Mousetrap Technology - Times Online - WBLG

"Plain English" web warnings

Symantec, the internet security company, today launches a "plain English" Internet Threat Meter.

Is this Microsoft's iPod-PSP-BlackBerry killer?

A mystery Microsoft project - codename Origami - is sending ripples through the blogosphere. Microsoft's ultra-cryptic webste doesn't give anybody much to go on, but the Microsoft Watch site, among others, reckons the software giant is set to launch a new "ultra-portable device" - a kind of iPod cum PSP cum BlackBerry killer - on March 2.

According to the Gamasutra site, the image above shows the Origami device in a leaked scene snatched from a promotional video. "Rather than an explicit game-only device, the Origami Project concept seems similar to existing tablet PCs, with a large touch screen display noticeably bigger than either the iPod or PSP," Gamasutra says.

It all depends on how big that in-shot thumb is - if it's an adult's then the device pictured doesn't look too portable. If the image really is "Origami", then it looks like we're talking about a kind of miniture tablet PC, much larger than a PSP or iPod, that resembles a hi-tech etchasketch.

Blogging doesn't pay

The world's "first professional blogger" has given up writing for money amid suggestions the medium is running out of steam commercially.

Jason Kottke, a lifetime achievement award winner at The Bloggies, whose award-winning site dated back eight years, said: "I haven't grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org."

Home cinema: understanding the risks

Home cinema sounds like a great idea when you're standing in Tottenham Court Road looking at shining silver speaker stacks and admiring The Fifth Element on a sixty-inch plasma, but it's an entirely different thing when you actually bring these alien devices into your home and they take all your money and your living room and keep getting bigger and more powerful.

When you finally take the plunge and buy your first system, you'll learn more about HDMI interconnects, DLP chipsets, and component inputs than anyone who isn't paid to be a broadcast engineer should ever have to consider. You will outrage your partner by destroying the artfully discreet symmetry of your living room.  Your children will weep as you mess about with miles of cabling and they discover that watching CBeebies involves hand-cranking a generator and pumping a 17-digit code into your universal remote.

Free software confuses civil servant!

Gervaise Markham’s description of how Britain’s civil servants are flummoxed by opensource software developers giving their products away – free! – has made a splash around the web this week and is one of the best read articles on Times Online.

Boingboing, the 800lb gorilla of the tech-blog scene, picked up the story, as did the good people at Metafiter, one of our favourite sources of news – both serious and not so serious.

To read the article from our Man from Mozilla (Gerv is employed by the Mozilla Foundation and writes a fortnightly column for Times Online), click here.

The Walkman phones just keep getting better

After the disappointment of the Motorola ROKR it was great to see Sony Ericsson use the Walkman brand as an opportunity to do a decent phone with an integrated music player. Andrew Lim at CNET.co.uk has been checking out the latest version in this line, the Sony Ericsson W950i, and it looks impressive.

It has a serious 4GB of internal memory, a great screen, an FM radio, push e-mail, and it also supports handwriting recognition. There's also a jog dial and a dedicated music button for accessing your tunes. He particularly likes the way the key pad lies completely flush with the main body of the phone, and the super large screen - which is colour and touch sensitive.

Many mobile phone vendors have stumbled as they try to cram too many features into a device that most of just want to make phone calls with, and end up with a complicated mess. It's nice to see the Walkman range shaping up as a pleasant exception.

Canon launches Spring collection

Digital photography giant Canon unveiled its Spring line yesterday, and CNET.co.uk's Mary Lojkine was on hand to check out the models on show. These included the new and stylishly petite Digital Ixus 65 compact, which has an impressive 3-inch LCD screen.

That's quite a jump for Canon, as the company's current compact camerasonly sported 2-inch screens. If you're into more serious photography kit, the company also showed off the new EOS 30D, which is an upgrade to its popular EOS 20D. The main improvement here is also a much larger LCD screen -- 2.5 inchs instead of 1.8 inches, as well as a more durable shutter mechanism and some other geeky camera tweaks.

A virtual lightbox for digital photographers

If you're a digital photo buff there's no shortage of interesting software you can use to manage and edit your images. The latest offering in this crowded space comes from Adobe, in the form of a virtual studio lightbox. Chris Stevens at CNET.co.uk has been playing with the second beta of Adobe Lightroom, and he says it's worth taking a look at.

Putting on the style

The good people at Logitech have confirmed what many of us have long suspected: youngsters value style over substance, while those of more mature years attach greater importance to how things work.

"Technology is about style and surface and not just about performance," Chris Spearing, Logitech’s UK and Ireland manager, says. "Younger people liked to show it off and be judged by their technology. It’s an emotional thing."

New virus targets Apple Macs

Apple users are being warned not to assume that their computers are impregnable after the discovery of a virus that targets the Mac OS X operating system. The virus, known as Leap-A or Oompa-A, spreads via the iChat instant messaging system.

"Some owners of Mac computers have held the belief that Mac OS X is incapable of harbouring computer viruses, but Leap-A will leave them shell-shocked," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for the security company Sophos, said. "It shows that the malware threat on Mac OS X is real."

Flame on in the office

Flaming: "the act of posting messages that are deliberately hostile and insulting"
- Wikipedia

Anybody who works in an office will know how e-mail is the perfect breeding ground for "flame wars" - those exchanges where banter goes overboard and things get nasty. But why is that?

Will Skype kill BT and Vodafone?

Another blow for VoIP? The Times reports today how Skype, the internet telephony group snapped up by eBay last year, will be available on mobile phones for the first time after a tie-up with 3, the mobile phone company.

It's tempting to think the day when we'll all be using VoIP (voice over internet protocol) services - mostly for free - is fast approaching. Could that spell trouble for the BTs of this world? And how about Vodafone, which has blown a staggering £5.1 billion in the past year alone marketing its 3G network?

Mobile TV gets a boost

Each year the organisers of the conference want something to shout about – a theme to distract from the real issue of the event, which is how the mobile industry can continue to make money now that high-revenue, Western markets, are coming under pressure. This year, the theme is mobile television and today Virgin Mobile and BT announced the roll-out of their service, following a successful pilot. It will be commercially available later this year.

Of all future mobile revenue generators, even the sceptics believe that television has real potential: Unlike some of the other applications that mobile operators have hyped, television is an easy-to-understand, easy-to-use service. With content partners like Endemol, maker of Big Brother, and Sky lining-up to offer their goods for display on mobile television the service has real potential.

True love – it’s all in the voice

"Forget endless hours pondering whether he loves you or not. One quick telephone call and after just two minutes his voice will be analysed, and his true desires revealed."

The promise comes from Nemesysco, an Israeli company that began life using its voice analysis technology to detect terrorists attempting to check in at airports. Security still makes up a large portion of the company’s work, but the Love Detector caters for the fluffier end of the market.

A glimpse of celebrity at 3GSM

Only at 3GSM, the global High Mass of the telecoms industry, could such a scene be possible as that witnessed yesterday. In the conference hall 300 people, mostly men, queued for 30 minutes to catch a glimpse of the Nokia chief executive, Jorma Ollila and listen to his annual forecast.

Such is his status in these circles that many at the back of the crowd were hoisting their mobiles above the crowd to snap his picture before lapping up his predictions of soaring 3G sales – take-up is predicted to hit the 100 million mark globally this year.

3G? Why throw good money after bad?

Forget 3G.

Isn’t it obvious, in the acronym-rich environment that is the 3GSM Conference, that the smart money should be riding on VoIP?

Blood on the bourse

A bad day, so far, for American tech shares.

The sector has slipped into the red, led by declines in Google after Barron’s, the business magazine, said the stock could see a massive 50 per cent fall in value. Google fell 4.9 per cent to $344.85 on suggestions it could fall if it faces mounting competition or fraud by users of its ad-buying system.

The search giant wasn't alone in feeling off-colour. Microsoft traded lower by 0.5 per cent to $26.55, Apple Computer fell 2.8 per cent to $65.43.

For more on the latest exchange action, visit Bryce Elder's market report.

What Apple won't tell you about its billionth song

So Apple Computer is about to sell its one billionth song via iTunes (see here), and Disney's High School Musical soundtrack has been breaking Billboard records because 'tweenagers' are paying to download the soundtrack onto the iPods they got for Christmas.

Sounds like great news for our limo-riding friends in the music industry, right? Er, wrong.

Let me tell you why.

Google privacy fears - the sequel

By Google’s high standards, it’s been a rough few days. The ripple of protests about the company’s decision to censor search results in return for access to the lucrative Chinese market was followed by disappointing UK profits and a consequent drop in its share prices.

And hopes that a new product launch might draw the run of bad publicity to a close have proved short-lived. The latest version of Google Desktop includes a feature that allows data to be transferred between PCs, but only if users give Google permission to store the data for 30 days. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which seeks to protect online privacy, is not happy.

The iTunes killer?

Songbird is being touted as an "iTunes killer".

Them's some big words. Can the web player based on Firefox's browser engine live up to them?

Well, "Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user-contributed, cross-platform extensions," its makers say, which sounds like a promising start.

Why not visit www.songbirdnest.com, try it out, and let us know what you think?

Washington edits Wikipedia

The world's most popular online encyclopaedia has been transformed into a political battleground in the United States, with politicians' aides accused of "vandalising" entries on opposition figures.

In passing, we would mention that Times Online spoke to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, back in December, just as the Seigenthaler crisis was finally calming down. 

We were struck by just how frank he was about what Wikipedia could and could not do: "If what you’re after is 'who won the World Cup in 1986', it’s going to be fine – no problem," he said. "If you want to know something a little more esoteric, or something that’s going to be controversial, you should probably use a second reference – at least."

We also liked the letter to the Editor of The Times, written around the same time, that said criticising Wikipedia for being inaccurate was like criticising paper for being flammable. If there's one thing to be added to that analysis from today's incidents in Washington, it's probably got something to do with "politicians" and "twisting the truth". If only we were cynical enough to work out how it should go...

Yahoo! accused over second Chinese blogger

The China rows roll on. Yahoo! was today accused of providing evidence to the Chinese authorities that led to a dissident blogger being sent to prison for eight years, the second such case involving the American internet company in the past year.

According to an article posted on Boxun.com, a US-based Chinese-language site, Li Zhi, a Yahoo! customer, was given a prison sentence in December 2003 for speaking out against Beijing. It claims the state’s case was built on electronic records provided by the company.

Yahoo has said it is looking into the matter. Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders, the press freedom group, is convinced western companies are co-operating with Beijing on a systematic basis.

Whatever gave them that idea?

Breaking up with Google

"Has Britain fallen out of love with Google?" Rhys Blakely asked in a Times Online comment article last week, after the search engine’s disappointing financial performance led to a slip in share prices.

Some seem to have taken his question rather literally. "Break up with Google for Valentine’s Day," urges the Students for a Free Tibet website. The group, angered by Google’s decision to censor search results on its Chinese site, calls on surfers to boycott the search engine on February 14.

Paid-for e-mails: the cost of doing business

The reaction to a planned two-tier e-mail system, in which companies would pay for guaranteed delivery, even if spam filters were turned on, has not been encouraging.

The idea is that legitimate firms would happily pay to reach their customers, while spam-based businesses would be unwilling to do so. They make a profit only by sending out millions of e-mails at little or no cost, thereby returning a healthy profit if even a tiny proportion of recipients respond to their mail.

The blogosphere is characteristically sceptical.

Gmail Chat says hello

Google marches on. Relentlessly.

The latest product from the search giant’s stable is “Gmail Chat”, a service billed as “the first integration of e-mail and instant messaging in the browser that offers users a seamless communications experience”.

Despite the clunky press-release syntax, and the ploddingly-prosaic name, the actual product could prove quite nifty – though it’s only being rolled out in the US to start.

Podcasting hits the catwalk

The fashionistas are podcasting. This Friday, says Yahoo! News, the designer Karl Lagerfeld will podcast his new collection through the iTunes site.

But hasn’t Karl heard? Podcasts are just so passé – darling. The real victims are into the very latest thing – Podfading.

Google and Dell test desktop software

According to Reuters, Dell and Google today confirmed that they are testing a pre-installed package of Google software on Dell computers. A spokesman for Dell said: "We can confirm that we are running a test with Google that could include a Google-powered Dell home page, Google desktop search and a Google Toolbar."

No doubt, the move will be seen as a challenge to Microsoft's current dominance of your desktop. But will Bill Gates be worried?

Well, while it is a major reiteration of intent from Google, there is already a Google desktop search tool and a Google Toolbar – so, there may actually be little that’s new here. That said, the fact these things are already out there probably means that Mr Gates is already worried.

Blackworm: aftermath of a no-show

There is, apparently, a German word that means ‘the disappointment felt when something turns out less badly than expected’. A fair bit of that was probably floating around over the weekend, when the Blackworm virus failed to have much impact.

The virus weblog at F-Secure suggests that this may have been because computers were only affected if they were started up on Friday, and many were either already running or were left off for the whole day. So were journalists, ourselves included, guilty of hyping a non-event? Maybe, maybe not. F-Secure generously suggests that “media coverage on the whole incident prompted many people to check their system and clean them up in time”.

A date with Blackworm

The internet virus Blackworm (aka Blackmal, Nyxem, MyWife and Tearec) is timed to leap into action today. It will, the security experts tell us, start deleting files from infected computers half an hour after they are switched on.

A recent posting on F-Secure's virus weblog said that damage has so far been limited but is expected to increase later today. "The vast majority of the machines infected by Nyxem are home computers," it said. "Nothing will happen on them until people get home from work and boot up their machines. Half an hour later the damage starts. The full scope of the problem won't come to light until during the weekend or early next week."