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What more can social networks do to protect us from ourselves?

Over the last few days we’ve seen a glut of official reports and warnings about Facebook, Bebo and the other social networks, and the threat that they pose to children. Or rather, the threat that some children pose to themselves by posting too many details about themselves.

It must be a frustrating time for the networks, who will be tempted to dismiss the reports as scaremongering by people who don’t understand the new phenomenon and want it stopped. A desire to seem sympathetic and responsible will keep a lid on the frustration, but it’s hard to see what more they can do to protect people from themselves.

It is, after all, up to the individual to decide what he or she posts. Where the person in question is too young to make a sensible decision, that responsibility passes upwards to the parents.

Parents may struggle to strike a balance between allowing children freedoms and keeping them safe, but in this respect the internet is an extension of everyday life rather than a world apart. "Don’t talk to strangers" is good advice, either in the street or on the web.

‘I’m on the plane’: the disturbing idea of airborne phone calls

On many flights, the ban on mobile phones is observed only begrudgingly, with cabin crew prising handsets from the fingers of besuited businessmen. Soon, new rules mean they’ll be chatting away merrily throughout the flight, and that’s going to add a whole new kind of pain to the already fraught business of long-haul air travel.

Most of us struggle to believe that something we carry in our pocket could bring down a Jumbo Jet. As Toby Ziegler says in The West Wing: "We’re flying in a Lockheed Eagle series L-1011. It came off the line 20 months ago and carries a Sim-5 transponder tracking system. Are you telling me I can flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?"

Personally, I’m always happy to turn off my phone, regardless of whether it threatens the navigation system. It’s one of the few times when no one can reach me, and I enjoy the feeling of dropping off the grid. For others, being constantly on call means being constantly productive, and for them making calls in the air could be very lucrative. For the rest of us, it’s just going to be annoying.

Public use of mobile phones has proved beyond doubt that the least interesting people have the most to say and the loudest voices with which to say it. They also tend to have annoying ringtones. Sitting next to one of these people on a transatlantic flight is not going to be pleasant: apart from the usual irritations of an inane and one-sided phone call, which will be the same in the sky as it is at sea level, airborne mobile use will introduce several new annoyances:

Why Blu-ray may not boost the PS3

A big jump in PlayStation 3 sales has been forecast for this year, based on Blu-ray emergence as the dominant format in the high-definition war. If you are after a new player, the PS3 a relatively cheap option, given that it's also a powerful games machine.

This argument raises the question of whether the HD battle was really about disc formats. Personally, I don't own a high-definition TV and I am currently perfectly happy with DVD quality films. By the time I decide to upgrade my TV set, probably in the next year or two, I'm not sure that I'll be looking for a new type of disc to replace my DVDs. What I'll probably want is HD downloads. I already convert a lot of my kids' DVDs to .avi format so that when we go on holiday I can take my laptop and hook it up to a hotel TV, saving the hassle of carrying around a load of discs that won't work in DVD players in other contries.

In the same way that Real, Windows Media Player and Quicktime were all were busy fighting over online video formats while the now-ubiquitous Flash player crept up behind them, Blu-ray may well end up being a format that gets killed off by downloads before it takes hold.

The real boost to the Playstation 3 is more likely to come from the upcoming release of the much-anticipated exclusive, Metal Gear Solid 4, but with other top titles such as Mario Kart and Grand Theft Auto coming out on the other consoles, Sony won't have it all their own way. As for me, I have my Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii so I don't see the need for a Playstation 3.

Inflated piracy and the silver lining

Nintendo, along with its publishers and developers, claims that it lost $975 million (£498 million) last year due to piracy. Is this an accurate figure for real cash losses? Companies like to talk about all the money piracy is costing them, despite their immense profits. That’s not to say that they shouldn't complain – it is theft, after all, but it may be a form of theft that comes with a silver lining.

I know several people who download films illegally online. They often download movies they would never think of going to see at the cinema, buy on DVD or even renting. So in reality the film company was never going to get their money anyway.

But when somebody plays a game or watches a film or listens to music illegally, it may well open them up to genres they wouldn't otherwise have tried. A pirated copy could actually increase interest in the game and other future games like it. The people who download media online are often large legal media consumers as well. This means the illegal download may convert into a legal purchace where before there was no chance of one.

When record labels sue a 16 year old for downloading music, it doesn’t make people fear they may be next – it encourages resentment of the company and erodes sympathy for their losses. It also makes people lose sight of the knock-on effect of the musicians losing money and therefore struggling to continue making music.

The companies can come across like bullies complaining that they've skinned their knuckles after knocking you out, and nobody likes a bully. Games companies trying to reduce the effects of piracy should avoid going down the route of the music and film industries, which just leads to people feeling justified in stealing their products. Instead they need to make people understand that in the long term, piracy equals no money to invest in new games.

And if they want to go after anyone, I think it should be Johnny Depp. He was the one who made piracy cool with the kids again.

Un-convert the converted

Why is the latest Simpsons game so bad? It's a huge brand with loads of money behind it, yet they have produced a game that plays so terribly in places, you suspect it must be on purpose. It's the same with lots of other TV shows and films that make the jump over to games. The Golden Compass got reviews so terrible you were left with the impression that playing it was an act of masochism.

I do love The Simpsons TV show and think the game has lovely graphics, funny cut scenes and some good ideas, but the gameplay is frustrating and executed in a way that smacks of too much time spent on the concepts and jokes and not enough on the actual game.

Fortunately there is a ray of blocky golden light at the end of the tunnel and it comes from the Danes. The Lego Star Wars series of games is a perfect example of how it should be done. The games are easy enough for a six year old to play but well scripted and fun enough for an adult to enjoy too. The cut scenes have often made me laugh out loud and the way they blends the two brands of Lego and Star Wars seamlessly is perfection.

So why do the film and TV companies feel that it's OK to fob off fans with games that are simply not good enough? Given that games make more money than movies you would think it would be in their interest to make a game that really can compete with the likes of Mario and Call Of Duty. At least games sometimes can get their own back, as anyone who remembers the classic 1993 film Super Mario Bros featuring Bob Hoskins will remember.

The Wii60: a perfect family console

I've got an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii, and I like them both for different things. The Nintendo for the pretty colours and odd games that appeal to my inner child. The Xbox for it's online capabilities that allow me to download demos and kill pixelated versions of friends, which appeals to my inner sociopath.

The problem I have with the 360 is the limited style of games. It seem to me that there is a huge amount of first person shooters and car racing games and very little else that's any good. Running around armed to the teeth is great, but sometimes I want something else. It's aimed squarely at the adult male market, which is a shame as the graphics are great and the ability to chat online to the person you are playing against is also brilliant.

The Wii suffers from the opposite problem. Loads of games for kids and adults but nothing great for the large 'kill them all and let God sort out the rest' market. What's the best recommendation for a family? I think getting both consoles and calling it a Wii60 is the answer. If this seems an expensive option you could always just get the Xbox 360 and send the kids outside to play. After all, they need the fresh air and you've got some killing to do.

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.

A glimmer of hope for Italian bloggers?

Click here to read Bernhard Warner's column: A geriatric assault on Italian bloggers

For those of you who are still grousing about Italy's draft "anti-blogger" legislation (and judging from my inbox and the comments on my most recent column, there are a lot of you) don't despair. To be sure, any law requiring Italian bloggers to register with the Government before airing their grievances would generate more problems that it solves, but there are ways around it.

As a number of you have already told me, we can all sneak our blogs to an offshore server and still take aim at unresponsive elected officials and their poorly conceived laws, the reckless drivers, the misguided football managers and the inefficiency of Poste Italiane from our homes and offices in Parma, Rome, Milan and Sicily. In other words, we can have our pasta out in the open and engage in some honest criticism of the system too without fear of being roughed up by Guardia di Finanza officers.

Could Skype kill Facebook's lofty valuation?

If Facebook fails to score a cool half-billion dollar investment from Microsoft, as the pundits in Silicon Valley are betting, it can blame Skype. Skype has revolutionised the phone industry by making calls cheaper. It looks likely to score a second, even greater trick: killing the valuation of over-hyped dot-coms like Facebook.

A free online Wall Street Journal? Murdoch likes the idea

That didn't take long. Having splashed out $5.6 billion to buy The Wall Street Journal last month, Rupert Murdoch is already talking about making the online version of the newspaper free of charge. According to Reuters, Mr Murdoch views a free online Wall Street Journal as potentially more lucrative than its current subscription model. Mr Murdoch rejects the view that ditching the $99-per-year subscription in favour of a fully ad-supported site would harm the most successful online publishing business model in existence.

The switch to freely available online content would help boost readership and revenue globally, Mr Murdoch told attendees of a Goldman Sachs media conference in New York yesterday. "Will you lose $50 million to $100 million in revenue? I don't think so," Mr Murdoch said, according to Reuters. "If the site is good, you'll get much more."

While he still hasn't made a final decision on the matter, it's becoming abundantly clear that paying for news is a model that is nearing obsolescence. And, it's a move I predicted here even before Mr Murdoch clinched the deal. The New York Times beat Mr Murdoch to the punch earlier this week, scrapping, as suspected, the subscription-based TimesSelect service. The Financial Times too seems to be fazing out its paid-for offerings, with more and more breaking news available free of charge.

The move is not without risk. Relying solely on online advertising could backfire if the market were to suddenly implode, or, more likely, Google swallowed up all the ads. But for now, the aim of online publishing is to attract the world's largest audience, and steadily increase your ad rates. That may be the only way to keep Google at bay.

14 months of fame ends: Fake Steve Jobs is unmasked

The 'fake Steve Jobs', blogger/satirist/Apple irritant, has been unmasked. The New York Times put an end to the ruse on Sunday, publishing the identify of the blogger who claimed over the past 14 months to be blogging the innermost thoughts of the mercurial Apple CEO. So, who is "Fake Steve"? A Valley insider? A shareholder activist with a dodgy iPod? Nope and nope. He's Daniel Lyons, a 46-year-old Forbes tech editor who, evidently, holidays in Maine, owns a necktie, and has never met Jobs face-to-face. In fact, he tells the Times, he has zero sources within Apple. "I had to go out and get books and biographies to learn about a lot of the back story,” he says. His secret leaked out when he sought out a book deal to cash in on his faux-Jobs persona.

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.

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".

Germans rule in Second Life

Think the virtual world Second Life consists primarily of Americans? Think again. According to the latest comScore tally, Europeans out-number North Americans by a whopping 3-to-1 ratio. Of the 1.3 million people to run the Second Life software in March, 777,000 were Europeans. Digging deeper into the numbers, the Germans, French and then the Brits make up the largest concentration of European Second Lifers. But the Germans are the kings of Second Life, comScore says.

Wikipedia: now available on CD

Wikipedia, the free and instantly editable online encyclopaedia, has launched a version that is neither free nor editable nor online. The CD-based version will cost $14 (£7) and will contain a selection of about 2,000 articles taken from the website. They will be given a once-over by Wikipedia volunteers to check for bad language and vandalism, but no more editing will be possible once the articles have been committed to CDs.

The idea is that people without web access will now have access to a wealth of information at a fraction of the cost of a more established encyclopaedia. The problem is that it abandons Wikipedia’s great advantages – its dynamism and scope – and consolidates the fundamental unreliability that is its great disadvantage. Once burnt onto a CD, the information and any errors it contains cannot easily be changed.

Wikipedia volunteers have checked the selected articles for bad language, spelling errors and obvious signs of malicious or misguided editing, but they have not verified the information they contain. The result is a deceptively authoritative tone. Without the outbursts of insanity that punctuate the online version and serve as a useful reminder of its strengths and limitations, it’s easy to be seduced by the cool, orderly prose.

Banning YouTube won't prevent cyber-bullying

The Australian state of Victoria has banned YouTube from government schools in an attempt to prevent cyber-bullying, after footage of an assault on a 17-year-old girl in Melbourne ended up on the video-sharing website.

Which seems to miss the point rather effectively. YouTube will, of course, continue to exist, as will bullies, and they’ll still be able to bully people, film the bullying and post the footage on the web. They just won’t be able to do it within the walls of government schools.

Jobs "wholeheartedly" shifts DRM blame

Have the Norwegians brainwashed Steve Jobs? Are they the ones who have forced him – possibly at gunpoint – to denounce the evils of digital rights management and pledge to open up iTunes to everyone? Not so fast.

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.

Click here to read the whole article

Never trust a webbed politician

"Watching politicians getting excited about technology is always an embarrassing experience," writes Michael Parsons in this week's column. "The manifest insincerity of their attempts to pull on geekish robes is physically painful to anyone who knows what's really going on."

What provoked this rant is, of course, David Cameron's much heralded video weblog, but our correspondent is not impresed. "I suspect Cameron's entire generation are going to have to die before the bluff amateur ho-ho-ho pin stripe anti-intellectual technocontempt of him and his ilk has been bred out of the establishment gene pool," he concludes.

Click here to read the full article

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."

Click here to read the full article

The good pirate

The news that Google News will have to stop linking to stories from several Belgian publications after a court ruled that the site breached newspapers' copyright rekindled the debate about copyright and the internet. "The proper role and use of copyright is one of the great, unresolved arguments of the internet era," writes Jonathan Weber in his latest column.

Click here to read the full article

Microsoft's Zune: will you make the switch?

It's got a catchy name, wi-fi compatibility and, no doubt, massive marketing support, but can Microsoft's soon-to-be-launched Zune really improve upon the iPod experience? Already, the gadget sites and blogosphere are buzzing with the question: has Microsoft finally arrived at the right formula for a digital media hardware/software product launch capable of challenging Apple's dominance in the digital media market? In other words, will Zune be the "next iPod-killer" or the next Tablet PC?

Bloggers facing the chop

A blogger has been fired from her post as a secreatry depite never revealing her surname nor the name of her employer. The company, Dixon Wilson, claims that she made herself and the firm identifiable by publishing photographs of herself, and that she updated the blog on company time. The blogger is taking the case to a labour tribunal.

Should companies be able to fire employees for material published on personal blogs, or is the division between work and private life sacrosanct? Use the comment button or form below to add your opinion

Success breeds failure at Google

"Rivals get the jitters when Google's non-search products grab headlines. But a close look shows that so far, there's not a market leader among them," BusinessWeek reports.

Of course, Times Online readers already knew that Google has been struggling to replicate its success in search as its makes its breakneck drive to diversify.

It is tempting to say that if Google involves itself with enough new products, some of them have got to be successful. Law of averages, innit? But then, there was a very similar argument doing the rounds on England and penalty kicks at around 4pm on Saturday.

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?

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."

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

"I'm not actually that clever"

"Amir, if you want to refund my money you know where to contact me, and this page will disappear forever."

One very compelling demonstration of why it's never a good idea to sell your old - possibly highly embarassing - laptop on eBay unless you're sure - really, really sure - that the hard drive has been well-and-truly wiped.

http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/

It's time to get a Second Life

The interesting thing about reading science fiction and writing about technology over a few decades is that eventually it does all come true. When I read Neal Stephenson's novel Snow Crash.I was captivated by his portrait of people living inside 3D animated virtual worlds, wearing animated representations of them self called avatars, working, buying, selling and generally hanging out. I remember going online to check out such a world about ten years ago and it was very disappointing: clunky graphics and way too slow. Reading that the online community Second Life has received $11 million (£6 million) in funding, I decided to try again, and ladies and gentleman, the hairs went up on the back of my neck. The connections are faster. The PCs are more powerful. We're there. Virtual worlds have arrived.

The pay-as-you-go PC is here

Microsoft and Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought IBM's laptop business last year, are to launch market trials for "pay-as-you-go" purchases of computers in China and India.

For sure, it's an interesting application of an idea usually associated with mobile phones.

But is it really an innovative plan to bring computing power to the deserving masses, or a way of extending credit under another name to people who can ill-afford to be in debt?

The Cloud, the Screen and the Hand, or where's my stuff?

Here are some principles that govern how digital stuff should flow in our lives. The first is that when something goes wrong, all the stuff we care about should automatically have been backed up to the internet cloud so that we don't lose it forever. The second is that the only kind of data entry anyone really wants to do is while sitting at a full-size keyboard in front of nice big screen, whether PC or TV. The third is that there is some information we want to have in our hands when we're on the go: phone numbers, diary, some e-mail, the odd map or address or photo or video. That's it: the Cloud, the Screen and the Hand. When they work together seamlessly, the digital part of our lives will explode.

Bloggers on the beat for the LAPD

Chris Ayres, Los Angeles Correspondent of The Times, writes today in his LA Notebook about the Los Angeles Police Department's attempts to reform itself – by blogging. "You get the feeling, however, that [public comments] are put through an industrial-grade sanitation process – especially the ones about why immigrants should be denied constitutional rights," he writes. Click here to read the full story.

Just keep taking the Googles

"Of all the inept diagnoses handed out by practitioners of the NHS, this one takes the biscuit for its sheer impertinence," writes Carol Sarler in today's Thunderer.

Apparently, "cyberchondria" is "a condition causing great concern to GPs as increasing numbers of us have the temerity to research our own ailments on the internet."

For more polemic, click here.

The BBC: Absolutely Fabulous or Balderdash and Piffle?

The BBC is standing on its tippy-toes, looking down into the internet abyss. It’s an uncomfortable position for anyone to maintain for long, and a particular strain for battle-scarred warrior like dear old Auntie. In the cyber age, people must be able to find, play, and share the BBC's content with their own mash-ups, blogs, and viral videos entries. The rules have changed. However, I believe that the Beeb can adapt and survive. Here's how.

Why is the good TV in the shed?

About five years ago I broke down in Tottenham Court Road and bought myself a huge widescreen Sony Trinitron TV set: gun-metal grey with a stunning picture, it cost more than a thousand pounds, an astonishing sum for what is basically a toy. I bought it on a credit card with the sweaty panic of someone who knows he'll be in a lot of trouble when he gets his purchase home. At 28 inches, it was my LDAU: that is, the Largest Domestically Acceptable Unit – meaning that my significant other would complain bitterly about the way it ruined the aesthetic of our living room, but would enjoy the picture and not make me take it back to the shop. A key to ensuring that the TV was allowed to stay was getting it delivered when only I was home: that way I could conceal the staggeringly large box and the fact that it took four men to carry it into our living room. It's now somewhere else, and its journey tells us an awful lot about technology in our homes.

Is 'slightly different' Skype the same company eBay bought into?

Skype, the voice over internet protocol company now owned by eBay, will reveal a major upgrade to its service tomorrow. It is not the only change that the company will have to tackle if it's going to compete in the brave new bundled world of telecoms. Another is the metamorphosis of its rivals.

Can Microsoft's IE 7 finally slow Firefox?

Internet Explorer, arguably the single most neglected piece of Microsoft software, is finally getting the proper attention it so plainly requires. The software giant announced this week it would be unveiling a new test version of IE 7 (for those keeping score, this will be the third beta for IE 7) that seems to have fixed the freezes and hitches suffered by the previous test versions. For the dwindling number of IE devotees, the re-vamp couldn't come soon enough.

A brush with anonymity

Jonathan Weber, one of Tech & Net's regular columnists, writes from the United States about a recent furore. A Los Angeles Times journalist, Michael Hiltzik, used psedonyms to post on his blog and others, praising his own work and rubbishing his critics. The duplicity was uncovered when an arch-rival noticed that pseudonymous postings were coming from the same IP address as those bearing Mr Hiltzik's name.

The case highlights one of the many lurking dangers that await traditional newspapers trying to incorporate the energy of the web into their coverage. The Los Angeles Times has already had a brush with the dangers posed by anonymity: last year it was forced to abandon open reader forums after repeated attempts to post pornography on its site. The BBC was forced to close a cricket-related forum after rivalry between India and Pakistan supporters spilled over into racist abuse.

Don't let the kids catch DVD

If you're a parent, you need to understand a new threat to your children's health: the possibility of infection with the DVD virus. Your children can now be exposed to DVDs at the homes of their friends, in supermarkets and shopping centers – even public libraries are no longer safe. My son is only two years old, and first became exposed to DVD during a single encounter with Monsters, Inc. at a party.

After seeing this DVD once, for ten minutes, at the house of a friend, his mood changed. His face became red. He then asked to watch "Scary Bear", as he called it, at ten-minute intervals every day for the next two weeks. This produced irritation, mood swings, and increasing anger until we finally gave in and bought a copy. He has now seen Monsters, Inc. 374 times. Be warned. This could happen to you.

A brief introduction to global gadget warming

There's a painful force at work in the gadget world. Gadgets all over the world are losing their cool rapidly. From Seoul to Sidney, we're seeing global gadget warming, and it's going to get worse. Remember how cool the PSP was? I first touched one a year ago. It froze the tips of my fingers. It made my eyeballs bleed. Now I couldn’t care less. This is a problem. If you write about gadgets for a living you know: you open boxes and take out shiny silver things and see if your heart sings. Every now and then we see products so cool, so mind-numbingly hip that we have no alternative but to lick them. We can't help it. They're just that delicious. Well, we haven't had our tongues on anything worth licking for months. We're all out.

Knowing your RSS from your elbow

I know something you don't. I know where to get the latest high-res images of Isaac Newton's alchemical notebooks. I know there's a useful CNN profile about how Bill Gates gets things done. I know where to find pictures of people clubbing seals to death, a fascinating news story about police in Paris sealing so-called "death clubs" and the hot gossip about Paris Hilton, who's apparently dying to go clubbing with Navy Seals. Want to get the good stuff? Here’s how to do it.

It's all about RSS feeds. RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, allows you to subscribe to loads of different information sources, making it much easier to see what's new on the web. I use Bloglines, which is a browser-based reader, but there are loads of others you can try. The information is then pushed to you. It's as though all the blogs or websites you care about decided to come round to your house, instead of you having to schlep your way around to theirs.

Apple XP – the recriminations begin

You might think the news that Apple computers will run Windows XP would put a smile on the face of Mac users. Now they'll have the choice of two operating systems and access to a much wider range of software and games, but Apple aficionados are a funny bunch and to some of them practicality comes second to exclusivity.

The cold, hard analysts of the financial markets gave Apple a pat on the back and a 6 per cent share-price boost, but pro-Mac bloggers were feeling betrayed. The object of their desires had just announced its intention to sleep with the enemy.

Web 2.0: This time it's lucrative

The web is changing. Mighty forces are at work and a new internet is slouching towards a monstrous liquidity event. This reborn web is vast, huge, and unimaginably significant and intense. In fact, it's a new web – it’s called Web 2.0. You may have heard some buzz words: folksonomies, mash-ups, social networking. You may have been to Flickr, Wondr, Del.icio.us, Orkut, or Listl (note the daringly misspelt or awkward names, to ensure a nice Google ranking – very Web 2.0.) But do you really understand Web 2.0 – the way you understand fishing, traffic lights, or tangerines? You may have had to fake it when a colleague mentioned a new website being "totally two dot oh." You nodded. Yeah right. You even made air quotes: "two dot oh." If so, you're a fakr. A losr. Farked. Or at least you were – until you found this bluffer's guide to Web 2.0.

Apple rumour watch: Happy 30th birthday to you

Online Apple watchers are having fun with the countdown to Apple's 30th birthday this Saturday. There's much speculation as to whether the company will announce something magical (see below). We do know from sources close to Apple that the company's PR types are preparing to receive a mysterious "anniversary pack", but that may just be exec bios and cute photographs of the founders as young men.

Chris Stevens at CNET.co.uk has rounded up the rumours, which include a touch-screen video iPod, an iMac for gamers and that long-awaited Apple phone. There's also a nice cartoon on the Joy of Tech, showing anguished journalists leaping from buildings when they realise that Steve Jobs may not pull a tech rabbit out of his polo neck this time. He writes: "There is a collective fear that, come Saturday, the section of the wall-planner marked 'cover massive Apple announcement' will read like a cruel morality tale. Seppuku may be rather fiddly, but if Apple doesn't deliver, will there be any choice for the self-respecting hack but to die with honour?" There's hype, there's tech hype, and there's Apple...

See you in court, again

Microsoft and the EU continue their regulatory war of attrition with the first skirmish over Vista, the much-anticipated and much-delayed Windows update. XP has already landed the company with the threat of a €2 million per day fine, subject to appeal, and now the EU has said that Vista could land it in similar difficulties.

At issue is whether the systems are open enough to allow companies a fair shot at building software to rival Microsoft original equipment such as Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. Microsoft says yes; the EU says no.

Don't cut the cord

Can you imagine being constantly unable to find your fridge? Picture it. You're in the living room. You think, "I'd quite like a gin and tonic… ice, a slice, a heavy glass." You go into the kitchen. Cutting board. Lemon. Knife. Aah – that fresh, fresh smell of sliced lemon. Perfect. Two decent glasses.

Then two generous fingers of gin, if the fingers in question belonged to Shaquille O'Neil and had been trapped in a door so they were swollen to twice their already revolting size. All you need is ice and tonic. You go to pull open the door of that overpriced Smeg you just had to have – but it's vanished. Your fridge is not where it should be.

Libel in the chat room

A UKIP parliamentary candidate has won his libel case against a woman who posted abusive comments about him in an internet chat room. After a disagreement about the Iraq war, Tracy Williams accused Michael Keith-Smith of being, among other things, a Nazi and a lard brain.

A fairly tame exchange by the standards of many chat rooms, but one which prompted Mr Keith-Smith to resort to the courts. Should his victory encourage others who have been insulted on the web to issue writs, judges will soon be spending the majority of their time arbitrating between alleged Nazis and alleged lard brains.

The problem with DAB radio

I'm a big fan of digital radio, but not everyone is sold. Chris Stevens at CNET.co.uk argues that the way DAB has been set up in the UK is short-changing us, actually delivering lower quality audio than we're receiving from FM stations.

It all comes down to the richness of the data that's being sent through the digital broadcast, and Chris argues that we've prioritised quantity over quality – lots more stations, but with lower sound quality.

Put the iPod down and come out quietly

We have to stop the gadget menace now, before it's too late. This iPod thing is not a fad. It's not a craze. It's an arms race, and it's going to end badly. He pulls out a Shuffle. You pull out a Nano. He pulls out a Nano. You pull out a PSP. He nicks the lot. You miss your bus stop and are fifteen minutes late for work.

It's a cliché among right-wing libertarian types that an armed society is a polite society - a phrase credited to science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein. Nothing could be further from the truth. We now arm ourselves to the teeth in public to protect ourselves from being slightly bored. All we've got is ruder.

Delay station

Leo Lewis, Tokyo Correspondent of The Times and occasional contributor to Mousetrap, responds to the news that the PS3 will be six months late. "To a die-hard gamer of 1980 vintage, it's like Santa Claus shooting Rudolph in the paddock on the morning of December 24," he says. Click here for his full article.

Radio, Radio: it's a sound sensation

If you love radio, it's time to get hip to podcasting. I know you're busy, but you can't put it off any longer. Technological advances mean you can now listen to a lot more radio whenever and wherever you want. It's time to gorge your ears.

It's not just podcasting. It could be a paid-for music service, free media on a website such as Times Online, an MP3 e-mailed from a friend, iTunes on your iPod, an audiobook on your Archos PVR. It doesn't matter. The endgame is audio everywhere -- all the time.

Hourglass technology

There’s been some talk of the hourglass economy recently. The idea is that consumers are spending in an increasingly polarized fashion, concentrating their money on a few top-end purchases and economising on the basics. A supermarket basket might therefore include premium fillet stake and own-brand economy toilet rolls.

At CeBIT, the same principle can be applied to size. People want things that are either really, really big or really, really small. Panasonic’s stand boasts "the world’s largest" high-definition plasma TV, whose 103 inches would dominate all but the most palatial of living rooms. Everywhere else, tiny MP3 players, memory sticks and digital cameras sit on their stands like high-tech jewels.

There’s not much excitement about things that are merely medium-sized. As someone of average build, I find this dispiriting.

Photocopiers aren’t sexy

… which is not their fault. Allure is hardly a part of the job description, but you can’t help feeling sorry for those in the copying business when they’re vying for attention with high-definition television and shiny black gadgets that will do anything you ask of them.

Next to Samsung and Benq’s high-impact stands, poor old UTAX was having trouble persuading people that their CD 1060 photocopier was worth a moment of their time, notwithstanding its 8,100-sheet capacity and 600 dpi resolution. An employee noticed my furtive notetaking and asked if I wanted to put the machine through its paces. She looked so lonely that I couldn’t say no, and agreed to copy a page of my notebook.

It worked a treat.

Origami - a new kind of PC

At an event the size of the CeBIT technology fair, which occupies a vast complex of exhibition halls on the edge of Hanover, companies need to do something a bit unusual if they're going to be noticed. Microsoft managed to do just that this morning with the launch of what the firm describes as a new category of product.

Crowds quickly gathered around the small corner of the Microsoft stand dedicated to the Origami project, the result of which is a family of very small, keyboardless PCs. They will be built by a range of hardware manufacturers, but all will have a similar core design and will run the full version of Windows XP. What they will not do, as some had predicted, is kill off the Sony PSP and the iPod.

Digital Living: life without wires

Getting a wireless network at home seems ridiculous until you do it. Once you've done it, it seems ridiculous that you once had to connect your laptop to a cable to make it work, as though it were a puppy that needed to be kept on a leash at all times. Depending on where you are on the adoption curve, having a wireless network at home will seem either a bit technical, or entirely unremarkable. Technology trickles down, like rain, and diffuses amongst the wider population over time. The important people in this process are the early adopters, as the rest of us consumer sheep tend to follow their technical lead.

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.

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.

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?

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 Di