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Britain's online video habit: three web clips per day

Here's a finding that, while inevitable, is sure to raise the blood pressure of your typical ISP executive -- and your boss. Our daily online video habit is reaching a staggering proportion.

According to Comscore, Americans viewed 11.5 billion (yes, billion...with a b) videos in March, or an average of 83 videos for every American who ventured online last month. The most recent tally for the UK is even greater, Comscore says. In December, Britons watched 3.1 billion videos, or 108 videos per UK net user.

Assuming an average video length of two minutes, you are talking about more than 103 million hours spent (some may say "wasted") in front of the computer watching YouTube and, for a week at least, the BBC iPlayer (the iPlayer launched on Christmas Day klast year).

It would be interesting to see Comscore's most recent numbers, which will reveal the iPlayer's contribution to our video-snacking habit. It will also no doubt trigger more howls of protest from the likes of Tiscali and Sky, who see the iPlayer as the biggest threat to their business.

In the US, YouTube is the dominant player, Comscore reports. The video-sharing behemoth has 38 per cent of the market (by videos viewed; 51 per cent if you count unique viewers) and its audience is growing.

The Google Street View car causes a stir in Rome

For many Romans, these are jittery times. For the first time in a generation, the mayor of the Eternal City, once a left-wing stronghold, is on the political right. Gianni Alemanno, a former neo-Fascist, swept to power late last month on a tough-on-crime platform that included bulldozing encampments of Roma people, expelling supposedly violent foreigners and installing London-like surveillance cameras around town.

So a group of Romans can be forgiven on Wednesday afternoon for assuming the worst when a black car sporting a massive, rotating video camera, slowly drove down Viale Trastevere, a busy thoroughfare, filming everybody in sight. On cue, pedestrians shuffled off the street and into bars, out of sight of the offending vehicle, no doubt wondering if these are the new intrusions that must be endured after a sudden shift to the right.

Your correspondent managed to snake through a queue of cars at a traffic light to get a better look at the vehicle that upset so many mid-afternoon espressos. A new type of video surveillance vehicle aiming to capture random Romans on a sunny afternoon? Nope.

It was the seemingly more benign Google Maps vehicle. After snapping a few photos on my Nokia N95, I was asked by a group of pensioners who was driving the offending vehicle. "Google", I informed them. "They are filming the city, street-by-street", I added. They just shook their heads in bafflement.

Just then the Google car swung left and I followed, in a very slow pursuit. The identical scene unfolded before me: Romans stumbling into shops and bars, hoping to be out of view of the camera's lens. I cannot wait to see when Google Earth will have a street-level view of Rome. Don't be surprised if you see the backs of a lot of Italian hurrying for the door.

In their own ways, Microsoft and Apple push the next iPhone

Microsoft sent an unambiguous message to European consumers this week: the next iPod killer will arrive imminently. It's called the iPhone. The 3G iPhone. Well, in truth, Microsoft never mentioned Apple's iPhone. Instead, it announced a -- yawn -- new software upgrade for its Zune music store, saying the phantom device will now play video too. You'll have to take their word for it, European gadgetheads. There is still no word on when, or if, Microsoft will make the player available here. The latest rumour is that it will be 18 months from now, in autumn 2009, when Microsoft introduces the third generation Zune.

By our calculation, that will be a good 15 or so months after the European launch of the 3G iPhone, all but burying the Zune's chances here. Apple appears set to announce its plans for a high-speed 3G iPhone next month.

According to the New York Times, the 3G iPhone will arrive in Europe as early as August. Citing a person familiar with the roll-out plans, the paper says the first 3G iPhone market is Italy via a deal with Vodafone and Telecom Italia Mobile, I type with a huge grin from my perch here in Rome.

A 3G iPhone is seen as a necessity for Apple as sales of the current models, which plod along on GSM networks, have begun to dip and retailers fear a glut of unsold 2.5G models.

What's on Mick and Keith's iPod?

Stones songs. Lots of them. From the most recent performance.

Richard Kerris, the band's former AV geek, tells Variety he introduced Mick, Keith, Charlie, Ronnie & Co. to the wonders of the iPod on the 40 Licks tour. Ever since, the band has been recording all of its shows to a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie Watts' drum stand. After the show, the techies then port the play lists to iPods so the band can listen afterwards.

As Kerris tells Variety, "If you look at any of the old videos from that tour you’ll see a laptop, a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie, everything’s recorded with these two stereo mics, so they have a rough, they have a full 48-track underneath, but everything goes into that laptop. Everything’s connected to a little distribution amp with five Firewire cables hanging off of it. So while the band was doing their bows and the fireworks were going at the very end, the backline crew would plug in their iPods, synchronize the thing, and put in their bathrobes an iPod that had that night’s show, so when they came offstage, they’d grab their stuff, get in their car and they would have the show with them right then and there. No one had done anything like that at all."

Mick, says Kerris, is a natural geek. He took to the technology in short order. And Keith? Well, that's a different story. Says Kerris, "Keith doesn’t use the computer as much, he just recognizes what part it plays."

A new infected website every five seconds

That's the findings this week from online security specialists Sophos, who say their filters are detecting an alarming rise in the number of infected web pages in the first quarter of 2008, another indication that cyber criminals have set up shop virtually across the web.

Sophos says its filters blocked, on average, an infected website every five seconds -- up from one infected web site every 14 seconds a year ago. The top three culprits are the US, China and Russia, which account for more than 82 per cent of all web-based malware hosted online.

The mystery of the world's biggest net outage solved?

Conspiracy theorists, you were right. Apparently.

The biggest net outage ever recorded was the work of two wayward ships off the coast of Egypt earlier this year. The news comes from Dubai, where the ships were briefly impounded in recent days and two men could face trial, VNUnet reports. This comes after Egypt's Communication Ministry informed us in early February that no ship was capable of knocking out the underwater cables, triggering vexing net outages from the Middle East to India.

The new version of events is that two ships -- one Korean-owned, the other Iraqi -- travelling in a forbidden zone, dropped anchor and dragged it across the sea bottom, snapping the lines.

Reliance Globalcom, which owns the cables, was able to piece together this scenario, using satellite photos to identify the culprits, essentially sinking the official Egyptian version of events.

Where are all the Blu-ray discs?

Call it a casualty of winning the war too soon. Now that Sony's Blu-ray technology has emerged the victor in the blinked-and-you-missed-it high-definition format war, the real struggle is just beginning. It looks as if there is no chance there will be enough Blu-ray discs to meet global demand this year, say analysts at Screen Digest.

Now that chief rival HD-DVD (backed by Toshiba and Microsoft) has been consigned to the scrap heap, global demand for Blu-ray discs is expected to jump three-fold in 2008 to a minimum of 43 million units, Screen Digest says. The problem is that production capacity can hardly match the surge. The top producer is Sony itself. Sony DADC's unit is investing in extended production line capacity to produce 38 million discs per month by October. This would meet just 60 to 70 per cent of global forecast demand, Screen Digest says.

Greater than expected demand is great for Sony's bottom line, but consumers will feel the pain. With production capacity being outstripped so far by demand, expect disc prices to remain at a premium.

Good news for Apple, bad news for music labels

That observation is proving axiomatic yet again as news emerges that Apple's iTunes has now leap-frogged Wal-Mart to become the No 1 music retailer in the United States, which is the No 1 music market in the world. According to Ars Technica, Apple has 19 per cent of the music retail market compared to Wal-Mart's 15 per cent. A year ago, iTunes surpassed Amazon for the first time. Now, Amazon is in fourth, Ars says, citing statistics from industry sales tracker NPD Group.

While the report suggests download sales are still surging (at least for Apple), it does point to yet again worrisome news for the labels. NPD Group had been tracking the precipitous decline in physical music sales for some time. In February, it estimated  that "one million consumers dropped out of the CD buyer market in 2007, a flight led by younger consumers. In fact, 48 percent of US teens did not purchase a single CD in 2007, compared to 38 percent in 2006."

So, while everything looks rosy for the sale of iPods and tracks on iTunes, few music execs have reason to smile. These latest figures no doubt will propel talks by the major labels to push ahead with plans to introduce all-you-can-eat monthly fees to broadband users who want access to their catalogues. If a universal fee is introduced, it might just be called the next "iTunes killer." 

Apple, the most indispensible brand to global consumers?

So says a new survey this morning, commissioned by Steve Jobs himself... Kidding.

The findings are courtesy of marketing consultancy Interbrand's Brandjunkie survey which ranks Apple as the brand consumers around the world cannot live without. Interbrand is well known in the advertising and marketing industry for its annual brand study that attempts to estimate the value of a consumer brand. Usually, Coca-Cola wins that derby.

The Brandjunkie findings, which took the pulse of nearly 2,000 professionals and students in an online survey conducted earlier this year, sought rank the emotional value of the brands in our lives. The questions were the typical anthropomorphic, touchy-feely queries brand consultants like to ask, including:

Turkey bans photo-sharing service for insulting Ataturk

You're not a proper social media application, it seems, until you've been banned by a humourless, censorious government. That's the upside for Slide today, the Web 2.0 outfit whose popular photo-sharing application is stamped onto so many blogs, MySpace and Facebook profile pages. According to the Slide Blog, the application has been blocked by the Turkish Government for "harboring pictures and articles that are considered to be insulting to [the republic's founder] Ataturk."

Slide is trying to reassure its Turkish hosts that it has nothing against Attaturk as it tries to find a remedy to get the application running again for its Turkish users. The problem is that Slide has no idea what the offending material is. Slide's general counsel John Duncan told Reuters that Slide never received formal notice of the action against the company, nor has it received the details of a court order that effectively shut down the service. In the meantime, Turkish Telecom had complied with the court's order.

As the company notes, Slide is in fine company as the latest Web 2.0 phenomenon to be banned by jittery government officials. As it says in its blog, "Slide joins several other popular web services such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace that have been banned in various countries (including Turkey, Pakistan, China and the UAE) for user-generated content".

Just how big a deal is losing Turkey for a Web 2.0 start-up? Pretty significant. Facebook recently revealed usership by country and found Turkey in the top five, ahead of France, where other social networks dominate.

Swiss bank backs down from muzzling "leaks" site

Score one for freedom of speech advocates.

A controversial lawsuit in the US between Swiss bank Julius Baer and the whistle-blower website Wikileaks.org appears to be coming to an end with the web start-up emerging victorious. Julius Baer last month tried to muzzle Wikileaks for allowing an insider to publish hundreds of classified documents about the bank's dealings with one of its off-shore operations. The leak may have gone unnoticed except that Julius Baer took the site to court to get the documents expunged from the web. In a move that stunned First Amendment watchers, a California judge sided with the bank in round one, incredibly ordering the site operator, Dynadot, to not only disable the URL, but to wipe any copy of the site off its servers.

This being the web, sympathetic mirror sites appeared everywhere and the matter of Julius Baer vs. Wikileaks.org became a cause célèbre for free speech online, painting Julius Baer as a villain.

But one by one, the case began to unravel. As the New York Times reports, the judge withdrew last week his original decision and then this week moved to withdraw the case entirely.

In the fickle realm of web controversies, the case will be no doubt forgotten in a matter of days, but Wikileaks no doubt will emerge the big winner here. A site few people had heard of has fought the law, and won. For a site that deals in discrete leaks, there is no greater promotion.

Can you blog away the blues?

Evidently, you can.

According to a new study by researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne who were looking into the psychological benefits of blogging, bloggers tend to feel a greater sense of connectedness to a particular community, and feel that they have a larger social support system behind them compared with those who do not blog. Using social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, the researchers found, also "lifted the mood of all participants (of the study) in some way."

Viewed in this light, blogging could be prescribed as a potentially cheaper (and drugs-free) way to help people overcome a feeling of isolation.

That bloggers derive an elevated sense of self-worth comes as little surprise to this blogger. Blogging has been dismissed as a  narcissistic pursuit, the equivalent of giving a megaphone to the most opinionated person in the room. But it can also be a tremendously beneficial pursuit -- for both the blogger and his or her readers. Most of the time, anyhow.

Unsettling discovery shows thousands of web sites at risk

Security specialists at Finjan report today they have stumbled upon what may be the biggest cache of stolen website details ever amassed by cyber-crooks. FTP server details -- including the user name, password and server addresses -- from thousands of large sites were contained in the database, Finjan said, no doubt meant to be sold off to scam artists. The 8,700 stolen FTP accounts found include some of the world’s top hundred domains, Finjan added.

The discovery appears to be another piece of evidence pointing to a new trick favoured by cyber fraudsters: infecting large websites with malware. Over the past six months, there has been an alarming increase in the number of sites that are unknowingly hosting malicious code, infecting their visitors with an errant click. Sure enough, Finjan reports, "these stolen  (FTP server) credentials enable criminals to compromise servers and automatically inject crimeware to infect users visiting them".

"You could pick any server you wanted in the list, pay for it" and launch an attack with very little effort, Finjan CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak told Computer World.

What's the penalty for creating a fake Facebook page?

Three years in the clink if you happen to live in Morocco, and the target of your gag is the King's brother. On Friday, a Moroccan judge  sentenced Fouad Mourtada, a 27-year-old computer engineer, to three years in prison and a fine of 10,000 dirhams (about £660 pounds, a big chunk of a techie's salary in Morocco) for creating a fictional Facebook identity for King Mohammed VI's brother, Prince Moulay Rachid.

Amnesty International told AFP that they were "shocked by such a heavy verdict", and the civil rights group has already begun questioning the veracity of the evidence, which they say was extracted from Mourtada under duress.

The news is already rippling through the Facebook community. A host of groups critical of King Mohammed VI have been created plus "Help Fouad" petition groups in multiple languages. As one erratically spelt Facebook petition reads, "There are on Facebook 41 Nicolas Sarkozy, 10 prince William of England, Many Jackes Chirac (Former France president), Roger Federer, Georges Bush, Osama Benladen and so on...Fouad's initiative was a pure innocent act without any personal gain or harmful intent. Since Facebook Launch on 2004, a big number of young adults in many countries profile public figures and stars on Facebook for reasons of admiration or entertainment, without malicious intent."

There are now 2,720 members, including a "Prince Moulay Rachid" who says: "This is truly a farce. I am deeply ashamed by this."

At least one Prince Moulay Rachid is.

Is Toshiba pulling out of the high-stakes high-definition format war?

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Toshiba is preparing to pull the plug on its support of the HD-DVD format in the coming weeks, attributing the report to "reliable industry sources." We could see this day coming for several weeks now.

Following last month's jarring decision by Warner Bros to jump camp to the Sony-led Blu-ray format, Toshiba and its main development partner, Microsoft, were left with minimal studio support and little choice but to consider its options.

Toshiba officials have been trying to put a brave face on the situation, but with no access to 75 per cent of the new cinema releases, the format is all but sunk. Speaking to Hollywood Reporter, Toshiba acknowledges it has few options. "Given the market developments in the past month," Jodi Sally, VPof marketing for Toshiba America Consumer Products, told Hollywood Reporter, "Toshiba will continue to study the market impact and the value proposition for consumers, particularly in light of our recent price reductions on all HD DVD players."

Evidently, consumers have already given up on HD DVD. Quoting sales figures from NPD, in the week following the Warner Bros announcement, 93 per cent of all U.S. sales of high-definition players were Blu-Ray players. Toshiba responded by slashing prices and sales did rebound, but is still being outsold two-to-one.

Survey: Some Britons spend 12 hrs per week on social networks

Britain's addiction to its daily social networking fix appears to be intensifying. Social network fanatics in the UK spend an average of 12 hours per week on these sites, while a particularly avid minority (12 per cent of those surveyed) remaining logged on for at least six hours per day, making social networks a bigger draw than that classic time-waster, the telly.

The survey was sponsored by Badoo.com, yes, a social network site. But the findings certainly jibe with other recent pieces of research into Britain's love affair with sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr and, evidently, Badoo (which claims 12.9 million registered users). The addiction has its costs.

Last month, a survey of corporate IT specialists concluded that social networks are a threat to UK competitiveness. According to leading tech executives, social networks cost companies £6.5 billion per annum, calculated in lost productivity and questionable bandwidth usage required to keep our friends and contacts informed on our latest mood swings and whereabouts.

Badoo is calling it the "social itch," in which users are "repeatedly drawn to check their social online status". Only 25 per cent of respondents said they could go an entire day without checking in on their online status.

An expensive itch, indeed.

Britons spend £5.4 billion online, but still miss expectations

We can today finally put Christmas 2007 behind us as we get our last report from card payment processing association, APACS, tallying UK online holiday sales. It makes for interesting reading. Online credit and debit card sales (which would represent the vast majority of all online sales) in December jumped a very respectable 50 per cent year-on-year to £5.4 billion, particularly significant when you consider that Britons' overall spending on plastic was £32.2 billion overall in the month, up a paltry 4 per cent, one of the slowest growth rates yet.

But online retailers shouldn't be congratulating their performance too quickly.

Egypt: web outage wasn't caused by a ship

The plot thickens in the biggest net outage ever recorded. It was not a ship recklessly dragging an anchor along the sea floor that snapped a vital underwater data cable off the coast of Egypt last week, triggering a net outage that spanned across the Middle East as far as India, Egypt's Communication Ministry cryptically reported over the weekend.

What was it then? Alas, the good people at the ministry are not saying. For now, the focus of the investigation appears to be on ruling out earlier press reports that a wayward ship was to blame. And a clever bit of sleuthing has been employed to back up their assertions.

Browser Wars update: Firefox continues to gain on IE

Firefox continues to make impressive gains among Europe's web surfers, chipping away further at the once unassailable lead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. According to web measurement firm Xiti Monitor, Firefox's pan-European share of the browser market was 28 per cent in December, up from 23.1 per cent in the year earlier period. In some countries -- namely, Finland, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary -- at least 40 per cent of web surfers use Firefox, impressive for a browser that is a little over three years old.

How a wayward ship off the coast of Egypt paralysed half the world

Call it "the mother of all outages". Two submarine cable networks a few miles off the coast of Egypt were snapped by a passing ship earlier this week, knocking out completely or seriously disrupting internet access and telecommunications service to vast portions of the Middle East and India. Repairing the line will take 12 to 15 days, Bloomberg is reporting.

The theory is that an anchor scraping along the floor of the sea snapped the lines, cutting access to tens of millions.  "It's a national disaster,'' Joseph Metry, network supervisor at Orascom Telecom Holding SAE, the biggest mobile phone company in the Middle East and North Africa, told Bloomberg. He said all Egyptian internet users have been affected.

Tax the internet? Not so fast, says the EU

Nicolas Sarkozy's controversial proposal to tax new media and give the money to struggling old media has hit with some tough opposition this week from Europe's top geek: Viviane Reding, the EU's telecommunications commissioner. Earlier this month, Mr Sarkozy floated the idea of taxing internet access and mobile phone contracts to help the state-owned TV broadcaster in its transition to go advert-free. Sarkozy, perhaps sensing the attack he would endure in the blogosphere, called it an "infinitesimal sales tax."

Still, Ms Reding isn't buying it.

Facebook and MySpace a threat to Britain's competitiveness?

Is your daily Facebook/MySpace/Bebo habit a threat to Britain's competitiveness? Indeed, says a new survey of UK workers conducted on behalf of IT security specialists Global Secure Systems and the upcoming IT security conference, Infosec 2008.

There's even a price tag that's being attached to our daily workplace ritual of updating our Facebook status, perusing MySpace for a local gig and sending alerts to our Bebo friends.

The damage?

£6.5 billion per annum, calculated in lost productivity and questionable bandwidth usage required to keep our friends and contacts informed on our latest mood swings and whereabouts.

Green Google unveils $175 million philanthropy fund

For a moment, anyhow, Google is doing its part to live up to its "don't be evil" slogan. The company's philanthropic arm, Google.org, announced yesterday that it will issue $175 million (£89 million) in grants over the next three years for a series of do-gooder initiatives. The focus will be on bringing basic services and improved education to the developing world, mimimising the impact of climate change, improving security and the development of green technologies, including investments in alternative energies aimed at reducing our addiction to coal.

Report: Over 10,000 websites infected by keylogging Trojan

A worrying development in criminally inspired malware, or 'crimeware' for short, emerged last year with a bang -- then it seemed to fade from view. It involved malware that was installed on legitimate websites and passed onto unsuspecting web users, infecting an untold number of web surfers who simply visited the sites. They included those run by The Economist, Major League Baseball and Canada.com, to name a few. The menace is back, net security specialists are reporting, and it's much worse than the first time around.

A tip for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray customers: don't buy until 2008

For those of you who've already purchased a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player, you may want to look away now. Why's that? Well, the price of these next-generation video players is about to fall dramatically, so far in fact that you'll soon be able to pick up a perfectly fine model for under £100.

Why the Wii could fall in 2008

Nintendo's Wii may have won round one, but its longer term fortunes are very much in doubt, according to new forecasts from media analysts at UK-based Screen Digest.

This Christmas season marks the first time the three game consoles -- Sony's Playstation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360 and the Wii -- have vied for consumer's wallets in all major territories. And, despite costly supply shortages, Wii is a cinch to come out the winner. But in 2008, the market will not be so kind, says Screen Digest.

Looks like another breakthrough e-tailing season, unless you're German

Britain and France appear well on their way to another record year for online holiday shopping. But don't expect much of a gift from your German friends. Traffic to German e-tailing websites has been in decline for the past month, according to the latest stats from web measurement firm ComScore.

Is spam e-mail finally on the decline?

It is indeed, says Google's spam enforcer Brad Taylor. In an interview with Wired, the staff software engineer for Google's wildly popular Gmail service says the volume of bogus e-mail messages is beginning to plateau, and could be declining for the first time in anyone's memory.

Taylor didn't share any raw numbers with Wired. He said merely that spam as a percentage of legitimate e-mail is down. Already, there are sceptics, including this Gmail user who has not seen any tail-off whatsoever in the number of get-rich-quick-work-from-home-improve-your-potency-full-head-of-hair-Nigerian-lottery-winning-ticket missives.

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.

All I want for Christmas is...

"I was in the United States last week. Between the commercials, reports came in from America’s malls. Scenes of stampeding mobs, near-looting and fists flying appeared on the screen," writes Bernhard Warner in a comment article about what a tech geek wants for Christmas. " Apparently, a stampede is a good indicator for a retailer’s share price; looting, less so"

Click here to read the full article

Spamalot: why laws have failed to stem the spam

"Do you feel confident that in the past three years the net has been made safer from scam artists and information thieves? What does your in-box look like today? Is it any less cluttered with spam than it was in, say, November, 2003?" asks Bernhard Warner in a comment article about spam. "I didn’t think so."

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The Zune is no iPod killer

One morning in March, 2004, in an anonymous office building off Chancery Lane, I met with a Microsoft executive who had just flown in from the States. He wanted to show me a brand new gadget the technicians back in Redmond were cooking up to dethrone Apple. I believe it was on that drizzly morning that I first heard a Microsoft official utter the phrase "iPod killer".

Copyrights and wrongs

"This week, the iPod generation secured some support from a notable UK think tank, The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)," writes Bernhard Warner in a comment article about copyright. "In its report, the group argues that the UK’s copyright laws are woefully inadequate for the digital age. The group takes aim in particular at one glaring anomaly: the fact that UK consumers cannot make personal copies of the media they purchase – thus,copying your CD collection onto your computer or iPod is a criminal act.

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The $100 million Wikipedia challenge

"Loosening the shackles of copyright restriction is the cause célèbre of the internet era," writes Bernhard Warner in a comment article on the copyright debate. "The BitTorrent generation feels entitled to unfettered access to all creative works, while copyright holders assume anyone with a broadband connection is a potential thief."

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Virtual news

"In this era of newsroom downsizing and newspaper sell-offs, it’s refreshing, if not slightly perplexing, to hear this week’s news that Reuters is expanding, opening a news bureau in the virtual world of Second Life," writes Bernhard Warner, himself a former Reuters correspondent, in this week's column. "As beats go, Second Life has all the makings of a community on the rise, and thus a worthy territory for a news operation to keep tabs on. Its economy is on an annual run-rate set to exceed $130 million."

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Google goldmine or legal landmine?

What motive lies behind Google's acquisition of the video-sharing site YouTube? Bernhard Warner suggests that the decision may have more to do with a desire to keep Silicon Valley rivals off its turf than with any great enthusiasm for YouTube itself.

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Who wants to run the internet?

"Last week, after years of struggle, you and I finally got our first glimpse of 'internet freedom,'" writes Berhnhard Warner in a comment article about the governance of the internet." That cabal of crooked men in a Dr Evil hideout (aka, the US Department of Commerce) finally relinquished its iron-tight grip on governing the web."

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Social networks go shopping

"When I need to purchase a new gadget, I usually first hit the reviewer sites, of which, there are already an intimidating selection," writes Bernhard Warner in his latest column. "Now there's a new one, Crowdstorm, the idea behind which is that many of us average consumers are capable of helping out a fellow shopper in need. We may not be a paid expert, but we know what works and what doesn’t. Put more glamorously, it's the social network model applied to shopping."

Click here to find out how it works

Pirates run aground at the polls

"Was it naïve to think that a populist movement galvanised by a call of ‘downloads for all!’ could sweep into political power?" asks Bernhard Warner in this week's column, reflecting on the Piracy Party's poor showing in the Swedish general election. "A party founded on three basic principles – to reform commercial copyright, eradicate meddlesome patent laws and stop the surveillance of file-sharers – proved to be less popular with the voters than the tax cuts and new jobs promised by the victorious right-leaning Moderate Party."

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Who needs an iPod?

"For many European consumers, the brands TrekStor, SupportPlus and Koola are more attractive than the über-cool iPod," writes Bernhard Warner in this week's column, charting the rise of the cheap-and-cheerful MP3 player. He unearths the surprising statistic that between them, the low-end, own-brand players comfortably outsell the mighty iPod.

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Lectures in bed

"In an age where we can view Lost and Desperate Housewives on iTunes a few hours after airing on the tube, why can’t university students get this morning’s Chemistry 101 lecture off the net?" asks Bernhard Warner in this week's column. Click here to read the full article.

Intercity internet

"For years, engineers have been trying to bring a continuous and speedy net connection to commuter trains – with frustratingly little luck," writes Bernhard Warner, in an article explaining why it's harder to get a web connection on a train than on a plane. "Train operators have the opposite problem from Boeing: they believe they have strong consumer demand, but the technology is the big stumbling block."

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