Jul 31st, 2009 - There has been a lot of comment in the past on Gary McKinnon and his hacking into US military computers. Readers might understand that some of the comment in the UK has been about how he should have been tried over here, there's no need to extradite him and if America's military systems are such... (Read More)

Jul 6th, 2009 - Facebook's page on which the location of the head of MI6's flat was available has been taken down. You also can no longer find information about his family and their whereabouts, which you could on the site previously. There has been a debate about this, of course. For Americans who aren't sure,... (Read More)

Jul 1st, 2009 - Security stories abound on the Internet, and as we enter a new month an old one has resurfaced. There are legal questions over the Sarah Palin hacking event last year. Graham Cluley has blogged about it. For me he's buried the main point right at the end of the story. I don't want to seem... (Read More)

Jun 25th, 2009 - You might have seen the announcement yesterday that Microsoft is going to start offering free antivirus protection to its customers. The initial reaction is no doubt going to be reasonably positive, and speaking as someone with a family member who's been hit by a computer virus fairly recently, the... (Read More)

May 29th, 2009 - This is a good idea. Not for the first time the American President is keeping his earlier word. This time he is appointing a Cyber Tsar. This, it strikes me, is an excellent idea. In the UK we have a data protection commission and a commissioner in charge of that. It's important and it... (Read More)

Apr 28th, 2009 - On the day that the annual Infosec show starts in the UK we have a call for a Euro cyber security tsar. I was surprised at this. In many ways it's the perpetuation of all that I feel is bad about security management. A handful of readers might have heard me on BBC Radio London this morning... (Read More)

Apr 27th, 2009 - I had a call this morning asking me to go on the radio tomorrow morning. It was from BBC London and I'll be on at 7.20am UK time, thanks for asking - discussing this story about the terrorist Cyberthreat to the 2012 Olympics. The man suggesting there is such a threat is David Blunkett, formerly... (Read More)

Jul 24th, 2009 - An interesting story on the BBC site says there's yet another search facility starting up, following the launch of Bing, Wolfram Alpha and Google wave. This one's called Splashtop and the idea is that you can be searching the Net withing seconds of switching on. In other words, it's a bit faster... (Read More)

Jul 10th, 2009 - Google is making it much simpler to work out which photos you're allowed to use for what, and which you aren't. The company is allowing people to search for pictures and you can filter by what's available for reuse, what's available for reuse without modification and so on. It's using the Creative... (Read More)

Jun 26th, 2009 - I hate bloggers and Twitter users that bandwagon something like the tragically early demise of Michael Jackson. This isn't the right platform for tributes even if I were his biggest fan anyway. Nonetheless, there is a lesson to be noted in terms of technology. The fact is that the Internet had... (Read More)

Mar 20th, 2009 - This has started earlier than I expected. American readers will be quite used to the idea that in many areas if you go to Google Maps you'll find pictures of the street as well as maps. Personally I think this is a good thing; only two days ago I was heading to a meeting, I had the address but the... (Read More)

Jul 20th, 2009 - Kazaa has decided to join Pirate Bay in becoming a legal peer to peer service. This raises interesting questions for moralistic pedants like me. The full details of the story are here but that's not what I want to discuss. I'm more interested in what sort of message it sends out when people... (Read More)

May 27th, 2009 - Yet another report suggests that marriages are splitting up and people are blaming the Internet or Cyberspace for their real-life troubles. There's an account on British newspaper the Guardian's website here, at the end of which there is a reasonably comprehensive listing of actual incidents... (Read More)

May 21st, 2009 - It must be about 15 years since I was standing on a boat in Los Angeles at a press party, talking to a computer executive from the States. I don't remember his name; he'd had a couple of drinks by that time and there were a few people from the European press around. "We operate in Europe," he... (Read More)

May 19th, 2009 - I've been reading about VNUNet's choice of the top ten most disappointing technologies - stuff that really didn't deliver. I'm sitting here typing with a wireless keyboard and mouse talking to my Mac by Bluetooth stunned that they chose Bluetooth as one of them, and enough Linux addicts have... (Read More)

Apr 1st, 2009 - This is going to be a high-risk blog entry, I know. But I'm in the UK, it's 1 April at eight minutes past ten in the morning and so far we've had no reports of mass outbreaks of the Conficker virus. The BBC was suggesting it was all overblown in a report yesterday. This is actually quite... (Read More)

Mar 23rd, 2009 - This is excellent. A map of Britain in which the forthcoming extra-fast Internet is highlighted. It's here on the Guardian website. A number of things become clear from this. First, unsurprisingly, there's a lot of concentration around London and Manchester, with Edinburgh getting a respectable... (Read More)

Jul 8th, 2009 - Google has confirmed that it is working on an operating system called Chrome. It will be a rival to Microsoft Windows, a zillion flavours of Linux, the Apple operating system and any other minority systems of which you might be aware. A lot has been said across the web about how this will affect... (Read More)

Mar 26th, 2009 - It's not the users for whom I feel sorry. Yes, they'll have to learn a bit more about how they're going to interact with - sorry, use - their computers when multitouch comes into significant amounts of hardware with Windows 7.0, but if it's as easy and intuitive as some of the phones on the market... (Read More)

Jul 2nd, 2009 - Twitter has been in the headlines again. You can now pay a company to find potential followers, approach them and ask them to follow you and it's apparently a very innovative approach. It must be, that's why the BBC thought it newsworthy. Actually I'm not so sure. I think I've seen things like... (Read More)

Jun 29th, 2009 - This just has to be one of the best pieces of news ever - there is agreement for a standard for mobile phones. It's really as simple as that. Here's the story, on the BBC's junior site, would you believe. I just can't work out why it has to be mobile phones only, though. Of course there are... (Read More)

Jun 24th, 2009 - There's a new campaign on Twitter about fixing Microsoft's flagship email program, Outlook. Outlook 2010 will be coming out next year (just say if I'm going too quickly) and it renders emails oddly if they're in HTML. There are details here. Let's ignore the fact that the Fixoutlook page is one... (Read More)

Jun 22nd, 2009 - I've been doing a lot on social networking lately, mostly because of the book I've been writing on the subject. Social media is a real market-changer. Something else that's been happening quietly and in the background is the emergence of games as a serious computing application. A new study says... (Read More)

Mar 31st, 2009 - I wasn't surprised to read that the Apple iTunes store had been hacked. It was just a matter of time. I was even less surprised to see that the applications were a prime target for the hackers and pirates. I can see that peer to peer networks and illegal downloads will be appealing to some iPhone... (Read More)

Jun 18th, 2009 - Twitter was all a-twitter overnight (UK time) about the iPhone version 3.0 software upgrade. It was falling over, people weren't able to download, it was agony and then it wasn't working apparently. I hope you don't enjoy reading that sort of stuff. I'm not able to write it, you see; it works here,... (Read More)

Jun 9th, 2009 - I have to confess my initial reaction was the same as that of Daniweb colleague Bill Andad; the lack of a coherent upgrade path for the new iPhone 3G S is some sort of idiocy by UK operator 02. But then I got to thinking. And it's not. It's unfortunate and I wish they'd change their minds, but I... (Read More)

May 5th, 2009 - So I get up to work first day after a hard time relaxing over the public holiday weekend and guess what - the web's full of rumours that Apple is about to swoop and buy Twitter. The value being put on the deal by anyone wanting to tout the story is $700 million. This is my first sanity check on... (Read More)

Apr 2nd, 2009 - Sometimes someone you'd written off surprises you. Take Palm, for example. My first ever hand-held computer was a Palm - or PalmPilot as they were called then. So was my second, and my third. I really, really liked them. Then things moved on a little, or indeed a lot. Compaq entered the fray... (Read More)

Jun 16th, 2009 - Now here's a thing. The web browser Opera is coming out in a new version, Opera Unite, and it's going to let you host all the music, photos and social media you want. On your own computer. Here's the Reuters report. Initially I can see this will look like a good idea. In the right (as in... (Read More)

Apr 22nd, 2009 - For American readers this is probably a bit of an ordinary day - you go about your business and there's every chance that when you wake up tomorrow things will be much the same as they were when you woke up today. In the UK that's not the case. In the UK the chancellor of the exchequer (the head of... (Read More)

Jun 15th, 2009 - I think I must be turning into some sort of freak (fill in the kneejerk comment of your choice at the end of this blog, there are plenty to choose from). I've just read this interesting story that says Google is going to launch a microblogging search engine. It's here. You're going to be able to... (Read More)

May 18th, 2009 - First let's deal with the big negative I've seen on a number of websites including the BBC: Wolfram Alpha is American-centric. Well, yes, it kind of is. This will be because it's starting up and America is the biggest market it has to serve. Personally I find that understandable - presumably others... (Read More)

Apr 30th, 2009 - A new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has gone into public beta. I say search engine but it's not quite that; it's a new concept that takes a question asked by the user, goes and has a look online and offers a proper answer in return rather than a series of web links. The BBC's coverage is here. I... (Read More)

May 28th, 2009 - Twitter has struck again according to reports. The German elections had their results leaked online, both on Twitter and over the open Internet. In the same week that the UK heard that it was going to have insufficient broadband bandwidth to meet the needs of the Digital Britain initiative, critics... (Read More)

May 27th, 2009 - Is this the beginning of a backlash? It looks as though there's some research out there to suggest that the over-55s are starting to desert Facebook. There could be a number of reasons for this. The best guesses I've seen mostly involve money. This time last year you might recall there was a... (Read More)

Apr 17th, 2009 - This is going to be important - although some lawyers are saying it's not going to stick outside Sweden. The Pirate Bay people, who aren't so much advocates of Internet file swapping as proud boasters of their activities in it (the clue is in the name), are going to jail. There's a video report... (Read More)

May 12th, 2009 - Jonathan Ive (there, I bet you thought the headline was a typo) is not as famous as perhaps he ought to be. Next to Steve Jobs he has been responsible for turning the Apple brand around, making it desirable again, chiefly by designing the iPod, the first eMacs and substantial amounts of iMacs so... (Read More)

May 4th, 2009 - The UK Government's communications agency GCHQ has issued a rare statement saying it has no plans to monitor every individual's emails. Instead, the Home Secretary says we should all be ready to have our ISPs record all our Internet contacts. I've met a few ISPs. They're going to be delighted, nay,... (Read More)

Apr 20th, 2009 - It's probably a little early to be looking for implications of Oracle buying Sun (no, it's official, here's the press release). They've only just confirmed it's happening, and as one of the journalists who covered Novell buying Lotus many years ago I can confirm things aren't done until they're... (Read More)

Apr 16th, 2009 - The Twitter controversy rages on, by the looks of things. In the UK the latest influencer to condemn the micro blogging service is one Matthew Gwyther, who edits Management Today, one of our major management sites. He's written about how useless the service is because, among other things, you... (Read More)