Justastory

I heard on Steve Hewlett’s Radio 4 media show that the Observer has declined in circulation again – this story is from there – and for once I have kept the original headline because it is great, real “surgeon priest in palace sex probe” material. I wonder how many people will read this without thinking about trying some of this strange…new….chatroulette….

An addictive new website that links strangers’ webcams is gaining popularity – and notoriety

A new website that has been described as “surreal”, “addictive” and “frightening” is proving a sensation around the world – and attracting a reputation as a haven for no-holds-barred, explicit material.

Chatroulette, which was launched in November, has rocketed in popularity thanks to its simple premise: internet video chats with ­random strangers.

When users visit the site and switch on their webcams, they are suddenly connected to another, randomly chosen person who is doing precisely the same thing somewhere else in the world.

Once they are logged in together, chatters can do anything they like: talk to each other, type messages, entertain each other – or just say goodbye, hit the “next” button and move on in an attempt to find somebody more interesting.

Chatroulette describes itself as a “brand new service for one-on-one text, webcam and microphone-based chat with people around the world”, but no one is sure who started the site. The owners did not respond to an attempt to contact them by email, and they have gone to great pains to protect their identities. This may be because ­Chatroulette appears to operate largely as an ­unregulated service and, as a result, has rapidly become a haven for exhibitionists and voyeurs.

A large contingent of people seem intent on using the service’s string of random connections as the basis for some sort of sex game.

Users regularly describe unwanted encounters with all sorts of unsavoury characters, and it has become the defining aspect of the site for some. Veteran blogger Jason Kottke, who has spent years documenting some of the web’s most weird and wonderful corners, tried the site and then wrote about witnessing nudity, sexual activity and strange behaviour.

“I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many, many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn’t female, [and] several girls who disconnected after seeing my face,” he said, adding that he also witnessed “three couples having sex and 11 erect p******s”.

Yet despite the highly offensive nature of much of the site’s content, Kottke – like thousands of others – has been hypnotised by the glimpses the site offers into other people’s lives. “Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now,” he wrote.

Although the site says that it “does not tolerate broadcasting obscene, offending, pornographic material” and offers users the option to report unsuitable content, the restrictions do not seem to prevent users from broadcasting explicit videos of themselves online.

However, like the chatroom explosion in the late 1990s or the early days of YouTube, spending time inside Chatroulette is becoming a peculiarly modern form of entertainment, particularly popular with students in campuses around the world. In just a couple of months the site has expanded significantly as it tears through universities by word of mouth, spreading virally in a similar manner to sites (more…)

This story just had everything: social networking, police, anti-banks, riots, drink, drugs, parties you name it it’s all there. Quite a few papers ran it at the end of the week — – the version I’ve chosen is from the Telegraph

A Facebook-organised party at a squat in a Park Lane town house was broken up by police after hundreds of youths caused havoc in the streets around the £10 million property.
Riot police dispersed crowds in the streets and cleared the building after partygoers pelted them with bottles and bricks from the roof and balcony.

Officers had been summoned to the party, allegedly organised by two teenagers from London, at 11pm after a wave of complaints from terrified neighbours.

Two members of the public were thought to have been injured as the partygoers jumped on cars, threw fire extinguishers and plant pots from windows and drew graffiti before the chaos subsided in the early hours of yesterday morning.

The property was bought for £10m in 2007 by (more…)

Saw this in today’s Washington Post. Sign me up.

Google, the world’s biggest online search engine, wants to turbocharge your Internet connection.

The company said Wednesday it is getting into the broadband service business with trials for fiber networks that will deliver Internet access speeds that are 100 times faster than what most Americans are getting today.

The company said in a blog that it will build fiber-to-the-home connections to a small number of locations across the country that will deliver Internet access speeds of 1 gigabit per second. The company didn’t say what areas would be part of its experiment, but said prices would be competitive and that its network would reach at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people. A source who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the company doesn’t currently have plans to expand beyond the initial tests but will evaluate as the tests progress.

“Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone,” wrote product managers Minni Ingersoll and James Kelly in the blog titled, “Think big with a gig: our experimental fiber network.”

Some of the fastest connections through cable, DSL and fiber access cap off around 20 to 50 megabits a second. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told The Washington Post during a visit late last year that ultra-high-speed Internet connections were imperative for a next generation of applications to take off for the Web. Currently, he said, most network services fall short.

At such speeds, a rural health center could receive streaming three-dimensional medial imaging over the Web and discuss health issues with a physician in a Los Angeles, for example. Downloading high-definition, full-length feature films would take about five minutes, Google said.

Hooray for Scunthorpe. This story in the Economist adds a certain ambiance to the town that put the umber into South Humberside…as well as casting light upon the growing publicity surrounding the workaholic beaver and its eponymous publication. No the beavers are not in Scunthorpe they are in Canada….anyway read the story

CANADIANS have long been proud of the industrious beaver, an animal capable of cutting down 216 trees a year with its teeth and of surviving the long winter in a purpose-built lodge made of mud, twigs and bark. The largest rodent in North America is a national emblem. The first Canadian postage stamp, the 1851 Three-Penny Beaver, carried its image. And one of Canada’s oldest magazines carries its name.

But soon it will not. From April The Beaver will be renamed. A journal of popular history founded in 1920 by the Hudson Bay Company to celebrate its 250th anniversary, it is now owned by others. Its evocation of the fur that had made the trading company’s fortunes no longer struck the right note—especially since the word has become slang for female pubic hair.

The editors had known for some time that a name change was needed. Market research indicated that many women and people under the age of 45 said they would not subscribe solely because of the name. But it was the internet that struck the fatal blow.

The Beaver website was attracting (albeit briefly) readers who had little interest in Samuel de Champlain’s astrolabe or what prairie settlers ate for breakfast. They lasted about eight seconds before moving on. E-mails to potential subscribers were blocked by internet obscenity filters. This is known online as the Scunthorpe problem, after the town in Britain whose residents were initially unable to register with AOL because its name contained an obscenity.

The Beaver Club, a classy dining room in Montreal, and the SS Beaver, a replica of an 1835 steamship operating in British Columbia, remain unperturbed by any ambiguity. As for The Beaver, it hopes to expand its 50,000 circulation as Canada’s History. Dull, yes, but at least it will do what it says on the tin.

This article in the New Scientist caught my eye today – and then I thought – what if this weapon DID catch your eye? It would still be shocking you while you were reeling from a serious and very painful injury.

THE manufacturer of the Taser stun gun is sparking new controversy with the commercial launch of a long-range version that can be fired from a 12-bore shotgun.

Government-funded tests on initial versions of the new Extended Range Electronic Projectile (XREP) have revealed possible health risks to people on the receiving end, New Scientist has learned. The manufacturer, Taser International of Scottsdale, Arizona, says the issue has been addressed in redesigned devices, but these have yet to be independently tested.

Unlike the current Taser X26, which fires darts attached to short wires, the XREP is wire-free. Its projectile, the size of a shotgun cartridge, is designed to pierce the target’s skin and contains battery-powered circuits that deliver a debilitating shock. It has a range of 20 metres or more, compared with 5 metres for previous Tasers.

A team led by Cynthia Bir, a trauma injury specialist at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, found that some of the 275 XREP cartridges that Taser supplied for testing last year were capable of delivering an electric shock for more than 5 minutes, rather than the 20 seconds of shocking current they are supposed to generate. Previous Taser stun guns shock for only 5 seconds per discharge, though that can be repeated.

Bir’s team reported their findings at a conference on non-lethal weapons in Ettlingen, Germany, in May. Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK, who has studied electric shock weapons, says Bir’s report that the device can carry on shocking for 5 minutes is worrying. The effects of prolonged shocking are not known, he says, but the finding raises concerns about the potential damage to a victim’s mental health.

Bir also found problems with the weapon’s accuracy. In test firings, it proved difficult to aim, as the aerodynamics of the projectile caused it to fall below the aiming point at a range of 20 metres. “Any lack of accuracy means a greater risk of hitting an unintended part of the body and therefore greater risk of injury,” says security researcher Neil Davison, author of a recent book on non-lethal weapons.

Steve Tuttle, a vice-president of Taser International, says the XREP munitions supplied for Bir’s tests were early pre-production versions. He says a redesign of the projectile has greatly improved its aerodynamic accuracy, and the fault in the munition’s “firmware” – its built-in software – that led to it being capable of providing an extended shock has also been corrected.

The two production versions of the XREP device include features said to improve aiming accuracy. One version, for use with rifled shotguns, has a plastic cap that engages with the rifling and gives the projectile a stabilising spin. The version for smooth-bore shotguns sprouts stabilising fins when it leaves the barrel.

Tuttle says, however, that Taser did ship some pre-production batches to US police departments.

Bir and her team have not had a chance to test the newly modified production rounds that Taser says are more accurate and reliable. Some of them have, however, already been purchased, delivered and used by unnamed “agencies” in the US, Tuttle says. Tests funded by Taser showed the rounds to be safe in terms of their impact effects on cadavers, he says. “There was no internal damage in the vicinity of the XREP impact.” There is no requirement under US law for them to undergo independent pre-sales testing.

Bir’s tests are being funded by the UK Home Office, the US National Institute of Justice and the Canadian Police Research Centre. All want to know whether the weapon can do what Taser International claims: allow police officers to incapacitate people at greater distance.

For this, the ability to take precise aim is seen as crucial. “In public disorder situations accuracy at range will be particularly important, perhaps to target individuals within a tightly packed group,” a review of “less-lethal” technologies by the Home Office states. Such weapons will help contain crowds or prevent them re-forming, the review says.

Shooting cadavers is one thing. But what happens when the weapons are fired at pregnant women, people with health problems or the very young, Wright asks.

I saw this report from Reuters in Rome today. Thanks to a mistake in the online booking system thousands of punters booked a room in this rather nice Venician hotel for one cent a night….

Hundreds of holiday makers struck lucky when they chanced upon a very special offer — a mistake in a hotel booking system which offered a romantic four-star weekend in Italy’s lagoon city of Venice for 1 cent.

The offer, a tiny fraction of the Crowne Plaza Quarto D’Altino’s normal rate of up to 150 euros ($214) a night, was quickly withdrawn when staff realized the mistake, Italian state TV reported.

In just a few hours, some 1,400 nights had been booked under the tariff, costing an estimated 90,000 euros for the hotel, part of the Intercontinental Hotels Group, the world’s largest chain, media reported.

Staff at the hotel, some 25 km (16 miles) outside Venice, declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Intercontinental Hotels Group was not immediately available.

Two employees of Domino’s video themselves horribly messing up food they are about to deliver to people and post it on YouTube. The result isn’t very funny – and it’s not even interesting viewing. However, it does totally wreck Domino’s carefully nurtured brand image, according to this story published in the New York Times. The thing about “social media” like YouTube is that it gives everyone a voice and the chance to publish their views to millions of people. I think anyone who works on the internet knows the downside of this. How many times have we had to consider how to deal with people who think it’s funny to be totally obscene to other undeserving people for no good purpose. Call me conservative. I don’t think I am. I’m certainly no fan of fast food. I’m certainly no defender of “big name brands” at all costs. I’m not sure where this leaves me with my view of social media – other than that perhaps we should rename it antisocial media. Or perhaps – media that reflects society like it really is, and it’s too much to bear.

When two Domino’s Pizza employees filmed a prank in the restaurant’s kitchen, they decided to post it online. In a few days, thanks to the power of social media, they ended up with felony charges, more than a million disgusted viewers, and a major company facing a public relations crisis.

In videos posted on YouTube and elsewhere this week, a Domino’s employee in Conover, N.C., prepared sandwiches for delivery while putting cheese up his nose, nasal mucus on the sandwiches, and violating other health-code standards while a fellow employee provided narration.

The two were charged with delivering prohibited foods.

By Wednesday afternoon, the video had been viewed more than a million times on YouTube. References to it were in five of the 12 results on the first page of Google search for “Dominos,” and discussions about Domino’s had spread throughout Twitter.

As Domino’s is realizing, social media has the reach and speed to turn tiny incidents into marketing crises. In November, Motrin posted an ad suggesting that carrying babies in slings was a painful new fad. Unhappy mothers posted Twitter complaints about it, and bloggers followed; within days, Motrin had removed the ad and apologized.

On Monday, Amazon.com apologized for a “ham-fisted” error after Twitter members complained that the sales rankings for gay and lesbian books seemed to have disappeared — and, since Amazon took more than a day to respond, the social-media world criticized it for being uncommunicative.

According to Domino’s, the employees told executives that they had never actually delivered the tainted food. Still, Domino’s fired the two employees on Tuesday, and they were in the custody of the Conover police department on Wednesday evening, facing felony charges.

But the crisis was not over for Domino’s.

“We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea,” said a Domino’s spokesman, Tim McIntyre, who added that the company was preparing a civil lawsuit. “Even people who’ve been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino’s, and that’s not fair.”

In just a few days, Domino’s reputation was damaged. The perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative since Monday, according to the research firm YouGov, which holds online surveys of about 1,000 consumers every day regarding hundreds of brands.

“It’s graphic enough in the video, and it’s created enough of a stir, that it gives people a little bit of pause,” said Ted Marzilli, global managing director for YouGov’s BrandIndex.

The Domino’s experience “is a nightmare,” said Paul Gallagher, managing director and a head of the United States crisis practice at the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller. “It’s the toughest situation for a company to face in terms of a digital crisis.”

Mr. McIntyre was alerted to the videos on Monday evening by a blogger who had seen them. In the most popular video, a woman who identifies herself as Kristy films a co-worker, Michael, preparing the unsanitary sandwiches.

“In about five minutes it’ll be sent out on delivery where somebody will be eating these, yes, eating them, and little did they know that cheese was in his nose and that there was some lethal gas that ended up on their salami,” Kristy said. “Now that’s how we roll at Domino’s.”

On Monday, commenters at the site Consumerist.com used clues in the video to find the franchise location in Conover, and told Mr. McIntyre about the videos. On Tuesday, the Domino’s franchise owner fired the employees, identified by Domino’s as Kristy Hammonds, 31 and Michael Setzer, 32. The franchisee brought in the local health department, which advised him to discard all open containers of food, which cost hundreds of dollars, Mr. McIntyre said.

Ms. Hammonds apologized to the company in an e-mail message Tuesday morning. “It was fake and I wish that everyone knew that!!!!” she wrote. “I AM SOO SORRY!”

By Wednesday evening, the video had been removed from YouTube because of a copyright claim from Ms. Hammonds. Neither Ms. Hammonds nor Mr. Setzer were available for comment on Wednesday evening, said Conover’s chief of police, Gary W. Lafone.

As the company learned about the video on Tuesday, Mr. McIntyre said, executives decided not to respond aggressively, hoping the controversy would quiet down. “What we missed was the perpetual mushroom effect of viral sensations,” he said.

In social media, “if you think it’s not going to spread, that’s when it gets bigger,” said Scott Hoffman, the chief marketing officer of the social-media marketing firm Lotame. “We realized that when many of the comments and questions in Twitter were, ‘What is Domino’s doing about it’ ” Mr. McIntyre said. “Well, we were doing and saying things, but they weren’t being covered in Twitter.”

By Wednesday afternoon, Domino’s had created a Twitter account, @dpzinfo, to address the comments, and it had presented its chief executive in a video on YouTube by evening.

“It elevated to a point where just responding isn’t good enough,” Mr. McIntyre said.

 This story appeared on the website boing boing this week.I was quite taken aback by the tone of it at first and then found it interesting – because naturally there’s quite a strong liberal American consumerist feel to the site….but surely they don’t feel an affinity with bomb-makers?

The London police have bested their own impressive record for insane and stupid anti-terrorism posters with a new range of signs advising Londoners to go through each others’ trash-bins looking for “suspicious” chemical bottles, and to report on one another for “studying CCTV cameras.”

It’s hard to imagine a worse, more socially corrosive campaign. Telling people to rummage in one another’s trash and report on anything they don’t understand is a recipe for flooding the police with bad reports from ignorant people who end up bringing down anti-terror cops on their neighbors who keep tropical fish, paint in oils, are amateur chemists, or who just do something outside of the narrow experience of the least adventurous person on their street. Essentially, this redefines “suspicious” as anything outside of the direct experience of the most frightened, ignorant and foolish people in any neighborhood.

Even worse, though, is the idea that you should report your neighbors to the police for looking at the creepy surveillance technology around them. This is the first step in making it illegal to debate whether the surveillance state is a good or bad thing. It’s the extension of the ridiculous airport rule that prohibits discussing the security measures (”Exactly how does 101 ml of liquid endanger a plane?”), conflating it with “making jokes about bombs.”

The British authorities are bent on driving fear into the hearts of Britons: fear of terrorists, immigrants, pedophiles, children, knives… And once people are afraid enough, they’ll write government a blank check to expand its authority without sense or limit.

What an embarrassment from the country whose level-headed response to the Blitz was “Keep Calm and Carry On” — how has that sensible motto been replaced with “When in trouble or in doubt/Run in circles scream and shout”?

I heard comments about YouTube yesterday on BBC radio 4 which surprised me. YouTube has overtaken Yahoo and MSN as the search engine of choice. Mainly because people are looking not just for music videos, but for things like DIY videos, and recipes, which makes sense – especially when you consider that the “how to” market has grown incredibly rapidly on the internet. However, this Performing Rights development looks quite serious with regard to music’s future on YouTube….as reported in the Guardian today

YouTube in the UK is to be stripped of its most popular music videos after the site failed to agree a new licensing deal with the Performing Rights Society for Music, the trade body that collects music royalties.YouTube said today that after the expiry of its former deal, PRS had proposed new payment terms that would be financially prohibitive for the site and would require YouTube to pay out more than it makes from the ads next to each video. It also said that PRS would not agree to identify which artists and songs are covered by which licence, something essential for YouTube’s content ID system to identify and reimburse rights holders for each song that is viewed.”We value the creativity of musicians and song writers and have worked hard with rights-holders to generate significant online revenue for them and to respect copyright,” said parent company Google in a statement.

“But PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our licence than before. The costs are simply prohibitive for us – under PRS’s proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback.”

Google said it is still negotiating with PRS but in the meantime, premium videos from artists on EMI, Universal, Warner and Sony BMG and some indie labels have started to disappear for UK viewers and will be systematically removed over the next few days. YouTube’s has separate deals with the major labels who control the sound recording rights but PRS controls licencing for the music and lyrics, without which live or pre-recorded songs cannot be performed.

Patrick Walker, YouTube’s director of video partnerships, said he couldn’t give a figure for the proportion of site traffic generated by music videos, but that music videos are some of the most popular content on the site and generate a lot of activity including remixes and on music blogs.

“This is about long-term viability,” he said. “If the next Arctic Monkeys is going to surface we need to get this to work. It’s in the interest of the music industry – we’re not just doing this for us. The record industry needs a new business models so it’s kind of a shame that this has happened. But sometimes you have to step back to step forwards.”

PRS said today that Google’s announcement was made without any consultation and in the middle of negotiations, and that it is “outraged on behalf of consumers and songwriters that Google has chosen to close down access to music videos on YouTube in the UK”.

But it also appeared to contradict Google’s claim that PRS had asked much more money for the new licence, saying the tech giant wants “to pay significantly less than at present to the writers of the music on which their service relies”.

“We were shocked and disappointed to receive a call late this afternoon informing us of Google’s drastic action,” said PRS chief executive Steve Porter. “… which we believe only punishes British consumers and the songwriters whose interests we protect and represent.”

Clearly pre-empting the fury of YouTube users, PRS emphasised that it did not ask YouTube to remove the videos and “urges them to reconsider their decision as a matter of urgency”.

But even if PRS is completely squeaky clean in this episode, it comes soon after the closing days of the Pirate Bay trial and for web-savvy consumers it will confirm the gulf between the traditional music industry and the technology they love.

It also follows some bad press for PRS over licence chasing; PRS has allegedly been pestering small businesses demanding licences if, for example, they have more than two staff and listen to the radio.

We were talking about Twittering at the weekend….. re who did and didn’t do it – it’s a no from me -and found this story in the Telegraph today by Claudine Beaumont and Ian Douglas about Britain’s most popular exponent

Only one other person, President Barack Obama, has a greater number of followers at 225,520. CNN, the american news network, has 124,286.

Fry’s 100,000th follower, Hayley Elliott, has 33 followers herself and follows no one but Fry. He welcomed her to the micro-blogging site with a reply: ‘Hi there Hayley! You are my 100,000th follower! And I’m proud to be your first. Welcome to Twitter xxx’, shortly after exclaiming ‘Holy ARSE. Thank you all xxxxx’. Ms Elliott has yet to post.

At 3.30pm Fry had 100,536 followers.

Fry uses the service to keep fans and followers updated about his travels and latest television projects, as well as his thoughts and views on world events, and the more mundane aspects of daily life.

There was a surge in Twitter traffic after Stephen Fry discussed the service with fellow user Jonathan Ross on the BBC presenter’s chat show last week. Fry issued a set of tips and hints for new users in a bid to manage the huge number of extra followers he was attracting on a daily basis.

He said that he was “touched and pleased” to have such a loyal Twitter following, but was finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with all the messages sent by his followers.

There are a number of other high-profile British Twitter users in the top 40 list. Jonathan Ross is number 26 on the list, with 43,289 followers, just ahead of John Cleese, who has 43,046 Twitter fans. Russell Brand set the record for fastest-growing account with 8,000 new followers in one day, but has not posted since.

Gordon Brown’s Downing Street Twitter account, meanwhile, is the 59th most popular, with 26,579 followers.

Good background info about recent growth in the art of Twittering from the Independent last week:

It was established as a communication tool for geeks and now counts showbusiness stars and the American President among its users.

The popularity of Twitter, the micro-blogging service used by President Obama to remind Americans to vote and tennis player Andy Murray to update fans on the weather, has risen so much that it has seen its visitor numbers increase by nearly 1,000 per cent among UK users.

Latest figures from Hitwise, the online intelligence service, show a 974 per cent increase in traffic, jolting Twitter from the 2,953rd most popular site among UK users to the 291st most visited by mid-January.

Widely feted as the follow up to the networking site Facebook in the evolution of web communication, the service allows users to post short updates about what they are doing. Established as the preferred communication tool for members of the tech community, the service has now entered the mainstream as a form of instant news alert and marketing technique.

The recent explosion in user numbers is largely a product of enthusiasm for a new form of citizen journalism. President Obama has a Twitter profile, although it has been quiet of late, while news of the recent plane crash in New York’s Hudson River first emerged from survivors’ Twitter updates.

Jonathan Ross, the disgraced BBC presenter, has been using the service to chat with fans during his enforced absence from the BBC. He has said he will Twitter live with Stephen Fry, another celebrated Twitterer, on his BBC television programme tonight.

“Twitter was one of the fastest-growing websites in the UK last year, and shows no signs of slowing down,” said Robin Goad, director of research for Hitwise. “If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website.

“If the people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications [such as Twitteriffic, Twitterfeed, and Tweetdeck were included, the numbers could be even higher. Many people seem to find Twitter addictive: the average amount of time that people spend on Twitter.com has more than trebled from less than 10 minutes a year ago to half an hour now.”

Twitter does not provide official figures for its usage, but industry analysts believe that more than 2.25 million “tweets” are posted every day, on top of more than 1.1 billion such messages since the service was launched in early 2007.

And the site is about to open a radical new arm of its operation by integrating search functions into the home pages of users. Until now, users who wanted to search for “tweets” had to go to a separate website, search.twitter.com.

That obstacle is thought to have put off many members of the public. But over the next 10 days, Twitter will start putting search functions into the home page of around 1 per cent of users, asking them for feedback about its efficacy. Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s co-founders, deflected criticism of his creation as simply a platform for narcissists. “Search integration is a way of introducing relevancy to people”, he said. “This is not just about, ‘What are you doing?’ but about what everyone else is doing. Twitter is about finding out what is going on out there right now in real time.”

The fastest growing group of users in the UK is in the 35- to 44 year-old bracket and accounts for 17.3 per cent of UK visitors. Growth in the UK is likely to be accelerated by the reintroduction of free two-way text messaging of “tweets” to countries outside the US.

The service was withdrawn in Europe last year because it was too expensive for the company. For all Twitter’s success, it remains a small player in online networking. Facebook is the most-visited networking site in the UK, with almost 38 per cent share of the market, followed by YouTube, Bebo, and MySpace, with 17 per cent, 9.1 per cent, and 5 per cent respectively.

This article ran in the G2 section of the Guardian yesterday – nicely put put together by writer Alok Jha, who had to  wear a wrist band that records walking and exercising movements in order to link up with a computer based personal training system.

Like so many who have gone before me in the fight against flab, I am engaged in an unending war with my body. I don’t mind exercise – I jog, cross-train and swim – but I do love food. Children learn early that when your stomach is full it is a good idea to stop. It is a skill I have yet to develop.

These two sides – the exercise and the eating – are finely balanced. For months at a time, exercise will prevail, but it takes only one missed gym session for the discipline to fall apart.

Enter MiLife, a web-based system that claims to be the world’s first “personalised online coaching system”. As I am never going to get an actual personal trainer (why pay for someone in a tracksuit to shout at you?), I thought a virtual one could keep an eye on my progress and shame me into action.

The system comes with a wristband that records all the movements you make in a day and, when connected to a computer via bluetooth, uploads this data to a personal profile on the MiLife website. Every week, you track your performance with a plethora of bar charts and line graphs and the MiLife software advises you on how to get the best out of your exercise.

To start, you tell MiLife what your goals are. Perhaps you want to raise your activity levels or lose some weight? The website’s virtual trainer will come back with a personalised plan, broken down into daily targets. As you progress, the software automatically adapts the plan during a weekly coaching session to take into account the exercises you seem to be good at and those you’re not.

I chose to give myself both exercise and weight targets, but rapidly regretted the latter. Weight control involves recording a daily food diary, an activity as tedious and irritating as filing tax returns. Every day. I tried, I really did. MiLife even allows you to use your mobile phone to text in how many calories you eat but, seriously, how do you know exactly how many are in a salmon mousse? I gave up after just a few weeks of semi-completed diaries and, during my weekly online coaching sessions, the software duly reminded me of my laziness.

I was more successful with the wristband, which I wore obsessively. MiLife breaks down activity into low, medium and high. Shuffling around my flat was low activity, a brisk walk counted as medium-to-high and a jog or even the odd dash for a bus would rack up minutes in the high-activity section. Like anyone given a target, I did everything I could to get the daily totals up: I walked into work more often, went walkabout at lunchtimes, and avoided buses for all short journeys.

All the information about my activity was recorded with no need for my intervention, and it was useful: days when I took the bus home, for example, instead of walking, appeared as conspicuous gaps among the skyscrapers of activity in the days where I had been more diligent. I could monitor my minutes of high activity from jogging or cross-training to ensure that I kept up the levels suggested by the software. All of this was motivational, too – I was surprised how far I would go to get a perfect set of bar charts.

If you choose, MiLife will email or text to get you exercising, and chide you if you miss too many sessions. The virtual trainer is powered by something called the “Idapt engine”, a computer model that MiLife says is the result of five years of research collating data from hundreds of people to tease out successful strategies to, for example, lose weight or keep motivated to exercise. During the first few weeks of use, this builds up a profile of the kinds of exercise that seem to work for you. By matching this to the profiles it stores, it can suggest exercises or ways to break consistent bad habits. I was advised, for example, to try an exercise bike and do more gentle jogging, but the longer you use the programme the better the suggestions should be.

In a randomised controlled trial of 77 people over nine weeks, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research in 2007, those using the MiLife system ended up doing, on average, two hours more physical activity a week than the control group. This is a good result, but bear in mind that these were probably active volunteers, so likely to be motivated to exercise.

There are niggling problems with the system: the website is slow, badly designed and frustrating to use. As a Mac user, I found the software a small nightmare to set up and the system lost two weeks of my weight and activity data. That meant my programme was all but shot to pieces because the software assumed I had been lying down for a fortnight.

I didn’t manage to make MiLife record my activities for long enough to complete a 12-week programme but, on the evidence I do have, my feelings are mixed. Just knowing that all your movements are being recorded is surprisingly rewarding and motivational. Small bits of low-level exercise can add up, and visualising all the jogging and cycling with the bar charts every day was (when I was wearing my geek hat) addictive.

The weight-loss part of the MiLife programme was defeated by my lack of willpower. But the exercise plan definitely recorded an increase in my activity in the weeks that I used the system. Whether that was entirely due to MiLife, I’m not so sure – most of the increase came in the low-level exercise – the jogging or other aerobic exercise I would have done anyway.

So a partial success for me, but is it worth the £99 it costs for the basic equipment and a year’s subscription to the website? It might not be as expensive as a personal trainer, but if MiLife is hoping people will put their hands in their tracksuit pockets, the technology needs to be more impressive.

• For more information, see milife.com

• This article was amended on Wednesday 14 January 2009. Milife, a computer based personal training system, costs £99 for a year’s website subscription and all the basic equipment, not £200, as we said above. This has been corrected.

Rather than run a story today about the demise of Lehman Brothers or the financial problems of AIG, or the imminent coming of a second 1930’s style recession – in my view these have all been well covered by the mainstream media and perhaps later in the week I shall pick a particular aspect of them to comment upon……….

I had dinner with friends in the banking sector  two weeks ago. They are not prone to using the word “Armageddon” very often – so I guess I will have to include some financial sector stories soon enough.

In the meantime I was interested to read about something new today, a rival for Google in China called Baidu – which works in a different way from our oft-used engine –  this very good and full account below is written by Andrew Orlowski for website The Register. Andrew’s well-written article gives more detail if you want to visit the original feature. Baidu is huge and different – and I had never even heard of it before.

Baidu is renowned as China’s glittering internet success story, and as the start-up that gave Google a bloody nose. It dominates the web in the world’s second biggest economy with 70 per cent market share, and on Wall Street carries a market cap of almost $12bn.

But Baidu’s success comes at a price, for the legitimate music business, for the development of China and of its intellectual property (IP) law, and for any internet company wishing to do business in China.

Baidu owes its success to its MP3 Search service, which takes surfers directly to music. It’s known as “deep linking”, and early this year, sound recording owners represented by IFPI filed a copyright infringement case against Baidu, claiming damages worth $9m.

Yet the scale of Baidu’s operation, uncovered by a forensic six-month investigation conducted in China for The Register, has surprised the music business.

“Although we already had some doubts about Baidu mp3 search, when we saw the investigation results presented, it was really a shock,” Susanna Ng, EMI Music Publishing Managing Director, Asia Pacific told China’s Fortune Times.

Music searches using Baidu return results that are heavily skewed in favour of unlicensed music, while they rarely return search results for licensed music sites. Meanwhile, the unlicensed MP3s appear to systematically move around a complex network of domains in response to infringement notices.

Chinese web surfers may be forgiven for missing the news. Baidu fails to link to news stories critical of the company, including some of the findings below; these have been covered only by a handful of publications within China. It’s a chilling reminder of the ability of a web search engine to control and shape public discourse.

We’ll explain what Baidu does, and why it’s in trouble. And the grim prospects for anyone hoping to build an internet business in China – with an unstoppable Baidu.
What does Baidu do?

Most full-length recorded music in China is unlicensed, infringing material. Some estimates put the figure as high as 98 per cent. A popular act can expect to sell as few as 2,000 copies. Yet China is not quite the lawless frontier these figures suggest.

In March this year, another Chinese top five music search engine, Zhongsou had its servers seized and subjected to the maximum fine for copyright infringement by state administration authorities. This was the first public case of a music search engine being convicted for hosting MP3 files. Government appointed bodies such as the Music Copyright Society of China (MCSC) and the China Audio-Video Copyright Association (CAVCA) are both active in attempting to support businesses that reward the creators. Baidu’s notorious MP3 Search is the biggest problem they face.

MCSC’s Director of Legal Services Liu Ping used the following real life analogy to describe deep-linking:

“If Google’s search works as a guide by giving directions and telling you the address while taking you right to the door of your destination, Baidu’s search brings you directly through the door, right inside the room and helps you take away the CD from shelves without the owner’s permission.” Liu Ping considers this to be beyond the scope of a search engine, and a practice which moves Baidu into the area of transmission of music.

Baidu has amassed numerous lawsuits over the practice, with MCSC and the IFPI involved in a number of these. Baidu’s defence is that as a network service provider it cannot be responsible for the legality of the sites it indexes and is therefore not liable for damages. Nevertheless, Article 23 of China’s Copyright Law says that it is jointly liable “where it knows or has reasonable ground(s) to know” that the linked works are infringing material.

However, our investigation suggests close enough linkage between Baidu’s business and the infringing material for it to be viewed as something more than ‘just’ a network service provider.

Baidu’s MP3 Search was monitored for six months at the end of last year, analyzing search results using 600 songs spread across multiple genre. A number of areas that seemed incongruous to a pure and neutral search engine were discovered, and three details emerged.

Firstly, a network of mysterious sites with closely related domain names contributed more than 50 per cent of the search links returned by Baidu. The songs hosted on the mystery sites were unreachable except through the Baidu search engine. Furthermore, infringement notifications resulted in unlicensed songs simply moving from one of these domains to another.

Secondly, Baidu does not link to the two leading paid download sites in China, 9Sky and Top100. While Google for example will return results for a song search to licensed providers (7Digital, Amazon, eMusic or even iTunes) as well as Torrent trackers, Baidu is much more selective.

Thirdly, music blogs and forums naturally form a significant source of music search links for any search engine. But with Baidu, these contributed to only 30 per cent of the music search links on Baidu’s MP3 Search.

The cumulative effect is to keep the “free music flowing” for Baidu’s users – with devastating consequences not just for creators, but for rival internet businesses.

I found this story on Reuters today originally but the BBC report fills in the gaps pretty well. An important detail which I feel the BBC have glossed over is that Yevloyev was shot in the temple whilst being driven away in a Russian police car. There are rumours of a struggle in the car, but it reminded me that the Gestapo used to describe their murder victims as “shot whilst trying to escape”. All we need to hear now was that it was a small caliber 22 handgun and we will be certain that the assassination was a professional job.

Kremlin critic shot in Ingushetia

The owner of an internet site critical of the Russian authorities in the volatile region of Ingushetia has been shot dead in police custody.

Magomed Yevloyev, owner of the ingushetiya.ru site, was a vocal critic of the region’s administration. Yevloyev’s website is said to be one of the most visited for Ingush news

The Russian prosecutor’s office said an investigation into the death had been launched, Russia media report.

A post on Yevloyev’s site says he was detained by police after landing at the airport of the main town, Nazran.

The website owner was taken to hospital but died from his injuries.

Reports quoting local police said Yevloyev had tried to seize a policeman’s gun when he was being led to a vehicle. A shot was fired and Yevloyev was injured in the head.

Fierce critic

Yevloyev was a thorn in the side of Ingush President Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB general.

His website reported on alleged Russian security force brutality in Ingushetia, an impoverished province of some half a million people, mostly Muslims, which is now more turbulent than neighbouring Chechnya.

President Zyazikov had been on the same flight as Yevloyev.

Ingushetia borders Chechnya and has suffered from overflowing unrest.

There is a low-level insurgency, with regular small-scale ambushes against police and soldiers.

In June 2008, the Human Rights Watch group accused Russian security forces there of carrying out widespread human rights abuses.

HRW said it had documented dozens of arbitrary detentions, disappearances, acts of torture and extra-judicial executions.

I found this story in today’s Independent. Interesting because someone once messed around with one of my son’s Facebook entries which caused him some distress – but building a whole fake one is a different story and proved the undoing of the guy below.

A businessman whose personal details were “laid bare” in fake libellous entries on the Facebook social networking website was awarded £22,000 damages today against a former friend who created the profile.

Mathew Firsht, managing director of Applause Store Productions Ltd, sued an old schoolfriend, freelance cameraman Grant Raphael, for libel and misuse of private information.

A judge at the High Court in London ruled that Mr Raphael’s defence to the action – that the entry was created by mischievous party gate-crashers at his flat – was “built on lies”.

Deputy Judge Richard Parkes QC awarded Mr Firsht £15,000 for libel and £2,000 for breach of privacy.

Mr Firsht’s company, which finds audiences for TV and radio shows and provides warm-up services for live audiences, including the evictions on Big Brother, was awarded £5,000 for libel.

Mr Firsht accused Mr Raphael of creating a false personal profile, and a company profile called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?”, from a computer at the flat where Mr Raphael was living in Hampstead, north west London, in June last year.

Mr Raphael claimed that “strangers” who attended an impromptu party at the address that day sneaked off to a spare bedroom and created the profiles on his PC.

The profiles were on the site for 16 days until Mr Firsht’s brother spotted them and they were taken down by Facebook.

The judge heard that the private information concerned Mr Firsht’s whereabouts, activities, birthday and relationship status and falsely indicated his sexual orientation and political views.

It said that he was “Looking for: whatever I can get” in terms of relationships and was signed up to groups including Gay in the Wood…Borehamwood, and Gay Jews in London.

Mr Firsht complained about allegations that he owed substantial sums of money which he had repeatedly avoided paying by lying, and that he and his company were not to be trusted in the financial conduct of their business and represented a serious credit risk.

He accused Mr Raphael of bearing a grudge against him since they fell out in 2000 and of creating a false Facebook entry with the aim of causing him anxiety and embarrassment.

Recounting the “unfortunate dispute between two former friends”, the judge said Mr Firsht’s company provided audiences for popular shows such as Big Brother, The X Factor and Top Gear.

He was personally involved in overseeing the audience operation, and his credibility and reputation were very important to him.

Mr Raphael, a freelance lighting cameraman, also spent much of his time working in television.

Mr Firsht, now in his late 30s, became good friends with Mr Raphael in Brighton, where they went to school together.

They fell out around six years ago over a business dispute. Mr Firsht, who said he did not hold grudges, forgot about the episode and moved on to become very successful.

“He is plainly a businessman of single-minded drive and dedication, and he did not strike me as being the kind of man to waste valuable time on ancient disputes,” the judge said.

By contrast, Mr Raphael’s company went into voluntary liquidation and, by the time the present dispute arose, “Mr Firsht was prospering and highly successful, and Mr Raphael was not”.

The judge described as “utterly far-fetched” Mr Raphael’s claim that a complete and random stranger visiting his flat for the first time used his computer for more than an hour, without being observed, to create a false and hurtful profile containing information that few people apart from Mr Raphael could have known.

Mr Raphael, as a witness in court, was “glib and loquacious, always prepared, it seemed to me, to talk his way out of a difficulty, with no apparent insight into the implausibility of some of his answers”.

The judge said Mr Firsht, a very private person, was shocked and extremely upset by the gross invasion of his privacy and the fact that personal details, including false details about his sexuality, had been “laid bare for all to see”.

The damage he suffered was made worse by his being compelled to endure an expensive and time-consuming court process to achieve vindication in the face of Mr Raphael’s lies.

He would have accepted an apology if Mr Raphael had offered one at an early stage, thus avoiding the distress and expense of litigation.

I found this story in the Santiago Times written by Ada Letelier. When I first started reading it I thought ho-hum, but the writer has sound tips for planning a holiday. This caught my attention because last night I heard a pundit discussing the new trend for “holidaying at home” – this article puts into words my exact feelings on the matter. She also wrote part two – about how to holiday with an organised group – yeccccch! – but actually maybe not yeccccch unbelievably…..I’ll post that story if I get interested comments on this one.

Tourists enjoy the world’s largest swimming pool at a seaside resort in Algarrobo, Chile, 95 kilometers (58.9 miles) west of Santiago. Acknowledged by the Guinness World Records, the lagoon measures 1,013 meters (3,323 feet) in length, covers an area of eight hectares (20 acres), contains 250,000 cubic meters of water, and is navigable in small boats.

In the 1969 movie If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium, directed by Mel Stuart, a busload of American tourists embark on a crazy tour across Europe, getting into a multitude of problems and sticky situations along the way. This one movie alone perhaps did more to deter people from traveling in organized groups than all the airplane hijackings we have witnessed since then. After this movie was released, it became unfashionable to travel in this manner. Many Americans opted to go it alone with a little bit of help from family, friends, and tips gleaned at the office water cooler.

The Internet is another thing that has changed the way people plan vacations. Years ago, it seemed the only people who had access to this revolutionary new method of communication were banks and airline companies. Nowadays, most people go online when they decide they want or need a vacation.

The types of vacations that people take also have changed. And by vacation, I do not mean staying at home and getting up late until it’s time to return to work. If you don’t leave your home—indeed, if you don’t leave the state where your home is located—then you are not on vacation. Instead, you are merely hanging out at home and wasting these precious days doing something other than enjoying yourself.

Staying at home means those closets that you have been ignoring for the longest time finally get straightened out. Those pictures that you meant to put into albums finally get put in. The attic gets cleaned out, and, if you have a garage, likewise. And if your child has gone off to college, you dig in and clean out that room and hope you don’t disown your child by the end of this cleanup due to the many wonderful things you have found under the bed or tucked away in the back of the closet. Trust me, those conversations about what the hell this and that mean are just not worth it. Move on! Now that we have gotten that straightened out, let’s think about going away from home, with or without the children. Let’s plan to visit someplace new and enjoy ourselves by doing some of those things we always dreamed about. Things like sunbathing on a black sand beach in Hawaii; climbing the Sun or Moon Pyramids in Teotihuacán, Mexico; exploring the ruins of a lost civilization in Machu Picchu; tasting the famous wines of Chile; dancing with the locals during Carnival in Rio; seeing a bullfight in Madrid; taking a gondola ride in Venice and being serenaded by a gondolier; climbing the Great Wall in China; scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia; and visiting the Louvre and Picasso museums in Paris, then walking up to Montmartre for a spectacular view of the city at night.

Once the decision is made, our next step is securing a flight to our destination of choice. In the past, one merely called or went to the nearest airline office and asked what flights were available. However, when I went to American Airlines to inquire about travel to New York, I was told to go online and check out their latest offers. “But, I’m here now,” I said. “Can’t you look it up and tell me what is available? Are there any specials? Do I have enough miles to travel free to New York?”

“Well, you wouldn’t be here now if you had checked American Airlines online first, now would you?” said the young woman behind the counter.

At LAN Airlines, down the block from American, they have several agents ready and willing to help customers who walk in off the street. Any inquiry will be researched and answered. However, know that there may be a long wait time—which becomes increasingly longer during high season—and that the information that they have readily available is only for their flights and tour packages.

If you plan to visit your family, then your work ends here—for we all know it’s tacitly understood that, when family comes to visit, the host does all the work. The family you are visiting will take you to see all the sights and be responsible for ensuring that you get tickets for museums, concerts, plays, amusement parks, etc. And they will do this because, for sure, it will be your turn up at bat at a later time.

However, if you’re not planning to visit relatives and want to stay at a luxurious hotel with all amenities included, that’s a different story. So, the next thing you have to do is decide whether you are going to find this wonderful hotel yourself, within your price range and for the dates you need, or let someone else do this for you. If you opt for the former, and don’t mind spending time sitting in front of a computer trying to put together your dream vacation, I would suggest that you do so.

Now you may ask, “Where do I start?” First things first: as mentioned earlier, your first step is securing your flight. You simply cannot book a hotel and then hope you can get a flight that fits into that time frame—unless you are willing to pay whatever it costs to get there.

You start by going to all those Web sites that offer these magical vacations at unheard-of prices. If you enter any of the following words in the search bar, you will be surprised at the number of hits you will get for travel anywhere around the world: “cheap tickets,” “cheap flights,” “travel deals,” “vacation packages,” “trips,” and “smart travel.” Also, ask around at work and among your family and friends. Some people have favorites and are more than willing to share this information.

Next, you need a place to stay. Figure out what type of lodging you are interested in, and then start your search. Are you interested in staying in the city or outside of city limits? Do you want to be near the sights, or do you not care if you have to travel a bit? But be warned: if it looks too good to be true, there probably is a catch. Sometimes hotels require a stay of at least three days or more for a reservation. Ocean views sometimes cost more. You may not want an ocean view (too noisy). Do they have smoking or non-smoking rooms and/or floors? Is this really important to you? Is breakfast included in the price? What type of breakfast? Will you be satisfied with a hard-boiled egg and a cup of tea or coffee, or do you prefer a breakfast buffet with more options? It is up to you to ask as many questions as possible before you book the room. Don’t worry: they have heard them all before.

To find accommodations, just type in “lodgings.” Here, you will get a listing of hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts, apart-hotels, cabins—you name it. Don’t limit your search by just typing in the word “hotels.” What you are trying to do is find out what is out there.

I told you this would be work, but well worth it in the end.

One caveat: the Internet waits for no one. If you see something you like, book it right away. Special offers do not last very long. If you walk away from your computer to discuss this with your spouse or family, you may come back and find the offer is no longer available—or if it is, not at the cheap price you had seen earlier. So, have these discussions with your spouse, family, or significant other before you begin your search. Also, have two or three alternatives in case you can’t finalize your first choice. Then, when you go online, all you have to do is complete the transaction with your credit card, and bingo: you are set to go.

Be sure before you commit that the flight and the tour package are the ones you really want, because there may be hefty fines involved if you change your mind. In some cases, you may lose all of your money or a great part of it. It also does not matter whether the reason you have is valid or not; read the fine print. If it says you have two weeks to cancel your reservation without penalty, understand that they mean business!

Another word of warning: you must have a credit card. No, you cannot write a check or money order. Your credit card must also be valid. It doesn’t hurt to have more than one because sometimes, for no explicable reason, they simply will not accept a certain credit card, even if it is current and you have a generous line of credit available in the account.

Make sure you keep a copy of the transaction number and follow up by visiting the site again and again to ensure that everything is O.K. Lots of people do business this way and have been quite successful at securing a good flight, lodgings, vacation package, and great prices—yours truly as well. It can be time consuming, but remember: we are talking about your dream vacation.

Last but not least, check that you have all your paperwork in order. The three most important things are passports, visas, and vaccinations. If you have any questions regarding any of the above, call the embassy and consulate offices of the countries you plan to visit and ask about the latest requirements. Make sure you also inquire about entrance and exit fees, fees many countries are now requiring as a condition of travel to and out of their countries. Once again, most of this information can be found online. You owe it to yourself and your family to be prepared on all fronts if you are to fully enjoy this wonderful vacation that you have worked so hard for.

Hmmm. Personally I don’t like anything which impinges upon the privacy – and rights to browse without policing- of the individual – but as a marketing person I can see where this idea is coming from. Difficult, but interesting. This article appeared in the Economist and enjoys their usual high standard of reporting and writing. I’ve asked my ISP whether they have signed up for this. I don’t expect a reply.

IS IT a worrying invasion of privacy for web surfers, or a lucrative new business model for online advertising? A new “behavioural” approach to targeting internet advertisements, being pioneered by companies such as Phorm, NebuAd and FrontPorch, is said to be both of these things. The idea is that special software, installed in the networks of internet-service providers (ISPs), intercepts webpage requests generated by their subscribers as they roam the net. The pages in question are delivered in the usual way, but are also scanned for particular keywords in order to build up a profile of each subscriber’s interests. These profiles can then be used to target advertisements more accurately.

Suppose a web user is idly surfing a travel blog one Sunday afternoon. He visits pages containing words such as “holiday”, “flight” and “hotel”. The behavioural-targeting software watching him inside the ISP’s network registers and categorises this apparent interest in travel. Later, when he logs on to a social-networking site to see what his friends are up to, advertisements for an airline or hotel chain pop up alongside the postings and photos. The depressing prospect of having to return to work the next day prompts him to click on an advertisement and book a minibreak for the next weekend.

To advertisers, this all sounds great. Behavioural-targeting firms are doing the rounds in Europe and America offering the prospect of working out what web surfers are thinking, perhaps even before they know themselves. If this really works, advertisers will be prepared to pay more to place ads, since they are more likely to be clicked on. That in turn means that websites will be able to charge more for their advertising slots. A small cut also goes to the ISP that originally gathered the profile information.

The companies involved suggest that internet users will welcome all this, since more accurate targeting will turn internet advertising from an annoying distraction into a genuinely helpful service. “This idea that we don’t provide a service by doing this is as far from the truth as it’s possible to be,” says Kent Ertugrul, the boss of Phorm. “It creates a situation where there’s less rubbish bombarding you.”

But not everyone likes the idea. Opponents of behavioural targeting have kicked up the biggest fuss in Britain, which is where the technology seems to be making the most progress: the three biggest ISPs (BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk), which together account for around 70% of the market, have all signed up to use Phorm’s technology. Since news of their plans emerged in February, over 13,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the system. Legal and networking experts have argued that it constitutes an unauthorised wiretap, and is therefore illegal. Richard Clayton, a computer-security expert at Cambridge University who has taken a close look at Phorm’s systems, did not like what he saw. Proponents of behavioural targeting, he concluded, “assume that if only people understood all the technical details they’d be happy. I have, and I’m still not happy at all.”

Phorm, which is now trying to get American ISPs to adopt its technology too, emphasises that consumers will be given the option to opt out of the system if they do not wish to use it. It points out that information about individuals’ surfing habits remains within the custody of the ISP (which already has access to such information anyway), and that user profiles merely associate keywords with an anonymous serial number, rather than a name. Its profiling system ignores sensitive pages, such as those from online-banking sites, and will not be used to target advertising for pornographic sites.

Critics worry, however, that behavioural targeting fundamentally undermines the trusting relationship between ISPs and their subscribers, by allowing a third party to monitor what millions of people are doing. They also worry about Phorm’s previous behaviour. Until last year it was known as 121Media, and it gathered information about internet users’ interests by getting them to download “adware”, which was included in bundles with other pieces of software. This software then monitored users’ surfing habits and used the resulting data to target “pop up” advertisements of the kind that once blighted the web.

All this was legal, but it won 121Media few friends among PC users, who found its software difficult to remove from their machines. The revelation that the company, since renamed Phorm, conducted a secret trial of its new technology with BT in 2006 and 2007, monitoring thousands of customers without telling them, has not helped its image.

As the controversy swirls, Google, the 800-pound gorilla of the internet-advertising industry, is quietly watching. ISPs around the world have looked on jealously as Google has grown rich on their subscribers’ web-browsing, while the ISPs have been reduced to “dumb pipes”, ferrying internet traffic for subscribers but unable to win a share of their online spending.

Phorm and its ilk promise to change that, by offering ISPs a chance to get their hands on a slice of the fast-growing online-advertising pie. Behavioural-targeting firms also like to portray themselves as feisty underdogs taking on mighty Google, which is itself the cause of concern about online privacy. Phorm points out that its system does not retain detailed information about web usage as it builds its user profiles—in contrast to Google, which keeps records of users’ search queries for up to two years. (The European Commission recently called upon Google to delete such information after six months.) “If people knew what was stored right now, they’d be shocked,” says Phorm’s Mr Ertugrul. His company’s system, he says, is “the model for privacy online”.

Even so, most web users are happy to strike an implicit deal with Google: it provides an excellent free search engine in return for the ability to display relevant advertisements. The quid pro quo with behavioural targeting, says Mr Ertugrul, is that ISPs will start making money from online advertising, which they can then spend on upgrading their networks, without raising prices for subscribers. “This is a way of funding the internet,” he says.

Behavioural targeting is not necessarily a bad idea, but imposing it without telling people is likely to annoy them when they find out about it. Without adequate disclosure, an “opt out” system looks like snooping; but an “opt in” system, given all the fuss, now looks like a tough sell.