Posts by newsguy

Mobile developers will be pleased to learn that Recursion Software has announced the availability of a C++ Toolkits Symbian bundle. The cross-platform, mobile and embedded app development tools specialist took the opportunity at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment Expo 2009 to announce that C++ libraries for the iPhone and Android platforms would be forthcoming.

The Symbian C++ Toolkit promises to deliver a rich array of libraries, templates, and code samples to help the coder to create high performance applications requiring sophisticated computing and information handling functions while retaining a small program size. It comprises a total of five separate toolkits including Communications and Foundations, Standard and Extended Template Libraries (STL/ETL), Math, plus a collection of more than 500 example programs.

This Symbian implementation is just the latest in a long line of the Recursion code base, a code base that has been compiled more than a million times over the last four years.

Bob DeAnna, CTO, Recursion Software said "Symbian-based handsets from Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, LG, Sharp and others represent a vast and vital market. These new tools will allow our many existing customers to extend their market reach by bringing their desktop, server and embedded applications to the many millions of Symbian device users, and will enable Symbian developers to bring their mobile apps to millions more new customers who use the many other platforms we already support. And with our planned releases for other C++ enabled mobile phones, we will make the promise …

If you are in the market for a new Apple computer, you might want to wait a few days. It would appear that new super thin iMacs, MacBooks and even a cheaper Mac Mini are on the way real soon.

According to AppleInsider a raft of advertisements were published ahead of time, in error, by the Netherlands Apple Store online.

The Google Adsense adverts were spotted on Google.nl but when eager shoppers clicked the links they arrived at the Apple Store only to discover the goods were not actually available. And what goods. The advertising would appear to confirm many online reports over the last few months that Apple is about to launch thinner polycarbonate MacBook, am ultra-thin series of iMacs and a speed increased but price decreased Mac Mini.

AppleInsider expects them to be "accompanied by redesigns of the company's Mighty Mouse and Apple Remote, as well as aluminum wireless keyboards."

The online grapevine is suggesting that the new product line could be announced before the end of this week.

It seems that Google searches on terms that are related to iPhone SMS information are being used to return results that direct unsuspecting users to rogue AV sites. According to the Websense Security Labs ThreatSeeker Network blog malicious URLs related to Apple iPhone SMS/MMS searches are ranking as high as result number six. Examples of the kind of searches that are being poisoned include "iphone how to send multiple chats over sms" amongst others.

Websense researchers have tracked the infection trail should a user click on a link controlled by the attackers using this particular rogue antivirus coupled to SEO poisoning scheme. It appears that they will be taken on the usual runaround of 302 redirects until they land on a scareware site that does the old 'run into a room shouting fire' trick and then try and sell you a fire extinguisher. Although in this case it is displaying a warning that your computer is infected with malware and then offering to let you buy and download fake antivirus software in order to clear up the non-existent infection.

Websense concludes that "The use of Blackhat SEO leading to Rogue AV will only increase in the upcoming year. This scare tactic has proved to be a very successful method of social-engineering users into installing software onto their computers and tricking them into paying for it".

According to the British government organisation which helps UK-based companies to succeed in the wider global economy, UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), it is currently helping some 76 UK companies pitch for business with the European particle physics laboratory, CERN. Apparently, CERN spent a massive £110 million ($175.75 million) on such supply contracts last year.

UKTI is working with the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to bring senior procurement officials to the UK who are looking to fulfil contracts in areas such as IT, mechanical engineering and electronics. The UK companies will be meeting with CERN officials at two roadshows, the first of which is to be held at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire today while the second will be tomorrow at the STFC Daresbury Research Laboratory in Cheshire.

Sir Andrew Cahn, UK Trade & Investment Chief Executive says "Working with CERN is not only a feather in the cap for a British company but also an excellent business opportunity. Firms which meet the highest scientific standards required by this facility win not only business but also a world-class endorsement of their innovation and quality."

John Womersley, Director of Science Programmes at STFC, added: "This is a fantastic opportunity for UK businesses to be involved in one of the world’s most exciting scientific projects, and for the UK to reap some of the benefits of the major scientific investment made by the Science & Technology Facilities Council in CERN."

UK firms …

The Microsoft Windows embedded product portfolio has just been given a hefty push into the limelight with the official release of Windows 7 technologies over to what Microsoft refers to as manufacturers of specialized devices.

During an industry address at the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston yesterday, Microsoft announced the initial roll out of the program through the release to manufacturing of next-gen platforms for Windows Embedded Enterprise and Windows Embedded Server to OEMs of specialized devices.

The same day, Microsoft also let slip feature enhancements and RTM details of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3 for streamlined connectivity to Windows 7 based machines. This will deliver the Silverlight experience through the Silverlight for Windows Embedded user interface framework, an out-of-browser, native code implementation of Microsoft Silverlight technology used to create rich, immersive UIs on Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3-based devices.

“With the release of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R3, Microsoft has furthered its commitment to energize the evolution of consumer Internet devices (CIDs), which fall between Smartphones and the full-featured, small Windows-based notebooks, by empowering our OEM and developer ecosystem with innovative, new technologies to fuel rich, animated and compelling user experiences,” said Kevin Dallas, general manager of the Windows Embedded Business Unit at Microsoft. “Microsoft has reaffirmed its investment in the Windows Embedded CE operating system and raised the bar by providing embedded OEMs with access to Visual Studio, Silverlight, Expression Blend and other advanced Microsoft technologies. These technologies help drive innovation and differentiation in devices, …

According to the 2009 Web Application Security Report from NTA Monitor, 90% of all web applications have at least one medium risk vulnerability and 27% have at least one high risk vulnerability. Apparently the most common vulnerabilities are those which involve SQL injection, cross-site scripting and cross-request forgery. One data security specialist told DaniWeb that not only should this come as no real surprise, but nor should the fact that the problem is steadily getting worse instead of better.

Brian Contos is the Chief Risk Strategist at Imperva, and he points out that the high risk category percentage is up from 17% last year, while the medium risk number has risen from 78% a year back. "Although this comes as no surprise to us" Contos says "it is an appalling indictment on the software audit and control operations in most companies. With NTA spotting an average of 13 vulnerabilities per test, it's clear that IT departments really do need to pull their socks up in terms of testing and auditing of their software development processes."

Indeed, according to Contos, NTA Monitor's report proves what he has been saying for some time: few organisations have the in-house resources to perform regular software testing and updating a clearly-stated set of application security policies. Worse, even fewer do as NTA Monitor suggests and include security service level agreements into their contracts with Internet or managed service providers.

Maybe some of the recently projected increase in security budgets for …

They say it ain't over until the fat lady sings, well it looks like this particular Opera story is far from over folks no matter what some might tell you. Perhaps the most famous Norwegian export since the Vikings, Opera the web browser has certainly lost favour with the technology press. Once upon a time Opera was the big threat to Microsoft Internet Explorer, it was the only alternative browser client that anyone who was anyone would talk about. Then along came Mozilla Firefox and everything changed, pretty much overnight. Today, Opera struggles to get column inches ahead of even upstarts such as Google's Chrome.

You would be forgiven for thinking, then, that the fat lady has well and truly been singing as far as this web browser is concerned. But no, quite apart from the phenomenal success the cut-down mobile version has enjoyed within the mobile phone market, the full-sized original is not only still around but still kicking ass.

The latest incarnation, Opera 10 with Turbo (whoever thinks of these names should be taken out back and hit with a stick, by the way) has been downloaded a whopping 10 million times in just the first week of release.

Opera now reckons it has more than 40 million active desktop users of it's browser family, to which you can add tens of millions others browsing on Opera products for mobile phones, game devices and even televisions.

"While we …

Symantec has detected a new Trojan which targets Skype users in order to monitor and record conversations made using the Internet telephony service. Apparently the source code for this particular Trojan, called Pesky Spy, is already being touted around the usual places where the bad guys can pick up such things.

It would appear to work by using the Windows API hooks that are intended for audio applications, such as Skype. The audio processes are monitored, calls recorded as relatively small MP3 files, and transferred quickly to anywhere on the Internet before the victim even knows their calls are being tapped. In fact, before the conversation even hits Skype.

Symantec explains that "Because the Trojan listens in the data traveling between the Skype process and the audio device, it gathers the audio independently of any application-specific protocols or encryption applied by Skype when it passes voice data at the network level. Essentially, it sits below these security measures, recording the audio at the Windows level—before outbound audio from the microphone gets to Skype and after incoming audio leaves Skype and reaches the speakers."

Skype is said to be aware of the Trojan, and is advising that users ensure their anti-virus and firewalls are up to date and operating properly.

Continuing on its charm offensive, the music industry is apparently not satisfied with the $675,000 fine for sharing 30 songs imposed on Joel Tenenbaum or the $1.92 million Jammie Thomas-Rasset was hit with for illegally downloading 24 tunes. Now it is going after the lyrics pirates.

The what? Well, exactly. But apparently three music publishers have filed copyright infringement suites against a couple of sites which display song lyrics so you can sing along while the music plays. According to an article in Billboard the two businesses concerned, Liveuniverse Inc and Motive Force LLC, have been accused of "exploiting unlicensed lyrics for profit through the operation of four web sites."

The National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) accuses the businesses and their owners of engaging in willful copyright infringement on a vast scale. A press release explaining the action says "These sites are profiting on the backs of songwriters. It is unfortunate that copyright holders must so frequently divert energies to protect their rights to license and distribute their works. However, the demand for music prompts a seemingly endless stream of illegal business models."

The NMPA argues that music fans are the losers when free lyrics are posted online, and made available with iPhone apps for example when music is playing, because licensed businesses cannot prosper in the face of unlicensed competition. But some fans have been making it clear by posting to various forums online that they think just the opposite, with applications and websites …

I am, it appears, a lot more average than I hoped. Well, at least when it comes to the world of computer gaming. A new study reveals, amongst other things, that the profile of the average gamer looks a lot less like the hyperactive, cola drinking teen obsessed with kicking alien ass. In fact, it reckons, your average gamer looks a lot more like me: 35 and fed up.

Not that I am a perfect match, I will admit, as I don't consider myself to be overly aggressive (your average gamer is) nor introverted (I'm more of an Andrew WK 'Party Hard' type of guy) or even particularly overweight, so there is hope for me yet to escape the bondage of being average after all.

But then again it turns out that not only is the study based on data from 2006, but the original survey carried out in 2006 was restricted to just 552 people who lived in the Seattle, Washington. Which leaves me wondering just how representative of your average gamer the report really is. Mind you, it also concludes that playing video games is bad for your health and that many gamers show multiple signs of addiction. Nothing new in that opinion, of course, people have been telling us that gaming is bad for you for years. But there is also nothing new in this report that makes me take that particular opinion any the more seriously either, so I'll continue …

Sony Computer Entertainment America has filed a patent application, number 20090195392, which could lead to a PlayStation controller that knows when you are happy, sad or just plain angry.

The patent application is officially for a 'laugh detector and system and method for tracking an emotional response to a media presentation' has an abstract which reads "Information in the form of emotional responses to a media presentation may be passively collected, for example by a microphone and/or a camera. This information may be tied to metadata at a time reference level in the media presentation and used to examine the content of the media presentation to assess a quality of, or user emotional response to, the content and/or to project the information onto a demographic. Passive collection of emotional responses may be used to add emotion as an element of speech or facial expression detection, to make use of such information, for example to judge the quality of content or to judge the nature of various individuals for future content that is to be provided to them or to those similarly situated demographically. Thus, the invention asks and answers such questions as: What makes people happy? What makes them laugh? What do they find interesting? Boring? Exciting?"

Is it just me, or is anyone else having some difficulty in contemplating exactly how this technology, assuming it even works, could be used to enhance the video gaming experience? It appears that a camera and microphone would be …

I love a good patent story, I love my Nintendo Wii and I love bouncy cushions. However, it is a rare thing to be able to write a news story which covers all three. Yet it would appear that Nintendo has, indeed, filed a European patent for a bouncy cushion for the Wii. The actual patent refers to an inflatable air cushion or other seat, and comes complete with a special pocket for your Wii Remote in order to detect your movements and a Nunchuk can be used as reins. Did I mention that this particular bouncy cushion doubles up as a horseback riding or vehicle driving simulation device? Actually, it seems the bouncy cushion can be many different things as the patent also talks of using the Nunchuk as a lasso, sword or even for raising a balance hand in bucking bronco or bull riding. I quite like the bit where Nintendo talks about the cushion simulating elephants or dolphins, or how about dragons and giant eagles. You've got to love the imagination of these guys. There's even talk of it being a magic carpet controller...

Safari 4.0.3 is out now and available for download from Apple, for both Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

While there are the usual claims of making things more stable when using third party plugins and in particular for handling the HTML 5 video tag, it is with regards to security strengthening and bug squishing that the real interest lies.

So with the latest update Apple says it has fixed issues which impacted upon users logging in to the iWork.com document sharing service, an Apple service embarrassingly enough and I should have said prevented users logging on to be precise. Other bugs trampled underfoot include an odd retro effect one which could make some content online display not in colour but in a grey scale rendering instead.

Apple calls them security fixes, I say they are simply more bug fixes by another name. Whatever the semantics of the situation, Apple has patched an EXIF data flaw which could lead to a remote code execution on the Windows platform, the same flaw which had already been resolved for Mac users incidentally. What else, about the only thing of note I can see is the beefing up of floating point processing code to prevent buffer overflow exploits.

Do cats have a taste for porn? Somehow I doubt it, and I doubt that a jury will fall for it either no matter how much one alleged downloader of the most disgusting of pornographic images tries to insist that's what actually happened in his case.

When found in possession of a computer full of pornographic images, it is human nature to deny all knowledge of how it got there. Someone could have disguised it as something else, such as when YouTube got hit by the porno pranksters on Porn Day. Some have blamed Wikipedia for linking to explicit images which have popped up when they were, err, searching for porn. However, it is fairly unusual to blame an animal for putting the images on your computer.

But that is exactly what has happened in the case of Keith Griffin from Jensen Beach in Florida, after police detectives discovered more than a thousand items of child pornography downloaded to his home computer. Griffin denies any involvement, and apparently says that his pussy is responsible.

48 year old Griffin, who has been charged with just 10 counts of possessing child pornography after detectives made the discovery on his computer, has told investigators that it was his cat, and not him, who downloaded the disgusting stash.

According to various reports, Griffin said he was downloading music files when he left the room. He returned to discover his cat had jumped on the keyboard and …

Mike Maser, Chief Strategy Officer at Digg, has confirmed that Digg Ads will start rolling out in an early beta format during the next few days.

So expect to start seeing sponsored Diggs mixed up with the real stuff, although the adverts will carry a 'sponsored by' title the screenshots suggest that they will not be easily distinguishable from ordinary Diggs if you ask me.

Maser is "excited" about the move and says the goal of Digg Ads is to "encourage advertisers to create content as compelling as organic Digg stories, and to give you more control over which ads you see on Digg."

Hmm.

There are some things to like about the adverts, such as the fact that they give the user more control over which ones appear on Digg by using a system whereby the more an ad is Dugg the less the advertiser has to pay and the more one is buried the more the advertiser is charged. The argument being that advertisers will have to please the crowd to keep costs down, will have to provide compelling sponsored content in other words. The danger, surely, is that the compelling content will take the format of something which looks like any other Digg story and nothing like an advert, and blurring the lines between editorial and advertorial is never a good thing, is it?

Maser adds "We’re rolling Digg Ads out initially to small sets of users to help us …

The independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industry, OFCOM, was charged by the government to reveal consumers' experiences of electronic communications services, including broadband provision, and the results do not make for happy reading.

The research saw in excess of 60 million separate service performance tests carried out in over 1600 homes between November 2008 and April 2009, comparing the real world performance of the UK’s nine largest ISPs by market share.

Perhaps unsurprisingly it found that there were significant differences in the download speeds offered by providers, with speeds depending on the technology used to deliver broadband and the capacity of the provider’s network. However, sadly it comes as no great shock to anyone that the download speeds to be found in the real world at the consumer end of the equation were nowhere near the advertised rates that persuaded them to sign up for any particular service in the first place. How wide was the difference? Well the average broadband speed in the UK in April 2009 was 4.1Mbit/s. This compares to an average ‘up to’ headline speed of 7.1 Mbit/s. Only 9 percent of those on 8Mbit/s headline packages received actual average speeds of over 6Mbit/s and around 19 percent received, on average, less than 2Mbit/s. Looks like the UK is really getting the low speed broadband that has been predicted then.

Live outside an urban area and things were even worse. The average speed delivered to urban consumers …

According to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report from Symantec, things are looking good as web malware writers have taken a sabbatical. Unfortunately the spammers have gone multi-lingual in a lazy-ass automated kind of a way with great effect.

Spam levels have, say Symantec, stayed at their highest level for two years at 90 percent on average. France, Germany and the Netherlands are suffering more than the rest of us, with spam levels now hitting more than 95 percent. The MessageLabs research folk reckon they know why, and it comes down to those lazy-ass spammers using automated translation services and templates to enable their spam runs to operate in multiple languages.

Indeed, the report suggests that local language spam now accounts for 46 percent of spam in Germany and 53 percent in France. In The Netherlands, 25 percent of spam is in Dutch. In Japan 62.3 percent is in non-English languages and in China this number is 54.7 percent.

“Once again the spammers turn to their online toolbox, the Internet, for their latest tactics. Translation services and templates enable the spammers to push out multiple-language spam attacks and some dubious translations through the use of poor online services highlight the use of these antics,” said Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Senior Analyst, Symantec. “Non-English spam now accounts for one in every 20 spam messages, a figure we’ll be closely monitoring to see if spammers continue with their global expansion.”

Yay, maybe Google Mail will kindly

According to a new Gartner survey, despite companies driving down overall IT budgets this year things are looking good for global software spending in 2010. Well, I say good, but perhaps I should say a teensy weensy little bit better than this year. Gartner reckons that organisations surveyed indicated that software budgets will be rising in 2010 by an average of, cue drum roll, er 1.53 percent.

By region, 30 percent of companies in Asia/Pacific, 28 percent in North America and 25 per cent in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) said they expected their 2010 IT budget to increase. Overall, North America is still expecting software spending to decline 2.06 per cent, and EMEA is only slightly positive at 0.45 per cent for 2010 compared with 2009. Software budgets in Latin America will rise 2.54 per cent, and in Asia/Pacific, software budgets will increase 4.34 per cent, showing a very positive trend in increasing their software spending in 2010.

"Software vendors should continue to build, fund and invest in software sales and marketing programmes, even during tight market conditions to maintain customers and expand revenue opportunities," said Joanne Correia, managing vice president at Gartner. "A market downturn is a disrupter that creates great marketing and sales opportunities for organisations prepared to take advantage of the right products, marketing programs and funding."

The High Court in the UK will this Friday decide if an appeal against the Home Office backed decision to extradite Gary McKinnon on hacking charges to the US is to be upheld or, as seems likely, not. McKinnon has been accused of what US prosecutors refer to the biggest military computer hack of all time after hacking into US military computers right after the 9/11 attacks. He is said to have deleted files, bringing the station to a standstill, at the New Jersey Naval Base that has responsibility for supplying munitions to the Atlantic Fleet. McKinnon, a former systems analyst, is also a man in his forties with a self-confessed obsession about UFOs and aliens, and a sufferer from the autism related Asperger's Syndrome.

The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has expressed his sympathy for McKinnon at a recent Number 10 press conference. He said that the case raises a number of issues and "anybody who looks at this must be sympathetic to someone who suffers from Asperger's syndrome" but fell short of saying the hacker should not be extradited. Which should come as no surprise given that the Home Office has already backed the decision to extradite, and his own government whips were apparently out in force to ensure that MPs followed the party line when given a chance to vote on the matter recently. One Labour MP who voted against the government on the extradition issue, Andrew Mackinlay, …

So Google reckons that it can provide the perfect operating system in Chrome, even to the point where according to Google's Engineering Director, Linus Upson, it will herald the end of malware. That's what he went on the record to say, promising that Google was "completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates." Which could just end up being one of those 'why did I say that' moments that go down in software development folklore. Not least because as soon as you say something is 100 percent secure, is malware-proof then out of the woodwork crawl all the bad people just itching to prove you wrong.

One application vulnerability specialist, Richard Kirk of Fortify Software, told us "You can have the most bug-free operating system in the world – which is what energy companies have in the shape of the SCADA-compliant embedded firmware that drives their critical systems - but if the software has bugs in it, you're dead in the water."

Kirk continues "The plans of Linus Upson, Google's engineering director, outlined in the latest New Scientist magazine are laudable and, if they turn out to be correct, will make computing a lot safer for everyone, but the plethora of software that is available - and being developed all the time - makes the task of eradicating viruses impossible."

According to Kirk, this isn't to decry Google's plans …

Can anyone top this: the Ministry of Defence here in the UK has admitted that last year it managed to lose a server. A whole one, and get this, it was meant to be located in a secure government building for good measure.

Over the years I have become more than a little immune to data loss stories, probably as a result of the sheer number of press releases concerning this subject that pass through my inbox every month. Yes, I was gobsmacked when the UK government admitted that it had managed to lose a couple of discs from HM Revenues and Customs which contained the financial details of some 25 million citizens. But when news filtered through that a memory stick with personal data of every single prisoner in the land had gone missing my gob was less smacked than it might have been.

When I read that the average cost of a data breach to a company is some $6.65 million my brow was wrinkled a little, but remained as smooth as a baby's bottom upon discovering that 12,000 laptops are lost in US airports every week. I will even admit that I had a bit of a non-moment when writing about the bank employee who stole its computers and sold them to co-workers or on ebay.

However, reading that a supposedly secure government building can allow an entire server to go walkies did peak …

Mainframe literate IT professionals are becoming as rare as rocking horse crap courtesy of demographics, the economy and the fact that the mainframe came close to death some years back. So what, you might think, but business is starting to embrace the mainframe once more and the dramatic exodus of all the geeks skilled in these technologies is starting to show.

According to Tim Farrell, co-founder and CEO of solutions developer FutureSoft, experienced IT professionals with a background in evolutionary mainframe technology are "being persuaded to retire" while at the same time some "14 percent of UK IT graduates, increasingly being trained with mainframes in mind, can’t get jobs". All of which means that businesses are "struggling to adapt their technology to the resources at their disposal" says Farrell.

Farrell is in a good position to comment, considering his company produces mainframe terminal emulation software which has seen a 175 percent rise in sales during the last year when the UK software market as a whole has shrunk by 11 percent during the same period. he argues that we are also now seeing many of those who were pioneers of business IT, managing mainframes in the seventies and eighties, now leaving the profession. "We can’t afford to waste mainframe expertise just when we’re seeing a staggering increase in the uptake and development of mainframe technology" Farrell says.

It's something of a lose-lose situation it would appear, as economic pressure is forcing many businesses to cut the work …

According to a new poll the Apple iPhone 3GS is the smartphone that most Brits would want to be seen with on the beach this summer. The poll asked some 1500 people which smartphone they would be taking to the beach, and 28 percent of them said it would have to be the iPhone 3GS.

In second place on a fairly distant 11 percent was the new Nokia N97 which placed just a fraction ahead of HTC Hero on 10 percent of the vote. Way back in fourth place was the Palm Pre which collected five percent of voters, and the Toshiba TG01 managed to scrap a fifth place on just two percent of the poll.

I'm not quite sure where this leaves BlackBerry, despite the Bold and the Curve both getting mentioned in the poll, BlackBerry failed to hit the top five spots. Mind you, the beach is not place to be doing business I guess, unless it involves selling ice cream that is.

Perhaps the most telling result of this poll, however, would seem to be the fact that some 30 percent of those asked said that they are not buying a new phone at all this year, and for that matter not going on vacation either!

I am planning to take a vacation, and hit the beach with my iPhone 3GS. I've not got a white one so it should not turn pink in the heat. It got me …

Lawrence 'Larry' Roberts is something of an Internet legend, and for good reason: he helped build it. Way back in 1967 Roberts not only drew up the plans for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) which would eventually lead to the Internet, but he also headed up the team that designed and built it.

So when he announces that 'The Internet is Broken' and suggests that we need a radical new routing methodology to fix it, to get around the growing problem of Internet congestion, the network engineering world tends to sit up and listen.

In a hugely technical article for the IEEE Spectrum Roberts proposes a flow-management router to replace the traditional packet data network routers. The problem, as Roberts sees it, stems from the change in how we use the Internet these days. Instead of it being primarily an email and static web-based medium, for which packet data is perfectly suited to the job at hand, the Internet has become a video and voice medium for which it is not. The only reason the Internet has coped so far is, Roberts insists, that "the Internet has been grossly overprovisioned."

Roberts argues that IP packet routers simply cannot guarantee that video, for example, will steam smoothly to a user's computer because "they treat the video packets as loose data entities when they ought to treat them as flows."

Of course, and here comes the rub as it were, Roberts does also happen …

comScore has just published data from the Video Metrix service which shows that the number of online videos being viewed here in the UK is up 47 percent on a year ago and fast approaching 5 billion in April 2009 when the measuring period ended. Google did best out of the sharp upturn in online video viewing habits, with YouTube display advertising reaching some 18 million people during that month. Hardly surprising when it seems everyone, including the Pope, uses YouTube these days and there is 30 minutes of YouTube video uploaded every single second.

According to the data, in April 2009 some 4.7 billion online videos were viewed in the UK by 21.8 million UK Internet users. Because all of this has to be commercially driven, and in the world of online video monetization comes by way of display advertising, the good news is that they also viewed a total of 971 million online display adverts on multimedia sites during the month.

Google has good reason to be happy, coming out rather unsurprisingly as the top UK online video property with 2.1 billion videos viewed, up 58 percent on the same period the year before. YouTube, by the way, accounts for 99 percent of all videos viewed within the Google realm. YouTube also led the way when it came to multimedia display advertising reach, it had 18.5 million visitors in April who viewed a total of 621 million display ads.

…

With the iPhone 3GS slowly coming back into stock after selling out during the first week of release, there is more good news for potential buyers: the 3GS has been jailbroken.

Yes, 19 year old George Hotz who you might remember shot to hacking fame a couple of years back when he claimed to be the first to unlock the original iPhone, has done it again. His 'purplera1n' software has been made available for immediate download, although it remains in Beta, and is said to be able to successfully jailbreak the new iPhone 3GS.

There are some problems though, not least that at the moment only Windows users can use it which is a little ironic given the core Mac fanbase for all things Apple, including the iPhone. Otherwise, as long as the device is running the 3.0 firmware and you have iTunes 8.2 installed you are good to go.

Amazingly, Hotz has produced an executable which is smaller than a C++ 'hello world' app yet will simply and speedily open up a 3GS device to non-Apple approved applications.

Hotz says "Normally I don't make tools for the general public, and rather wait for the dev team to do it. But guys, whats up with waiting until 3.1? That isn't how the game is played. We release, Apple fixes, we find new holes."

Generally speaking I would not recommend reading a newspaper in the hot tub. If that hot tub happens to be of the spa-jet variety then that only makes it worse. If the newspaper is a rare item from the 19th century then surely only a fool would consider it. Yet this weekend I have been doing just that, reading an 1815 newspaper in the hot tub with all the jets massaging my body to bits but without destroying the delicate document.

How so? The wonders of the Internet of course. Specifically the wonder that is the new online archive of British newspapers from the British Library.

The British Library Collection has put a quite mind-boggling two million pages of 19th century British newspapers online, covering millions of articles from a total of 49 regional, national and London based publications dated between 1800 and 1900. As well as being fully text searchable with keywords in context visible in the results list, you also get thousands of illustrations, photographs and tables to wonder upon. I can email articles, save them or print them - although not in the hot tub, of course.

Being able to view the original news reports of the Battle of Waterloo, June 1815, which is what I found myself doing over the weekend, is just brilliant. This is exactly what I always thought that the Internet was for, making information available to anyone no matter where they are and at any time. It …

I am probably showing my age here, but I can recall when relationships started as a result of face to face meetings. If those relationships came to an end, they ended the same way as a rule. OK, a few cowardly types might have resorted to a 'Dear John' letter or even a phone call, but only a few. Now, a new survey suggests, more and more people are both finding and dumping lovers by email.

This should come as no great surprise, of course, after all research suggests that people are far more likely to tell lies using email than they would do if they were writing on pen and paper or talking face to face.

These are some of the findings of a nationwide survey commissioned by an email security specialist which seems to conclude that as far as the British are concerned (for it was they who were questioned) flirting and deserting by email is now commonplace.

The survey revealed that 41 percent broke bad news by email rather than doing it face to face, while 36 percent were happy to apply for a new job using email from their current one. When it comes to relationships, 26 percent admitted that they had broken off a relationship by email and a further 32 percent had used email to send 'saucy messages' to lover or prospective lover during working hours.

David Stanley, managing director EMEA at Proofpoint which commissioned the survey told …

Over the years there has been plenty of speculation regarding the sanity of Steve 'Monkey Dancing' Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO. But what is it with Microsoft and this obsession to pursue the search supremacy dream at any cost? Sure, I know Ballmer has sworn to kill Google before but the truth is that Microsoft just doesn't seem to have got what it takes to be the undoing of the search supremo. Which is why I cannot help wondering just why it is intent on investing as much as 10 percent of its income pushing Bing. Ballmer has gone on record to say that Microsoft is willing to spend up to 10 percent of operating income "for up to five years" and is confident it can "get an economic return."

To put that into perspective, based upon the $4.4 billion operating income last quarter, Microsoft could be investing as much as $1.8 billion a year for five years to further develop Bing.

But is throwing money at the problem really going to make Google go away and Microsoft take over as the new King of Search? Hell no, I don't think so. For once I think that Ballmer actually does have a grasp on the reason for the Microsoft failure in this particular market to date: it simply missed the boat and entered far too late.

While Google was getting serious about search, Microsoft was still mucking about. Google got it, Microsoft …

Seems like a silly question, right? But $80,000 per track is exactly how much Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother from Minneapolis, has been charged. Well, I say charged but actually she was fined this amount for each of 24 songs downloaded via a file-sharing site at the end of a jury trial which found her to be liable for wilful copyright infringement in every case.

The $1.92 million in damages for the four record labels involved sets a new record, if you will excuse the pun. Her attorney told reporters he was angry about the damages, but Thomas-Rasset was more laid back and insisted that the recording industry would find that getting the money from her would be like "squeezing blood from a turnip."

Indeed, an RIAA spokesperson has even hinted that the industry may not even bother collecting the fines by saying it had been willing to settle from day one and remained "willing to do so." Could the recording industry be scared of stirring up even more bad publicity surrounding how the music business deals with individuals who illegally download and share music.

Still, it could have been worse as the jury could have imposed a maximum $150,000 per infringement in such a case under the terms of the Copyright Act. Some, of course, might point out that it already is worse: than her first trial on the same charges that is. Then the total in damages came to just $9000 …

UK iPhone 3G users hoping that the network operator with the exclusive contract on the new iPhone 3GS might see sense and let them upgrade have been dealt a body blow as O2 confirms they can go and swivel on Twitter.

The iPhone 3GS will be upon us in a week or so. Brilliant stuff, especially seeing as predictions about the tech spec were pretty spot on. What a shame, then, that UK users are going to once again get shafted by mobile operator O2 over pricing, thanks to the exclusivity contract it has with Apple.

First the good news: the iPhone 3GS will be a 7.2Mbits/sec super-speedy HSDPA supporting, 3 megapixel camera toting, 30fps video shooting, hardware encryption protected, voice controlled wonder. What's more, Apple has somehow managed to pack all this additional functionality into a form factor some 23 percent smaller than the iPhone 3G that went before it. No wonder Apple is calling it the "fastest, most powerful iPhone yet."

Now for the bad news, if you happen to be in the UK as I do: Apple has renewed the exclusivity contract with O2 rather than do the decent thing and open up access to the new iPhone to all mobile operators and therefore drive down the cost to the consumer through competitive pricing deals. Not only will new customers get shafted by having to pay £274 for a 32GB iPhone 3GS on an 18 month contract whereas in the US it …

"Opera Retakes Leadership from iPhone in Mobile Browser Market" reads the press release that arrived in my email this week. "Opera is the world's number one mobile browser, overtaking iPhone in May according to data from StatCounter Global Stats" it continues, which certainly peaked my interest. Not least because, according to another set of figures, the Net Applications' Market Share report, the iPhone commands more than 60 percent of the mobile browsing share.

So what is going on here? Well, Opera insists that according to the StatCounter statistics its browser scooped a worldwide market share of 24.6 percent compared to 22.3 percent for the iPhone. Certainly if you look at those StatCounter figures the market share ordering is clear enough: Opera, iPhone, Nokia, iTouch, BlackBerry, Sony PSP, Sony Ericsson, Openwave and Android. But I am old enough to appreciate that first impressions can be a little misleading occasionally. I suspect that this is just one such occasion, because surely it is failing to compare like with like?

Let me explain. Take the iPhone and the iTouch numbers and lump them together, after all they both use the Safari browser do they not, on a mobile device do they not, and you get a market leading share of some 37.2 percent compared to the Opera share of 24.6 percent. That would be a fairer way of presenting the numbers I reckon, especially as Opera runs on different devices with different operating system platforms.

"Opera …

Just as British MPs line their pockets with taxpayer cash, just as Hollywood epics re-write history with happy endings, so Google was always going to want to compete with the Wolfram Alpha computational engine head on. And so it is that we get a sneak look at Google Squared in the Google Labs, and answers engine rather than a straight search one.

So what is it, how does it work and perhaps most importantly is it any good?

What it is, in the words of Google itself, would be an "experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet." More similar to a grid, or funnily enough given the name, a square. Instead of returning web pages it returns facts. Searching for US presidents provides grid containing at a glance information including dates of birth, full names and additional data. Each square on the grid is interactive, clicking opens up the web page which was the source of the information contained. Ah yes, that brings us nicely to the how: whereas Wolfram Alpha provides answers from its own database of information, Google Squared gets its data from searching the web and scouring the pages there for the relevant stuff which then has to be analysed, sorted, filtered, condensed and displayed within the grid. If you want additional information, you can add another square (or column if you want to stick to the spreadsheet …

This is interesting, as we are all used to reading about online resources being optimised for mobile devices. Take YouTube which has been successfully shrunk to fit the iPhone and other mobiles, but has now been writ large by way of a change.

Google informs me that it has now introduced YouTube XL, especially optimised for watching video clips on the large screen rather than the small. It says that, in addition to an all new design offering large text and simplified navigation, YouTube XL also "offers a continuous play feature, which lets you search for a topic on YouTube and then press "play" once to watch all of the videos sequentially on that topic. Also, getting from one video to the next takes just a few clicks, and you can control the action with a universal remote control, or even some mobile phones."

Sounds like a good idea to me, especially as there are now millions of HD playbacks on YouTube every day, to be able to easily view these on a big screen. Just don't mention porn though, after the YouTube Porn Day affair the other week.

Across Europe people have been voting in the European Parliamentary elections, and it looks likely that a pirate or two will have got elected in Sweden.

I voted nice and early this morning, with candidates representing the three main political parties here in the UK as well as a rather long list of somewhat oddball ones representing many diverse religious and political viewpoints. However, there were no pirates on the ballot paper. But that is only because I do not live in Sweden where the Pirate Party has been gathering momentum during the last month.

The Swedish Pirate Party is expected to do well enough to win at least one seat when the votes are counted, which is pretty impressive for a political party that was only founded three years ago and stands on a platform championing better privacy for Internet users in the face of entertainment industry moves to clamp down on illegal file sharing with laws such as the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive. It is believed that as many as ten percent of Swedes use peer-to-peer services for sharing copyrighted music and videos.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, membership and support have been bolstered tremendously by the April 17th court verdict that found the Pirate Bay founders guilty and imposed a large fine along with prison time for their part in aiding the illegal sharing of copyright material. In order to win a seat at the European Parliament, the Pirate Party would need something above …

On Thursday 2nd June 2009 it will be the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre when an undisclosed number of student protesters were killed after tanks rolled into squash the protests. You might imagine, then, that in China services such as Twitter would be a-buzz with talk about the day. Well it probably would have been, had the Chinese authorities not closed it down on Tuesday.

Various chatroom sources are saying that both Twitter and Hotmail have been blocked throughout the mainland of China since 5pm on Tuesday, China time. There have also been some reports of Windows Live and Flickr being unavailable.

Gamers have got to love the E3 Expo, especially Microsoft gamers who are into the social side of the Xbox experience. If they happen to be obsessed with Twitter as well as Xbox Live then Microsoft had some good news to announce for them at E3: a Twitter client for the Xbox 360 with that all important Xbox Live look and feel to the interface. You might think of it as being the Twitbox 360 from the fall, in fact. I certainly will, as I cannot imagine anything worse than trying to use Twitter from the games console, ordinary web surfing is awkward enough without arsing around with text entry. Actually, I can think of something worse than Twitter via the Xbox, which after all is restricted by its nature to short text messages, and that is Facebook.

It should come as no surprise that Microsoft has an interest in Facebook, it also has an investment. A rather large $240 million one in fact. But anyway, Microsoft did also demonstrate a Facebook 360 client complete with photo browsing and profile stream viewing etc. Sure, some aspects of it are cool such as Facebook Connect which is due to arrive at the same time and which will enable Xbox users to broadcast their achievements etc through Facebook profiles, but on the whole it seems a monumental waste of time.

But then again, that kind of sums up Facebook doesn't it?

The Google Android OS is coming to the Acer Aspire ONE netbook, and sooner than you might imagine. As a happy ONE owner myself, and a keen observer of all things Android, the news that it could be as soon as Q3 this year really pleases me. Jim Wong, President of IT Products at Acer, was speaking at the Computex Trade Show when he said that an Android netbook would make an appearance during the third quarter of 2009. Wong reckons that, primarily, the "incredibly fast wireless connection to the Internet" that Android provides has been the motivation for getting the product out so quickly. This is more good news for both Google and the wider netbook using public, especially as ASUS has already showcased the Snapdragon/Android Eee PC.

The Aspire ONE Android, though, if it does appear later this year will be the first Android-powered netbook. It will feature the same Intel Atom processor inside as existing models, and a 10 inch screen. Let's just hope the ongoing trademark infringement case does not rain on the Android parade too heavily.

Where would we be without the hole in the wall, that magical machine that provides us with cash whenever we need it? Where would we be without online banking, that magical system that lets us pay our bills via the Web? Customers of the HSBC bank in the UK found out over the weekend when it suffered an ATM network outage that caused them both to FAIL.

I know, being an HSBC customer myself and attempting to make a couple of bill payments on Sunday only to be met with an 'I'm Sorry Dave, I'm Afraid I Can't Do That' style message. Trouble is this was not some science fiction computer, this was a network operated by one the biggest banking groups in the world. FAIL should not be in the dictionary as far as it is concerned.

HSBC has apologised to all customers and promised that a "full investigation is currently underway" in order to find out what went wrong but that could take several weeks to complete. I cannot help but wonder if this was due to the ongoing common platform business integration process that is underway at HSBC, known as One HSBC?

Now that's what I call a really cool idea, an air-fuelled battery for the ever popular iPhone. Actually, it is more than an idea, this is a development with legs. University researchers in the UK, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have designed something called the STAIR cell.

The STAIR, short for St Andrews Air (the University of St Andrews is the lead researcher on the project) battery uses oxygen drawn from thin air to produce a reaction within porous carbon to create the electrical charge.

The good news being that this pretty green and clean device can theoretically last around ten times as long as current battery technologies. According to the boffins at EPSRC the new design has the potential to "improve the performance of portable electronic products and give a major boost to the renewable energy industry" mainly because it can "enable a constant electrical output from sources such as wind or solar, which stop generating when the weather changes or night falls."

Even better news, the STAIR cell should be cheaper than current rechargeable batteries as the main new component is constructed from porous carbon which is much less expensive that lithium cobalt oxide which it replaces in current battery designs. The University of St Andrews design replaces the lithium cobalt oxide electrode with a porous carbon electrode and allows Li+ and e- in the cell to react with oxygen from the air. Initial …

The latest State of the Mobile Web report, published by mobile web browser client developers Opera, reveals that mobile web usage in the UK has grown by nearly 50 percent over the last year.

The report also tries to make sense of other global trends as they impact upon mobile web usage, including:

• In April 2009, Opera Mini had over 23.4 million users, up more than 140 percent compared to April 2008.
  
• Opera Mini users viewed nearly 8.7 billion pages in April 2009. Since April 2008, page views have increased 249 percent.
  
• Last month, Opera Mini users generated more than 151 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90 percent. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed up to 1.4 PB of data in April. Over the previous year, data traffic is up 295 percent.
  
• Opera Mini usage in Nigeria continues to surge, pushing past Poland and taking the number 9 spot.
  
• Customers of U.S. operators view more data-intensive pages than subscribers in any other country. The average page viewed over U.S. operator networks is approximately 32 KB compressed or almost 320 KB uncompressed.
  
• Operators in the Ukraine were the big winners. Their customers view 582 pages per month, on average. Ukraine operators also sport the highest data transfer per user at more than 10 MB per month compressed. This is as much as 100 MB of …

File under strange but true. It would appear that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second has been presented with a specially commissioned gold-plated Nintendo Wii games console by THQ as part of a marketing campaign for some new game. The rather loose connection between British royalty and the game in question is that it is called 'Big Family Games' and you don't get much bigger than the British Royal Family.

THQ product manager Danielle Robinson says "The Royal Family is arguably the most important family in the country so we felt that they had to have a copy of the new game. But we thought that Her Majesty the Queen wouldn't want to play on any old console, so an extra-special gold one was commissioned. We hope that she and the rest of the Royal Family enjoy the game!"

The idea of the Queen playing any games console might seem a little far-fetched, but there have been stories circulating that suggest second in line to the throne Prince William has a Wii already. I understand that his girlfriend bought it as a gift and some newspapers over here reported that the Queen herself enjoyed a game of bowling once it was set up.

With the Wii being applauded as a miracle cure console perhaps it could do the impossible and repair the most dysfunctional family in Great Britain?

A survey of leased line Internet connections from 6000 organisations covering speeds ranging from 256Kbps right up to Gigabit Ethernet has revealed that as many as one in six are loaded to a degree where performance impacts are likely. NetEvidence, a network performance management outfit, undertook the research, and was surprised by the results. "We were particularly surprised that these customers who know their lines are overloaded are leaving them that way" says Richard Thomas, Managing Director of NetEvidence. "The organisations in the survey use our Highlight network monitoring system, so they are aware of the problem. However, many organisations don't have good visibility of this key resource and it's reasonable to assume that instances of overloading are even higher amongst this group."

Looking at the 1000 companies with the most heavily loaded lines, a number of reasons were presented as to why they had endured such low performance:

Customers are doing more with their Internet connections (such as virtual meetings or VoIP) but have no budget to upgrade.

The consistent, if poor performance and the vastly superior support provided with their Leased Line have kept them from switching to Broadband or DSL, even though it could be faster.

Internet applications have a built-in 'survival' mode to cope with poor connections and rarely fail completely. Instead, performance deteriorates slowly over time, and users simply get used to it. IT departments may choose to wait until they receive serious complaints before taking action.

At least nobody …

I have just been reading about the YouTube Porn Day scandal and it reminded me that I had been meaning to pass this little snippet of information on, direct from a YouTube Team Member and serving to illustrate just how popular the Google owned video clip sharing site has become. That truly sickening porn videos disguised as family content story takes on a whole new dimension of disgust when you appreciate the kind of popularity we are talking about here.

According to Ryan Junee, Product Manager at YouTube, an astonishing 20 hours of video content are uploaded to the service every single minute, or more than 30 minutes of film every second.

To put that into some historical context, Junee reveals that in mid-2007 YouTube was seeing around six hours a minute being uploaded, and this grew to 15 hours by January this year. That is "the equivalent of Hollywood releasing over 86,000 new full-length movies into theaters each week" Junee insists.

He also mentions a new method of uploading video content, with a feature that "allows users to conveniently record a video response immediately after watching a video, making the YouTube experience even more social" by clicking an icon to activate your webcam and record your comments.

Now there is a headline that is right up there with 'Vatican endorses new Dan Brown novel' in terms of something you would not expect ever to be reading, but according to reports it is true. The Pope is apparently keen to emulate President Obama in the way he has embraced the Internet to spread his message.

The Times says that the Vatican is "seeking ways to embrace full online “interactivity” with all one billion members of the global Roman Catholic Church" and the new accept and embrace strategy has been outlined by the head of the Holy See press office, Father Frederico Lombardi.

Lombardi confirmed that the Church could not ignore communications developments or separate itself from them and that as well as presenting "very grave risks" the Internet also had great potential for good.

You can already catch up with The Pope on YouTube, although the Vatican has yet to confirm or deny that he will be joining other old folk on Twitter any time soon.

Scared that students taking an exam might cheat, teachers at the posh Harrow School in England took the unusual step of banning them from using the Internet and re-routing their email so it could be read by the headmaster. The irony of the exam being concerned with Nazi foreign policy has not escaped me.

According to The Sun the school suspected a plot to cheat in the GCSE history exam as fellow pupils at a sister school in China had taken the same one a few hours earlier. The newspaper says that the headmaster, Barnaby Lenon, "read every email sent by pupils who took the paper."

Lenon said "We blocked internet access for pupils taking the exam and re-routed all emails to read them." Yet he also admits there was no evidence found of any plot or any cheating, adding that they could have used mobile phones instead.

Perhaps he should apply for a job with the British Government, given the record it has regarding email privacy.

Facebook, home of the 104 year old Frisbee Queen, would appear to have taken a disliking to large parts of Wales. You know, that rather lovely country which borders England and forms part of the United Kingdom. Wales even has a devolved Government in the Welsh Assembly, something the Welsh fought long and hard to get. No wonder, then, people are more than a little bit annoyed at discovering that Facebook now informs the world they live in England.

It seems that people who live in places such as Cardiff and Swansea, very definitely in Wales, now find Facebook giving their location as Cardiff, England for example.

More than 8000 angry Facebookers have started a protest group to get their profiles changed back to show them as living in Wales, but so far Facebook itself is remaining oddly quiet on the matter. Some Welsh users, so perturbed at being thought of as English have even started choosing other towns with the same name on the other side of the planet such as Cardiff, Australia.

Let's hope they do not try asking questions about their homeland of Wolfram Alpha, the much hyped computational data engine. Ask it what the population of Wales is and it reckons the answer is 5956, using an estimate from 2004. Now I know it is a relatively small part, population-wise, of the United Kingdom but last time I looked it up (which was 10 seconds ago on Google) the …

Ever wondered why your WiFi doesn't work as well as you expected, especially if you live in a highly populated part of town? The obvious, and oft-repeated, answer is that all those WiFi networks trying to work in the same vicinity just end up causing network edge congestion and that equals poor performance has been poo-pooed by a British report. The Ofcom regulator over here in the UK reported on the WiFi 2.4GHz band and discovered that WiFi slowdown is caused primarily by babies.

Well, baby listeners at any rate. You know, those devices parents use to listen to every gurgle the little kid makes in the room down the hall. The report reckons that these baby monitors, along with other non-WiFi kit such as security cameras and AV sender units, are causing WiFi interference. It suggests that
the "greatest concentration of different radio types tends to occur in urban centres, so interference tends to increase with population density" but admits that interference also occurs in low population density areas. This is because it can take just a single device, just one baby listener, to impact upon WiFi services within a short range leading to "a single large building" or a cluster of houses experiencing "difficulties with using a single WiFi channel."

The report does not blame the babies, however, nor the parents. Instead it blames "light regulation in the 2.4 GHz band" with a "plethora of radio types" not all designed via standardisation processes. The solution? …

Now this is interesting: with the arrival of a demand for some $4.5 million in damages, one of the founders of Pirate Bay has come up with an innovate method of paying it. Gottfrid Svartholm has set up something called internet-avgift which encourages ordinary Internet users who are friendly to the Pirate Bay cause to donate towards the cost of that fine. In fact, the system enables them to send those donations directly to the law firm which represented the music companies during the trial.

You might think that is all well and good, until you get to the detail. In this case the very small detail, because those people are encouraged to donate very small sums indeed, certainly a lot less than a dollar. The idea being that far from benefitting from these donations, the music companies will end up spending more in order to handle the donations that each is actually for. In other words, every donation made will end up costing them money.

Think of it as being a Distributed Donation of Dollars attack.

According to Blog Pirate the bank account where payments are made "has only 1000 free transfers, after which any transfers have a surcharge" for every donation, meaning that after the first 1000 donations each will cost them money. The same source also points out that "if after paying the internet-fee you determine that your payment was erroneous, Swedish law states that you can request …

While The Telegraph has been enjoying all the media attention this last week, at least here in the UK, thanks to exposing the scandal of British MP expense claims and breaking new details first online every day, it is not the most popular online UK newspaper according to newly published research. The Telegraph was third in the list with 3.9 million visitors during the month of March, admittedly long before the current media-magnet scandal hit the front page.

Maybe that honour, then, falls to The Guardian. After all the online version of this long running newspaper did pick up no less than three Webby awards this month, including the Best Online Newspaper award for the fourth time in five years. But no, The Guardian could only manage second place in the most viewed polls with some 4.3 million visitors.

So that just leaves the thunderer, that best known of British newspapers, The Times to mop up the crowning glory then? Nope, with just 3 million visitors it could only manage fifth position behind the Daily Mail in fourth on 3.5 million.

According to comScore, the "Total Online Visitors to a Selection of Leading U.K. Newspaper Titles" poll was topped not by one of the former broadsheets, the serious side of the newspaper industry, but rather by a red top tabloid. Yep, The Sun topped the list with a rather impressive 4.6 million visitors during that single month. A figure that represents an 8 percent year …