanged.) From then, you will continue to find our writing online, or through our Twitter feed, and also throughout the paper incarnations of the Guardian in the news, business, features and other sections, where we will have a renewed focus on bringing you our take on the technology issues that truly matter and which you should know about.
That said, I am sure that many of you will feel the absence of the physical manifestation of the Technology section — which among its former incarnations has been called Futures Micro Guardian, Computer Guardian and Online, before taking up its current naming in 2005 in order to reflect our wider coverage of all sorts of technology, not just that which comes through a browser. The latter is, of course, still enormously important, given the key part that the internet plays in all our lives.
In part it has been the internet that has hastened the end of the physical version of this section, as more classified job adverts have migrated to online job sites such as Guardian Jobs (jobs.guardian.co.uk, in case you're looking); there have also been the arctic winds of the recession, which seems to be hitting the UK harder than many other countries around the world.
But it would be foolish to resist the tide; we prefer to swim with it, and the purpose of this section has always been to teach our readers how to manage technology, what to expect, what to watch out for, and where to look for further advice. We've also tried to be guided by the feedback you have given us – through the letters and more recently emails, and then blogs and most recently Twitter remarks that you've written.
The huge advantage of going online, of course, is that it frees us from the space constraints of print – games and gadget reviews can be longer and more plentiful, features are untroubled by the tyranny of the word count, and interactivity comes to the fore, both in how we present data and how you can respond and inform us about the topics you find interesting and important.
There is still plenty more to tell you: there are issues left unsolved (such as the Free Our Data campaign, which as you will see is still gaining momentum right at the top of government), and topics that we know you'll want to have answered. We know that there's a huge swathe of readers for whom Ask Jack has been a weekly lifeboat; that fact is evidenced by the continuing stream of queries and cries for help that we receive.
But having said that, we'd like to ask for your help. We're sure that you have stories that you'd like to tell us about how this section has affected your life over the past two decades. Has it helped you find a job? Start a company? Shaped your life in some important way? We'd like to know: email us at tech@guardian.co.uk with the subject line "Guardian Technology memories". We'll try to use the best in one of the last issues that we produce. And with your help, we'll make it one to keep for a long, long time.
• Charles Arthur is editor of the Guardian's technology coverage
• In pictures: Techy-types strip for charity
Christmas is approaching, and with it the burning need to buy a calendar for next year. But rather than getting dubious calendars entitled "Cheryl Cole's 12 X Factor judging expressions" or "Ashley Cole's 12 Leaving A Nightclub Expressions" from the bloke down at the market, why not support a real charity and show off your geek credentials by buying a London Nude Tech Calendar?
The purpose is to raise funds for Take Heart India, a charity focused on IT education projects for blind and disabled students in India.
You can buy the calendar from Firebox: it costs £10, and is launched on 1 December (so you're getting a head start). There are no administration fees because the production costs were covered by the sponsors (listed here (and it's a long list, so do go and whistle at its length...). It costs Take Heart just £37 to provide a six-month computer training course which secures a job for life for one of the students, so your money will make a difference.
The calendar is the brainchild of the "technology writer, party planner and all round top banana, Milo Yiannopoulos" (we think he wrote the press release). Obviously, it's inspired by tropes such as Calendar Girls, but that had charity as its aim. And you get pictures for your wall. Plus if you ever happen to meet any of them you can say "oh, you look different with your clothes on". Breaks the ice...
There's a gallery of some of the images, plus this video of how it got put together. You're going to need a bigger bat... aren't you?
Recently, there was a big fuzz about the social network sites failing to protect children. Different newspapers, among them the Guardian, reported a "head of goverment body responsible for keeping children safe" has criticized social networking sites for not doing enough. But was that correct?
Facebook is giving its users numerous ways to report abuse, under every picture you find a report button for example. And so does MySpace. Both sides are quite strict about sensitive content. In fact, what the head of the goverment body Jim Gamble was criticising in his role of being the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop) was not using Ceop's own tool.
So what do you think? Is Facebook not doing enough? Should the media have had a look on Facebook instead of just reading press releases?
Controversial behavioural advertising firm Phorm moves focus overseas
Has much-maligned behavioural ad targeter Phorm finally put its UK ambitions on hiatus? It's saying goodbye to its UK managing director Nick Barnett, we have learned.
According to his bio, Barnett was "responsible for the UK business, working with ISPs on the trial and deployment of Phorm's technology as well as overseeing our commercial relationships with advertisers, publishers and ad networks". But, with none of Phorm's initially-announced three interested UK ISPs having gone ahead with rollout and some publishers having become wary, there seems little prospect of UK success at this point.
Asked about Barnett's departure, whether he is being replaced, what it means for UK plans and whether there's any further reorganisation, Phorm declined to comment. It's not known whether Barnett is at a new job.
Phorm in June tried a new pitch, by offering users personalised content along with ads. But the focus has shifted to international – having secured a whiff of business through a trial by South Korea's KT, Phorm hired a local CEO there and has continued to say other international ISPs are interested, though none have been named for trial. A spokesperson tells paidContent:UK: "The trial with KT (Korea Telecom) is ongoing. We'll update the market (AIM) in due course."
Barnett joined after Phorm's big boardroom and executive clear-out in December 2008, which saw the exit of its UK CEO, CFO, COO and general counsel and four board members be replaced by a more London-based board. Barnett effectively replaced UK CEO Hugo Drayton, the former Telegraph new media director who became InSkin Media's CEO after the exit. At this point, the company has stopped listing its execs' names on its website.
There's nothing inherently wrong with ad targeting, of course (Google's doing quite well out of it) – but Phorm's method of profiling a user's every web visit via his/her ISP concerned digital liberties advocates and the clamour grew so loud that the European Commission ruled Britain was wrong to declare Phorm legal, ordering the country change its privacy laws as a result.
One thing's clear, though – institutional investors still see plenty of promise in Phorm. Lloyds Bank has continued to snap up Phorm shares despite the headlines.
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Wii; £39.99; cert 3+; Nintendo
In many ways, Super Mario Bros Wii is a confusing release for Nintendo's eponymous hero as he approaches middle age. For, although it borrows elements from just about every previous game, some may find its resolutely retro approach a missed opportunity for a character and console so obviously capable of more.
Indeed, at first glance it looks like a straight port from New Super Mario Bros for DS, so small and unassuming do the sprites and simple sideways-scrolling levels appear. For control, you have a choice of using just a sideways Wiimote (with movement uncomfortably mapped to the up/down D-pad) or a combination of Wiimote and Nunchuk. Analogue control is required when jerking the Wiimote for spin jumps or tilting it to navigate certain platforms – neither of which feel particularly natural. It's surprising that no "classic" control option was included, as it seems natural for an otherwise doggedly retro game. Still, once you get used to the fact that analogue commands requires fractional compensatory timing, it all begins to make sense.
The game itself requires no introduction to fans of the series. There are coins hidden around each screen or trapped in blocks that must be tapped from below with a bouncing head. Mario has his familiar moves, such as being able to toss fireballs, pound the level below or hurl back enemies with his spin jump, but there are also new abilities such as ice flower, which has him throwing freezing snowballs, and propeller or penguin suits to enhance aerial and arctic performance. You'll need them too, because although the levels look deceptively basic, they require expert control from the off and the intermittent boss battles will test even veteran players at first. Luckily, there's a useful new feature for novices called "Super Guide" which lets an NPC-controlled Luigi take you through any level where you lose eight fights or more.
Another thing that makes this instalment different to the old 2D template is the ability to play competitively or cooperatively with up to three other players. "Free for all'" allows you to battle through the single-player levels together whereas "coin battle" lets you compete to gather the most coins per level. With inevitable laughs to be gained by bouncing other players off platforms, multiplayer Mario has never worked this well and it adds new appeal to an otherwise predictable game. Super Mario Bros Wii delivers just what it always did: pixel perfect gameplay, great design and Christmas retro-gaming of the highest order. However, 13 years after Nintendo's last attempt to reinvent the franchise, what we really needed was a sequel to Super Mario 64.
PCC chairman Peta Buscombe has said she does not want to regulate bloggers after all unless they sign up for it
Further to the earlier posting about the bloggers' response to Baroness Buscombe, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission...
Buscombe has pre-empted the sending of a letter by blogger Sunny Hundal by responding to the criticisms in advance of it being sent.
In her letter she refers to "my apparent proposal to regulate the blogosphere" and clarifies what she said to The Independent's media writer Ian Burrell. She writes:
"My point to him was about the dangers of over-regulation, the misplaced desire that can be common to governments to seek to control areas of freedom.
"Blogging, as your letter rightly suggests, is a clear area where freedom of expression is absolutely paramount. I have no desire to infringe on that.
"My point was that, as there is already pressure to increase regulation of the internet, it is important to make clear that this must not lead to some form of statutory interference.
"Rather, a system of self-regulation (such as exists by the PCC for newspapers) would be more appropriate, if any bloggers wished to go down that route. [my italics]
"I say 'wish', because any advance in this area would have to be consensual. Self-regulation is about collaboration between willing parties.
"The PCC is not in any way constituted to impose its views on the unwilling and cannot simply extend its remit to cover non-newspaper sites."
In other words, she is making it clear that she does not want to regulate bloggers after all unless they sign up for it.
However, one of the reasons I ran the Hundall-Unity letter at such length was because of the specific case they referred to: the complaint against the News of the World and its columnist Carole Malone for a piece she wrote on immigration.
While Buscombe defends the practice of the PCC, she does not comment on the substantive points made about the way that complaint was handled.
Instead, in spite of the claims made in the Unity letter, she writes:
"Most often, corrections and apologies appear on the same page as, or further forward in the paper than, the original.
"The issue of online location of apologies is a legitimate question, and something the PCC will need to continue looking at."
The point, of course, was that the eventual print correction did not appear on the page on which Malone's column is published. In my view, it was not therefore appropriately placed.
That is a legitimate complaint about a failure of practice. Surely, if a columnist breaches the code, then the apology should go on the columnist's page.
And the point made by Hundal-Unity therefore about bloggers making their corrections much more transparent is therefore valid, and not answered by Buscombe.
Microsoft has added social networking and music radio functionality to its Xbox 360 console. We test it out
Four months after announcing the features, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) added social networking and music radio functionality to its Xbox 360 console on Tuesday, along with the first European foray for its Zune brand (see earlier reports from Tameka and I). Here are my initial explorations with each new service…
Last.fm verdict: Slick player presentation and Last.fm experience, good for parties but no on-demand, may have ads…
Zune verdict: Just an updated Video Marketplace with "Zune" badge…
Twitter verdict: Cute implementation for reading, initial bugs, keypad is a must…
Facebook verdict: Especially nice photo slideshows, typing a real pain…
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Bill offers illegal filesharing clampdown, tougher rules on video game age ratings and powers for Ofcom over ITV regional news
A clampdown on unlawful online file-sharing, a push for the switchover to digital radio in 2015, tougher laws to stop children getting hold of violent video games and power for Ofcom over the provision of regional news on ITV are the highlights of a rather anaemic digital economy bill, to be published on Friday.
The bill, announced in the Queen's Speech today outlining this Labour government's final legislative programme, will also include a simplification of the UK's complex copyright laws, making it easier for people to use images on the internet without having to get permission.
"My government will introduce a bill to ensure communications infrastructure that is fit for the digital age, supports future economic growth, delivers competitive communications and enhances public service broadcasting," the Queen said in her speech.
The digital economy bill is due to be announced in parliament tomorrow, with full details published on Friday.
Some of the flagship Digital Britain initiatives are not in the bill because they require new tax measures to be introduced.
Plans for a £6-a-year tax on all phone lines to raise cash for the next generation of superfast broadband networks, which was the big surprise in June's final report, will be included in the pre-Budget report on 9 December.
The Treasury secretary, Stephen Timms, who took over responsibility for implementing Digital Britain from the former communications minister, Lord Carter, in the summer, has pledged that the next generation of superfast broadband networks, which will allow people to download movies in minutes and music in seconds, will be within the reach of 90% of UK households by 2017.
Meeting the government's ambition that everyone in the UK will have access to a basic broadband service with a speed of at least 2Mbps by 2012, which was the centrepiece of Lord Carter's interim report in January, does not require legislation.
Next month's pre-Budget report may also include a "cultural" tax break for the video games industry, which is struggling to compete with the financial incentives offered by rival countries such as Canada.
The UK could lose its place as home to the world's third largest video games industry this year, falling to fifth place before dropping into sixth in 2010, according to recent research by the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (Nesta), because of the favourable tax regimes being offered by other countries. Negotiations are still ongoing between the Treasury and the video games industry, which contributes more than £1bn to the country's annual GDP.
As a result, the most headline-grabbing part of the digital economy bill will be a clampdown on online piracy. Last month, Peter Mandelson set out the government's plans for a scheme which would see persistent online sharers of copyrighted material sent a series of warning letters before having their broadband connections slowed down or even suspended.
Music companies welcomed Mandelson's move, which goes further than the measures suggested by Carter in June's Digital Britain report, but internet service providers have warned that the cost of implementing the measures will outweigh the benefits.
There are also fears that innocent internet users could have their wireless broadband networks hijacked by pirates and fall victim to the tough new regime. One of the UK's largest internet service providers, TalkTalk, has already warned that it will launch legal action if the plan is put into action.
Many of the other measures in the digital economy bill, however, are less far-reaching. There are to be changes to the regulatory framework for the radio industry to make it easier to push for digital radio switchover in 2015, while the remit of Channel 4 will also be updated so that it includes the provision of public service content on all media platforms, including the web
The remit of Channel 4 will also be updated so that it includes the provision of public service content on all media platforms, including the web.
Communications regulator Ofcom will be given new powers so that it can appoint and fund new independent ITV regional news providers. The Digital Britain report called for the creation of independently funded news consortiums, which would plug the gap in regional news provision left by ITV's proposed withdrawal from regional news production.
Digital Britain said the £130m a year of BBC licence fee money currently used to pay for the most vulnerable to switch to digital TV should be used to fund ITV regional news programming. The digital economy bill, however, will leave unanswered the question of exactly how the consortiums will be funded.
Earlier this week the Department for Culture, Media and Sport reiterated that it wants to trial regional news consortiums in 2010, with three pilots – in Scotland, Wales and one English region – funded from the money left over from the digital switchover licence fee fund.
But in response to a lengthy consultation on the issue, the department added that "the government's preference remains the contained contestable element but a final decision will be made before the licence fee settlement process in 2012".
As a result, even though the digital economy bill will give Ofcom the power to establish the regional news consortiums, exactly where the funds will come from to pay for them will be up to the next government. If the Conservative party wins next year's general election, it has already pledged to scrap the plan for ITV regional news provision.
Finally, the digital economy bill will change the way that video games are given age classifications, making age ratings compulsory for all boxed games designed for those aged 12 or above. The Digital Britain report in June called for rules to be introduced that would make it illegal to sell a video game rated 12 or over to an underage buyer, and take away the classification of games from the British Board of Film Classification.
The report included plans to introduce the PEGI or Pan-European Game Information system, already used in many EU states, as the sole method of classifying video games. It would replace the current hybrid system – which results in games with both a BBFC and PEGI stamp – under which the BBFC only had to classify games that depicted "gross violence or sexual content" while all other games were classified on a voluntary basis.
Instead, the report called for the Video Standards Council to take over age rating with all games having to be classified. Any developer making a false declaration about a game's content would face a fine of €500,000 (£425,000). The VSC will be able to ban games it believes are inappropriate for the UK market.
The current PEGI ratings are 3, 7, 12, 16 and 18. The 12 rating, for instance, allows violence of a slightly more graphic nature than would be found in, say, Tom and Jerry cartoons, but only towards fantasy characters. They can also include non-graphic violence towards human-looking characters or recognisable animals. The 12 rating also covers video games that show nudity of a slightly graphic nature but any bad language in this category must be mild and fall short of sexual expletives.
The digital economy bill is the culmination of the Digital Britain process begun by Carter in October last year.
Carter's ambition was to give the UK's creative industries – which he nicknamed "the poets" – both protection and support in the digital age, while also fostering investment in the next generation of digital infrastructure – which he nicknamed "the pipes".
However, while his final Digital Britain report in June was shot through with a grand ambition to create a new digital economy to would help lift the UK out of recession , the digital economy bill is more plumbing than poetry, in many places little more than a series of disconnected tweaks to existing legislation.
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Facebook and MySpace condemned for not installing tool for reporting abuse
How easy is it to report abuse on Facebook?
The head of a government body responsible for keeping children safe has criticised social networking sites for not doing enough to protect youngsters.
Jim Gamble, chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (Ceop), said sites such as Facebook and MySpace had "no legitimate reason" for not using a new tool for reporting abuse.
His comments came after Bebo introduced a "Ceop report" button for users to log abuse. Clicking on the tool, which appears automatically under users' profile pictures, opens a window inviting victims to log "violations of Bebo's terms of service" – including bullying, hate speech and sexually explicit content.
The Ceop button was added across Bebo's website yesterday. As well as functioning as a bullying deterrent, the tool can be used to report inappropriate behaviour toward a child directly to specially trained Ceop officers.
Facebook and MySpace are yet to install the Ceop tool, and Gamble criticised such sites for not taking up the free service.
"I do not want my criticism to be taken as a swipe at the online industry," he said. "This is aimed specifically at social networking sites. They are creating a public space that attracts young people, children and adults, so they can make money through advertising."
"We applaud that but do not forget while you do that there is a responsibility, a duty of care, to the young and the vulnerable. We are here to help at a low cost, in fact, this is free, we are giving away this service. What cost can you put on child protection? I have seen the horrible aftermath of it."
Sir Hugh Orde, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers, welcomed Bebo's decision to use the service and called for other websites to adopt it.
"This is an ideal opportunity to keep young people who use social networking sites as safe as possible while they are online," he said. "I can see no reason why other sites would not consider adopting the same approach and would encourage them to embed the Ceop report button for the benefit of all users."
A spokesman for Facebook, which has 300 million users, said safety was the "top priority" for the company, and that it had invested in "the most robust reporting system".
"We also work closely with police forces in the UK and around the world to create a safe environment," he said. Our teams are manned by trained staff in two continents giving 24-hour support in 70 languages."
The spokesman added that the company was "in dialogue" with Ceop, and looked forward to hearing about the Bebo's experience with the Ceop button.
Websites have been able to use the Ceop button for more than three years, but yesterday's move by Bebo is the first time a large social networking site has embedded it across all profiles.
Gamble said some sites had claimed technical issues for not using the button. It has also been suggested that sites do not want to lose advertising space.
"It is tiny and does not take up any significant real estate," Gamble said. "The bottom line is there is no legitimate reason for not taking it and placing it on a site."