Mousetrap Technology - Times Online - WBLG

All the news that's fit to print (about your block of flats)

News organisations such as this one do the best they can to record events deemed relevant to a particular country and indeed the world, but what about stories that are of interest only to a single apartment block?

Residents in a particular postcode and in some cases on a single block may soon be able to read news tailored to their own 'micro-geography' thanks to a site which trawls the web for information relevant to a highly specific location.

The 'news' - which could include anything from a recent crime to a planning application having been lodged or a picture having been taken nearby - is then packaged up on a map so readers can see where events relevant to their location took place.

"A regular journalist would never write about a mundane planning application, but if you live in that block it's totally news to you," Adrian Holovaty, founder of the site, called EveryBlock, said.

EveryBlock, which so far only covers Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, works by trawling publicly available databases for information such as addresses using a process known as 'scraping'.

Data leaks: Forecasting the end of privacy?

Flowing Data ran an interesting post this week about leakage from large databases. It’s now almost a weekly event for us to report that the personal details of millions of private individuals have been compromised in some way by government or commercial institutions.

Their graphic (linked here) highlights the most worrying data-spills on a timeline covering the last decade. Notice how the frequency increases over time. Extrapolating, it wouldn't be too surprising if absolutely all supposedly private information will be in the public domain by the middle of the next decade. Our only hope is that with such huge quantities of information available, criminals will spend so much time wading through data that they won’t have time to empty our bank accounts.

Facebook taps blood donors

Given that a good many of the groups that spring up on Facebook are of dubious motivation - one thinks of 'Let's go out and panic buy carrots', whose founder exhorts: 'If we all do this, we can make this global shortage of carrots happen!' - it's encouraging that the odd socially-minded application flourishes too.

A charity based in New York has set up a group which aims to improve the co-ordination of blood donation by sending out messages to donors in the event of shortages and encouraging a greater level of donation overall.

Takes All Types collates information about what type blood type is needed in which area, and sends out alerts to Facebook users who may be suitable to donate. It also sends reminders about regular donations.

"We were reacting to our sense that most of what was on Facebook was too academic or frivolous," said Ben Bergman, a New-York-based recruiter who set up the service and found that it immediately attracted the interest of hospitals and blood banks.

Facebook, which now has 38.5 million users worldwide, is widely recognised to be a platform with huge potential, and has been used by everybody from the US Presidential candidates to children's charities to promote an agenda.

But it is groups of a more inconsequential nature, such as the 'I'd go out of my way to step on that crunchy looking leaf', whose 138,299 members enjoy news updates like 'Guess what? Fall is here!', that tend to be the most popular.

Facebook 'monitored by Al Qaeda' say Canadian military

Wired’s always diverting Danger Room military tech blog carries an unlikely but fascinating report about an internal Canadian Armed Forces memo warning serving personnel about social networks like Facebook.

According to the report, which was made public by Canada’s CBC news agency, the Canadian Defence Department is advising troops not to post personal photos or information on social networking websites because of security concerns.

It warns soldiers not to mention their military service in profiles or to appear in uniform in online photos because the networks are regularly monitored by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

Brigadier-General Peter Atkinson warned of the dangers of logging on from a war zone. General Atkinson said that while sites like Facebook can be invaluable for keeping soldiers in touch with their families, seemingly innocuous photos, videos and news reports can be the source for as much as 80 per cent of the intelligence that insurgents gather on operations.

And you thought you had problems with your boss finding those terrible stag night pictures.

Nokia's new flexi-phone

Nokia has (again) seen the future of handsets - and this time they mould to fit the contours of your palm.

Only weeks after it demonstrated a phone made from recycled rubber tyres, the Finnish manufacturer has shown off a new 'concept handset' which relies on nanotechnology to give it flexible properties.

The Morph, which has been developed by the Nokia Research Centre and the University of Cambridge, was unveiled as part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.

It is a largely transparent device - a little like the early Swatch watches, with built-in solar cells to make the battery smaller, and a flexible frame made possible by the principles of nano-science, the company said.

"We hope that this combination of art and science will showcase the potential of nanoscience to a wider audience," Dr Tapani Ryhanen, head of Nokia's labs in Cambridge, said.

'Showcase' remains the operative word for now, though. Nokia said it would be seven years before 'elements of Morph' are integrated into commercial handsets, and even then it will be "only at the high end."

Toshiba plans to stay away from Blu-ray

Toshiba has "no plans" to develop Blu-ray players after losing the high-definition format war to Sony, according to Olivier Van Wynendaele, Toshiba's deputy general manager of HD-DVD in Europe.

Speaking at the unveilling of the company's new products, Mr Van Wynendaele said that Toshiba had not yet made a decision regarding its future strategy in high-definition discs, but insisted that "the mass market opportunity for HD remains untapped."

The gap left by HD-DVD in Toshiba's product line-up for 2008 means the company will fall back on its core businesses of laptop PCs, LCD televisions and DVD players, all of which continue to sell well. New models in all categories should start to filter into UK stores by early March.

Nigel Kendall

A camera with a built-in smile sensor

Somewhat adrift after the "megapixel war" ended, digital camera manufacturers are now turning to features which help amateur snappers take the best possible pics.

The latest play in the game of “my camera is better than yours” – following on from red-eye reduction and others - is a feature which works out whether all the subjects are smiling before taking a photo.

Foto Nation's technology locks onto the faces in a picture using so-called Face Detection software, and measures details such as the shape of the mouth and whether a person's eyes are shut or not.

“Think of it as a blink warning,” Foto Nation's technical manager, Valentin Mocanu, said.

There's also scope for a new type of self-timer, where instead of being taken after a set interval, the picture is simply snapped when everyone is smiling.

The problem, of course, is shutter lag. “There is a chance a person's facial expression may have changed by the time the photo is taken, but that depends on the camera, not our technology,” Mr Mocanu said. “Some cameras certainly have longer delays.”

So far Foto Nation, which is based in California, has only licensed its software to Samsung and Fujitsu, and even then only for use in cameras, but it hopes to convince the likes of Nokia that the feature will become popular on phones too.

Halitosis-detecting phone

From the school of products that remind you of your inadequacies (and hopefully prompt you to buy stuff) comes this phone that measures the smelliness of your breath.

All you do is hold the handset up to your mouth, blow briefly on a sensor at one end, and in ten seconds it rates your halitosis on a scale of one to ten – based on the sulphur content in your breath.

After a morning coffee, I scored a six, which was accompanied by the message “You're still fine to talk to people, but you should be a little bit worried.”

The phone, which is still a prototype and is not expected to come out until 2009 at the earliest, also measures heart rate, body fat, and can be used as a pedometer. (You put it in your pocket and it senses your leg movement, so the theory goes.)

"You have no new messages"

It’s a simple idea – as the best ideas often are – but they thought of it first, and now they’re reaping the rewards.

Spinvox takes your voice mail messages, converts them into text and sends them to you as an SMS message.

According to research (conducted, admittedly, by Spinvox), calls which result in a voicemail message are only returned 20 per cent of the time, but when they’re converted to text, the figure rises to 87 per cent.

This is, naturally, of interest to operators, one of whose options for raising revenue is to make more connections.

On average, people leave voicemails of between 35 and 40 seconds, which, once the “umms” and “aahs” are taken out, fit neatly into two text messages.

Spinvox, which is based in Maidenhead, says it strives to generate the “meaningful text equivalent” of a voicemail message. “But we’re not the taste or grammar police,” the company’s marketing director, James Robins, adds.

Spinvox says it has already has contracts with nine operators, including Vodafone in the UK, and that by the end of the year it will have 28 contracts. It does not sell its service direct to consumers, but rather provides it to networks which offer it as an “add on” to a regular monthly plan.

The company has 60 patents either approved or pending, most connected with its voice-recognition software which can already translate four languages – French, German, English and Spanish – and has to be “voice independent.”

“We’re hoping to do for voicemail what BlackBerry did for e-mail,” Mr Robins said.

Apple has made much of the ‘visual voicemail’ service on its iPhone, but that function only lists voicemails in an easy-to-use format – so you don’t have to play back all your messages to find just one – rather than transcribing them, Spinvox points out.

Nokia´s rubber tyre telephone

Nokia today gave a tantalising glimpse of the first handset to be made entirely of recycled waste materials, including rubber tyres.

The handset  - a sleek, silver device with tinges of green, unsurprisingly - counts among its component parts bits of recycled plastic bottles and "upcycled" metal cans. (The difference between "upcycled" and recycled remained unclear.)

The Nokia "Remade" is still a prototype - "You can´t make calls on it yet - it´s still a concept, but it gives you an insight into the way we´re thinking" the company´s chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told an audience in Barcelona, after showing a brief video. Even the electronic components in the device were "non-toxic", Mr Kallasvuo said.

Click here for full coverage of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

Why just sit when you can hover?

Everyone who has ever seen Star Wars, and that’s most people, will have been favourably impressed by Luke Skywalker’s hovering sports car. It’s one of the key features of science fiction that anything that can hover should hover, but to date maglev technology has made very few inroads into British homes.

That may be set to change though with the advent of the Hoverit hovering lounger. A transparent acrylic chaise longue that’s suspended in mid air by the applied magic of Really Big Magnets. Directors Keith Dixon and Steve Wild are launching the product at the 100th Ideal Home Show in London next month with an anticipated price of £5,875.

The powerful magnets may possibly provide some spinoff health benefits to humans, but will definitely do strange things to nearby TVs, phones, and heart pacemakers. It’s worth putting the TV a little further away, though, for the inarguable benefit of lying in mid-air, feeling for all the world like the main villain in an episode of Blake’s 7.

Apple boosts memory for iPhone and iPod touch

Apple has added new models to the iPhone and iPod touch range, doubling the maximum memory.

The 16GB iPhone will cost (£319), compared with £269 for the 8GB model, which will remain on sale. The 32GB iPod touch will cost £329, compared with £269 for the 16GB version and £199 for the 8GB. The new models are available from today.

The O2 mobile network recently added extra free minutes to its iPhone packages, leading to speculation that sales of the phone have been slower than expected.

Spy games: surveillance and countersurveillance on the web

In an early Bond film, 007 was impressed by a reel-to-reel tape deck small enough to be hidden inside a camera. Forty-five years later, anyone with a few hundred pounds to spare can buy a credit-card sized bug that will sit dormant for months, then spring to life and start transmitting as soon as it hears a voice.

The claim that MI5 listened in on an MP’s conversations has focused attention on the security services and their rules of engagement, but the online trade in surveillance equipment reveals a flourishing community of unregulated freelancers.

Websites such as Spycatcher of Knightsbridge and Eyetek Surveillance sell Bond-style recording devices hidden in watches (£175, pictured), pens (£279) and computer mice (£575). For those wanting pictures too, Spy Equipment UK provides wireless video camera transmitters disguised as clocks (£280), air fresheners (£319, scent included), smoke alarms (£319) or bowls of pot pourri (£250).

The shiniest computer ever

Not to be outdone by the golden Apple laptop featured on Mousetrap a little while back, Japanese computer manufacturers Zeus have announced a new range of PCs that redefine the term ‘conspicuous consumption’.

The Jupiter casing is cast from solid platinum encrusted with a dazzling array of diamonds (no low-budget Swarovski crystals here) arranged to resemble astrological constellations. If you were to ask your valet to open the case you’d find a 3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 256MB GeForce 7200GS graphics card, a 1 terabyte SATA drive, 2GB of RAM, and a choice of  Blu-ray or HD-DVD optical drives. Vista Ultimate is installed at the factory.

The entire package will set you back around ¥80million, or a shade over £375,000. If you’re on a budget Zeus also offer the ‘Mars’ casing, which wraps up the same PC works in gold instead of platinum. That’s only ¥60m (£280,000).

Of course if you have that sort of money burning a hole in your pocket you could always buy 100 Area-51 ALX CrossFire desktops and network them together for the finest LAN party setup the world has ever seen. They aren’t quite as shiny though.

Pretty as a picture: Sony's OLED TV screens

Sony's OLED screens, which use organic light emitting diodes rather than an LCD or plasma screen, attracted one of the bigger crowds at CES. The super-slim screens, just 3mm thick, did have the instant buy-me appeal that may well make them a hit, once the price falls, despite the questionable need for such a skinny TV.

OLED technology, which also consumes less power than other displays, have been used in small screens such as those found on mobile phones, but Sony is now selling these 11-inch TVs in Japan and the US (Europe will be getting them soon). They cost $2,500 (£1,250) in the US.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

See where you're going in the dark

In-car technology has a strong presence at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, with one of the cavernous halls filled entirely with cars and related accessories. Much of the space is devoted to mine’s-bigger-than-yours stereo systems, with so much bass filling the room that it was hard to keep the camera steady for a photograph.

More usefully, though, a company called Flir offers drivers the chance to see where they’re going at night. Its PathFindIR thermal imaging equipment lets you see five times further than you could with headlights alone, according to the company.

The demo looks impressive, but given that video from the console is displayed on a console mounted in the dashboard, keeping an eye on the screen and an eye on the road could be distracting. The next step must be to combine the system with a heads-up display.

Without PathFindIr, left, and with it, right

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

Let your shoes do the walking

So you need to get to a meeting in a hurry, but you don’t want to arrive all hot and bothered from running. The answer, obviously, is a pair of motorised shoes, and fortunately just such a thing is made by iShoes. They have a top speed of 13.5 mph and cost $599 (£300) for the pair.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

SlingCatcher will beam web video to your TV

The company behind the SlingBox, which lets you watch live and recorded TV on your PC via an internet connection, has launched a sister device at CES, which sends video in the other direction.

The SlingCatcher will allow you to watch web-based video from sites such as the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4’s on-demand service or YouTube on a TV screen. Users will be able to draw a box around the part of the PC screen that they want to send to the TV, so that only the video will be seen, without the content that surrounds it.

The SlingCatcher will connect to the TV either wirelessly, or using one of several possible cables including HDMI. It will also be able to play video from a USB stick.

The device is designed to convert web video from a ‘lean forward’ experience, where the viewer sits at a desk and hunches over a screen, to a ‘lean back’ one, with the viewer placed more comfortably on a sofa.

The device will be available in the US in the second quarter of the year for $250 (£125). The gadget was supposed to be ready in time for Christmas, but the Blake Krikorian, the chairman and chief executive of Sling Media, said the project was delayed. "We have been spending a lot of time perfecting new technology that is vital to the SlingCatcher's user experience but sometimes these things take longer than expected."

The company also announced plans for a version of the SlingBox capable of handling high-definition video.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

Video glasses: the long transition from sci-fi to reality

Mobile TV is one of those technologies that’s been rattling around for a good few years without yet making much impact. The problem it always comes up against is that mobile gadgets are meant to be small, but screens have to be big enough for comfortable viewing.

Video glasses are one potential solution, and judging from the evidence on display at CES this year it won’t be long before they provide an inconspicuous, comfortable way of watching TV and DVD while on the go.

Previous attempts have generally been bulky, odd-looking and the picture size and quality has been little better than you would get from a mobile phone. The Lumus glasses pictured above are not exactly indistinguishable from standard shades, but you wouldn’t get laughed at on the train.

Where they really come into their own is with the picture size. Lumus has used a miniature projection system that beams the image onto the lens – unlike most of its rivals, which use small LCD screens. This fools the brain into thinking that the picture is being projected onto whatever is in the field of vision – turning my head towards the conference centre wall in the middle distance, I appeared to be looking at a 20m-tall screen. It’s quite disconcerting at first, but after a couple of minutes it felt natural and comfortable.

The glasses shown here are expected to go on sale towards the end of this year. The price will be in the $300-$500 range, but this will fall if mobile phone networks choose to subsidise them (as they do with handsets), to encourage the take-up of mobile TV.

Click here for full coverage of CES 2008 and here for a slideshow of images

Can Yoggie make online security sexy?

Yoggie, already the winner of a CES ‘best innovation’ award, has announced a hardware-based firewall to add to its line-up of distinctive security devices. The Firestick, pictured above, looks like a USB drive, but contains a 300MHz Linux-based computer dedicated to protecting your PC from attack.

It's one of the few security applications that you might buy for its looks alone, but under the sleek casing it's a serious piece of kit.

"It takes the protection outside your PC, and so it stops any attack before it even reaches your PC," Shlomo Touboul, the founder and chief executive of Yoggie, said. "Our mission is to put Pentagon-grade security on personal computers."

The Firestick, which has a recommended retail price of $119 (£60), is an entry-level product designed for people who have already signed up to antivirus packages. Yoggie also makes a comprehensive security package, the Pico, which includes 12 security programs including antivirus, antispyware, antispam and firewall applications.

Click here for a full review of the Yoggie Pico, which was named CES’s best innovation in the computer accessories category.

Bill Gates's home video

Bill Gates made a home video to lighten up his speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Being Gates, it wasn't your average home video.

Pretending to be a documentary about his last day at work at Microsoft and his efforts to find a new job, the bulti-zillionaire is shown toodling around the campus of the company HQ in Seattle in a humble Ford Focus, with a briefcase perched precariously on the roof, Mr Bean-style.

Inside the company gym, he does a bench press and asks his personal trainer: "Am I ready to take my shirt off?"

"Not yet," says the trainer, who is played by Hollywood heartthrob Matthew McConaughey.

Later, Gates is seen playing the music video game Guitar Hero, and talking to Bono on the phone about a career in rock.

"We're full up in the band. All positions are filled. I can't just replace The Edge because you got a high score on Guitar Hero," says Bono.

Gates thinks about politics but gets more setbacks as he is seen offering himself as a running mate to Hillary Clinton, Al Gore and Barack Obama. (So, probably not going to be voting Republican, then.)

Thwarted, he turns out the lights in his office, picks up the box full of his belongings and goes out to the car, placing the box on the car roof. Then he drives off, sending the box crashing to the ground.

The video ends with Brian Williams, the NBC news anchorman, complaining that he won't be able to report on Gates anymore, a man "too cheap to spend more than $7 for a haircut".

Interactive underpants at CES

If you think Facebook is an invasion of privacy, brace yourself for digitally networked underpants that warn wearers if they are getting dehydrated or unwell.

The underwear is designed for the elderly and incontinent, and is one of the more extreme examples of the mania for interconnected technology on display at this year’s CES tech fair.

A group of companies working together as the P2P Universal Computing Consortium, or PUCC, is showing off products and prototypes based around wireless connectivity between home electronics, which is one the big themes of this year’s show.

More mundane applications include the ability to control heating, lights and other devices remotely using a mobile phone, but the most intriguing is a set of health-monitoring equipment that feeds information to a central database.

The device has been designed with high-tech Japanese care homes in mind. Elderly residents – as well as hypochondriacs of all ages – can monitor their body temperature, blood pressure, pulse, ECG trace and, using an "automatic urine collector", the composition of their waste products.

The data would be collated automatically and the system would alert carers to any anomalies.

Although the products are not yet available commercially, Fumio Nagasaki, who works for Epson, one of the companies involved in the consortium, said that they soon would.

"It depends on the market demand and the marketing strategy," he said. "We know that we can make them and that some people would buy them, but we have to wait until the potential market is big enough."

Super Spam Me

Someone somewhere must be replying to spam e-mail, otherwise the spammers wouldn’t continue with their irksome trade. Internet security experts McAfee are aiming to recuit a team of volunteers to respond to every spam message they receive over a 30-day period. McAfee are calling this initiative 'Super Spam Me' in honour of Morgan Spurlock’s fast-food diet-umentary.

Greg Day, a security analyst at McAfee, said: "Many people are bothered by spam because of the impact it has on the amount of time they spend reading their e-mail. The experiment will contribute to a study of the potential dangers of responding to those 'great offers' which pop up in your inbox from completely unknown sources, usually scammers and cyber crooks. The project aims to highlight the scams and risks web users across the world are exposed to everyday and to understand the potential impact of internet junk mail."

Whether the effect of replying to countless offers for bootleg Viagra will prove quite as deleterious to the volunteers’ online health as the original experiment was to Mr Spurlock’s is uncertain. The spam-munching guinea pigs will receive £300 from McAfee, though, which they are free to spend on anything they like. Some nice fake Viagra perhaps?

It's a Small World, if you're rich enough

Social networks like Facebook and MySpace can be addictively entertaining places to find old friends, and stalk old enemies. One of the downsides, though, is the hazard of receiving a ‘friend request’ from someone you’ve never met or being on the receiving end of a shameless sales pitch from a distant acquaintance.

Imagine how magnified those irritations might be for social networkers who are wealthy or well known. For the same reason that successful people tend to frequent the same clubs in the real world, they are turning increasingly to niche networks with exacting membership requirements that filter out the kind of person who has failed to make the Sunday Times Rich List.

The largest and best-known of these communities is A Small World. It was founded in 2004, but with in the region of of 300,000 members it’s still comparatively small: One FaceBook group alone, "Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex", passed that figure this autumn. Size isn’t the issue though. For founder Erik Wachtmeister it’s all about the quality of experience:

“This community is characterized by inter-connected, well travelled, interesting, educated, and accomplished people who tend to seek each other out for company and as a resource for trusted information… It is in essence a Social Google, a high-end Zagat/Craigs List/Monster.com, and a real time Wikipedia rolled into one”

Because the community is invitation-only, it’s impossible for an outsider to take a look and see exactly what’s on offer. The seemingly limited growth potential didn’t put off savvy film producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein who have invested in the company. For the ultra-luxury brands that can afford to advertise on A Small World, it’s a rare opportunity to access a high concentration of web users with astronomically high disposable income. 

Membership is private, so the precise value of the Small World demographic is hard to assess. Like the VIP area of a hipper-than average nightclub there’s thought to be a mixture of A-list names, old money and rather decorative fashion models behind the velvet rope.

Certainly if you’re looking to sell your old Bugatti Veyron, or are looking for a private ski lodge in high season, you’re better off there than on MySpace. Strict rules are enforced though to ensure that the elite are not pestered with unrequited sales pitches.

It’s certainly an interesting concept. If you’re of a certain social class and find you have a couple of hours free to fool around on the internet, you really should ask your valet to log on to A Small World and see what’s there.

Quite the most splendid thing on the internet today

WordPerhect is an ingenious online word-processing tool that emulates the kind of thing you might write on in the real world - an old phone bill, a bit of cardboard, an expired tube pass.

Of no obvious utility, it serves only to demonstrate the quirky genius of the programmers: and isn't that what the internet is all about?

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.

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.

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.

Back from the summer break, Europeans get blogging

There's been a noticeable surge in traffic across Europe to the popular blog platforms Blogger, WordPress and Typepad, coinciding with the September back-to-school period, web measurement firm comScore reported on Tuesday. WordPress, the open-source blogging initiative, saw the biggest monthly gains across Europe. Pan-European traffic to the site was up 27 per cent month-on-month to 21.6 million Europeans.

Does this mean we should expect to see millions of new Euroblogs coming online, covering every facet of daily life?

Free mobile calls and text messages?

That's the idea behind a new partnership announced today between Skype and the mobile network 3. Announced in Milan and London this morning, the two firms have teamed up on a Skype Phone, a specially designed handset that allows users to bring free (when calling or texting Skype to Skype) Skype calls with them while they are on the go. The handset will be available at 3 shops in the coming days in nine countries including Britain, Ireland and Italy.

With 246 million users around the world, Skype has already become a major irritant to fixed-line telecoms operators, who have seen business and home users defect to cheap net-based telecoms services. In July, telecoms consultancy Mformation reported that 70 per cent of the businesses they surveyed in Britain, America and across Europe are making plans to institute some kind of internet-based service on their mobiles within the next two years. at the time, 27 per cent said they currently make cheap internet calls and SMS messages on their handsets.

Twittering the California wild fires

"Ok, no really... I'm heading to bed.... will start updates again in the morning.. fire seems to be slowing right now anyway."

And with these words, "nateritter", as his friends on Twitter know him, signed off after a rapid-fire, round-the-clock day of covering the raging Southern California wild fires.

And, a few hours later he was back again.

As with sex, computer games can be casual

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

The 'next big thing' in computer games has been officially identified and it's called 'casual gaming'. Partly because of innovations like the Nintendo Wii, which have made gaming accessible to a whole new audience who wouldn't traditionally have been considered gamers, and partly because of increasingly sophsticated mobile phones, more and more people are playing basic games. (The gaming industry likes to refer to these as having low production values. The 'mini-golf' common on mobile phones is a good example: it doesn't look great, but it's a happy distraction on the Tube.) During a session on the future of gaming, panelists said there was an enormous opportunity for publishers to capitalise on this audience, who didn't care so much about the traditional values of games - like sophisticated graphics - and played games because they were simple and convenient.

Unlike other web-based services where people connect with one another, like Facebook, there was good opportunity to try different revenue models such as subscription, contributors suggested. Trip Hawkins, a co-founders of Electronic Arts, one of the world's largest gaming companies, pointed to the example of Avapeeps - a'virtual dating' game, where players send virtual versions of themselves (avatars) into 'virtual watering holes' to make friends. "It took four days before players got in touch asking if they could have the real contact details of the people whose avatars they'd met in the game," he said.

Robert Kotick, chief executive of Activision, the company behind the popular air guitar game Guitar Hero, said: "It's true the bulk of our audience have been 16-35 year-old guys who can't get a date on Saturday night, but the number of people who want to have a short-term gaming experience is growing."

Fed up with your PC? Why not get a VC (virtual computer)?

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

G.ho.st is trying to solve a problem that is being flagged up more and more as users flock to web-based services like Facebook. Namely: how do you ease the hassle of logging in everywhere? One solution is so-called 'open ID', where websites work out a way to share login information so that a user can have a single sign-in for multiple sites.

G.ho.st is approaching the problem in a slightly a different way - by transferring the entire operating system of a computer onto the web. That way, a single login on any computer with a browser effectively opens up the entirety of the web and PC-based applications that a person regularly uses. All document management and storage, for instance, becomes web-based. Creating and writing documents happens via free web-based products, like Google Docs.

G.ho.st is effectively trying to make us move towards a world where the entirety of a computer's 'functions' occur on the web - a type of computing that is referred to in the industry as 'the cloud'. Zvi Schreiber, the company's founder, said: "For 30 years we've all worked with the assumption that everything has to exist on the computer, but these days a browser is all we need."

Does it come with a virtual parking space?

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

Property enthusiasts who like the idea of buying a home (even when they're not buying a home) can now play a fantasy real estate game, where they compete to buy pretend houses.'Realius' allows players to visit a range of virtual properties - each complete with a virtual 'view from the balcony' - and guess what they're worth. If they're the closest bidder, the property is theirs, and they can sell on, or acquire others.

The game is "built around real world events" - Sunday is 'open home day', for instance - and there's also a 'social' element, so people can liaise 'neighbours' about valuations. If the popularity of fantasy football is anything to go by, Realius may well inspire the next 'own a pretend empire' fetish. "People have an obsession with their homes," Chuck Teller, Realius's chief executive, said. "We thought: let's let people channel their real estate passion into a fun and social game." 

Paperbacks - print your own in your living room

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

Soon you will no longer need visit the book store - or Amazon - to buy a book: you'll be able to print one in your own home. HP, the world's largest printing company, said it intended to introduce a range of printers that would allow users to turn their home printer into a paperback production line - albeit on a small scale.

The head of the company's imaging and printing group said that having attacked the market for machines that print in the traditional fashion, HP would like to "get into glue". (Or 'finishing'. Or whatever word you use to describe how the pages of a book are stuck together. It used to be called binding.) HP already offers 'binding services' that can be used by home users - for instance that will pull together holiday photos - but the next step is to produce a homemade book that resembles what we're used to.

Ballmer: why Microsoft is like a 3-year old

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

Steve Ballmer, the larger-than-life chief executive of Microsoft, is not known for subtelty or understatement. But his description today of how Microsoft is playing catch-up in the search advertising market - long dominated by Google, the company's arch rival - reached new heights of enthusiasm.

Asked by the conference moderator whether, in the search market, Microsoft had behaved "a bit like 'little Johnny' who got smacked over the head by his parents," Mr Ballmer's reply, which credscendoed to a thunderous climax, went: "Oh yeah, we're like the 3-year-old who's just started playing basketball with the 12-year-olds, but we're catchin' up real quick, and soon little Johnny's gonna be dunkin' like the best of them!"

Apple to scrap premium pricing for DRM-free tracks

That didn't take long. Less than five months after Apple announced it would sell DRM-free tracks on iTunes at a premium, it's now saying it will abandon the more expensive pricing structure. In the coming days, iTunes will offer songs stripped of DRM at the same price as those with the restrictive copyright protections, Steve Jobs told today's Wall Street Journal, after Ars Technica broke the across-the-board pricing scoop.

The sudden announcement now has the hopeful wondering: is this finally the beginning of the end for DRM?

Is the iPhone packed with hazardous materials?

Could Apple's iPhone be hazardous to your health?  Greenpeace thinks so.

Missed the biology lecture? Fear not, there's YouTube

Having difficulty making that first period university lecture? Perhaps, in the not-too-distant future it won't matter. Lectures could be filmed and uploaded onto the web. This is the plan at University of California, Berkeley.

In what is being hailed as a first in academia, Cal Berkeley, a university with a reputation for revolutionary thinking, announced this week that it will begin putting hundreds of hours of class lectures on the video-sharing site YouTube. There are already 201 UC Berkeley videos on the site, ranging from an integrative biology lecture where the professor gets very friendly with a droopy skeleton to a guest lecture delivered by Google founder Sergey Brin in 2005. Physics, biology and chemistry will all be added during the course of the semester.

Gold MacBook Pro

If Apple’s impressively-specified, impressively-priced MacBook Pro just isn’t quite expensive enough for you fear not; a solution is at hand. Oregon-based case modification experts Computer Choppers have just announced that they will be offering a 24-carat gold plating service for the world-beating laptop for well-heeled customers later this year. The modification is expected to add something in the region of  £780 to the purchase price of a standard aluminium-skinned model.

For extra bling power buyers will be able to specify a diamond or sapphire-encrusted Apple logo although, keen as they are to avoid a stern letter from Apple's lawyers, Computer Choppers make it clear that they will be treating any request to modify or enhance the famous logo on a 'case-by-case basis'.

First Robot Air Attack Squadron ready for launch

Unmanned drone aircraft are no longer the stuff of science fiction and the US Air Force’s remotely-controlled Predator reconnaissance aircraft has been an increasingly familiar sight in combat zones since it was first deployed in 1995.

Now, though, the Predator has a bigger, more heavily armed brother about to take to the skies above Afghanistan

The MQ-9 Reaper is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and with a service ceiling of 50,000 feet. It is equipped with infra-red, laser and radar targeting, and can carry up to fourteen Hellfire anti-tank missiles. "The name Reaper captures the lethal nature of this new weapon system," Gen. T. Michael Moseley, Air Force chief of staff, when he announced the name last September.

The Reaper can remain in the air fully armed for 14 hours, patrolling an area and waiting for targets to be identified, while the two-man flight team sits at a video console some 7,000 miles away in Nevada

The drones are delivered in four-plane systems with command and control infrastructure at a cost of around $69m.

American ground troops can stream live video from the aircraft direct to their laptops in real time, giving them an unprecedented ability to reconnoitre enemy positions without breaking cover. " They want more and more of it," said Maj. Chris Snodgrass, commander of the Predator squadron at Balad air base in Iraq

Sixty Reapers and 160 Predators are to be organised into military aviation’s first UAV wing, the 432nd, which will be formally established on May 1. The exact numbers to be deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan will remain classified. The RAF will also take delivery of a four Reaper package for use in Afghanistan later this year, but these are expected to be the unarmed reconnaissance variant.

Study: mobile voice charges to fall, but our bills will climb

Thanks to EU heat and old fashioned competition, mobile voice charges are expected to keep falling over the next three years, leading to lower average revenue per customer from voice calls for mobile operators, a new study from tech consultants at Analysys predicts. But it's not all good news for price-conscious mobile users. New services such as mobile internet will be too tempting for consumers to pass up, raising overall average bills for Western Europeans by 10.2 per cent between now and 2012, Analysys says.

Rumour vs reality: the iPod touch is born

After all the hype and expectation, Apple's sixth-generation iPod is finally among us. Some of the rumours proved true, others less so:

Widescreen: check
Touchscreen: check
Wi-fi enabled: check
Web browser: check
120GB memory: no, far from it. The maximum is 16GB (but the iPod classic has been boosted to 160GB)
Internet radio: no

The new iPod is also the most tangible evidence to date of the tech industry's big c-word, convergence. Easily be mistaken for the iPhone, the iPod touch also shares many of its features. It's not hard to see these two product lines merging in the not-too-distant future.

Memory remains the weak point of both devices, preventing either from taking the place of the original iPod line, but that is likely to change. The first iPod arrived in October 2001 with a capacity of 5GB, which had been quadrupled nine months later.

Did China hack the Pentagon?

Did the Chinese succeed in hacking the Pentagon? This is the big question hovering around the tech world today following a report in the Financial Times quoting "senior US officials" as saying the Chinese military was behind an extensive hack attack in June on the Department of Defence computer network. It's fairly clear the attack was not the work of script kiddies or gangster fraudsters. The attackers succeeded in disabling part of the network that serves the office of Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary. At the time, Mr Gates downplayed the attack, saying the Pentagon gets attacked all the time. He also revealed he's not very tech savvy, not a comforting revelation for defence hawks.

A rare victory in the spam wars as PDF spam falters

Some promising news on the spam front that no doubt none of you had noticed: spammers evidently have all but given up on the once highly effective gimmick of sending their love cures and get-rich-quick missives via PDF. According to security specialists at Sophos, spam messages sent as a PDF attachment has dropped off the charts in recent weeks. PDF spam had accounted for as much as 30 per cent of all spam at its height earlier this month. Now, it is nearly zero, Sophos reports.

UK web use hits all-time high in July

Another high-water mark for the UK last month. The number of Britons online reached its highest ever level in July with 31.8 million unique visitors flocking to the net, many in search of last-minute holidays in the sun, from the looks of it. The summer season usually sees a lull in net usage. Not so in 2007, the year summer never arrived.

Germans aim to build laptop powered by body heat

Face it, batteries just aren't very reliable, I type with gritted teeth as I spy the rapidly dwindling battery power indicator on my MacBook. And, as we learned recently, lithium-ion batteries have a tendency to overheat, triggering expensive recalls from Nokia and Sony in the past year. Perhaps the researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute, the same group that brought us the MP3 audio format, have found a solution: a new method of drawing electrical current from our body heat that could some day power laptops, mobile phones and gadgets.

As workplace e-mail overtakes the phone, is office interaction doomed?

E-mail has surpassed the telephone as the most popular workplace communications tool, NetworkWorld reports, citing a new Datamonitor/Dimension Data survey. That probably comes as no surprise, unless you're a chief exec who has the secretary "handle all the e-mail". What is a bit of a surprise is how e-mail has become the overwhelming tool of choice, suggesting that in the workplace of the future we'll have less face-to-face and over-the-phone interactions with our colleagues than we do today. The researchers regard this as a worrying development.

Microsoft pipped in Beijing Olympic race?

Some confusion this week about whether the organisers of the Beijing Olympics had taken a swipe at Microsoft, or not.

Reports surfaced in the past couple of days that Lenovo, an official supplier to the Beijing Olympics, was to ship the majority of its computers to the games with XP, rather than Vista, installed.

This - the chairman of Lenovo, Yang Yuanqing, suggested, in remarks that were taken slightly out of context - was because the Olympics needed stable technologies and "if it's not stable, it could have some problems."

Implication: Vista was unstable.

Cue a series of rather unflattering (for Microsoft) headlines, including 'Unstable Vista Dumped for Olympics', 'Windows Vista Snubbed by Olympics organisers', 'Vista loses Olympics race', and, perhaps the most inspired, '2008 Olympics to run on XP'.

The environmental cost of chat sessions and the paperless office

The rise of the paperless office, online banking, VOIP calls and e-commerce is not as green as you might think. The demand for electronic services is creating a boom in the construction of data centres to store and process these digital details on countless computer servers, and the need to keep these server farms cool and always-on is having a noticeable effect on the power grid.

According to a recent report by America's Environmental Protection Agency, America's data centres require more power than all the television sets in the 50 states, combined. Put another way, the energy consumed is equivalent to 5.8 million homes – that's a lot of Amazon orders and Skype chat sessions. Put in monetary terms, it's $4.5 billion (£2.2 billion) worth of electricity consumption per annum, says Greenbang.com.

Is fixed-line telephone service doomed?

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

Chinese iPhone runs Windows...

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

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

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

Encylopaedia Britannica is wrong, and Wikipedia can prove it

The ongoing debate over which is more reliable – Encyclopaedia Britannica or Wikipedia – is sure to turn more volatile now that Wikipedia has published a full page entry