Mousetrap Technology - Times Online - WBLG

Digital four play – bringing it all back home

How big is your bill for home digital services? If you add up things like satellite TV, cable, landline, mobile phones and broadband, it starts to become quite a big slice of your domestic budget. Ofcom tracks this figure and found that between 2000 and 2004, the average household spend went from around £60 to £80 a month. If you can't live without a glitzy, high-end satellite package, you could be spending £60 a month on TV alone, so it's hard not to think that this number has crept up some more. Suddenly we're all corporate technology officers, managing a small IT division from our sofa. Now that we've got the gig, how are we going to make it easier?

Flash Player 9 is here

Adobe today released Flash Player 9 – available as a free download here. The company claims that the new player will run up to ten times faster than its predecessor, which is already installed on some 600 million PCs and Macs.

It also supports Flex 2, a new internet application development platform also released by Adobe today, which lets users build Ajax-style applications.

The UK's digital home falls behind

Today I got a chance to see some surprising new research from Motorola's Digital Home business on the different ways in which broadband is being used across much of Europe. The research polled 2,500 users across five countries (UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) and found that despite the UK's relatively high usage of broadband at home, British consumers are lagging behind in our awareness of the related applications which broadband enables. It's as though we've been among the leaders in getting hooked up, but have shown limited imagination in actually doing something interesting with all that bandwidth…

Microsoft woos open source developers with CodePlex

Microsoft, a champion of the open-source movement? Apparently so. The world's largest software developer has quietly launched CodePlex, a collaborative development community for programmers, coders and tinkerers of all stripes. It has a decidely SourceForge feel, describing itself as a place to "create new projects to share with your fellow developers around the world, join others who have already started their own projects, or use the applications on this site and provide feedback". Already, 30 development teams have signed on to collaborate on projects such as developing a new RSS feed reader (which doesn't seem to be generating much interest as of yet) and a new version of something called Ascend.Net (one of the five most popular CodePlex projects in terms of users).

Google search - "automatic and objective"?

Google, it would appear, is on a bit of a charm offensive.

The question of just how the company orders the content that pops up every time you enter a search query has been bothering plenty of people for some time. Google has, it told Times Online today, taken this on board. It is now working to make its business more transparent.

"Let’s be clear here, there are no guys in a backroom smoking cigars," Douglas C Merrill, a Google vice-president who works on search, said.

NHS scores low marks in securing patient data

The NHS's track record for securing the medical records and patient information it stores on various digital devices is remarkably lax, according to a survey published today. Nearly two thirds of those surveyed at the NHS reported they use no security or very little (primarily in the form of password protection) when storing data on portable devices. Half use their own device – from Blackberrys to USB pen drives – to store patient information, which is considered a breach of even the most basic security regimes.

You can already read minds. And soon computers will be able to as well

Can you read minds? "The answer is most likely yes," says Professor Peter Robinson of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.

"You may not consider it mind reading, but our ability to understand what people are thinking and feeling from their facial expressions and gestures is just that. People express their mental states all the time through facial expressions, vocal nuances and gestures.

"We have built this ability into computers to make them emotionally aware."

Nintendo DS Lite: a vision in white

One of the perks of tech journalism (all right, the only perk of tech journalism) is that you often get your hands on the latest and greatest gadgets first when they come in for review. This makes it extremely difficult to put your hand in your pocket and spend your own money on the stuff. So it's a mark of the seductive appeal of the Nintendo DS Lite portable game player that when it was launched in the UK on Friday, CNET.co.uk's Rory Reid actually went out and bought one.

It'll never catch on

We've just received a phone call from someone trying to sell us a printing press. A print version of Times Online: now there's an idea...

I've seen the future, and it's white

It’s been an important week for BT. The company has launched its biggest marketing campaign since it started pushing broadband heavily in 2002. The new hard sell is the Total Broadband Experience – a magic white box that provides a fast broadband connection and a wireless network connection to become "the heart of your digital home." You might be forgiven for thinking that Microsoft had already offered to provide this domestic organ with the Media Centre PC. BT’s move is in fact the latest in a fascinating game of marketing Go, in which technology vendors keep trying to surround each other, sneaking warily around our coffee tables in the quest to dominate our digital home lives.

When I invented the web...

"When I invented the web, I didn't have to ask anyone's permission," writes Tim Berners Lee on his blog. "Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going [to] end in the USA."

Crossing Canada on a gallon of petrol

Perhaps record-breaking petrol prices won't cripple the world economy after all. Physorg.com is reporting that a group of engineering students from the University of British Columbia has developed the world's most fuel-efficient vehicle, capable of driving across from Vancouver to Halifax on a single gallon of fuel. The vehicle – a single-person model that requires the driver to lie down – made its road debut at the Society of Automotive Engineers' Supermileage Competition and achieved a mind-blowing 3,777 miles per UK gallon.

Coke cans its music download service

Mycokemusic.co.uk will soon be nobody's-coke-music.co.uk. The mega brand's foray from caramelised sugar water into music downloads will be history as of July 31. In a statement posted on its site, the company explained the download service, at one point Britain's most popular, will close due to lack of demand. The statement never mentions Apple iTunes, though it really doesn't need to in order to get across the obvious point: even a brand with a massive marketing budget like Coke is fighting a losing battle against the market dominant iTunes.

Censors eye the web

Britain's film censor has suggested that it could help devise a classification scheme for websites that would provide parents with more information about whether sites are appropriate for their children. “We regularly see and deal with material, whether so-called ‘extreme reality’, abusive pornography, or simply content which is unsuitable for the age group to whom it is addressed, where our intervention is clearly necessary," said the British Board of Film Classification in its annual report.

The fundamental things apply

One of my favourite images from Terry Gilliam's brilliant film Brazil is from a scene in the Ministry of Information. Whenever the hero's boss, an irate supervisor, sticks his head out of the office, he sees his staff hard at work – but once he's ducked back in they get back to what they've really been doing: using their computer screens to watch Casablanca. The BBC's decision to make the World Cup available on the net has had much the same effect on our office, where the tinny buzz of distant crowds in German football stadiums can be heard leaking from people's headphones. The noise isn't loud enough to drown out the sharp crack of yet another barrier between office and home being breached: technology makes it harder and harder to draw clear lines between our digital work and our digital play. It's hard to know where to look.

VoIP snips the fixed-line phone business

Internet and mobile telephony services are sending the traditional home telephone to a speedy grave. That's the conclusion drawn by tech consultancy Jupiter Research this week. The firm reports that Europeans are rapidly ditching fixed line phone service in favour of voice over IP (VoIP) calling services such as Skype, or using their mobiles, for their primary telephone needs. The principal reason is as much cost savings as convenience. The idea of bringing your primary phone number with you wherever you go is of enormous appeal to more and more Europeans, Jupiter reports.

End of an era?

Bill Gates is stepping down from his executive role at Microsoft after more than 30 years. Ray Ozzie, the tech guru behind Lotus Notes, takes his role as chief software engineer. Gates will devote more of his time to his charity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's richest, managing assets of some £16 billion.

So where does that leave Microsoft?

The late '98

Still running an old version of Windows? Time to upgrade, says Gervase Markham in his latest column.

"In just under a month, on July 11, the last vestiges of Microsoft's support for Windows 98 and Windows Millennium Edition (ME) will vanish. That includes support for Internet Explorer 6. No more updates, no new versions, no security patches, nothing. When the next internet worm comes along, Microsoft will not be riding to the rescue."

Read the whole thing here.

Will $100 laptops create generation of cybercrooks?

Do we really want the world's developing nations to have universal access to cheap PCs and the internet? What if they use it for sinister purposes, such as spamming wealthy Westerners, or causing havoc by writing potent new viruses and exotic malware? These are some of the questions Eugene Kaspersky, the Russian anti-virus whiz for Kaspersky Labs, would like us to consider in his latest state-of-the-medium address.

Apple braces itself for EU challenge

"There’s a growing consensus among legal experts that Apple could be the next American firm to face the wrath of EU Competition Commission investigators over its closed system, FairPlay," writes Bernhard Warner in his weekly column for Times Online.

"FairPlay digital rights management software that locks consumers into a single option for their iTunes purchases: the iPod. The counter argument that you can always burn your iTunes purchases onto a CD, then upload the contents onto a second player application before downloading the tunes onto a compatible device is preposterous. Consumers could also generate pure ethanol from corn to use as a petrol additive, but most of us have far more important things on our minds, such as grousing about digital rights management."

Click here to read the full article

Google's giant secret supercomputer revealed

Google’s expansive ambitions have finally been given concrete expression – in the shape of a secret giant computing complex, the size of two football fields, on the banks of the Columbia River in Oregon.

The vast plant, pictured in today’s New York Times, appears to signal how Google intends to exploit huge "server farms" – massive clusters of machines that can harness far more computing power to solve a problem than a single PC can.

In other words, this brown-field site is going to be one of the brains behind Google’s web-based applications – such as the recently announced spreadsheet rival to Excel.

More on the story here. There’s an overview of what Google’s been up to lately here. And a bit more about giant server farms here.

Global PC shipments beat expectations

Worldwide PC shipments grew by a "healthy” 12.6 per cent in the first quarter of 2006, beating expectations as emerging markets offset slowing mature territories, according to IDC, the market analysts.

But the industry isn't quite out of the woods yet.

"Slower growth in mature markets, the delayed release of Windows Vista, and rising inventory increase the risk of slower growth," Loren Loverde, director of IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker, said.

She cannee take no more, Capt'n - Microsoft risks crashing the internet

Is demand for Microsoft's Vista, the latest version of the near ubiquitous operating system, really in danger of crashing the internet? Apparently yes – if you take the comments from the Windows Vista Team blog at face value.

In a line of dialogue that sounds like it was written for Scotty from Star Trek, the site warns: "It's not that we didn't anticipate this level of interest or demand, but that we are at the threshold of what the internet can bear."

Logging on to the World Cup

More than 2.5 million people visited sports and gambling websites last week as the World Cup got underway. The BBC site was the runaway leader with 1.3 million unique users, nearly four times as many as the Sky Sports site, its nearest rival, according to figures from Nielsen NetRatings, a web traffic research company. Times Online, the highest ranked newspaper website, attracted 115,000 readers to its World Cup coverage.

"Traffic during the week peaked the day after the first [England] game," according to Alex Burmaster, the company’s European internet analyst. On Sunday, he said, "1.1 million sports fans [went] online, most likely for the post-match analysis on what was considered a rather poor performance by England." Online sports traffic is likely to be higher for England’s midweek games, when office-bound staff will rely on websites to keep them updated.

Google's Brin says he didn't mean what he said about China, we think

Google’s corporate communications team looks to have finally caught up with Sergey Brin, the company’s billionaire co-founder who went wildly off-message earlier this week when he admitted Google had compromised its principles by entering the Chinese market on Beijing’s terms.

Mr Brin reportedly told a small group of invited journalists: “I think it’s perfectly reasonable to do something different. Say, OK, let’s stand by the principle against censorship and we won’t actually operate there.” But he then added: “That’s an alternative path. It’s not the one we’ve chosen to take right now”.

Daddy, what was it like to be clueless?

I saw the author Douglas Coupland speak recently about his new book, Jpod, flagged by his publisher as 'Microserfs for the age of Google.' The book tells the story of a group of techies working on a terrible game development project, and it features much that is familiar to Coupland's fans: obsessive triviality, the wit of clever, geeky tech types, and a total immersion into the details of modern digital lives. It's a world of Web surfing, infinite product choice, and fragile or non-existent human relationships. In the question period after his talk Coupland ended up giving a rough timeline of his work, and singled out two historical events as transforming the world he lives in. The first was 9/11. The second was Google.

Jaw jaw with Jajah

A new internet phone service launched this afternoon promises to take the hassle out of web-based voice calls. Unlike Skype, Jajah lets you call anyone in the world using your usual landline or mobile phone, without the use of headsets, microphones, adaptors or downloaded software.

Is Google reconsidering its "evil" ways?

Did Google “do evil” by entering the Chinese market on Beijing’s terms?

Lots of people think so. Reporters Without Borders, the press freedom group, says China is “the world champion” of internet censorship. It believes Google lends China’s internet policies legitimacy by operating there.

On a slightly different tack, Chris Smith, a Republican representative, claimed last year that Google has become "a megaphone for communist propaganda". Signalling the strength of feeling in the US on the issue, he was speaking at a congressional hearing called after Google said its Chinese site would censor search results for politically sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Now, it appears, we can add to these the voice of Sergey Brin, one of Google’s billionaire co-founders.

Is Google's scattergun backfiring?

Lots of attention is being given today to Google's launch of a spreadsheet application that will compete with Microsoft's Excel. It is one of a number of new products the search specialist has hatched over the past two years or so - apparently in an effort to diversify away from search and search-based advertising.

But is the ploy working?

According to new research seen by Times Online, Google’s scattergun approach to diversification - taking in everything from e-mail to word processing - appears to be backfiring with the internet company failing to make an impact outside of its core search business.

Yes, the boss is reading your e-mails

Pssst....you may want to tone down your boss-bashing e-mails. According to a new report by messaging security specialists Proofpoint, 38 per cent of large UK companies have hired staff to read or analyse outgoing employee e-mails. What are these company snoops finding that's so alarming? Breaches of confidential information and legally sensitive content, which can be enough to sack the offending e-mailer.

The solution to DRM confusion? Clearer labelling

The All Party Internet Group, a group of MPs who last year fought for stiffer criminal penalties against hackers and DDOS extortionists, are turning their focus on another reviled group: technology companies that lock up CDs, DVDs and digital downloads with a mystifying layer of copy-protection. In a recent 30-page report, the APIG members prescribed a series of remedies to make it easier to view or listen to digital media without having to be concerned whether the product will play on a particular digital device, or is free to be copied. Just how do they propose to ameliorate this frustrating DRM headache? More government oversight and explicit labels.

Living with webbed fingers

If you've got a smart phone with a data connection, you will have been able to experiment with mobile web browser access. I've conducted such experiments several times with my current phone, a Treo 650 on the Orange network, and by and large those experiments have been dismal failures. And yet Tom Hanks got his mobile device to work on a bus in The Da Vinci Code… It can mean only one thing: a sinister conspiracy of global titans is bent on enslaving mobile data consumers and keeping them forever chained in their grisly data portals. In other words, the phone companies have cocked it up.

Telly on the go

Could it be possible, an electronic gadget that beams your favourite TV programmes to your computer wherever you are in the world? The answer is yes and the device is named Slingbox. Its creators, US-based technology start-up Sling Media, claim that it will revolutionise your television-viewing habits. "Whether you’re in another room or in another city, you’ll always have access to your television," to hear the company tell it. Sling Media announced this week that the device, which retails for £180, is now available in Britain, and soon it will make its debut in continental Europe.

The Archiveus trojan password

Virus analysts at Sophos, the online security company, have cracked the Arhiveus trojan, a piece of malicious software that held victims’ files to ransom. According to the company, the password that will free the encrypted files is: mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw.

"The Arhiveus password is deliberately long and complicated in an attempt by the hackers to avoid people easily cracking it," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said. "Now the password has been uncovered, there should be no reason for anyone hit by this ransomware attack to have to make any payments to the criminals behind it."

Regulating the (internet TV) revolution

It’s become apparent that the internet revolution will be televised – or at least that video content transmitted over the web is going to play a massive part in our future media diets.

Now for the tricky part –  should it be regulated and if so, how?