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Foggy day for Google News

In Turkey, 56 people were feared to have beenkilled in plane crash. A teenager in New Zealand had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in a £9.7 million computer hacking ring. And in Sudan a British teacher had been sentenced to jail after her class had named a teddy bear Mohamed.

But in Florida conditions were partly cloudy, with a chance of afternoon storms, and that - for a moment, anyway - was the most important story in the world according to Google News, one of the most widely watched news sites.

There were a couple of 'related stories' - 42, in fact - mostly from local newspapers in Florida, which also sparkled with headlines like 'Some fog, some clouds today' and 'Spring-like weather ahead.' Watergate it wasn't.

How could a spot of moisture in the air over the East coast of the US have enveloped the world news agenda?

A spokesman for Google explained that Google news partly ranked stories according to the "critical mass" of similar stories - for instance, if a number of similar stories were posted within a few minutes of one another, "that would make Google news deem them more relevant."

In other words, local Florida news services rose up and took Google by storm, so to speak?

A statement clarified the matter:"The headlines on the Google News homepage are selected entirely by a computer formula, based on many factors including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web."

So the computer did it.

Still, it was pretty weird, wasn't it? "There do seem to have been more important stories around this morning, yes," the spokesman said.

Videogames more dangerous than smoking?

Michael Parsons: Why do we play violent games?

According to Cancer Research UK, cigarette smoking is responsible for 30 per cent of cancer deaths per year in the developed world. In Britain in 2005, that would have equated to 46,000 deaths. What's the next most dangerous societal ill? Researchers from the University of Michigan say violent videogames and films.

Google and the 'Israeli blog damage control operation'

The words 'Google', 'personal information' and 'privacy' are a bit like tindersticks to a technology news wildfire.

It was no surprise then, that when a relatively obscure Israeli business news website reported that Google had 'handed over' information about a blogger to a local council which was suing him for libel, news spread quickly, and creatively.

Today senior spokesmen for Google were forced to deny reports that the company had 'voluntarily' handed over the IP address of a blogger using the Google-owned Blogger service to council authorities in Sha'arei Tivka, a settlement in the West Bank.

The story, they said, was "factually inaccurate" - but not before tech news sites had picked it up anyway, and sent their readers into a lathery wave of 'Is our information really safe with Google?'-type commentaries.

Will the real IFPI please stand up?

The art of a proper online hoodwink is an elaborate enterprise. (Just look at all the time and energy phishing scammers put into their fake websites.) But some downloading enthusiasts have managed to score as much success with a rather low-tech approach -- a simple domain squatting ruse that has allegedly managed to fool the music industry's leading lobbying organisation into coughing up valuable legal documents to its crafty nemesis. Here's how it happened:

Facebook fraud fears

Hundreds of thousands of young people are disclosing their home address to people they don't know on social networking sites like Facebook, according to research.

More than 2.5 million give their birthday, about a million say what job they have, and 420,000 say where they live, making it easier for criminals to commit identity fraud and other scams, according to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

The report was issued as the House of Commons Culture Media and Sport committee announced it would conduct a public inquiry into how to protect young people from violent and extremist content online, as well as other problems such as cyber-bullying.

Cyber-crime's latest menace

The vocabulary of cyber-crime has always been colourful. From the discourse that brought us 'evil twin' attacks, the Love Bug and the notorious Silver Lords gang comes a new threat: fast flux, or what in some circles is called 'dynamic website repositioning'. Fast Flux is a technology that enables criminals to constantly shift the locations of websites from which they launch their operations - in some cases, after a site has existed for only a matter of seconds. In the time that a user has clicked around 5 pages on a website, they may unknowingly have been bounced between servers in Eastern Europe, China, Brazil and the US, leaving law enforcement with almost no way to trace the origin of the malicious software, experts said. "It's like chasing shadows," said Nick McGrath, a director of security at Microsoft, adding that the number of fraudsters using fast flux had increased dramatically in recent months following the technology's emergence nearly a year ago.

Exposed! Facebook outrivals HMRC as privacy villain

You wouldn't think it possible, but Facebook has managed to tie with the HM Revenue & Customs as the world's biggest online privacy villain this week. All Revenue & Customs managed to do was lose 25 million sets of taxpayer details. Pffft. Facebook has gone and ruined Christmas! 

3G iPhone on the way?

Here's a new iPhone "launch" to add to the rumour mill: Apple intends to unveil a 3G iPhone in the next six months. Where? In Spain, and probably Italy too, says Spanish mobile tech specialists at SevenClick. SevenClick says an official at Telefonica told them. That's good enough sourcing to posit this hopeful leap from tech bloggers: Spain+Italy=all of Western Europe.

As The Register reasons plausibly: "May 2008 is a sensible timeline for a 3G iPhone, but by that time the competition will be well established in Spain and elsewhere, so Apple is going to have to pull a few other surprises if it's going to stay ahead".

Despite economic gloom, online stores look forward to a Merry Christmas

So much for the doom-and-gloom talk of a credit crunch robbing Britons of their Christmas cheer. A new forecast out today says British shoppers will spend a total of £5.6 billion this festive season in card-related transactions online (which is virtually all transactions), or more than a billion pounds per week.

Prince asks Sheriff to clean up lawless fan sites

In a move regarded by many industry pundits as somewhat self defeating, Prince has demanded that a number of fan websites stop using his image.

His aggressive approach, enforced on his behalf by Web Sheriff, seems to be a side-effect of a new business model in which sight of the artist in live performance constitutes the principal revenue stream and recorded music is effectively just an advertisement. His most recent album was given away with The Mail on Sunday.

His ingenious reinvention of what it means to be a pop musician in the 21st century hasn’t, however, prevented web commentators from having a good deal of fun at his expense. The celebrated, and frequently scatological, website B3ta has issued a challenge to Prince in the form of a competition for contributors to create the funniest and rudest image of the star.  Some are just droll, like Sine'O'the Times, above. Others are  a reminder that  the Internet can be a fierce and relentless antagonist.

Predictably, Web Sheriff has issued takedown notices to several B3ta users already, exciting much debate on the jurisdiction of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been invoked in the cease-and-desist notifications.

Despite the naysayers, online ad market continues to grow

For the twentieth consecutive quarter, the US online advertising market grew again to $5.2 billion (£2.5 billion) in revenue for the third quarter of 2007, the Internet Advertising Bureau reported this week. The quarterly growth rate is slowing, as paidContent points out, but it should also be noted that the third quarter is generally a quiet period in the advertising sector. In fact, the IAB predicts, online advertising in the US is expected to top $20 billion, a nice round number that no doubt will be on M&A specialists' PowerPoint presentations as they make their case for the next big sector take-over.

Is Sony growing weary of the Blu-ray format war?

Speaking in New York on Thursday, the Sony chief executive Howard Stringer had some conciliatory things to say about the bruising next-generation DVD format war it is waging with Toshiba and Microsoft. It was the first sign that the consumer electronics giant regrets that the two sides failed to hash out a standard years ago.

Losing a key content rival in Universal's Paramount Pictures had Mr Stringer sounding oddly nostalgic. "We were trying to win on the merits, which we were doing for a while, until Paramount changed sides," he was quoted by Associated Press as saying, adding that the two formats are locked in a "stalemate".  He then revealed he had always wanted the two sides to work together on a unifying format. According to AP, Mr Stringer "wishes he could travel back in time to make that happen."

Those aren't fighting words! What happened to the winner-takes-all rhetoric from earlier this year?

We were all aware this collision course would happen. When it comes to home electronics, consumers religiously tolerate a single technology in their homes to play their movies or their music. In the personal computing arena, there will always be multiple formats and standards, but once we move into the living room we become insistent upon a simple, elegant solution. Those who invested in DAT recordings and Betamax players can ruefully attest to this.

At least there's some positive news on the PlayStation 3 front. A price cut last month in Europe, has triggered a surge in PlayStation 3 sales, he says, putting the company on track to sell ten million PS3s by the end of the fiscal year in March. Nintendo, AP points out, has already sold 13.2 million Wiis. And, according to Shiny Media's PSP gamer site, Sony's sales spike may be short-lived.

Foul ball

Imagine you bought something, a car say, only to have it repossessed because the factory had closed down.

That, in essence, is what happened to Allan Wood, a baseball fan and sports writer who paid $280 to download a series of baseball videos. Major League Baseball, which sold the videos, then switched to a new (and incompatible) DRM copyright-protection system, which meant he could no longer view his $280 video collection. 

Videos bought from Major League Baseball today are not labelled with an expiry date, but it’s evident to many consumers that what can be done once can be done again. Similar DRM systems are used by many other popular forms of digital media, including Napster, Valve’s wildly popular Half Life series and a wide range of videos running under Windows Media Player 10.

If we want to avoid Allan’s fate we should all hope that companies like Valve, Microsoft and Major League Baseball remain financially buoyant for as long as possible.

Who watches the watchmen?

Britons are among the most watched people of all time, with new surveillance cameras seeming to appear every hour. But who watches all those images? Well, if you have a recent Apple computer and an inquiring mind, you can.

Surveillance Saver is a freeware screensaver module that trawls the internet feeds of hundreds (and soon to be thousands) of CCTV cameras worldwide and displays them on your monitor when it’s idle, using Apple's Quartz Extreme imaging technology.

Whether using these feeds in this way is entirely legal or ethical is an interesting question, but as a temporary alternative from your home-brewed Times Online RSS feed screensaver it's a pleasing diversion.

Why triple play offers won't save the telcos

Another week, another gloomy forecast for the telecoms industry. UK-based tech consultancy Analysys has forecast that Western Europe's fixed-line telecoms providers like BT Group and Telecom Italia will see a further decline in what it calls "legacy voice revenue", a business that up until the consumer internet age was a solid money spinner. Revenues from such mainstays as voice calls and leased lines will decline by 53 per cent between now and 2012, Analysis says. The same business has already dipped 12 per cent since 2004.

Silver lining on the copyright cloud?

Will it be the silver lining media companies have been hoping for?

There has been a lot floundering about how content owners should protect their material from being copied illegally and shared on the internet.

A broad consensus seems to agree that some type of filtering technology - where a digital 'fingerprint' of a piece of content is taken and cross-checked against content uploaded to sites like YouTube - is a good idea.

And while some significant legal bickering remains about where responsibility should lie for searching out unauthorised content, a common view that the technology should be industry standard and work across sites is at least emerging.

The unveiling today of Attributor.com, a content-tracking site, takes the debate on and focuses attention on the next question, which is how a media company manages the revenue when its content is consumed - on a range of sites - across the web.