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Harry Potter and the military spyplane

What is it that connects Harry Potter, Channel 4 advertisements, and military surveillance aircraft?

Well, a clever piece of software.

A series of Channel 4 'idents' have become well-known for featuring a constellation of objects in the air which, when the camera circled around, were revealed to form a '4'. (The most recognisable showed a bunch of floating haystacks.)

Similarly, fans of the Harry Potter films will be familiar with the image of Hogwarts looming large as the students approach it on the water. The scene filmed for the shot was in fact an empty hill near Glen Coe, in Scotland, with the school's imposing facade being dropped in later.

Both shots rely on a technology known as 'moving image processing', which helps film-makers cope with problems of perspective when objects not originally in a moving shot are inserted after the event.

Now, the same technology is being used by military aircraft to pinpoint the precise location of objects on the ground.

Is fixed-line telephone service doomed?

In a generation's time, the fixed-line handset could be one of those tech relics, like dot-matrix printers or the Telex machine, that no longer serves much of a function in our increasingly mobile and wireless lives. The latest evidence comes courtesy of tech consultancy Analysys, which says that by next year half of all voice calls in Europe will originate from mobile phones.

Another lawsuit chips away at Apple's design prowess

With yet another lawsuit looming, this time over its iPhone, Apple is in familiar territory. In 2005, the scratch-prone Apple Nano got the firm into hot water, and last year it was over MacBooks that mysteriously shut down. And this isn't the first time customers howled about the lacklustre battery life of an Apple product. In 2003, a class-action lawsuit was filed by aggrieved customers who felt Apple misrepresented the battery life of the iPod of its day. Sure, you can argue that suing a company for a non-replaceable battery is a frivolous gesture, but when viewed in the context of Apple's recent design history, a disturbing trend begins to emerge about the reliability of Apple products. You would have thought after the iPod battery life lawsuits of a few years ago, Apple technicians wouldn't repeat the error with the iPhone.

Chinese iPhone runs Windows...

Or so it seems. YouTube relays to us the ceremonial unpacking of an iPhone rip-off, complete with Windows chimes on start-up. 

Virgin angers bloggers by using Flickr pics without asking

When Virgin Mobile launched a new advertising campaign in Australia, their creative team thought that it would be amusing to take photographs posted on Flickr and label them with provocative slogans. A holiday snap of orange-robed monks in Thailand is captioned "monks are boring", while a group of friends at work appears with the slogan "work friends are just that".

So far so good. Virgin gets a cheap advertising campaign, amateur photographers get a showcase for their photos and their subjects bask in the limelight. Except that no one at Virgin thought it would be sensible to contact the photographers, let alone the people featured. So imagine 15-year-old Alison Chang’s surprise when someone saw her picture on a bus stop in Adelaide – under the slogan "dump your pen friend".

For the paranoid and remorseful, "self destructing" emails are here

For anyone who's ever inadvertently pressed the send button well before they should have, here's a service that could be of interest: "self-destructing" and "recallable" e-mail from a firm called BigString. For good measure, the message can be rigged so that the e-mail can neither be forwarded to a third party nor printed. And you can track the message too, proof that yes, the recipient has in fact read the message that he now claims he never saw.

Encylopaedia Britannica is wrong, and Wikipedia can prove it

The ongoing debate over which is more reliable – Encyclopaedia Britannica or Wikipedia – is sure to turn more volatile now that Wikipedia has published a full page entry citing dozens of errors its editors have located in the 2005 version of EB. According to Wikipedia, EB editors have flubbed birthdays of famous figures in history including that of Joseph Stalin's, incorrectly defined mathematical terms including that of "real numbers", and they have muddled the distinction between hip hop music and rap music. Oh, and Frank Zappa was never christened "Francis", as EB says. 

Can a jet fly on pond scum? New Zealanders think so

It seems as if you can make an eco-friendly fuel out of just about any organic matter: corn, table wine, and, now, algae.  According to a report out of New Zealand, Boeing, Air New Zealand and biofuel developer Aquaflow Bionomic are at work on a secret project: to make an organic fuel out of wild algae extracted from sewage ponds and other fetid watering holes.

How the FBI spies on suspects

Details of a nifty piece of kit used by the FBI to spy on the internet activities of suspected criminals have emerged during a court case in the US.

CIPAV, which stands for Computer and Intenet Protocol Address Verifier, allows agents to track what connections a suspect's computer has made with other machines, for instance by e-mail or browsing the internet.

Broadband, with a free laptop

More evidence of falling computer prices and competition between British broadband suppliers. Orange is offering new customers a free laptop if they sign up to a two-year, £15-per-month contract in PC World. If people want something more powerful than the entry-level laptop available free, they can opt for a £350 discount on any laptop in PC World.

It’s not the first time that an ISP has offered a computer as a free gift. Last year, RedTen Internet began to give away a £500 desktop PC with its two-year, £20-per-month contract, but Orange’s greater marketing resources are likely to attract more interest. PC World said that it has "tens of thousands" of laptops available.

EU setback for record labels

Record industry groups seeking the names of people they suspect of breaching copyright by sharing files are likely to face more obstacles after a senior legal adviser to the EU’s highest court said that ISPs were not always obliged to name their customers.

Juliane Kokott, the advocate general, told the European Court of Justice that ISPs are acting within European law if they withhold personal data in civil cases. In criminal cases, they are required to reveal the data.

What price peace in Iraq?

A man who claims to have a viable solution to the war in Iraq is offering it for sale on eBay – at a "buy it now" price of $5 million.

The New York Post reports that the solution was posted by a US intelligence officer, Army Captain Thad Krasnesky, who described himself as a military intelligence officer with an extensive background in the Middle East.

Potential buyers seemed unconvinced: AFP reported that at midday yesterday the highest bid was $20.50. The item now appears to have been removed from eBay.

OLPC and Intel shake hands and make up

It was never going to be great publicity. A technology giant pits itself against a philanthropic enterprise which aims to bring affordable computing to the developing world because a rival's product is chosen for the said 'affordable computer'. Intel appears now to have realised that aggressively marketing its own cheap laptop to compete with the one made by One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) came across as quite hard-nosed, and that doing a deal in which the two machines could be sold alongside one another was more sensible.

As its net population soars, China mulls an end to censorship

Is China's great wall of online censorship about to crumble? Reports over the past two days suggest it is indeed doomed to crack under the pressure of tens of millions of Chinese newby net surfers logging on in the next few years.

The Facebook Friendship Challenge

Some have suggested that friend requests on social networking sites can become intrusive or tiresome, but here at Times Online we embrace all the friends we can get. Competitively.

Dan Harris, deputy editor, special projects:

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. No it isn’t. It’s a barefaced popularity contest. And it's a contest that I'm currently winning against my esteemed colleague and Times Online Driving editor, Arion McNicoll.

The end of "the page view" and other misleading web metrics?

As web metrics go, few measurements are as misleading as the ubiquitous "page view." (Well, perhaps the meaningless "hit", which no credible geek uses anymore. Right? Of course.)  With this in mind, web measurement outfit Nielsen//NetRatings will now "scrap rankings" based on the people who merely show up to a website in favour of how long those curious souls actually stay, according to the Associated Press. The move is already got the tech world buzzing. Some are asking: is this the end of the "tyranny of the page view"?

South Koreans are the undisputed kings of social networking

Web users in the United States and Britain are fast taking to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, but the phenomenon hardly compares to the rabid take-up in such countries as South Korea, Brazil, China and Mexico, a new study by Ipsos Insight reveals. In fact, the US and UK ranks fifth and sixth respectively, in terms of percentage of adult web users who visited a social networking site in the past month. Top honours go to South Korea, followed by Brazil and China.

In South Korea, 55 per cent of adult web users logged onto a social networking site in the past month, compared to 24 per cent in the US and 20 per cent in the UK. And in South Korea, they're not going to Facebook.

U.S. sends cyber envoy to Estonia to investigate recent hack attacks

America's Department of Homeland Security is sending a crack team of cyber forensic analysts to Estonia to investigate the crippling Web attacks the country endured two months ago, IDG News service is reporting. From the vast data flow generated by the hack attacks, security officials hope to learn more about what to expect from future Web attacks concentrated against state and commercial organisations. In the past year, hackers have targeted Denmark, Israel, Lebanon and Estonia following international diplomatic rows, or acts of military intervention. It's doubtful the investigators will unmask the culprits, however.