Posts by newsguy

We already know that the US military has embraced the social networking concept, and that Twitter accounts are becoming valuable commodities, now it looks like the advertising industry is throwing money at Facebook in terms of spend - and doing so at the expense of Google.

New Media Age is running an interesting cover story this week, suggesting that Facebook is challenging Google in terms of direct response advertising spend. This comes as advertising agencies have started to notice a trend with spending power shifting away from channels such as paid search. Certainly there seems to be no shortage of brands which are looking to embrace social networking as an avenue for advertising reach, and Facebook is without doubt the daddy of the social networks right now. The fact that it opened up its API for advertising agencies last year won't have hurt any either, allowing the agencies to have some granularity of control over campaign creation and management. Oh, and the new sampling ad format being rolled out this week helps as well.

New Media Age claims that a "shift in spend favouring Facebook over Google could threaten the search giant’s dominance over online ad spend" and Matt Simpson, chair of the IPA Digital Group, told the publication that "the idea of having so many people’s data in one place and being able to test on so many variables is compelling. In 2010 Facebook is likely to become the second biggest …

The long awaited unveiling of the latest Microsoft mobile phone OS is happening as I type in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress. Twitter is all excited, as you might imagine, with tech journalists and gadget watchers alike swooning over the flashy new additions which would seem to suggest that Microsoft has finally arrived in right place as far as mobile phones are concerned. However, just as many people would appear to be asking the rather pertinent question: does it matter any more? After all, with BlackBerry, Android and Apple already well entrenched it does seem to be a little late to be getting all excited over the Microsoft offering.

Talking of which, just what is it that Microsoft is offering. Forgive me for being brief, but consider this the clip-notes version with more in-depth analysis coming later at DaniWeb from our staff writer team. There's a 'Live Tiles' interface which is being described as putting super-icons on the home screen which connect to the Internet and pull data from disparate feeds such as email, social networking, calendars and photo sharing services according to Joe Belfiore, the Microsoft executive introducing Windows Mobile 7 Series in Barcelona today.

Then there is the X-Box Live integration, although I am not as yet sure exactly how this will work it would appear that Microsoft is intending there to be a level of integration between X-Box Live games and your mobile phone handset. More interestingly, especially from the 'is Microsoft too late' …

There are many interesting new products that get released to the masses at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but few of them are as cheap as the Vodafone 150. Being dubbed the most affordable ultra low cost handset from Vodafone ever, the 150 is intended for those emerging markets where low cost devices can have the most significant and positive of social impacts, namely India, Turkey and across Africa. The intention being to enable millions of people in these markets to have the opportunity of sharing in the benefits of mobile technology for the very first time.

And how low cost is low cost? In the case of the Vodafone 150 I am told it will "retail unsubsidised at below $15" which is, by any metric, pretty damn low. Of course, low cost handsets are nothing new to the developed markets of the West where more often than not the networks make their money from the contracts which tie customers in for 18 months or more and the handsets come for free. But things are very different in these emerging markets where a different approach is needed. Some might argue that low cost handsets alone are not enough, and Vodafone has taken that on board. It reckons that to maximise the availability of the handsets in areas with sizeable and isolated rural populations, the launches will be supported by an extensive logistics infrastructure, reaching deep rural segments where mobile penetration typically remains low. In India, it is expected …

According to the latest State of Spam and Phishing report from Symantec, a truly astonishing 92% of all adult phishing scams are being conducted across social networking sites. This coincides with a newly identified trend of adult oriented phishing whereby users are being tempted to enter personal credentials in exchange for the promise of free porn. A new trend using a very old premise, it would seem, as I recall the same 'free porn' promise being made over the years with scams ranging from Trojan Porn Diallers to drive by malware delivery. Indeed, the new trend is very similar to those attack vectors of old when you look at the payload: users are directed to a porn site which in turn leads to fake antivirus sites (most often using the pop-up alert trick) which contain malicious code. Most of the phishing sites involved have been created using free web hosting services.

Symantec warns that both scam and phishing categories have doubled as a percentage of all spam in January 2010 compared to December 2009. Even good old 419-Nigerian spam has had something of a resurrection with this particular type of scam accounting for 21% of all spam - the highest level recorded since Symantec started publishing its report.

Software from boffins who used to work at the Space Technology Centre at the University of Dundee promises to reveal secrets of legacy code.

Founded in September 2009, Rapid Quality Systems is a software development outfit that was 'spun out' of the Dundee University Space Technology Centre, and is still based in the University business incubator. Now it is about to release it's first product, Code Rocket, which promises to make the development and analysis of complex computing code a whole lot easier.

Working with Visual Studio .NET (2005, 2008 and 2010 versions) Code Rocket reveals the inner workings of C#, Java and C/C++ code by interactively exploring the structure of legacy programs and allowing developers to visualise the underlying algorithms and find the meaning behind the code. It has been described by some as being akin to a software x-ray machine for your code. Think of it as slicing through obscure code and by so doing making documentation pretty simple, even automatic within a continuous integration system, and all without any instrumentation of that code.

By providing this interactive visualisation of the code as it is being developed, coders can work in any view, text, diagram or pseudocode while each view remains synchronized in real time. Rapid Quality Systems claims this frees developers "from working within the confines of a language" and allows them "to develop the underlying algorithm by taking a higher level view of the work at hand".

Chief …

Bjorn Olstad, a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of FAST, has revealed that beyond 2010 there will be no more Microsoft FAST enterprise search products which support Linux and UNIX search cores.

In an official Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog posting, Olstad states that although when Microsoft acquired FAST two years ago there was a commitment to "cross-platform innovation" and that stand-alone versions of ESP that run on Linux and UNIX would continue to be offered, the days of the cross-platform search core are numbered. "With our 2010 products scheduled for release in a few months, we’ve just started to plan for our next wave of products" Olstad says, adding "As a part of that planning process, we have decided that in order to deliver more innovation per release in the future, the 2010 products will be the last to include a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX".

Olstad makes it clear that the search solutions will continue to crawl and index content stored on Linux and UNIX systems, and that the UI controls will work with UI frameworks regardless of the operating system. He also points out that there will be support for the cross-platform search core in the 2010 products (ESP 5.3) for the next 10 years part of the standard support policy covering 5 years mainstream support and 5 years extended support.

But there is no doubting that it is the end of an era, and one that many industry …

Wow! That's a lot of display-ad sales. Google is expected to generate $1 billion in sales this year from display advertising. Although that's only a meagre 4% or so of the total Google sales expected in 2010, it's still a pretty stellar performance given the overall state of the online advertising market and the difficulties many are facing in selling such advertising space.

According to an article in Bloomberg Business Week part of the Google success can be laid firmly at the door of acquisitions back in 2005 and 2007. First Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion followed by DoubleClick for $3.1 million. Sure, display-ad revenue is never likely to rival search related ads but the demand for marketing messages in video clips and web banners is certainly on the rise. Actually scrap that, demand for marketing messages in video clips is certainly on the rise and expected by some analysts to account for around $700 million of that predicted $1 billion revenue.

Which begs the question, where is your online advertising budget being directed this year? Search ads, banner ads or video related display ads?

Ryanair has lost almost 60% of its visibility online since September 2009, according to search marketing agency Greenlight which has just published its research. The report, Flights Sector Report – Issue 4, analysed key search terms used by UK consumers looking on the Internet for a flight and profiles search behaviour, assesses which brands, aggregators and websites are the most visible in natural and paid search results, and hence have the greatest share of consideration when UK-based searchers go to Google to look for flights. The report is based on search volumes for the last quarter, with a focus on December to give a more in-depth analysis.

Greenlight identified more than of the most commonly used search terms, cumulatively delivering more than 28 million searches for flight-related terms in December 2009. The research determined the best positioned, and hence most visible websites, in the flights sector based on the volumes for each keyword.

The term ‘Flight’ accounted for 59% of all flight-related searches. Short-haul destinations, largely within Europe, accounted for almost 5.3 million searches in December with queries for flights to Palma and Rome cumulatively accounting for 16%. Long haul flight search volumes meanwhile fell 43% since September although when compared to domestic and short haul, they decreased the least. New York, Bangkok and Australia were the most popular destinations.

But when you look at the online flight brands things get really interesting. Ryanair held fourth position in the visibility stakes in Q3 2009, but …

As Safer Internet Day comes to a close, one expert in the field warns that there can be no safety without security. John Colley is managing director of (ISC)2, a non profit organisation which runs a program helping volunteers visit schools, clubs and parent evenings. They also support council appointed e-safety officers in their efforts to promote Internet Safety and Security. He says, "We must realise that it is the young people that continue to use the internet in new ways and take risks in a world where their parents and teachers are ill-equipped to guide them. Children are only just beginning to understand how to protect themselves online".

Colley suggests that it is important that kids receive guidance on security online as well as safety, since they have little understanding of how their actions present risks for themselves, friends, family or even the work place.

Findings from (ISC)2 classroom sessions revealed:

• 85% of over 750 kids in one school said they had personal computers in their bedrooms, with 75% of them admitting to being online after 11 pm on a school night.
  
• About half the children visited by volunteers admit to using peer to peer networks to download music illegally, allowing the accidental download of malware to present a much more prolific risk than paedophilia, affecting both the schools’ systems and parents’ work systems as well as the personal information kids are counselled to keep safe.
  
• Children share their parents home or …

According to a recent Kaspersky security research report, stolen Twitter accounts are being sold on the black market for as much as $1000 a time. This really should not come as any great surprise given that the rapid evolution of social media mirrors the rapid evolution of cybercrime.

The price of a file of user credentials, or a dump if you want the hacker vernacular, depends greatly on the Internet service where it can be used, says Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer with data security specialist Imperva.

"Just five years ago, the illegal trade in credit card details was a rising problem for the financial services industry, as well as their customers, with platinum and corporate cards being highly prized by the fraudsters" Shulman told us, adding "Today, however, there are reports of Twitter credentials changing hands for up to $1,000 owing to the revenue generation that is possible from a Web 2.0 services account. This confirms our observations that credentials can fetch a high sum according to both the popularity of the application, and the `popularity' of the account in question".

Indeed, with the going rate of a stolen Hotmail account being a paltry $1.50 yet a Gmail account selling for an average of $80, the proof would appear to be in the eating of this particular criminal pudding. "As a service, Hotmail has fallen out of favour of serious Internet users" Shulman explains "while Gmail's all-round flexibility …

Recently I reported how the US military is using a Facebook-alike social networking system, and now I can follow that up with a Facebook makes love not war message. But it's not quite the good news it seems. Tony Blair has not decided to post a big 'I'm Sorry' message on his Facebook Wall. In fact, it appears that the lovers in this story are of the cheating variety.

If you have ever been tempted to cheat on a loved one, and thought that hooking up via Facebook would maybe be a 'safe' way to conduct such an illicit relationship you would certainly not be alone. At least if the research from an extra-marital dating site is to be believed that is. Of the 800 members of the IllicitEncounters site asked about being caught out, some 41% admitted that they had and that Facebook was directly involved. This comes on the back of statistics from an online divorce service in the US which has revealed that 20% of the divorce petitions held in its database included the keyword of Facebook.

Of course, despite the Facebook fuss the truth is that far more people will be caught out in a relationship lie by using their mobile phones, specifically text messaging. Apparently 61% of those surveyed by IllicitEncounters admitted that a text message had either incriminated them or aroused suspicion with their spouse.

Spokesperson for IllicitEncounters, Sara Hartley, says that while "text messages may more …

Given all the media excitement that Apple can generate with the mere mention of a new 'i' product such as the new iPad, you might think that the iPod would kick television ass in terms of SEO. But hold your horses, according to UK search marketing agency Greenlight, it's the other way around. In the newly published 'Brown Goods Sector Report' (and oh boy does that sound like an exciting read - irony detected, irony detected) Greenlight reveals that televisions were the most searched for entertainment product online at the end of last year.

It reckons that in November 2009 the number of UK consumer searches for brown goods overall exceeded 20 million, that equates to a jump of almost 5 million on the previous monthly figures and an increase of 7 million compared to the September total. In order to gauge audience size and a profile of how UK Google users went about their search for brown goods, Greenlight used industry data to classify 940 keywords of the most popular search terms and totalled the number of times each one was used. The report was based on search volumes for the last quarter, with a focus on November to give a more in-depth analysis.

Accounting for over a third of November’s searches, the entertainment products comprising MP3 players, personal video players, audio and iPod products, together with brand terms such as Logitech and Apple, were the most popular. Combined, they accounted …

I have a lot of passwords to get me onto various online sites and services, but I only need to remember one: the complex and hard to crack one that unlocks my encrypted password store. Not everyone is as paranoid as I am it seems, and many fall neatly into the dumbass category if a recent analysis of 32 million consumer passwords is anything to go by.

A data security company called Imperva undertook a detailed analysis of breached consumer passwords, and the very fact that they ended up in the 32 million breached passwords database suggests that they were not brilliant to start with. However, to climb to the very top of that list by way of being the most 'popular' and hence most commonly cracked is a true measure of dumbassness.

And so, without further ado, are the top ten most commonly used dumbass passwords to be avoided when signing up for social networking or e-commerce sites:

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

“Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today’s world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second—or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes,” explained Imperva’s CTO Amichai Shulman. “The data provides a unique glimpse into the way that users select passwords and an opportunity to evaluate the true strength of passwords as a security mechanism. Never before has there …

Another day, another IE flaw! Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the Internet Explorer water (mainly as Microsoft told you it was after releasing yet another patch to fix yet another vulnerability) comes the news that actually, would you believe it, but Internet Explorer still isn't safe.

According to Jorge Luis Alvarez Medina, a security consultant at Core Security Technologies, who will reveal all at the Washington Black Hat conference next month the Microsoft browser is at risk to not one serious hole but rather a set of minor vulnerabilities that can linked together to exploit remote access to your data.

Microsoft has not been available for comment on the matter, although I'm guessing that will change as the brown stuff hits the fan in the coming days. I commented recently on how to activate God Mode for Windows 7 but maybe what we really need is a God Mode for browsing. Ah yes, I have it and it's called using Firefox, or Chrome or pretty much anything other than Internet Explorer right now.

Especially when, according to respected British journalist Jack Schofield of The Guardian, Microsoft apparently knew about the IE vulnerability it has just patched way back in September 2009. Sigh.

The US military is apparently making good use of a secure Facebook-like system for networking which already has hundreds of user groups and thousands of members. Known as "milBook" the system has been embraced by the Department of Defense for the way it can open up safer avenues of communications amongst personnel. Previously, the department lacked a medium for employees to share official and sometimes sensitive information. MilBook provides several options for users who wish to share information with specific individuals. By creating discussion threads, they can exchange ideas among specific, self-created groups on topics such as Army policies.

"The milSuite application allows the professional ‘DOD’ community to share information amongst themselves that is only intended for the internal community" said Justin Filler, deputy director of the MilTech Solutions Office, an Army organization. MilBook, which has reached 18,000 users since its inception in October 2009, is part of a suite of tools known as milSuite that also includes a blog and wiki.

"These technologies help those working on similar projects across ‘DoD’ to connect, share information, incubate new ideas, and help build the ‘DoD's’ body of knowledge and expertise, while generating organizational learning" said Todd Miller, an Army contractor. "People across the DoD can find professional working groups on various programs and efforts and join within seconds" Miller adds, "MilBook not only connects people, it connects those people to military topics so that ideas and information are shared across the Armed Services".

MilBook is also an effective …

The business world might still be struggling to shake off the recession but one sector has been enjoying truly extraordinary growth: the search market. What's more, according to digital metrics specialist comScore, one company has dominated this booming marketplace and unsurprisingly it is called Google.

Of the 131 billion searches conducted around the globe during the month of December, an astonishing 87.8 billion of them (or 66.8 percent of the global search market if you prefer) were made using Google. And not all of them were searching for sex or long lost messages.

Google owned sites enjoyed a 58% increase in search query volume over the past year while Yahoo! was up 13% globally and Chinese search engine Baidu made it into third place with a 7% jump. Microsoft, however, had the greatest gains among the top five search properties, jumping some 70% to 4.1 billion searches, mainly thanks to the success of Bing.

The comScore study also revealed that the United States is the biggest search market worldwide with 22.7 billion searches, which equates to around 17% of all global searches. Despite ongoing Google related problems, China is second with 13.3 billion searches, followed by Japan with 9.2 billion and the U.K. with 6.2 billion. Russia, though, made the biggest gains within the top ten markets with 92% growth to 3.3 billion.

Overall, the total worldwide search market saw enjoyed a 46% increase in the …

I am old enough to remember the Westworld movie which starred Yul Brynner as a malfunctioning robot cowboy. It also featured sex robots, androids which allowed paying punters to indulge their every sexual fantasy. Of course, Westworld was a big hit in 1973 and I guess it was only ever going to be a matter of time until that fantasy became a technological reality. Some 27 years on and the world's first sex robot has made an appearance in Las Vegas at, perhaps somewhat fittingly, the recent AVN Adult Entertainment Expo.

The Roxxxy TrueCompanion is said to be more than just an advanced 'blow up doll' which, considering it will cost you upwards of $7000 plus a monthly subscription fee is just as well. How much more advanced? Well the manufacturers claim that it comes complete with a programmable artificial intelligence engine which can learn just what turns you on and off. Advanced as in it is five girlfriends, although that is probably the wrong word, in one. According to the manufacturers the robot comes with the five personalities built in, be it Mature Martha or Wild Wendy that you want. It's even possible to create your own custom girlfriend profiles and, should you so desire, swap them with your other sad sex robot owning mates.

The man behind Roxxxy, if you'll excuse the expression, is a former AT&T Bells Labs AI scientist called Douglas Hines who spent more than two years bringing this fantasy android idea to …

For anyone who doubted that the iPhone was to be taken seriously as a games platform, and there have been many, the release today of Grand Theft Auto as an iPhone app should seal the deal that the iPhone is the real thing as far as being a games console is concerned.

OK, it is only the 'Chinatown Wars' version of the game, which has already been out on Nintendo DS and got a pretty luke-warm reception from fans of the full on GTA console game. But, despite the limitations of the platform and the distinctly retro top down look and feel of the thing, it is still GTA on a damn phone! It still manages to look really cool, and play really well. How incredible is that?

Probably not as incredible as the price point. Here in the UK the App Store is asking £5.99 for the game, while in the US it is $9.99 and that's rather important as it means that a proper big boys game has broken the ten bucks barrier. If it's going to stand a chance of making a real impact in terms of sales then a game has to be below ten dollars.

Sure, it may not appeal to your average gamer but perhaps that is not the target market for Rockstar. I reckon they are going for the occasional gamer market as well as (and I know I am stating the …

I ask because according to the latest data, there would seem to be an increasing number of working pirates around these days. The trouble is that they can be hard to spot as they do not tend to go for the Captain Jack look nor sport a long beard, come missing a leg or complete with a parrot. However, according to web security specialist ScanSafe, there has been a 55% increase in employees attempting to download illegal software and MP3s in the workplace over the last three months, so they are obviously out there and quite possibly in your office.

ScanSafe processes data for millions of employees across 100 countries to enable it to gain significant insight into the latest web traffic and malware trends, which is why this corporate piracy increase is so worrying. We all know that the death of piracy is about as likely as the death of porn, and the threat of major lawsuits have little real impact despite some well publicised success stories, but that doesn't mean it should just be accepted in the workplace.

"Employees mistakenly assume they can use the Internet at work in exactly the same way as they use it at home and this is potentially one of the reasons for this steady increase in illegal download attempts over recent months" said Spencer Parker, director of product management at ScanSafe who adds "inappropriate Internet use in the workplace can put the employer at …

Would you back Avatar (the movie) or Modern Warfare 2 (the game) to win a fight for the biggest grossing entertainment blockbuster of the last six months?

Given that Avatar has already stormed up the biggest movie blockbuster list to sit comfortably near the top as the second biggest grossing movie of all time according to The Internet Movie Database with worldwide box office takings of $1.3 billion, you might think that all bets would be off. You might be wrong.

Selling around 15 million copies so far, Modern Warfare 2 actually took an astonishing $550 million in its first five days on sale and has now gone on to break the $1 billion barrier. Although I am having trouble tracking down hard numbers Infinity Ward, the developers of Modern Warfare 2, reckons that in terms of those first week sales the game beat the movie. Indeed, in just a single day (launch day, naturally) Modern Warfare 2 took $310 million. Certainly it eclipses previous record breaking game claims such as that made by Microsoft for Halo 3.

But which is best, in terms of cold sales figures? Sorry Modern Warfare 2 fanboys (of which I am one) but it is not good news. Bear in mind that the cost of a cinema ticket is much less than the cost of the game on any format, and given that Avatar has already grossed more than Modern Warfare 2 in global sales …

Lord knows I could do with shedding a pound or 50, but it never occurred to me that WiFi could help me do that. However, according to a press release that arrived today it would appear to be the case. Some French technology outfit has launched a set of WiFi enabled weight scales which uses an iPhone app that enables users to monitor body weight as well as lean and fat mass (whatever they may be) on their smartphone.

Withings claims that the WiFi Body Scale is a world first and transforms a regular bathroom scale into a connected health monitoring system allowing anyone access to a range of secure online service to automatically record their body weight, lean & fat mass, and calculated body mass index.

"We strive to bring innovation, design and technology to everyday objects through a wireless connection to the internet and we feel the WiFi Body Scale truly delivers on all fronts" said Cedric Hutchings, Withings General Manager.

Uhuh. Trouble is, it is a rather expensive set of scales at UKP £119 and to be honest you can buy an awful lot of cakes for the same money. Seriously though, you could also spend a little extra and buy a Nintendo Wii with the Wii Fit stuff and maybe get into shape using technology (although this is not without some risk itself) rather than just get depressed watching how little weight you are losing by sitting …

A roundtable of industry licensing specialists has been discussing software ownership and liability in the complex new world tech order where cloud computing, virtualisation and Software as a Service reign supreme.

Certainly there can be little doubting that over the course of the last 12 months or so CIOs and IT managers alike have been under increasing pressure to answer the question: Where Does The Ownership Lie?

The roundtable was hosted by FAST Ltd and included software vendor Symantec, together with sponsor LANDesk, Webroot, Rocela, The UK Oracle User Group, Bytes Technology Group, ConnectSphere, Flexera Software, Regent Partners International, Beachcroft LLP, FAST customers LeaseDrive Velo and Lloyds Register, and a representative from industry analyst Quocirca.

A key driver for the discussion was the current confusion around the software ownership landscape and how it’s multiplied when you add M&A to the mix. Clive Longbottom at Quocirca said the situation is confusing for businesses. “Originally organisations went for the very old style of ‘thou shalt pay’ and thou shalt pay on a yearly basis when it came to licensing their software. However, now there are a lot of organisations that are moving towards subscription-based software as they don’t want the responsibility or liability when it comes to licences. But, the reality is that they still aren’t reading the contracts and don’t realise they are responsible for counting licences, so ultimately they are back to square one.

“And when you add M&A into the mix, these problems are …

Gamers are used to unearthing cheats that will give them ultimate power over everything, but now it seems that Windows 7 users can also activate a God Mode of their own.

Here's a really simple little Windows 7 tweak which activates an already pretty well documented developer shell feature that allows a filesystem folder to be turned into a 'namespace junction' and also brings the All Tasks special shell folder into play. Together it has been dubbed God Mode as it enables you to congregate diverse control panel functionality within a single folder.

To activate God Mode you just create a new folder and call it

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

and then double click the thing. This activates the super special folder which brings you an all new and maybe a tad more convenient control panel view.

If you are a power-tool and Windows tweaking geek, then I'm pretty sure you will love this. While you only get a plain vanilla Explorer list view at least everything you need for Windows 7 control is in one place now rather than being spread all over the shop in those multiple, if much better looking, control panels.

OK, so it might not be quite as talked about as the mythical Apple iTablet, but the Google Chrome OS-based netbook is also creating quite a stir. According to the IB Times the Chrome OS netbook will have the following tech specs:

An Nvidia Tegra chipset (given the late 2010 rumoured release one guesses Tegra 2.0) powered by an ARM CPU and replete with 64GB SSD and 2GB RAM will drive a 10.1 inch HD-ready, 1,280 x 720 resolution touchscreen screened device. The usual array of extras such as WiFi and 3G, Bluetooth and Ethernet are also on the reported tech spec list.

Meanwhile, the German Netbook News publication is suggesting a unit price of less than 200 Euros (that's under US $300) although a 3G plan will, of course, add a significant monthly fee to that basic hardware cost. Still, it is starting to sound like the kind of device that makes me yell IWOOT - I Want One Of Those!

Absolutely no surprise there then: Modern Warfare 2 is the all-format games Christmas Number One according to the ELSPA software charts just published here in the UK. A position, incidentally, it has held for the six weeks, ever since it was released.

The Top Ten, in case you are interested, is as follows:

1. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
2. FIFA 10
3. Wii Fit Plus
4. Wii Sports Resort
5. Assassin's Creed II
6. Mario And Sonic At The Olympic Winter Games
7. New Super Mario Bros. Wii
8. Forza Motorsport 3
9. Mario Kart Wii
10. Just Dance

A little more surprising, it has to be said, is the apparent interest being taken in Modern Warfare 2 by spooks. You might think that spending your leisure time engaging in anti-terrorist shooting activity is something of a busmans' holiday for a spay, and I dare say you are right. But then the interest being taken by GCHQ, a UK Government intelligence organisation with a reputation for being very secret squirrel and works in conjunction with both MI5 and MI6, is more of a professional one.

It would appear that GCHQ has started running an advertising campaign on Xbox Live which targets 18 to 34 year old players of Modern Warfare 2 (as well as Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed II and Left 4 Dead 2). The thinking behind the campaign being that these gamers are likely to possess the same kind of quick thinking and problem solving that GCHQ recruits need. Another important …

The media seems to have been a-buzz this week following the release of the top search terms from 14.6 million searches picked up by parental control service OnlineFamily.Norton - mainly because it 'revealed' that kids are searching for sex online.

I am a parent myself, of young kids, and while of course I was shocked to discover that 7 year olds were looking for porn (and that search term was in position number 4 in the 7 and under age group according to Symantec which operates the service) I certainly would not get my knickers in a twist over finding 13 year olds searching for sex online (also number 4 in the teens group popular search list).

It's interesting to note that both boys and girls were searching for sex, although the boys had sex and porn in positions 4 and 5 respectively whereas the girls moved Taylor Swift up into the 4 slot and sex was at 5.

But is it really such a big deal that 13-18 years olds include sex and porn in their top search terms? No, of course not, kids have always been interested in sex as they go through puberty and the only difference these days to when I was that age is that the Internet makes it a lot easier to go look at naughty pictures.

I had to pay a few pennies to sneak a look at the Playboy magazine an older boy had sneaked into school. What …

Thought that 2009 was the year that botnets died, well think again Batman, it was actually the year they bounced back. Compromised computers were responsible for distributing 83.4% of the 107 billion spam messages sent around the world, every single day, during 2009 according to a new Symantec report.

Indeed, the Symantec MessageLabs Intelligence 2009 report suggests that the shutdown of botnet hosting ISPs such as McColo towards the end of 2008 and Real Host in August this year didn't destroy the botnet threat but rather simply made those behind them re-evaluate and enhance command and control backup strategies so as to be able to recover from damage in hours rather than weeks.

Symantec predicts that botnets will become autonomous intelligent, with each node containing an inbuilt self-sufficient coding in order to coordinate and extend its own survival, during the course of 2010.

Cutwail, Mega-D, Rustock and handful of other botnets already have control of upwards of five million compromised computers. Cutwail alone was responsible for issuing 29% of all spam, that's 8,500 billion individual spam messages, between April and November 2009.

Cutwail also distributed the Bredolab Trojan dropper, disguised in the form of a .ZIP file attachment, designed to give the sender complete control of the target computer which then could be used to deploy other botnet malware, adware or spyware onto the victim’s computer. It is estimated that during the month of October, some 3.6 billion Bredolab malware …

Oh dear, now I do not believe that was meant to happen. It appears that users of Office 2003 who also protect their documents with the Microsoft Rights Management Service (RMS) have found them so well protected that nobody can open them - not even the person who created the documents in the first place.

Microsoft came clean about the problem in a blog post which reveals that "Starting on December 11, 2009, customers using Office 2003 will not be able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Rights Management Service (RMS) or save Office 2003 documents protected with RMS".

It appears that users were faced with the following error message when attempting to open RMS protected documents using Office 2003:

"Unexpected error occurred. Please try again later or contact your system administrator"

It has taken a few days but I am informed that a hotfix is now available from Microsoft to unlock those frozen documents. Better late than never, I guess. And the cause of the problem, well you'll love this - an information rights management certificate had expired.

Nice one Microsoft.

IBM today announced that it has opened a Cloud Computing Laboratory in Hong Kong to support its LotusLive cloud services and the numbers are pretty impressive whichever way you look at them. From the 18 million seats in year one that LotusLive has amassed, to the $126 billion IBM expects the global cloud computing market to be worth by 2012. The 10th cloud computing lab to be opened by IBM, which has been investing heavily in cloud technology for some time now, it's the first by any major IT vendor in Hong Kong.

IBM sees it as being key to global development efforts for public cloud collaboration services, and envisages that the lab will support growth of cloud collaboration by both governments and companies, helping transform communications and collaboration and foster innovation while enhancing efficiency and reducing costs.

The Hong Kong cloud computing team is dedicated to identifying and driving best practices for cloud messaging business in critical areas such as security, privacy and stability by building on the email technology and expertise of Outblaze Limited, a Hong Kong-based company whose messaging assets were acquired by IBM earlier this year. Drawing on emerging market expertise, this unit represents a major expansion of IBM's Web-based mail and collaboration capabilities and acts as a development and services centre focusing on LotusLive messaging development, testing, technical support and services delivery. The core team has rich experience in architecting and operating secure, scalable and reliable SaaS messaging platforms.

Speaking …

Forget about tight budgets and economic woes impacting upon the IT business, there's a post-recession return to pre-recession spending happening and networking is likely to benefit the most.

According to IDC, "transformation will impact every corner of the industry in 2010" but the most important transformational force of all is going to be the "continuing build-out and maturing of the cloud services and consumption model".

In the Predictions 2010: Recovery and Transformation report, IDC suggests that an emergence of enterprise-grade cloud computing services will be a strong and unifying theme which could see a strategic battle for cloud application real estate emerge that will last for two decades.

"Significant opportunities will also unfold for public IT cloud services, private clouds, cloud appliances, and hybrid cloud management tools, while cloud APIs will emerge as the new determinant of the cloud partner/solution ecosystem" IDC insists.

Another important driver for network infrastructure growth and increased spending will be the mobile device effect. Increasingly these smart devices are competing with desktop PCs as the primary client platform for both developers and end users. IDC predicts that some billion or more mobile devices will be accessing the Internet by the year end, and the arrival of the much talked about Apple iPad tablet can only help increase the demand.

With mobile applications exploding in number, IDC reckons the number of iPhone apps alone will triple to 300,000 in 2010, and cloud services getting serious, there will inevitably be …

There is no doubt that the current server market environment is the worse it has ever been, but a new report from IDC suggests that the worse may be over as the market posts sequential quarterly revenue growth for the first time since 2008.

The IDC EMEA Quarterly Server Tracker shows EMEA server revenue in 3Q09 reached $2.9 billion, a decline of 25.7% year on year, with nearly half a million units shipped, 24.6% less than in the same quarter of 2008. Sequentially, revenue and units experienced growth of 1.9% and 8.4% respectively.

While the market momentum for x86 servers continued unabated, with revenue performance better than non-x86 servers, x86 revenue was down 21.3% annually and up 16.7% sequentially. Shipments slumped, decreasing 49.5% in 3Q09 on 3Q08, confirming that non-x86 ASVs remain the highest in the market by a big margin. In terms of units, only 2.7% of all the servers shipped in EMEA were non-x86.

By server class, volume servers were the main market engine with $1.7 billion, or 59.1% of the total EMEA revenue whereas the midrange servers in the RISC segment suffered the sharpest decline being 34.6% down annually, with less than $400 million in sales.

"Overall, the EMEA server market environment remains challenging despite better than expected performance in the larger countries such as the U.K., Germany, Spain, and to a lesser extent Russia" said Nathaniel Martinez, director of IDC European Systems and Infrastructure Solutions. "Platform migrations, consolidation projects and …

You might not think that a 12,000 square foot data center would be anything for the environmental lobby to get excited about, but this is no ordinary IT facility. The Green Data Center (GDC) has been built by Syracuse University in partnership with New York State and IBM in order to showcase some world-class innovations in the field of advanced energy efficient IT systems construction.

Having taken just six months to construct, just how energy efficient is this $12.4 million facility? Well, thanks to the innovative on-site power generation system for electricity, heating and cooling, along with some snazzy energy-efficient servers, computer-cooling technology and system management software from IBM, it is claimed that the Green Data Center will use 50% less energy than the average data center.

The Syracuse University GDC features an on-site electrical tri-generation system that uses natural gas-fueled microturbines to generate all the electricity for the center and cooling for the computer servers. The center will be able to operate completely off-grid. IBM and Syracuse University created a liquid cooling system that uses double-effect absorption chillers to convert the exhaust heat from the microturbines into chilled water to cool the data center's servers and the cooling needs of an adjacent building. Server racks incorporate "cooling doors" that use chilled water to remove heat from each rack more efficiently than conventional room-cooling methods. Sensors will monitor server temperatures and usage to tailor the amount of cooling delivered to each server -- further improving efficiency.

Yes there are 100,000 or so apps for the iPhone, but thanks to Apple policy if it's porn you are after there's not an app for that. The construction of an Adult App Store for Android devices, however, could soon swing this particular market segment towards the iPhone competitor.

The MiKandi App Store is strictly an adults only affair, and claims to be the world's first fully mobile adult app store. Although currently only available for Android users, the developers are already talking about supporting other platforms in the future. Given the tight control that Apple has over the iPhone, don't expect it to be amongst them unless the developers target users of Jailbroken handsets that is.

MiKandi downloads a widget to the Android handset which acts in the same way as the App Store does on the iPhone, becoming a portal to content which in this case is anything legal according to the company behind it.

I'm not convinced it will be any kind of killer app for Android devices, and certainly doubt it will impact upon sales of the iPhone or the apps its users love so much. After all, if iPhone users want porn they already have an app that can do that. It's called Safari and it is quite happy to go and load whatever video and still image content you point it at, including that which is for the over 18 crowd only.

One area it could make a …

Apple has long been criticised for the way it handles iPhone App approval. Inconsistency and mind-boggling logic are the order of the day, or at least that's the way it appears to an increasing number of iPhone application developers.

The application review process has been rigorously defended by Apple, although the company has made some concession that it might have got things perhaps not quite right by introducing developer status updates as an attempt to quell the noisy protests.

Unfortunately, if Apple thought that the volume knob had been turned down it is in for a surprise as developers ramp it up to 11 with the arrival of a website called App Rejections which is attempting to keep track of all the questionable rejections it hears about.

The site was set up by a UK-based iPhone application developer, Adam Martin, who describes the iPhone App review process as "secret, undocumented, unquestionable, random" and says the Google Voice rejection shenanigans was the catalyst in setting up this site.

I'd like to tell you more, but at the time of writing my web browser is currently rejecting the site and not letting me access it.

Hopefully Martin will code an app so I can view it on my iPhone soon. Oh, hold on, I can foresee some problems with that...

Pretty much anywhere you live, it would appear that the iPhone consumes at least 50% of all mobile data traffic. Whereas the Android has a little catching up to do with just 11% of that mobile data bandwidth consumption.

Of course, the iPhone entered the restaurant first and is already on pudding while Android devices are still nibbling at the starters so to speak. Still, that's more than RIM (BlackBerry) on 7% and eclipses Windows Mobile phones which consume just 3%.

Only Symbian devices are seriously in the bandwidth consumption fight on 25% (a drop of 4% from the previous figures) which could be important if you use this as a metric of real world popularity of smartphones. The Palm Pre dropped 5%, for what it is worth, to 5% of traffic.

The figures come from a new report by AdMob, a mobile advertising specialist, which has billions of adverts on more than 15,000 mobile websites and uses the data from its ad-serving network to produce the figures.

Of course, the numbers might show that iPhones are popular but also that they consume a lot of bandwidth thanks to the success of all those apps. And that is proving to be problematical for some networks which are struggling to cope. Here in the UK, by way of example, O2 has recently announced that it will be building 1500 new network sites across the UK in 2010 with a total investment of hundreds of millions of pounds.

A couple of months ago DaniWeb reported how British singer Lily Allen turned the music copyright debate into a copywrong farce with some ill conceived blogging. Things went quiet soon after the media had swarmed all over Allen and her odd arguments, not least as she closed down her blog complaining of getting too much abuse.

Now, following an interview with the music press it seems that Allen has jumped straight back into the controversy with both feet. This time she appears to be confusing price and value, claiming that she wants her fans to appreciate the value of her work and if that means buying a ripped and burned copy of a CD then that's OK - "as long as the person buying it places some kind of value on my music" there's no problem she said.

As Mike Masnick over at Techdirt observes "Her earlier complaint was that when people file share, they don't provide money back to the artists and the labels. Of course, when counterfeiters are selling on the street, the same thing is true, but suddenly it's okay? At what point does the world realize that Ms. Allen doesn't know what she's talking about?" - well quite!

I can't say I have ever heard of pussy power being used as a driver for advanced chip technology development, but that's precisely what researchers at IBM are claiming. A team of boffins at IBM have been speaking about how they have arrived at something of a milestone breakthrough: a supercomputer that simulates a brain in near real time and has more cerebral cortex capacity than a cat.

The cognitive computing team which is headed up by IBM Research managed to achieve what it says are "significant advances in large-scale cortical simulation" as well as "a new algorithm that synthesizes neurological data" in time for a presentation called 'The cat is out of the bag' at the SC09 supercomputing conference this week.

Together it is being suggested that these advances mean we are getting increasingly close to being able to build not just an advanced computer chip, but a truly cognitive computing chip. That is, in other words, a computer system which can both simulate and emulate the brain’s abilities in terms of sensation, perception, action, interaction and cognition.

The IBM Research scientists, together with colleagues from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, performed what is said to be the first "real-time cortical simulation of the brain that exceeds the scale of a cat cortex and contains 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses". Working with researchers from Stanford University, the IBMers also developed a supercomputing algorithm which can "noninvasively measure and map the …

It has been one of the great blogging success stories, not to mention literary mysteries. But now the true identity of the Diary of a London Call Girl blogger has been revealed, by Belle de Jour herself. The blog, based upon a secret life covering 14 months as a high class escort and prostitute in London, spawned a successful national newspaper column, a best-selling book and even a TV movie.

For a number of years now speculation has been rife as to who Belle de Jour really was, with the media 'outing' everyone from the editor of the Erotic Review (Rowan Pelling) to best selling novelist and author of How To Lose Friends And Alienate people, Toby Young. While the notion of Belle de Jour being a balding man was amusing, the actual revelation of identity has been no less shocking. The woman behind the blog, and who did indeed work as a £300 per hour hooker in London six years ago, is actually now a respected research scientist called Dr Brooke Magnanti.

Dr Magnanti is a developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology specialist, and turned to prostitution in 2003 when she was having money troubles during the final stages of her PhD thesis. The 34 year old told the Sunday Times that she has no regrets and that while she "did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer" she kept up with the prostitution as "it was so much more enjoyable".

So …

According to the latest McAfee Labs Third Quarter Threats Report 2009 instances of Distributed Denial of Service attacks are growing in popularity.

In the last quarter the McAfee Labs observed many new attacks demanding ransom money including those aimed at sports betting companies which were taken out of action during key sporting events to cause losses in the millions. Such attacks have not only been used to make money, but also silence political opinion.

But perhaps the growth of DDoS as a service, whereby cybercriminals offer botnets capable of launching such attacks to the highest bidder is the biggest worry. "These botnets are capable of knocking even some of the most-protected sites offline" the report concludes and, of course, the whole concept of DDoS as a Service means that anyone can create a devastating attack provided they have the money to buy the botnet time.

The concern being that not only does it remove the technical requirement from the would be attack equation, but it also reduces the amount of money that they have to invest. It only costs a fraction of the price of establishing a viable DDoS attack botnet to rent one for an hour or two.

Other highlights of the report include:

Despite the Pirate Bay shutdown, there has been a 300% increase in the creation of file sharing websites.

Spam reached its highest level in history, breaking the previous record set in the second quarter of …

It is something of a good and bad news day for mobile phone giant Nokia. On the same day that it announces shipping of the new N900 handset, based on the open source Maemo 5 software, Nokia is also recalling a staggering 14 million mobile phone chargers due to concerns that they represent a potential electric shock hazard.

Although Nokia itself states that it has started an exchange program for "a limited number of Nokia-branded chargers manufactured by a third party supplier" it is understood that the number involved is actually 14 million.

It seems that the plastic covers can come loose and expose internal components which could, potentially, pose an electric shock hazard as a result of touching these while the charger is plugged into a live socket.

Nokia says that the affected chargers are manufactured by Chinese company BYD between June 15, 2009 and August 9, 2009 and of model types AC-3U, AC-3E and those manufactured between April 13, 2009 and October 25, 2009 of model type AC-4U. The chargers might have been sold with a Nokia device or sold as an aftermarket accessory, so Nokia users are being urged to check all chargers to be on the safe side.

The exchange program and more information can be accessed here.

Meanwhile, the N900 has actually started shipping with an ARM Cortex-A8 processor and up to 1GB of total application memory. Forget about the 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, or 32GB of …

What do you use Twitter for? Telling your circle of online friends what you are up to? As an alternative to email? Maybe a little bit of legal celebrity stalking? Perhaps, but if you are an Indian Twitter user the chances are you are treating it primarily as an online news source.

That is the surprising conclusion of a new survey which reveals that the majority of those asked (16%) regularly turn to tweets for their news updates. A trend which really started during the 26/11 attacks when there were nearly 1000 Tweets a minute being posted by eyewitnesses to the horrific events as they unfolded. This helped propel Twitter into the big time in India, which now has the largest number of Twitter users of any country other than US and Germany according to reports.

Of course, Twitter is used to making the news as well as distributing it. With more than 5 billion Tweets already, it is hardly surprising that Twitter is becoming a news medium in its own right.

Now that's what I call an Android phone. Actually, that's what I call an Android phone that might just kick some iPhone ass.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 social networking phone is Android powered and feature rich. How rich? Well, how does 1GB RAM plus 16Gb of flash storage and a stunning 8.1 megapixel camera that comes complete with a geo-tagging function strike you?

That's on top of the 4" (854 x 480, 262,144 color TFT) touch-screen and GPS, and WiFi, and Bluetooth of course. OH, and not forgetting the Qualcomm Snapdragon, a 1GHz system-on-chip that you can also find inside the new Acer Liquid phone.

And, of course, there's the all important Android inside. This time working with the Sony UX layer for social networking. The new UX platform, as I understand it, throws a new UI on top of the Android OS which will integrate and sync a variety of social networking and comms media content. From what I can tell it would appear to be the Sony take on the HTX Sense UI.

There will be UX specific apps coming, although they are in short supply right now. So far you get a unified comms management app called Timescape which supports Twitter and Facebook as well as your email and text message services. Plus there is another called mediascape which integrates media content for playback from sources such as YouTube and PlayNow.

Expect the Xperia X10 …

I got a gloating email today from those awfully clever folk at Wolfram Alpha which informed me that the iPhone app version of the 'Computational Knowledge Engine' popped up on the App Store What's Hot list. What's more, they positively gushed at how they were "pleasantly surprised" to see the app "appear on the store's 'Top Grossing' list on the second day it was available and remain there through the week".

Perhaps whoever wrote that email should have first asked the Wolfram Alpha engine why the app was on the top grossing list. I suspect that drawing on more than 20 years of development, 50,000 plus built-in algorithms and 10 trillion pieces of continually updated and curated data, it might have popped out the following answer: because it costs fifty bucks, stupid.

Sure, it may well let you get "expert-level answers to your specific freeform questions—complete with stunning, dynamically generated visualizations and tables, and richer and deeper information than you imagined possible" right there on your iPhone. It may well come replete with "elegant native iPhone interface that includes a special notation keyboard, customized iPhone output, editable history, and integration with maps and other iPhone services" for good measure.

It may well also be less than half the price of a graphing calculator at $49.99 as one Wolfram Alpha spokesperson has insisted, while missing the point that an iPhone graphing calculator app can be picked up for just a couple of bucks. And missing the …

Within the next five years, Citizen Developers will be responsible for building at least 25% of all new business applications. That is the rather startling claim being made by Gartner analysts ahead of the Gartner Symposium and ITexpo in Cannes, France next month.

So what is a Citizen Developer then? No, it is not somebody who creates avatars for immersive virtual world projects but rather, so says Gartner, a "user operating outside of the scope of enterprise IT and its governance who creates new business applications for consumption by others either from scratch or by composition".

Eric Knipp, a senior research analyst for the company, is convinced that citizen-developed applications will, over the next few years at least, start to leverage IT investments below the surface. The idea being that IT can then focus on the deeper architectural concerns that should be of most concern anyway, while the end users can concentrate upon 'wiring together' services within business process and workflow.

"Citizen development introduces the opportunity for end users to address projects that IT has never had time to get to" Knipp insists "a vast expanse of departmental and situational projects that have lain beneath the surface".

As long ago as 1982, when James Martin coined the term 4GL in his "Applications Development Without Programmers" book, this notion of application development performed by business users themselves has been floating about. So what's changed to push it into the limelight now? Knipp thinks the answer is

Once upon a time, Usenet newsgroups were the Twitter, Facebook and forums of the online world. All the early Internet community makers were there, and important announcements such as the arrival of Mosaic by Marc Andreesen broke there first.

Then the inevitable happened, and Usenet slowly imploded. That could have been the end of it, but everyone assumed this fairy tale would come with a Hollywood ending after Google got involved and waved a magic wand over the Usenet archive and turned it into Google Groups.

Unfortunately, not a lot happened in the years since February 2001 when Google acquired Deja.com and that archive, with some 700 million Usenet posts appearing to be lost as far as anyone performing a Google search on specific newsgroups were concerned.

As Wired reported, "Searching within a newsgroup, even one with thousands of posts, produces no results at all. Confining a search to a range of dates also fails silently, bulldozing the most obvious path to exploring an archive" - oops! And Wired was reporting a year after the Usenet search bugs had first been spotted and Slashdotted.

The good news is that Google has, it would appear, finally fixed Google Groups. Apparently a bug was found within days of the Wired feature, and it is now possible to search specific groups for specific text and actually find what you are looking for.

The bad news is that date range searches are still …

It's not just phishing scams that Facebook users have to worry about right now,

According to Roger Thompson, the Chief Research Officer with security vendor AVG, hacked Facebook applications are increasingly reaching out to exploit sites based in Russia. As Thompson says, this is different to the normal run of things whereby people are linking to hacked pages innocently enough on social networking sites. "These seem to be actual Facebook applications that have been hacked" Thompson points out, adding that the application developers are "innocent victims too".

AVG researchers first spotted the trend when a fire-fighter simulation game which it assumed was a developer hack, pointing to a Russian site where a scareware scam was being peddled. But when they looked closer, they discovered in the source code for the web pages an injected iframe that did the damage.

What is not obvious at the moment is just where the holes are in the infected Facebook apps which are letting the bad guys inject their code, but Thompson is as sure as he can be that the app developers are just as much victims as anyone else in these matters. So far AVG has uncovered at least 8 Facebook apps which have been compromised, and the full details can be found here along with screenshots of one exploited app and the exploit sites it reaches out to.

Maybe it is time to rethink the way that Facebook approaches app development and reconsider …

Apparently, women are more than twice as likely to go online and vent when stressed than speak to their partners. That's according to the results of a recent survey which also suggests that when stressed many women go and blog instead of turning to alcohol or chocolate.

The survey, conducted by women's online community Powder Room Graffiti reveals that some 58% of women will write more online during difficult times, either by blogging, commenting or taking part in social networks. Only 23% said they turned to their partners when things got on top of them.

"Our research would certainly indicate that the blogosphere has a real psychological benefit for some women and appears more effective than the more obvious stress relievers of alcohol or face-to-face exchanges with a close confidant" said Diane Hayman from Powder Room Graffiti. "Being encouraged to speak honestly is clearly very liberating for women... we’ve seen people share and debate the full gamut of subjects, many of which would be off-limits in a coffee morning setting or on the pages of a glossy magazine" she added.

Or, of course, there's the alternative theory that the Internet in general, and social networks/communities in particular, are just great places to let off steam no matter what gender you happen to be.

Why so much fuss about the rumour that Apple is developing an in house app to bring FM radio to the iPhone? Sure, the fact that (assuming the rumour is true) this will be a native application that can run in the background just like the iPod app does on an iPhone is cool, but do we really need a FM radio on the iPhone? It's a valid enough question. Sure, the new iPod Nano has a radio and it adds a needed function, but the iPhone has apps. And, as any app lover will know, there are plenty of streaming radio apps already out there which bring all the radio functionality you could want, and then some.

Yes, I like the sound of integrating radio and iTunes Store so that you could get more info about a song playing and then go on to purchase it in just a click or two. But to be honest I prefer being able to stream that song through the likes of Last.FM or Spotify rather than having to buy it at all.

Yes, I like the idea of the live pause function, assuming that this carries over from the Nano into the iPhone app that is.

But I'm just not convinced that there is any real need for old technology such as FM radio on a next-generation device like the iPhone. It's almost as bizarre as having a Blu-ray player built into a top end …

Jon Lech Johansen is perhaps best known as DVD Jon, the chap who cracked DVD movie encryption at the tender age of just 15. He may soon have to adopt a new nickname, how about iTunes Jon, as he releases software that takes iTunes out of the iPod music equation.

doubleTwist exists on the foundation that in the same way you don't have a different web browser for every web site that you visit, you shouldn't have to have different software when you use an iPod, a Nokia smartphone, a Sony device and so on. "The typical household today has many such devices" the company website says "there is a need for a simple and powerful software that connects them." Which is where the newly released software comes in, and iTunes goes out the door.

doubleTwist co-founder Monique Farantzos has even gone as far as to describe Apple as the new Microsoft, referring to a dark side that has emerged with apps being blocked from the App Store for example, and the Palm pre not being allowed to sync with iTunes. And so we now have a piece of software that has all the functionality of iTunes, but does not restrict the user to just an iPod or even just to iTunes for that matter. doubleTwist will, so I am informed, allow iPod users to buy their music from the Amazon MP3 store if they prefer. That said, it's the ability to play an iTunes library …

Sky, better known for news and sport television broadcasting, has today announced that it is entering the online music business with an ad-free streaming download service. All of the four million songs accessible by users of the service will be available by way of unlimited online streaming as well as in MP3 format for storage and playback on any compatible device.

Launching on the 19th October, Sky Songs in the UK will start off by providing access to new release and back catalogue songs from EMI. Sony, Universal and Warner along with a host of independent labels for good measure.

Mike Darcey, Sky’s Chief Operating Officer, says "Our music partners bring an outstanding catalogue and unrivalled expertise that complements Sky’s strengths in content distribution. Sky Songs will reach out to consumers who want legitimate digital services offering choice, ease of use and great value. Offering legal access to digital music is a vital step in combating illegal downloading."

That's as maybe, but the service is up against existing online music powerhouses such as Apple's iTunes and the streaming service Spotify in a market which was worth £106 million in the UK last year, that's an increase of 48% from the year before. Not that the CD market should be ruled out either, in terms of competition, at least not just yet. Sure, it is on the decline with income down 8% last year but it still managed to earn £856 million in the UK which is none …