The Times: Tech column - Domestic robots/Fritz Hollings/Harvard's cybercourse

By David Rowan

THIS looks like being the year of the two-legged robot - at least, if you have a bit of cash to burn. Last week, Sony unveiled its new domestic robot, code named SDR-4X, which can walk around the house and, usefully, pick itself up if it falls over. It can recognise individual faces and voices, talk to you with a 60,000-word vocabulary, and, according to Sony's executive vice-president, Toshitada Doi, it is "designed to live with people in homes". It is pitched as an entertainment toy - not surprisingly for Sony - and, for the price of a luxury car, should be on the market in Japan later this year.

Honda, meanwhile, is pushing Asimo, its own new walking robot, as a high-tech worker - serving as a receptionist or patrolling offices as a late-night security guard. Asimo costs around £110,000 a year to hire, although Masato Hirose, Honda's chief engineer, predicts that within ten years it will be cheap enough to serve drinks in a typical family home.

In 40 years of international efforts to make bipedal robots a reality, the challenge has always been to combine agility with balance and spatial awareness. Learning to walk is no easy task for a machine. But advances in sensors and image recognition mean that today's models can walk effortlessly across various floor surfaces. Tomorrow the world's latest robots will stroll around in the Robodex exhibition in Yokohama, Japan, asking for work in nursing, security or education.

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WITH Hollywood panicking over illegally downloaded movies, and record companies blaming piracy for their current woes, Washington continues to seek a solution in draconian restrictions on consumer technology. Last week, the US Senate's powerful commerce committee chairman, Fritz Hollings, introduced a Bill that, if it becomes law, will limit how you enjoy legally acquired music and films. The proposed legislation, the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Bill, would ban any electronic device that lets you record music or video unless it includes copy-protection technology.

In other words, everything from your computer to your DVD player would control your private use of digital content - with large fines and even jail sentences for those who build or sell devices that do not comply. This could mean the end of the MP3 player and the home-made compilation CD - in other words, legitimate uses of technology would be banned to prevent the occasional illegitimate use. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is leading a campaign against the Bill, says: "It is the technological equivalent of requiring that crowbars be made of foam rubber on the grounds that metal ones may be used in the commission of burglaries".

Nor would such a law affect the US alone: in a global entertainment market, we will all be forced to comply. The recent worldwide spread of copy-protected CDs has already shown how consumer rights can be ignored by the entertainment companies. If Hollings's proposal becomes law, those of us who pay for our digital content will have our consumer rights further eroded. It must not be allowed to happen. Join the campaign for fair-use rights in the digital world, at www.digitalconsumer.org.

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LAST week I enrolled for a six-week law course at Harvard University to bring this column's readers the latest insights into privacy law in cyberspace. But before my editors fret about the air fares and tuition fees, I should explain: this is a cybercourse, and I shall be logging in for weekly modules with students in 40 countries, from Canada to Kazakhstan. It is a remarkably constructive use of the Web by Professor John Nockleby and Harvard's Berkman Centre. Participation is absolutely free and readers of The Times are welcome to join me by registering at eon.law.harvard.edu/privacy.

(The Times, March 27 2002)

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Evening Standard: The bidding war over Liz Hurley's bump

As bidding hots up for exclusive pictures of Liz Hurley's baby, magazine executives ask whether her bump is really worth £1.6 million. By David Rowan

YOU can't blame an ageing actress these days for taking a fourth or even a fifth husband: it is the least she can do to help celebrity magazines locked in an increasingly brutal circulation war. With OK! and Hello! sharply down in the last six-monthly sales figures, only an endless supply of A-list engagements, weddings and christenings can, it seems, deliver the readers who would otherwise drift to Now and Heat. But with exclusive photo spreads now typically costing proprietors six- or even seven-figure sums, do huge "buy-ins" - such as the recent Liza Minnelli and Joan Collins weddings - really make financial sense?

It is a question being asked in publishers' finance departments this week as bids reach £1.6 million for exclusive access to Liz Hurley before and after she gives birth next month. An auction began the moment magazine editors discovered that Hurley, 36, was expecting a baby in April. The Evening Standard understands that Hello!, which initially expected bidding to end at £800,000, stopped at £600,000, before OK! offered a million more - though if Hurley makes a financial settlement with former lover Steve Bing's lawyers any such magazine deal could be invalidated. Bing's lawyers have denied any negotiations with Hurley.

"It's a big sum, but even at that price it would be worthwhile," says a Hello! source involved in the negotiations. "It would be syndicated across the world. You don't get an opportunity like this very often nowadays, as a lot of the top celebrities are too embarrassed to do these magazines."

It is typical of the deals that Richard Desmond, the proprietor, is now aggressively pursuing for OK!, as he wields his chequebook to rebuild the quarter of its circulation lost in the past year. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, sixmonthly sales have fallen from 598,000 last year to 487,000 today - and just 326,000 of them at full price. Hello! has also seen a sharp fall, from 843,000 to 527,000 although its figures balance out over the full year. The winners have been the cheekier newcomers: Heat has doubled to 356,000, and Now has risen to more than 550,000.

Richard Desmond's response has been to pour in cash. Over the past two months, his rivals estimate that he has spent £1.5 million buying in celebrity exclusives and advertising them on television. Joan Collins's wedding cost him £380,000, Liza Minnelli's around £500,000, - even the engagement of Hear'Say singer Kym Marsh to EastEnders actor Jack Ryder cost an estimated £250,000. Sources at the magazine suggest that the Joan Collins wedding special sold 60 per cent more copies than usual, although part of that is attributed to the Heat-lookalike, Hot Stars, which now comes free with each issue. A figure of 750,000 is confidently predicted for this week's Minnelli issue.

"The sums sound a lot, but the deals pay off handsomely," says a former OK! insider familiar with the figures. "Richard Desmond isn't doing it just to boost his ego - he knows his business, and only spends if it makes financial sense. Every time he's spent, it has generally worked out." There have been occasional disappointments Tracy Shaw's wedding last June, estimated to have cost him £350,000, failed to sell but, normally, large sums are recouped by syndicating photographs. They are also widely used across Richard Desmond's newspapers, and if possible repackaged: the Beckham-Adams wedding photos, bought for £1 million in July 1999, were used across three issues of OK! and in a subsequent book.

"He could earn back half the cost of the Liza Minnelli wedding just by syndicating photos to American magazines such as People," the source explains. "The same goes for Liz Hurley's baby. That would be used across two or three issues, and could boost circulation to 700,000 or 800,000, which brings up the average in the important six-monthly ABC figures."

OK! also competes to win the secondserial rights to celebrity photographs its editors spot in other British magazines, even while they are still on the newsstands. Last May, a Geri Halliwell picture spread in the UK edition of Marie Claire prompted an auction over second-use rights. According to a source involved in the negotiations, OK! offered £50,000 to run the photographs, whereas Hello! dropped out at £40,000. Both magazines also bid for Victoria Beckham pictures in last October's Marie Claire - again, with OK! winning the rights for between £5,000 and £10,000 per photograph, even though the Outside Organisation, Victoria Beckham's publicists, only released selected images.

Naturally, Express Newspapers - proprietor: Richard Desmond - was part of the deal. "Under the terms, the cover of Marie Claire had to be shown in both cases," the source said. "So it was also good PR for Marie Claire. He didn't mind."

Rival editors blanch at the sums involved. "We'd spend £10,000 to £15,000 on a set of pictures we really want," says Mark Frith at Heat; Jane Ennis at Now would go up to "tens of thousands". At Hello!, editor Phil Hall doubts whether the numbers add up for OK!, especially with the cost of television adverts that ran throughout February. "If you're spending £1 million to achieve 100,000 extra copies, it's shoot-yourself-inthe-foot stuff," he says.

BUT he acknowledges that the right faces can boost sales considerably. In January, Hello! paid a reported £300,000 to cover the wedding of Westlife's Bryan McFadden and Kerry Katona. "Our Westlife issue was up 25 to 30 per cent," Hall says. He has even greater expectations for this week's issue, which contains pictures of an "ordained" Robbie Williams marrying his two best friends. "We paid over £100,000, as he's the largest star in Britain. We have great expectations for the Robbie Williams issue."

But these days Hello! - which once paid the Duchess of York a reported £1.2 million - is not bidding against OK! for the bigger deals. Some observers believe that money is short, and that the Spanish proprietor, Eduardo Sanchez Junco, is taking an unusually close interest in minor financial decisions.

Phil Hall insists: "Things are tight if we're talking about buying up third-rate celebrities, but not for the A-list. If I'm spending a large sum of money, I'll obviously speak with the proprietor. We're still in the fight if it's worth having."

(The Guardian, March 20 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - Slate gets scammed/CeBIT highlights/Saving Internet radio

By David Rowan

THERE is a famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner in which a dog, sitting at a computer screen, confides to a four-legged friend: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." It is a joke that has provoked a few wry smiles this week at Slate, Microsoft's online magazine, where a faked Internet identity has proved how easy it is for even the most sceptical journalist to fall for an online scam. The rest of us can only learn to raise our guard.

Earlier this month Slate published some diaries from Robert Klingler, who - according to his e-mails - is the head of BMW in North America. Although most of his correspondence with Slate's editors took place through his AOL account - robertgklingler@aol.com - Klingler also sent one from his corporate address, rk@ceo.na.bmw.com. That seemed to confirm his identity, and the diaries were published to some acclaim.

Except that, according to BMW, no Robert Klingler is employed by the company. "Slate got taken by an Internet dog," admits Jack Shafer, the magazine's editor, who has apologised to readers for the breach of trust. "You can never be too sure that your fascinating e-mail correspondent is not a barking imposter."

Slate had been "spoofed" - misled by an e-mail purporting to be from someone else. It is one of the easiest scams to perpetuate, and yet takes only a few seconds to detect. Embarrassed that in this case his staff failed to double-check, Shafer launched an investigation which concluded that one Ravi Desai was the likely culprit.

Shafer traced Desai by examining the "Internet headers" on his e-mails - lists of the paths they took to arrive at Slate's inbox. Every e-mail has one, and you can read them using your e-mail program (on Outlook Express, for instance, look under the View option). Unlike some people, Internet headers tell the truth. When you tell your e-mail package what your e-mail address is, you can in fact type anything - even, say, a fake address such as "tony.blair@gov.uk". This is what will appear on each e-mail you send. Of course, replies sent back to tony.blair@gov.uk will be returned as undelivered. But by then it may be too late.

The moral is, reply to any e-mail address you find suspicious and wait for a confirmation. Or look at the headers. Remember, it could always be a dog.

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IT HAS been geek heaven this week in the packed Hanover exhibition halls of CeBIT 2002, the world's largest technology trade fair. One of the sexier gadgets was a cheap British mouse-like device called the Soundbug that can turn any flat surface into a loudspeaker. It takes electrical pulses from, say, a Walkman and turns them into mechanical energy that thumps away on a window or table. Just hope no one is using one in your train carriage. But the main business is pushing the next-generation mobile-phone services, in particular General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), the "2.5-generation" service.

Indications abounded of the sort of content the phone networks hope will earn back the vast sums they paid for their licences. One company is to offer the first European service of NTT DoCoMo's hugely successful i-mode. And, you guessed it, the "killer app" will be mobile soft porn.

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THE music fresh from having suffocated Napster, is now gunning for Internet radio stations. Under American copyright law, the labels are demanding backdated royalties of up to 10 pence per song per listener, working on the assumption of 15 songs per hour, 24 hours a day. According to www.saveinternetradio.org, many online broadcasters face a bill of around £400,000 for the past three years.

Sorry, lawyers. How many Web business can you think of that have made profits of £400,000? This is yet another licence for corporates to squeeze out enthusiasts who are the backbone of the Web.

(The Times, March 20 2002)

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The Times: Tech feature - The biometrics boom

By David Rowan

Forgive the overfamiliarity, but you have a rather special body. Unique, in fact - which is why the tech industry's latest growth area is biometrics, the means of identifying people electronically through physical attributes. From fingerprint scanners to software that analyses your lip movements, biometric technology will play an increasingly important role in the workplace, in the home and when you travel. It is catching on because, unlike a password or a credit-card number, your physical characteristics are the best way to prove that it is really you at the cash machine or the airport check-in counter.

Already scanners on the market can authenticate your identity through your iris patterns, fingerprints, hand shapes, facial features and voice patterns. You can even be identified by the way you walk, your typing rhythms and - apologies for the suggestion - your body odours.

Since the terrorist attacks of six months ago, the security industry has touted biometric software as the ultimate guarantee of passenger safety. This is why Heathrow airport, for one, is about to start identifying passengers by photographing their eyes. But even on a smaller scale, biometric devices are establishing a presence.

Computer manufacturers such as IBM and NEC are using fingerprint-recognition scanners in some of their newer models. Instead of logging on, you touch a pad that compares your fingerprint with a digital record in a central database. Fingerprint scanners are also being built into the standard computer mouse.

The Siemens ID Mouse fits the scanner between the two mouse buttons; the BogoCop Optic Mouse from Bogotech places it near the thumb. And if you are worried that an optical scanner might get confused by dirty hands, you could always choose the latest Touchpad by Synaptics, which uses radio frequency to detect the fingerprint.

For those of us who cannot seem to remember passwords, the benefits are clear: IT departments everywhere, which count password queries as their most annoying calls, must be rejoicing. And as a fingerprint is more difficult to steal than a password, there are fewer opportunities for hackers to access confidential information. But there are also wider benefits: a Swindon-based company, TSSI, has produced "Verid" readers, a means of preventing one worker clocking on for another. And in South Korea, the apartments are being fitted with fingerprint scanners instead of front-door locks.

The next step is shopping-by-fingerprint. Within a few weeks, customers at the Thrift Way supermarket in Seattle will be able to pay for groceries by touching a scanner and providing a personal identification number. Special software will then match their fingerprints with data held on a central computer and charge their credit cards as normal. Online retailers are watching with interest, as anything that minimises the need to send card details across the Internet will increase consumer confidence.

Iris patterns, though, are more distinctive than fingerprints. Researchers at Cambridge University have calculated that the chances of two people's irises being even two-thirds identical are one in ten million. The industry has been quick to take note. So look out for a new generation of iris scanners, often using a standard webcam to identify who you are. Panasonic has created its Authenticam, a small camera that uses iris-recognition software to confirm access for everything from the office network to an Internet bank.

And then there is lip-reading. BioID, a German company, has developed a system that uses a microphone and a digital camera to scan your face, listen to your voice and analyse your lip movements. Only when it is convinced that that it is you talking to your PC will it log you into the network.

Civil liberties groups fear that the rapid advance of biometric technology could allow our personal details to fall into the wrong hands. But with security ever more important to both policymakers and businesses, our biological differences may soon be the principal way of telling the world who we are.

(The Times, March 20 2002)

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The Times: Why we're all pirates at heart

Comment: Why copyright owners are on to a loser. By David Rowan

There is a bustling street market in southeast London where, for a wink and a fiver, a chap by the name of Tel will gladly update your CD collection with the latest chart hits. For a tenner, he can supply the latest computer games - Metal Gear Solid 2 should be in any day now -and, if you're looking for schmutters, he always has a good price on Versace jeans or Louis Vuitton bags. The goods might not be entirely kosher, of course, but Tel's clients never seem to mind. "Who needs Harrods," he says, "when you've got fakes as good as these?"

The crowds of respectable middle-class professionals willing to boost Tel's (presumably undeclared) income suggest that the pirate economy is doing rather well in Britain. From the songs we download from unlicensed websites to the fake Gucci sunglasses we wear on the beach, we are a nation at ease with cheating the system.

The only surprising thing about this week's row over pirated TV smartcards is why anyone should be shocked that so many unlawful smartcards are in circulation. The truth is that the average consumer today has no moral compunction about beating the system. We are, it seems, all pirates now. Most of us have "borrowed" a friend's computer software for our own use, or photocopied one too many pages in a library book, with the full knowledge that, technically, we are breaking the rules. Why should we worry if we are unlikely to get caught? Indeed, for even the most respectable of us, there may be an added thrill in temporarily living in the underworld -even if that means only underpaying for a train ticket, or claiming mileage expenses for a trip that never took place.

In a world increasingly dominated by faceless multinational corporations, we are rather relieved when some enterprising young David manages to put one over on the Goliaths - even if that means breaking the law. Who would sympathise with America's over-fed music-industry executives trying to shut down Sean Fanning's Napster website simply to defend their vast royalties? Who wouldn't side with Jon Johansen, a 19-year-old Norwegian charged with the crime of writing software that can unscramble the restrictions on how you watch DVDs?

It is no coincidence that the Internet was the means by which pirated smartcard source cards were allegedly made available as claimed in the case being brought by CanalPlus, the French television company, against NDS, the British-based technology firm which is 79 per cent owned by The News Corporation, parent company of The Times.

The Internet can make a pirate of any of us, simply by typing a few simple key strokes into a search engine. Go to Google and type "warez" - the key term for pirated software - and you have no fewer than 2,460,000 pages to choose from. And, boy, what choice we naughty consumers have. Take illegally distributed films: according to Viant, a research firm, more than 300,000 pirated movies are downloaded from the Net every day. It took me only 30 seconds last night to find pirated copies of Lord of the Rings, Monsters Inc and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

I made my excuses and left, of course. But, human nature being what it is, sooner or later selfishness is going to dominate my inherent sense of lawfulness. When the UK software industry warns that it loses £3 billion to pirates each year, I'm afraid my first thought is not for the jobs at risk or the supposed links between terrorist groups and unlawful software sales. It is for the £400 they are asking if I want to use Windows XP, or the £40 it will cost me to try a mediocre video game.

Similarly, when the Recording Industry Association of America claims that CD sales fell by 10 per cent last year because of Internet piracy, my instinctive response is to wonder why they charge so much for them in the first place.

Face it: we are all, by Hobbesian instinct, merely self-serving opportunists out to protect our personal interests. However ethical our behaviour in public, most of us would take a short-cut in private if we thought we could get away with it -which, most of the time, we can.

That is very bad news for the copyright owners of digital entertainment. Just don't say that The Times told you so.

(The Times, March 14, 2002)

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Evening Standard: City journalists who turn PRs

By David Rowan

HERE'S a hot financial tip, fresh from the City desk, that's guaranteed to double your money overnight. It's such a sure bet, in fact, that the business staff at The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph are talking about little else. And all you need do is wait for the phone to ring, and choose between whichever £200,000 offers are on the table.

There is a catch, of course. You need to be an established financial journalist whose name carries clout in City boardrooms. You must also be prepared to swap the buzz of a newsroom for the sales-led pressures of corporate public relations. But for Neil Bennett and Kirstie Hamilton, two of Fleet Street's most powerful business journalists, the lure of financial PR has proved irresistible in recent days - and many envious colleagues are now wondering how they too can cash in.

Bennett is leaving his post as The Sunday Telegraph's City editor to join the financial PR firm Gavin Anderson as a director, while Hamilton, doing the same job at The Sunday Times, is joining Tulchan Communications as a partner. According to the rumour mill, they stand to earn around £200,000 - with plenty more if they bring in the business. "I expect Neil has an arrangement whereby if he brings in new clients he could ratchet up his pay to £500,000," says the boss of one major PR firm who knows the going rate.

"They're at the top of their profession, so will probably get £200,000 at the very least," agrees another senior financial PR. "I came back from spending Christmas in New Zealand and just wasn't as excited about the stories," says Hamilton. "I thought it was time to do something else." Her basic salary will be boosted by potentially large bonuses, she says, as well as equity in the company.

Traditionally, many journalists have held the PR industry in some contempt, but it is not unknown for the stars to defect rather profitably to the other side. Roland Rudd left the Financial Times in 1994 to found Finsbury, the City PR firm that he sold five years later to Martin Sorrell's company, WPP, for up to £50 million. Rudd is still running the London office, although he has learned, he says, that his clients don't like him to be quoted in newspaper articles such as this one.

Others are less shy. Andrew Lorenz was Sunday Times business editor before he joined Financial Dynamics, where he represents clients such as Tate and Lyle. "They don't pay you for nothing," he warns. "You've got to perform. It's a mistake for journalists to come into this business because they see pound signs."

What makes the journalists so valuable to corporate clients is their understanding of how the newsroom works, and their contacts - not merely among former colleagues. "You'll have talked to so many CEOs and financial directors over the years, and that will be used to set up appointments to win new business," says one former journalist.

"They're buying credibility - the kudos of that big name who can be wheeled into the meeting with the CEO," says another. But new recruits will need to cultivate diplomacy, and that frequently eludes a successful newspaper hack. "You need to be very flexible, broadminded and able to juggle a difficult client's many demands," says a woman who knows both worlds.

BUT is there a downside to the PR world filling up with big-name journalists? Some observers reckon that newspaper City pages are not quite as fearless as they once were. Call it laziness, complacency - or a too-cosy relationship between PRs and hacks - but there doesn't seem to be as much investigative journalism as there once was. Certainly, any PR who used to be a reporter will know how precisely to spoonfeed a lazy journalist. Certainly no new thalidomide-type scandal is going to result from a call from a pharmaceutical company PR.

For these reasons or others, some have found that the big bucks of PR do not suit them. Jeff Randall, now the BBC's business editor and another former Sunday Times City editor, moved to Financial Dynamics on a reported salary of £250,000. He soon moved back to journalism.

So what tips can we offer those journalists who hope to double their salaries? Choose your specialism carefully and you could earn between £70,000 and £150,000 if you're good, says David Brain, who started as a trainee on the Newcastle Journal and rose to be joint CEO of Weber Shandwick. Financial journalists are in most demand, followed by political correspondents. Healthcare is also valuable.

But think hard first. "After four months out of writing I started to pine," Jeff Randall confesses. "I'm a journalist at heart."

(Evening Standard, March 13 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - CD copy-protection backlash/Geek spying/William Shatner's blog

By David Rowan

IF you bought the latest Robbie Williams CD or even the Greatest Hits album by Five, then there is a good chance that you have been cheated. You might have thought that by paying £12 for a legitimate, un-pirated album you would be able to play that music at your convenience on whatever CD player you happen to own. Tut-tut. You have forgotten how far the music industry will go in its determination to maximise profits using whatever new technology is available.

The big record companies are so determined to control digital music that "copy-protection" software is finding its way on to more and more chart CDs. Intended to prevent music from being unlawfully copied and distributed, the software determines exactly how a CD may be played - and on what.

Last November we reported that Natalie Imbruglia's album White Lilies Island could not be recorded on to MiniDisc or played on certain PCs, thanks to software called the Cactus Data Shield. Since then, the practice has spread rapidly. Unless consumers make a fuss they will soon have no choice on how they enjoy digital music. The Campaign for Digital Rights is monitoring the spread of what it calls "corrupt" audio CDs and the examples on its website (uk.eurorights.org) are growing at an alarming rate. Midbar, the Israeli company behind the Cactus Data Shield, says it has issued more than ten million copy-protected CDs in Europe and the US, and is about to put a further million on the Japanese market.

It is, the record companies say, their best hope for preventing digital piracy. Increasingly low-key warning notices are appearing on CD wrappers. But that may not be enough to prevent a consumer backlash. Last month Karen DeLise, a concerned Californian, claimed she had not known that the album would not play on her computer. Suncomm, the digital rights firm behind the album, agreed to warn more prominently that it could not be used in CD-Rom drives or on DVD players.

The fight will not end here. If you legally buy music for your own use you should have every right to play it on the device of your choice. Copy-protection technology should not be allowed to limit your listening choices.

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STOP me if you have already read this on my screen, but I am anxious about computer privacy this week. Markus Kuhn, a smart computer lecturer at Cambridge University, has just shown how simple it is to eavesdrop confidential information merely by pointing a telescope at your window. By measuring how your computer screen causes light to flicker across the room - bear with me, this is serious - he can, with the right sensors, work out just what your cathode-ray-tube monitor is displaying.

And don't think you're safe if you have one of those slick new LCD monitors: in a separate piece of new research, Joe Loughry, a programmer for Lockheed Martin, has shown how the flashing red lights on your modem can be decoded by spies 20 yards away to reveal what your e-mails say. Just because the technology is there, that is not to say Big Brother will necessarily park outside your front room, staring at the light bouncing around the walls.

But if you spot the neighbours taping black binliners over the windows, you will know what is worrying them.

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NOT all Hollywood stars let the PR machine control their every word, and just as well. Here's to William Shatner, Captain Kirk of Star Trek, for giving us plenty of amusement (sometimes unwittingly) through his lively new website, williamshatner.com. Besides the normal live chats and fan-club updates, Shatner keeps a diary detailing everything from his lunches of halibut sandwiches to his need for humour to counter "the joke that God is playing on us".

His daughter, Lisabeth, has her own column where she elaborates on dad's zany wit: the time he turned a phaser gun on her during filming, for instance, and made Leonard Nimoy laugh "for several minutes. Ha, ha, I thought, he did it again." This site is a cult in the making.

(The Times, March 13 2002)

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The Times: Tech news feature - Console wars erupt

Cyberwar enters a ferocious new phase this weekend as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo go all-out in the battle to dominate the £14 billion games console battlefield. By David Rowan

It is being called The Invasion of the Shopping Centres, an assault on Britain's consumers that cannot end with three winners. By late today, once the till rolls are in, analysts will have a clearer idea of where victory may eventually lie.

Microsoft is making a belated entry to the 30-year-old game market with the Xbox console. This weekend is its last chance to "pre-sell" Xbox before the official launch next Thursday and Microsoft is firing its biggest guns.

It says that it has spent £350 million promoting the console. Robbie Bach, the "chief Xbox officer", says this £299 matt-black box - US customers pay $299 (£210) - "is going to change video games the way MTV changed music". The selling point is a 733MHz Intel processor, which Microsoft says gives computing strength far beyond the opposition's, as well as cult games such as Halo and Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee.

Sony is making a pre-emptive strike; its £199 PlayStation 2 console was launched to acclaim across Europe in November 2000, and the company has chosen this weekend to promote what it calls "the biggest game launch the industry has ever seen". Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, an adventure game designed for Sony's console, has been previewed in such superlative terms that 550,000 advance orders were placed even before it went on sale in Britain yesterday.

This weekend the game's sales are expected to exceed £9 million, the sort of box-office take normally reserved for Hollywood blockbusters: Monsters Inc took a similar amount in its first weekend in Britain.

It may be no coincidence that Metal Gear's designers commissioned a cinematic soundtrack from Harry Gregson-Williams, whose Hollywood hits include the music for Armageddon.

Nintendo, meanwhile, has been hyping 2002 as "the year of the GameCube", its console that arrives here on May 3. Nintendo has budgeted £60 million for a European advertising campaign and predicts that it will shift a million units by July. At about £150, this will be the cheapest of the three competitors, but Nintendo believes that the 20 games available at launch, including Luigi's Mansion and WaveRace: Blue Storm, will give the GameCube the edge.

The money at stake makes this battle anything but a game. Last year Britain spent more than £1.6 billion on computer games, according to the European Leisure Software Publishers' Association, more than we spent renting videos or on visiting the cinema.

Analysts expect the new consoles to end a period of stagnation in the video-game industry. They are also being tipped as potential "home-entertainment gateways" that could evolve into the all-in-one audiovisual units that have long been predicted. Both the Xbox and the PlayStation 2 will eventually play DVD movies, host games online and send e-mails.

Justin Calvert, deputy editor of GameSpot UK, said the likely winner was PlayStation 2, which already is in two million British homes after just 16 months. "Even Microsoft and Nintendo quietly acknowledge that PlayStation 2 is the winner," he said. "They're just fighting for second place."

The weakest contender, he says, is Nintendo. "GameCube will struggle. They're last out of the blocks, and they have barely had enough software in place for their launches. Although Xbox is more expensive, it has 20 games available on day one. GameCube on launch won't even have a 'killer app', the one game that everyone has to have."

This war is, as much as anything, a clash of cultures. For decades Japan has dominated through relentless innovation and creative flair. Idiosyncratic artists such as Nintendo's creative head, Shigeru Miyamoto, get the freedom to invent ludicrous heroes such as Super Mario, a plumber, and the world is gripped.

Then along come the Americans boasting that sheer firepower will ensure their dominance. Microsoft gives the Xbox the biggest processor it can find, invests half a billion dollars to shout about it, and waits for others to design the games. For the Americans, the goal is to take the PC into the games arena, using a computer-based console to lure gamers to play online.

The Japanese have never seen computer power as the key to the games experience. In Japan video games have always been more closely linked to the television or to under-powered consoles.

Whatever the technicalities, plenty of people will be hooked. One enthusiast in Banbury, Oxfordshire, is said to have changed his name to PlayStation 2. It can only be a matter of time before we see a Mr Xbox or a Ms GameCube.

(The Times, March 9 2002)

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Evening Standard: The people behind Popbitch

Who is behind Popbitch, the online chat site that's feeding the tabloids? By David Rowan

THERE is a new force shaping Fleet Street's news agenda. Not since the Drudge Report has a scurrilous gossip website influenced so many morning news conferences. It's called Popbitch, and during recent days, it has provided the tabloids with the scoop of Victoria Beckham's pregnancy and given The Guardian the story about Sex and the City being remade as a children's cartoon.

Even the Financial Times pursued Popbitch's report about David Beckham working with Marks and Spencer. And the website's mischievous tone - using unanswered "blind questions" to avoid celebrity writs - has influenced gossip columns from the Mirror's 3am Girls to the Mail's Wicked Whispers.

Yet the owners of Popbitch continue to shield themselves behind their anonymous website - although, as the Evening Standard has discovered, they have rather close links to one of London's largest magazine publishers.

The website is built around message boards, on which anyone can post rumour or comments, and a weekly email summarising the highlights. Message-board regulars include well-informed sources in the music and PR industries, whose track record of success has earned the site a high-profile following: Sophie Ellis Bextor admits that she loves Popbitch - and Madonna dedicated a song to "all you Popbitches out there". (Indeed, past triumphs include the revelation that Madonna was to name her son Rocco, as well as the news last week of the singer's London stage debut.) The messages are not archived, to make it harder for potential litigants to find evidence, but occasionally the legal threats fly. Jeremy Clarkson and members of So Solid Crew are among those who have been wrongly targeted with false allegations, and stories about them are now carefully filtered. Others, notably Victoria Beckham and Kate Moss, are considered fair game. A recent story claimed that Moss, on a fashion shoot in a derelict house, needed a toilet. "Well, there is a loo, but there's no door on it," the assistant told her. Moss replied: "Well how the f*** do I get in there, then?"

Who, then, is behind Popbitch? The website claims to be "a pretty amateur operation, run by people in our spare time", but gives no contact point beyond a single email address. So the Evening Standard made some enquiries.

The website is owned by a company called Popdog Limited. A search at Companies House shows it is registered at an address in Limehouse and has two directors: Neil Stevenson and Camilla Wright. An examination of the internet domain-name registry confirms that popbitch.com was registered in 2000 to Stevenson.

Yet both Stevenson and Wright have proved extremely reluctant to take credit for their achievement. When we called, we were told: "We don't tend to talk to people on the phone." A follow-up email elicited a brief reply from Stevenson, stating that "at the moment, we'd rather not talk to anyone about Popbitch". He added that "we're currently finalising plans for some new Popbitch directions" and requested that "our identities are kept secret" - a privilege only rarely accorded to the celebrities whose private embarrassments have been shared with Popbitch's thousands of readers.

In homage to Stevenson, it remains only for us to complete our investigation in true Popbitch style. So here are a few Big Questions people are asking this week.

First, is Neil Stevenson, 32, the same Neil Stevenson who used to edit Mixmag (for Emap), was previously deputy editor of Heat (for Emap), and currently works for Emap Digital? Second, is Camilla Wright, 31, his girlfriend as well as Popdog's company secretary? And third, are the rumours true that Neil wants to include a Popbitch element in the Heat TV spin-off that Emap is planning?

Well-placed sources within Emap suggest that the Popbitch TV rumour is merely a rumour. But that's the trouble with gossip. No sooner is it published than it takes on a life of its own.

(Evening Standard, March 6 2002)

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The Times: Tech column - National Hi-Tech Crime Unit/Newsblaster/Geek egg-frying

By David Rowan

IN AN anonymous office block on the Isle of Dogs, East London, Britain's chief cybercop is facing a problem: where to store the vast evidence of online crime that his team is constantly accumulating. The National Hi-Tech Crime Unit is barely five months old but already its investigations have produced three terabytes of data implicating paedophiles, hackers and the occasional opportunist fraudster. "If we printed it out on A4 paper, it would stretch 30 miles," says Len Hynds, the policeman heading the unit.

There has clearly been no slump in the cybercrime sector. The unit, set up to work with police forces and intelligence services here and abroad, occasionally emerges to make headlines when it helps to trap paedophile gangs or software pirates. But its unreported work says far more about the Internet's day-to-day dangers.

The growth areas include virus-writing, hacking and auction frauds. As Len Hynds sees it, we as a population are not doing all we should to protect ourselves. Even now, he says, the classic bank fraud swindler finds willing victims who reply to unsolicited e-mails promising riches and end up being fleeced. He is also seeing a rise in auction fraud, where people are duped into buying bargains on websites that fail to deliver.

Parents, he says, should not underestimate the risks facing their children. "Some paedophiles are experts at convincing children that they are the same age, and we know children are still arranging to meet people whom they find in chatrooms. That is a dangerous situation."

Gangs are currently trying to avoid detection by posting material only briefly before removing it. But what really worries Hynds is the reluctance of companies to admit to falling victim to crimes. "In the UK, two thirds of businesses do not report security breaches for commercial reasons," he says. "I am concerned that companies are falling victim to online commercial extortion and we are not being told." This particular crime is growing, he says, as hackers find businesses prepared to pay in exchange for not breaching their IT systems.

If you are not yet worried about your company's security, you should be, says Hynds: "Too many companies still see IT security as an issue for the IT department. But IT managers are neither trained nor equipped to protect the company's most valuable secrets."

++++

NOW this is worrying. Computer scientists at Columbia University have discovered what some people have long suspected: that a suitably programmed computer writes at least as well as the average journalist. A team led by Kathleen McKeown has developed artificial-intelligence software that surfs news websites and summarises the main stories in crisp, lucid sentences - all without claiming lunch expenses.

The program, called Newsblaster, uses a natural-language processing algorithm to spot patterns in stories posted on the Reuters, BBC, Washington Post and 14 other websites, and the daily results (at www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster) are horrifyingly credible. This week, for instance, Newsblaster summarises 41 news items from Israel in 130 words, before reporting that "the buzz at the Grammy Awards was all about the so-called roots music movement". The voice lacks a certain sparkle, and the filtering is only as good as the source material, but the project shows what is possible with AI technology.

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Now here's a site that is really cooking. The code writers' most pored-over Web page this week concerns an XP1500+ processor, an MSI K7T266 motherboard ... and a raw egg. In a series of detailed instructions and photos (found at www.handyscripts.co.uk/trubador_egg.htm) someone called Trubador has become an instant Web celebrity for showing how to fry an egg inside one's computer. Sometimes the word "geek" just doesn't go far enough.

(The Times, March 6 2002)

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Evening Standard: The Thyssen family feud that is keeping the lawyers busy

The £2 billion dynasty feud that's made millions for London's top lawyers. David Rowan investigates

TO the lawyers unwinding in the Bung Hole wine bar near Chancery Lane, the champagne toast - to the fabulously wealthy Swiss industrialist Heini Thyssen - provoked a roar of self-satisfied laughter. The world's costliest lawsuit, fought between the Baron and his son over control of the Thyssen dynasty's £2billion family trust, had finally ended. It now just remained to settle the bills in a five-year case that had cost £100million in legal fees - much of which has enriched the London legal profession.

The Evening Standard has established that at least three London QCs - Michael Crystal, Robert Ham and Alan Boyle - made £1million a year during an extraordinary two-year court battle that involved 121,959 legal documents. Another two dozen barristers and solicitors, chosen for their expertise in commercial law, also earned substantial fees in a case which became known in the inns of court as a beanfeast.

How appropriate, then, that the lawyers' toast mentioned the Thyssen family motto, "Virtue transcends riches". It reminded those present how far the riches, if not the virtue, of this troubled aristocratic family had provided a windfall for London's legal elite.

The case, heard largely in a courtroom in Bermuda, where the trust had been set up, concerned an attempt by Baron Thyssen and his fifth wife, Carmen Cervera, a former Spanish beauty queen 22 years his junior, to regain control of the trust from his son Georg. Since 1997 the bitter family conflict had drifted through Bermuda's illequipped legal system. Then suddenly a few days ago the Baron - aged 81, and frail after several strokes - joined the rest of his immediate family to announce that "happily" their lawyers had reached a belated settlement. "The family very much regrets that misunderstandings have led to legal proceedings, which today are all dismissed or withdrawn," the agreed statement began. The Baron added that the family would now "build on its many achievements and support the contributions of its members to lasting success".

BEYOND that, all parties involved, and their lawyers, were sworn to silence, not least about the final legal bill calculated by The Lawyer magazine this week to be £100 million. "The sums involved are obscene," said a source at Lincoln's Inn who knows the details of the case. "It seems ridiculous that a family with so much money starts squabbling, and the only people benefiting are the lawyers."

A respected legal commentator confirmed that "it was like a beanfeast - one big staff outing". Even the Bermuda trial judge, who quit dramatically after 18 months, declared in court that "the amount of money which must have been wasted in this case is positively obscene".

The list of fee-earners is a rollcall of London's legal elite. The Baron, his son and the trustees hired the finest commercial barristers from Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn - men whose hourly rates can reach £1,000. In addition, they brought over some of London's top City solicitors to work with teams of local Bermuda attorneys.

The Baron's team was led by Michael Crystal, 53, a flamboyant white-haired QC and theatre aficionado who soon made a name in Bermuda for his lavish entertaining and his wife's opulent jewels. Beside him sat two other barristers representing the Baron; Robert Ham QC, a specialist in trust law, with whom Crystal shared a £10,000a-month seaside home in Hamilton, Bermuda's capital, and David Alexander, the 37-year-old son of Lord Alexander of Weedon who works from Crystal's Gray's Inn chambers. This formidable team managed to stretch out its opening address to almost 15 months.

Georg, the son who controlled the family trust, was not to be outdone. He hired four top barristers from Serle Court in Lincoln's Inn, led by Alan Boyle QC and backed by his colleagues Nicholas Harrison, Douglas Close and Tim Collingwood. Boyle, 52, was not a stranger to high-spending clients - he successfully represented Elton John against his music publisher in 1985. Together with Crystal and Ham, he is known as a member of the "million-a-year club" of top London silks.

Then there were the family trust's own lawyers. They faced a more troubled time. Their lead QC, Nicholas Patten, also on track to make a million a year, had to leave halfway through when he was appointed a High Court judge. His replacement, Trevor Philipson, died during the case, and was replaced by Michael Driscoll QC, head of 9 Old Square chambers. A junior barrister, Tom Leech, was retained as well.

Each side also employed a team of London solicitors, whose annual bills ran well into seven figures. Georg's team was represented in Bermuda by a team of top lawyers from Clifford Chance, the huge London-based practice whose fee income boomed by 60 per cent last year, according to the legal publishers Chambers & Partners. It calculates that in 2001 a typical equity partner at Clifford Chance made £721,604 profit, and the company had two partners in Bermuda, Jeremy Sandleson and Jeremy Kosky, plus four assistants.

The Baron employed Allan Reason of the City law firm Davies Arnold Cooper, whose past cases include the Maxwell, Barings and Polly Peck court battles. Another London beneficiary was the trustees' law firm Norton Rose, which last year enjoyed a 26 per cent rise in profits to £521,739 per equity partner. At least seven of the firm's lawyers went to Bermuda.

Michael Chambers, editor of Commercial Lawyer magazine, said: "It's the old story. Wealthy clients like the Thyssens who behave in a slightly irrational way, are a bit of a bonanza for the legal profession. Half the English bar were out there, and they were all doing very nicely." A legal source who spent time in Bermuda on the case agreed: "The leading counsels could typically expect close to £1million a year from the case." Michael Crystal's fee is thought to be "substantially higher", although junior barristers would typically earn two-thirds of the full rate.

A senior barrister's clerk, who sets fees for such cases, explained the charging process. Typically, a QC will charge a six-figure fee simply to be briefed. The clerk said: "The barristers in this case would get an extra premium, as they would be neglecting their London practice and paying Thyssen their full attention. So if a barrister's daily rate was £2,500 in London, it would be £3,000 in Bermuda.

"There's also a rate negotiated for weekends: you'd normally charge half the day rate for just being out there, even if you weren't working. Now, say Mr Average QC is getting £3,500 a day and counts on 48 working weeks a year. It's not difficult seeing how you can get into the million-pound-plus league." Then there were the fully paid expenses, from fine dining to regular flights home.

A REPORTER following the case in Hamilton noted that one of the young barristers kept writing "ARTR" on his briefing papers each morning. Finally he was asked what it meant. "Always remember the refresher," he replied, referring to the generous daily top-up that made the tedium bearable.

But Bermudans were soon questioning why the lawyers were being allowed to drag out the case in Supreme Court Number Four, a former Salvation Army hall refurbished at the Thyssens' expense. "Some of the locals were getting tired of them," recalled a journalist.

It took from October 1999 to January 2001 to complete Crystal's opening address, which involved intricate examination of "voluminous documents" and Crystal's own reflections on which Thyssen painting was his favourite - a Memling, he told the court, now hanging in Madrid.

When the Bermuda judge, Justice Denis Mitchell, quit suddenly in March 2001 after a dispute over his own £85,000 salary, he pointedly attacked the trial's excesses. "I was born and brought up in Scotland and taught a proper respect for money," he said. "It was not to be wasted."

By this stage, the case was estimated to have cost £70million and rising at £500,000 a week. The subsequent legal arguments, which continued in London and Zurich until last week's settlement, would have added a further £20 or £30 million, sources say.

The expense was finally enough to lead even Bermuda's Attorney-General, Dame Lois Browne-Evans, to mock the "big boys" from London who would stroll around "with their big briefcases and big bucks". "How wonderful that all these lawyers are making all of this money," she told the Bermuda Sun. "I just hope that some of it stays in the country and helps this economy."

A little of it did, they will tell you in the bars around Chancery Lane. There were the island's 10 golf courses to sample, the £29 bottles of chilled Italian wine in Fresco's, Bermuda's oldest wine bar, and the lunches of pan-roasted rockfish in pink grapefruit sauce.

TO Baron Heini Thyssen, the powerful Swiss industrialist whose art collection rivals only the Queen's, a Bermuda-based trust initially seemed a sensibly costeffective way to protect his business assets. By last week, when he finally agreed to drop his challenge to the trust's legal status, the legal fees alone had cost his family a big chunk of its £2 billion fortune.

The Baron, who is reported now to be seriously ill in Spain, has admitted to two weaknesses. "Looking at a beautiful woman or at a fine work of art produces a similar act - butterflies in the stomach and an urge to possess," he once confessed. Paintings, however, had the edge - "you hang them on a wall and they stay silent". His current wife has shown no tendency towards silence.

The first signs of family tension emerged after the Baron married Carmen Cervera, his fifth wife, in 1985. The Baroness, a former Miss Spain, had previously been married to the Tarzan actor Lex Barker and a Venezuelan film producer, and had a son whom the Baron adopted. The Baron had by then placed another son, Georg, from a former marriage to an Austrian princess, in charge of the Bermudaregistered Continuity Trust that held the shares in his industrial business. The trust was to pay the Baron £16million a year, subject to the business, Thyssen-Bornemisza Group (TBG), making sufficient profits.

The Baroness had agreed in a marriage settlement to renounce her claim on the trust. For this pledge, the Baron gave her a 179-carat diamond, the Star of Peace. But her concerns grew from 1992, when the Baron was reported to have been facing a cash-flow crisis. By 1995, the Baroness said the shortfall was £50 million. She visited Georg at the company's Monaco headquarters and demanded the money. Georg refused, claiming that this would breach the trust's terms. From then, tension grew.

The following year, after Georg stormed out of his father's 75th birthday party at their 18th-century Swiss villa, a legal fight looked inevitable. "This is going to be the case of the century," promised the Baroness, whose own son stood to gain by changes to the trust. "It affects one of Europe's most important families. The war has started." Legal papers were filed in January 1997.

Five years later, the terms of the settlement suggest that little has been achieved. It provides for "the continued undivided ownership" of the family business interests in the Bermuda trust; a new way of calculating the Baron's annuity, and the Baroness's continued involvement with the art collection. The fight was all, the parties now agree, a regrettable, if expensive, "misunderstanding".

(Evening Standard, March 1 2002)

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