The Times: TV Review - Time Commanders

A new show uses computer-gaming technology to allow players to re-enact great battles in a virtual world. The Times looked in. The trouble with history is that it does not always turn out as you would like. Wars might be won by the bad guys; misguided strategies can haunt the distant progeny of the defeated. So BBC Two has decided to give posterity another chance.

Any armchair tacticians who think they could have done a better job than some of history's great military minds now have a chance to prove it - taking on the most fearsome marauding armies from the comfort of a White City studio.

Time Commanders, which starts this Thursday (BBC Two, 8pm), claims to be a "revolutionary" type of history show. Using the latest computer-gaming technology, it allows ordinary citizens to re-enact one of the great battles in a graphically rich virtual world, so that contestants in the studio can command vast battalions and see the blood-spattered results in real time. If they are smart, they can, with a few well-planned mouse-clicks, re-shape the destinies of Boadicea or Alexander the Great; if they fail, their legions die with them. It may sound like a PlayStation game melded with a traditional low-budget BBC panel show, but Time Commanders wants to be seen as a seriously educational TV show.

Jobbing television extras have long been grateful for battlefield re-enactment scenes, but Time Commanders lets some clever 3-D computer-graphics software do all the work. For the player, the result is an unprecedented combination of realism and interactivity that puts them at the heart of the battle scene. The experience is rather less involving for the viewer, who remains entirely and frustratingly passive throughout the game. But so convinced is the BBC that audiences will find themselves caught up in the raw excitement of combat that it has already commissioned 16 hour-long episodes.

The Times went to watch an early episode being recorded in August at Television Centre, where a chilled studio had been stripped bare to turn it into central command to re-enact Hannibal's Battle of Trebia against the Romans. The year is 218BC, and the Roman commander, Tiberius Sempronius Longus, faces a Carthaginian assault by the Trebia river in northern Italy.

This, you may dimly recall, involves that most unforgiving weapon of mass destruction, the rampaging elephant. Can today's team of four amateur dramatics enthusiasts from Manchester measure up to 27-year-old Hannibal, who in victory here killed up to 20,000 Romans out of 45,000, before going on to ravage the Italian countryside?

Eddie Mair is oddly miscast as presenter - his deadpan wit certainly ought to move from radio to TV, but his mischievous charm is lost on the belligerent amateurs.

You can't help feeling he'd rather be teasing an MoD spokesman about Hannibal's readiness to attack at 45 minutes notice. Still, there are military historians on hand to ensure authenticity and provide commentary, and plenty of library books in the production room in case questions of detail arise.

Players plan their moves on a tabletop battlefield decked with models, perhaps borrowed from Peter Snow, but the real action starts when a couple of black-clad computer operators (officially "technicians", but looking more like burger flippers) translate their orders into computer animations on a giant monitor.

Contestants are offered similar choices to those facing Hannibal: how to position their Numidian troops (agile, but lacking armour), their Spanish heavy cavalry (disciplined, but poor against front-line infantry) and, of course, their elephants. Talk is of ambushes being sprung and concentrations of combat power. "I was very glad to see aggression all round," chips in one military historian, amid digressions to enlighten viewers as to the elephants' diets and other educational footnotes.

What Time Commanders really needs is an opportunity for viewers to interact with the game - something that the BBC is supposed to excel in, but which in this case no one seems to have mentioned. It's a brave strategy building a series around an audience watching other people play a computer game: but isn't that red handset button designed to let us play along too?

(The Times, August 30 2003)

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The Times: Caspian takes on Marks & Spencer

By David Rowan

A GROUP of activists who have taken on some of the world's biggest corporations and seemingly forced them into humiliating retreat is turning its attention to Marks & Spencer. The group, run by an American graduate student with deep religious convictions, believes that the retail giant has gone too far with new technology for tracking its products. The company is planning a trial this autumn of tiny "smart tags" in its suits.

Katherine Albrecht lists Gillette, Benetton and Wal-Mart among the companies she says have bowed to her concerns in the past four months and delayed implementing a stock-tracking technology. The companies deny her activities have affected their decisions. Now she is turning her attention to Britain, and M&S, although Tesco and Asda are also in her sights.

M&S should take her seriously. Last week Gillette appeared to pull back from its commitment to the technology after Ms Albrecht organised a global "Boycott Gillette" campaign. She encouraged thousands of people to write to Dick Cantwell, the company's vice-president, threatening to step up protests. A similar campaign against Benetton last spring led the company to announce that it was not planning to adopt the technology.

What bothers Ms Albrecht and her growing international band of supporters is what she describes as a "spy chip" designed to identify everyday consumer products using a low-powered radio signal. Those who support the technology, including leading retailers and manufacturers, say that it will allow them to track billions of items from the factory to the checkout, so that no stock is lost in the warehouse or misplaced on shelves.

Ms Albrecht sees a more sinister, "Big Brother" use for a system that she says will make it possible to monitor individuals long after goods have left the store, through the radio signals their clothes or personal items continue to emit.

Through her grassroots pressure group, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (Caspian), Ms Albrecht has repeatedly attacked companies adopting the technology, using web-based customer boycott campaigns to make them delay multimillion-dollar trials.She now sees it as her "mission" to bring her message to the British people.

The smart tags, embedded in goods or built into the packaging, emit radio signals that can be read from up to five metres (17ft) away, and unless "killed" they remain active long after they have left the store. Unlike barcodes, the tags - known as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) labels - identify individual items whose movements can be tracked by scanners connected to the internet. The microchips involved are the size of a grain of sand, and with the price falling to a few pence they can be fitted to virtually any item.

There is no legal requirement for the tags to be "killed". Supporters say that keeping the tags active will ensure smoother product recalls and rubbish disposal.

"This technology has the potential to track people from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to bed at night," Ms Albrecht said from her home in New Hampshire. She wants Britons to know that the police, criminals and marketers will all be motivated to scan people's property to learn more about them from their "electronic cloud".

"Everything from your earrings to what's in your briefcase would be sending out information," she said. "My concern is this will be tied in with Britain's CCTV surveillance system, and you'll be literally under surveillance at every turn."

She is working on setting up a British branch of Caspian, whose early target will, she said, be M&S. A spokeswoman for the company said yesterday that it was aware of Ms Albrecht's campaign, and would endeavour to work with her should it decide to extend its use of RFID tagging. "Whatever we do we will do responsibly, talking to people like Katherine Albrecht if we go ahead," she said. "There's no benefit to us in storming ahead if it will cause our customers concern. She'll clearly make herself very vocal, and that would get back to our customers."

The Government has been sponsoring trials of RFID tags as a means of reducing theft and counterfeiting, and the European Central Bank plans to put them in euro banknotes. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Unilever are working with the Auto-ID Centre, part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, to develop the common standard that would allow RFID tags to gain widespread adoption.

Kevin Ashton, the centre's executive director, said that consumers would benefit from lower prices and shelves that were permanently full if companies could use a global network of scanners, connected to the internet, to track individual items wherever they were. He suggested that companies should advise shoppers that the tags can be "killed".

Ms Albrecht characterised Mr Ashton as "one of my arch enemies on the planet". While working on her doctoral dissertation at Harvard - on consumer privacy - she has been devoting her time to exposing what she sees as the dangers of smart tags.

Caspian claims to have almost 6,000 members in 15 countries, with Britain now a "core constituency". "What makes us powerful is that 78 per cent of people oppose this technology on privacy grounds, and 61 per cent on health grounds," she said.

No health risk has been identified. The figures are from the Auto-ID Centre's own confidential research, which was mistakenly made available on the internet. Much to its embarrassment, she also discovered internal briefings from the centre's PR advisers suggesting that it create "a privacy advisory council".

Ms Albrecht says that her interest stems from her religious convictions. "When I was eight years old, my grandmother sat me down after a visit to a grocery store and told me that there will be a time when people will not be able to buy or sell food without a number, referring to the Mark of the Beast, Revelations xiii," she said.

"I made a promise to myself at eight years old that if there was ever a number to buy or sell food, I would stop what I was doing and fight it."

AGGRESSIVE ACTION

Caspian has been campaigning aggressively against companies promoting RFID technology. They include:

Gillette

Concerns: After ordering 500 million RFID tags, Gillette was found to be testing a "smart shelf" to photograph consumers buying products in supermarkets in Britain and the United States.

Action: Caspian urged a worldwide boycott of Gillette merchandise, from shaving products to batteries.

Result: Last week a Gillette spokesman said that items would not be monitored in stores for at least ten years.

Tesco

Concerns: The chain has been testing smart tags on DVDs and Gillette Mach 3 razor blades. The Gillette trial has involved taking unannounced photographs at a store in Cambridge.

Action: Albrecht challenged Tesco's initial denials; activists demonstrated and rearranged shelves.

Result: Tesco ended its shelf trials - on schedule, according to the company. Campaigners claimed success.

Benetton

Concerns: A press release from Philips Electronics last March said that Benetton would be installing smart tags in some 15 million Sisley-brand pullovers.

Action: Albrecht immediately launched a global "Boycott Benetton" campaign under the slogan "I'd rather go naked".

Result: Benetton publicly retreated from plans to tag items of clothing, insisting it had not yet put tagged goods on shelves.

Wal-Mart

Concerns: World's biggest retailer has told top 100 suppliers to introduce RFID technology by 2005. It was found to have installed a "smart shelf" in one US store.

Action: Caspian photographed the shelf and urged its supporters to blitz the chain with angry messages.

Result: Wal-Mart announced the "smart shelf" trial would not go ahead, and that its interest lay in tracking inventory in its warehouses rather than on individual items in stores.

(The Times, August 26 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Blog census/the Euro DMCA

By David Rowan

ACCORDING to the most authoritative census of such matters, there are now 878,940 weblogs, of which 580,100 are "active" - defined as having been updated within the last two months. Naturally, when you have more than half a million loquacious small-time publishers throwing words all over the ether, a specialist jargon will evolve to affirm the writers' "insider" status. If you've only just caught up with "bloggers" as people who keep weblogs, and think a "blog" refers to a blocked toilet, then it's time for a quick language lesson to keep you au courant.

First, that contracted word blog, which is extending itself in all sorts of directions. To refer to the entirety of weblogs, you can talk about the blogosphere, the blogiverse or, less commonly, blogistan - although the latter might refer specifically to the opinionated political weblogs known as warblogs.

The dominant figures in the blogosphere are known as the bloggerati, who provide links to each others' sites in lists known as blogrolls. The genre breaks down into stripblogs that include cartoons, blawgs dealing with aspects of the law, and microblogs that focus on a specialist niche such as, well, the business of publishing blogs (it's a self-referential place, the blogosphere). A kittyblog, you might like to note, used to mean one of those tedious journals dedicated to observations about the writer's cat, but the term has evolved to mean any pointlessly dull online diary. And if you lurk at other people's blogs but do not post comments, you are dismissed as a blurker.

The latest buzz among the blogerati concerns the moblog, the mobile weblog that can be updated via a wireless connection wherever its writer happens to be. As the new generation of camera-phones becomes more widespread, more and more mobloggers are uploading photos to their sites. Inevitably, these sites are being called photologs (or, more commonly, the more orthographically challenged fotologs).

Because Google counts weblog entries when its algorithms determine its search results, a new terminology has evolved among bloggers seeking to influence the process. So you can googlebomb a phrase, by encouraging other weblogs to link to a page using that phrase. You can also googlewash the search engine (think "brainwash") so that it redefines a particular phrase by getting enough weblogs to link to pages using that new definition.

Then there is fisking, named after the opinionated journalist Robert Fisk, a blogger's step-by-step demolition of another's contentious argument, originally one of Fisk's own but now in more widespread use. Google has already identified 19,800 web pages containing the term. Lexicographers, it's over to you.

++++

WHY should you care about the IP Enforcement Directive, yet another pile of paper from Brussels that seeks to regulate copyright, trademarks and patents far more rigorously than before?

Wake up. It's time you became aware of the plans to criminalise a wide range of activities.Your rights as a consumer are at stake. The directive, now under consultation, is Europe's very own Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) - the controversial American copyright law - but it appears to take an even tougher approach to digital rights management. Civil rights groups are warning that it could criminalise you for using ink cartridges not supplied by the printer manufacturer, or for disabling radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in the clothes that you buy. We'll return to the theme in future weeks, but you ought to read a devastating analysis on the Foundation for Information Policy Research website (www.fipr.org). Your freedom may depend on it.

(The Times, August 26 2003)

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The Times: RFID technology brings consumer wrath upon M&S

M&S faces righteous wrath over 'spy in a suit'. A champion of US consumer rights is bringing her battle to Britain's high streets. By David Rowan

A GROUP of activists who have taken on some of the world's biggest corporations and seemingly forced them into humiliating retreat is turning its attention to Marks & Spencer. The group, run by an American graduate student with deep religious convictions, believes that the retail giant has gone too far with new technology for tracking its products. The company is planning a trial this autumn of tiny "smart tags" in its suits.

Katherine Albrecht lists Gillette, Benetton and Wal-Mart among the companies she says have bowed to her concerns in the past four months and delayed implementing a stock-tracking technology. The companies deny her activities have affected their decisions. Now she is turning her attention to Britain, and M&S, although Tesco and Asda are also in her sights.

M&S should take her seriously. Last week Gillette appeared to pull back from its commitment to the technology after Ms Albrecht organised a global "Boycott Gillette" campaign. She encouraged thousands of people to write to Dick Cantwell, the company's vice-president, threatening to step up protests. A similar campaign against Benetton last spring led the company to announce that it was not planning to adopt the technology.

What bothers Ms Albrecht and her growing international band of supporters is what she describes as a "spy chip" designed to identify everyday consumer products using a low-powered radio signal. Those who support the technology, including leading retailers and manufacturers, say that it will allow them to track billions of items from the factory to the checkout, so that no stock is lost in the warehouse or misplaced on shelves.

Ms Albrecht sees a more sinister, "Big Brother" use for a system that she says will make it possible to monitor individuals long after goods have left the store, through the radio signals their clothes or personal items continue to emit.

Through her grassroots pressure group, Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (Caspian), Ms Albrecht has repeatedly attacked companies adopting the technology, using web-based customer boycott campaigns to make them delay multimillion-dollar trials.She now sees it as her "mission" to bring her message to the British people.

The smart tags, embedded in goods or built into the packaging, emit radio signals that can be read from up to five metres (17ft) away, and unless "killed" they remain active long after they have left the store. Unlike barcodes, the tags - known as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) labels - identify individual items whose movements can be tracked by scanners connected to the internet. The microchips involved are the size of a grain of sand, and with the price falling to a few pence they can be fitted to virtually any item.

There is no legal requirement for the tags to be "killed". Supporters say that keeping the tags active will ensure smoother product recalls and rubbish disposal.

"This technology has the potential to track people from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to bed at night," Ms Albrecht said from her home in New Hampshire. She wants Britons to know that the police, criminals and marketers will all be motivated to scan people's property to learn more about them from their "electronic cloud".

"Everything from your earrings to what's in your briefcase would be sending out information," she said. "My concern is this will be tied in with Britain's CCTV surveillance system, and you'll be literally under surveillance at every turn." She is working on setting up a British branch of Caspian, whose early target will, she said, be M&S.

A spokeswoman for the company said yesterday that it was aware of Ms Albrecht's campaign, and would endeavour to work with her should it decide to extend its use of RFID tagging. "Whatever we do we will do responsibly, talking to people like Katherine Albrecht if we go ahead," she said. "There's no benefit to us in storming ahead if it will cause our customers concern. She'll clearly make herself very vocal, and that would get back to our customers."

The Government has been sponsoring trials of RFID tags as a means of reducing theft and counterfeiting, and the European Central Bank plans to put them in euro banknotes. Companies such as Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Unilever are working with the Auto-ID Centre, part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, to develop the common standard that would allow RFID tags to gain widespread adoption.

Kevin Ashton, the centre's executive director, said that consumers would benefit from lower prices and shelves that were permanently full if companies could use a global network of scanners, connected to the internet, to track individual items wherever they were. He suggested that companies should advise shoppers that the tags can be "killed".

Ms Albrecht characterised Mr Ashton as "one of my arch enemies on the planet". While working on her doctoral dissertation at Harvard - on consumer privacy - she has been devoting her time to exposing what she sees as the dangers of smart tags. Caspian claims to have almost 6,000 members in 15 countries, with Britain now a "core constituency". "What makes us powerful is that 78 per cent of people oppose this technology on privacy grounds, and 61 per cent on health grounds," she said.

No health risk has been identified. The figures are from the Auto-ID Centre's own confidential research, which was mistakenly made available on the internet. Much to its embarrassment, she also discovered internal briefings from the centre's PR advisers suggesting that it create "a privacy advisory council".

Ms Albrecht says that her interest stems from her religious convictions. "When I was eight years old, my grandmother sat me down after a visit to a grocery store and told me that there will be a time when people will not be able to buy or sell food without a number, referring to the Mark of the Beast, Revelations xiii," she said.

"I made a promise to myself at eight years old that if there was ever a number to buy or sell food, I would stop what I was doing and fight it."

[PANEL]
AGGRESSIVE ACTION

Caspian has been campaigning aggressively against companies promoting RFID technology. They include:

Concerns: After ordering 500 million RFID tags, Gillette was found to be testing a "smart shelf" to photograph consumers buying products in supermarkets in Britain and the United States.

Action: Caspian urged a worldwide boycott of Gillette merchandise, from shaving products to batteries.

Result: Last week a Gillette spokesman said that items would not be monitored in stores for at least ten years.

Concerns: The chain has been testing smart tags on DVDs and Gillette Mach 3 razor blades. The Gillette trial has involved taking unannounced photographs at a store in Cambridge.

Action: Albrecht challenged Tesco's initial denials; activists demonstrated and rearranged shelves.

Result: Tesco ended its shelf trials - on schedule, according to the company.

Campaigners claimed success.

Concerns: A press release from Philips Electronics last March said that Benetton would be installing smart tags in some 15 million Sisley-brand pullovers.

Action: Albrecht immediately launched a global "Boycott Benetton" campaign under the slogan "I'd rather go naked".

Result: Benetton publicly retreated from plans to tag items of clothing, insisting it had not yet put tagged goods on shelves.

Concerns: World's biggest retailer has told top 100 suppliers to introduce RFID technology by 2005. It was found to have installed a "smart shelf" in one US store.

Action: Caspian photographed the shelf and urged its supporters to blitz the chain with angry messages.

Result: Wal-Mart announced the "smart shelf" trial would not go ahead, and that its interest lay in tracking inventory in its warehouses rather than on individual items in stores.

(The Times, August 26 2003)

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The Times: Op-ed - What makes a computer-virus writer?

Lonely nerds, greedy crooks, or just up for a challenge? The profile of a virus writer is more complex than the stereotypes suggest. By David Rowan

It would be discourteous not to thank all those Times readers who have been kindly e-mailing me this week enclosing "That movie", a "Wicked screensaver", their "Resume" or the joyous news that I had finally been "Approved". It is always exciting to find oneself a part of history, even if only as a passive recipient of the fastest-spreading computer virus yet monitored. Admittedly, the 176 copies of the new SoBig virus hitting the Rowan in-tray this week make me a bit-part player compared with the 23 million copies picked up by AOL since last Monday.

This week's fun with SoBig has been compounded by the arrival of the Welchia or Nachi worm, blamed for halting Air Canada's check-in system, Maryland commuter trains and a US Naval network, and the continuing chaos caused by the Slammer virus, which earlier this year crashed the computers at an Ohio nuclear plant. Surely this cannot all be the work of pimply adolescents who wreak electronic havoc as vengeance for their lack of girlfriends?

The truth is that this conventional stereotype is as useless as an unsolicited e-mail. Yes, the writers are typically computer-obsessed males aged 14 to 34 - but their reasons for infecting the electronic networks may range from ego and the lure of an intellectual challenge to a specific grudge or, increasingly, greed.

What worries security experts is the growing co-operation between virus writers and the "spam" industry, designed to use third-party computers - yours and mine - to relay their unsolicited e-mails and pornographic images for profit and to evade the law. Even though the anti-virus companies have still to isolate the source of the latest version of the SoBig virus - named SoBig.F, the sixth variation on a theme - there is a growing consensus that it is designed to distribute spam using "Trojan horse" software that can capture a victim's computer. A number of these hijacking programs have been used to relay messages via ordinary users' machines, with names such as Jeem and Proxy-Guzu. Other programs can log your every keystroke, sending your passwords and bank details back to the bad guys.

The world's vendors of anti-virus products - ever keen to terrify us into buying their products - have naturally been talking up the Trojan horse threat. They will no doubt bank a few million this weekend as panicking PC owners buy their software.

What is not being asked is why these companies - if they are so good at warning us of every minor threat - can't isolate the "big" threats at source. After all, you wouldn't expect to buy a new car, pay extra for reinforced bumpers, and then find your petrol tank supplying other cars with fuel, or your engine refusing to work. What is it about the low standards we expect from the computer industry?

Besides, it still isn't certain that SoBig is the work of malicious spammers. Why would a spammer rerelease over and over again a virus that slowed the internet and disabled users' machines? They certainly would not want to make people afraid to open an e-mail. But logic and virus writing are rarely synonymous.

What we do know about destructive coders is that, for all the stereotypes peddled about them, they are mostly well-adjusted and well-educated young people who simply relish a challenge. Sarah Gordon, a Florida-based researcher for the Symantec Antivirus Research Centre, who has come to know more virus writers than anyone, rejects the notion of a "virus writer psychology". Having interviewed perpetrators aged between 11 and their mid-fifties, she sees the only consistent characteristic as "a fundamental disconnect between virus writing and acknowledging the large-scale consequences of those actions". Many fail to understand the impact their creations will have, and mean no harm. The malicious writer, in fact, is a rarity.

It is too soon to know whether the SoBig creator is the most malevolent pornographer ever to go online, as the anti-virus firms' hype would have you believe, or simply a foolish and naive coder. All we know, from two decades of studies of virus writers, is that they act from a number of motives, whether to gain credibility in their underground communities, or, increasingly, to take a more private satisfaction from a challenge fulfilled. Often, they will pick on certain software products known to have a fault, and in particular those claiming to be secure (is it any wonder that Microsoft is the most frequent target?).

Others will simply want to achieve something that supposedly cannot be done - known in the business as "proof of concept" writing. That does not appear to be the case with the latest SoBig virus: a variation on an earlier creation, and with its own inbuilt switch-off date of September 10, it seems unlikely that it was designed either to show off a new technical trick or to reach an unlimited number of e-mail users. It is just a pity that the computing industry and its software vendors have not yet got around to fixing the flaws that gave its creator the opportunity.

Fortunately, human nature is often a more effective means of isolating coders than the anti-virus police. Many find it irresistible to boast about their work, whether online or in the virus code itself. Simon Vallor, the Welsh creator of the Gokar, Admirer and Redesi viruses, who was sent to jail last year, left a remarkable trail of boasts on his personal website.

This weekend, as you carefully clean out your e-mail inbox and back up your hard disk (what, you mean you still haven't?), reflect for a moment on why, in an era when we can clone babies and populate space stations, we still cannot protect our computer networks from the mischief or malevolence of a few loners. And then ask the people trying to sell you PCs and software why they still have not found a way to make them secure.

The author is The Times's technology columnist

(The Times, Comment page, August 23 2003)

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Evening Standard: Analysis: David Kelly and the Hutton Inquiry

By David Rowan

THE picture of David Kelly that emerges from the first eight days of the Hutton Inquiry is of an outwardly composed yet deeply isolated man, lacking anyone with whom he could share his burdens. His tragedy is that, with the habitual discretion and independence of mind that made him such an effective arms inspector, he chose to bear these pressures alone as the Government hung him out to dry.

To Dr Kelly, personal integrity and professional reputation were all. So concerned was he about finding himself in a "morally ambiguous position" should war be declared - thus appearing to have lied to senior Iraqi officials who co-operated with him - that as long ago as last February he seemed "in some personal difficulty or embarrassment". As David Broucher, a senior British diplomat, revealed yesterday, when the two men met in Geneva Dr Kelly said that if Iraq were invaded, "I will probably be found dead in the woods". It was an eerie premonition of his apparent suicide.

Dr Kelly's death, days after facing MPs on the foreign affairs committee about his briefing of the BBC's Andrew Gilligan, followed a series of high-pressure meetings with his bosses. The Ministry of Defence's top civil servant, Sir Kevin Tebbit, wrote to the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, asking that the committee go easy on a man who "is not used to being thrust into the public eye, and is not on trial".

That request was overruled, even though, as the inquiry heard, Dr Kelly was "clearly very nervous". As a Foreign Office official noted: "Kelly is apparently feeling the pressure and does not appear to be handlingit well."

But Dr Kelly did not share his concerns with colleagues, and we do not yet know how much he unburdened himself to his family. He retained his cool even as the Riot Act was read to him by the MoD personnel director. As his manager, Bryan Wells, told the inquiry: "He was composed throughout. It is not a comfortable experience for anyone to receive that kind of message."

Alastair Campbell, for his part, justified naming Dr Kelly by saying the scientist's emotional wellbeing had not figured in the Government's calculations. After all, he was "a very strong, resolute character ... who had been in many difficult, stressful circumstances". He was certainly not the "Walter Mitty character" who Tom Kelly, the Downing Street spokesman, claimed had exaggerated his importance.

Dr Kelly was one of Britain's top experts on biological weapons, working for the MoD and Foreign Office with high levels of security clearance, and valuable to the intelligence services, the UN and the CIA. "Hopefully it will soon pass," he wrote in an email the day before he died, "and I can get to Baghdad and get on with the real work."

As his friend Tom Mangold wrote before Dr Kelly's death: "He is an inspector's inspector ... in Iraq, the most feared. He is quiet, persistent, well informed, scientifically indomitable [with his] soft voice and semantic precision. You take on Kelly, you take on a truly hard man. The Iraqis know this and treat him with respect."

His last weeks, though, remain "full of conundrums", according to another friend, toxicology professor Alistair Hay, who believes Downing Street turned on him in a "monstrous" display of bullying. "There was pressure coming from the top - from Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon down - to ensure he would appear before the committee," Professor Hay said last night.

"They clearly hoped he'd refute what he'd said to Gilligan. It's clear that he was put under huge, remorseless pressure - it must have been bloody grim."

Professor Hay does not read too much into Dr Kelly's comments about being found in the woods. "If he felt that strongly about a breach of trust, would he not have acted at the time we went to war? Why wait?" He also finds it difficult to reconcile this with other evidence that Dr Kelly was "sympathetic" to the war. Such apparent inconsistencies recur in the inquiry evidence. Dr Kelly, for instance, told Nicholas Rufford of the Sunday Times that Gilligan's account of their conversation was "bullshit".

What is certain is that the pressure got to him. "He could see no way out," Professor Hay said. "I'm not sure how much he said to his family - was he trying to protect them?" He believes the Government was wrong to force Dr Kelly to give evidence. "There's only so much an individual can take."

DR Kelly had not previously shown signs of inability to cope, Professor Hay said. "He was someone who'd faced considerable pressure in the past - but he was always acting with the support of the UN and his own government." As his family said shortly after his death: "David's professional life was characterised by integrity, honour and dedication to finding the truth - often in the most difficult of circumstances." For a scientist with no one to turn to, there could be no more difficult circumstance than inconveniencing a government fighting to save its reputation.

THE LATEST KEY POINTS

-Dr David Kelly said in February that if Iraq was attacked he would "probably be found dead in the woods". He told diplomat David Broucher, who took it to be a throwaway remark. The scientist had assured Iraqi contacts that they would not be attacked if they disarmed. He feared that if war went ahead anyway, he would have betrayed them.

-After questioning by Ministry of Defence chiefs over his links with the BBC, Dr Kelly told a reporter he had been "put through the wringer".

-He dismissed as "bullshit" the core charge in Andrew Gilligan's Today programme report, blaming No10 for "sexing up" the weapons dossier, and said he had only spoken to the BBC reporter about factual matters.

-Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon blocked MPs from asking Dr Kelly about weapons of mass destruction and the Government dossier. He said the foreign affairs committee could only ask about Dr Kelly's dealings with the BBC.

-Dr Kelly said he was "shocked" that the MoD had named him publicly because he thought the matter would be handled confidentially.

(Evening Standard, August 22 2003)

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The Times: How newsreader programs are changing the news business

News stories from thousands of sources can now be accessed on a single web page. By David Rowan

Step aside Peter Sissons; a new generation of newsreaders is about to transform the way we discover what is happening in the world. They might look like lines of computer code, but they offer internet users instant access to thousands of customised news sources that are updated throughout the day. Whether your interest is foreign news, basketball results or the latest in nanotechnology, you can now create your own personal headline feeds that collate the latest stories from a huge range of publications of your choice.

Yesterday, between 10.55am and 11am, I read about a dozen publications, including The New York Times, the BBC's business news headlines, Le Monde, Wired News, the World Wrestling Entertainment updates and the Augusta Free Press. It took just a couple of seconds to load the relevant headline feeds, and, from a single web page, I could skim the stories that looked interesting and click to read them.

There is nothing new, of course, in using the web to aggregate diverse news sources to scan a bunch of headlines in one place. Companies such as Moreover and NewsNow have offered breaking news feeds scooped up from thousands of sources for years, and Google News scans 4,500 sources. What is different is that this latest technology is changing the way people are using mainstream media sources. No longer do you need to search for the information you want if you know that it will be automatically directed to your PC. And that negates the whole notion of "surfing" the web and keeping bookmarks or "favourites" that you click through each time you log on.

Dozens of news aggregators have become available, with names such as NetNewsWire, NewzCrawler and AmphetaDesk. You do not need technical knowledge to use them, but editors, in particular, ought to understand why they are catching on. They rely on a programming language called XML which makes information on proprietary websites available in other places, such as your PC desktop or a handheld computer. All that an online newspaper or a weblog needs to do to make its content available is to offer it in a simple format known as RSS. That (again, don't be boggled by the jargon) stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary. It offers vast new opportunities for consumers to decide which news feeds they wish to receive and when.

After all the billions of dot-com dollars that were wasted trying to build "portals" or websites that would be a user's primary source of information, it might seem perverse for a news organisation to give away its headlines in a way that takes them beyond its control. After all, why would The New York Times want its news to share a computer desktop with amateur weblogs or extremist political commentaries? The answer is that, as more consumers use these newstrackers to find what they are looking for, they no longer need to visit each publication's front page or inside pages. And each time they click on a headline from an RSS feed, they are instantly transported to the newspaper's website to read the full story. All without the paper spending any money to bring them there.

The RSS revolution has been pioneered by the weblogging community, but now CNN, the Christian Science Monitor, Reuters and Liberation are among the mainstream organisations offering customised news feeds. Rolling Stone magazine lets you receive news about your favourite bands as soon as it appears on its website; individual writers, such as the columnist Dan Gillmor, let readers know each time they have written anything new. The BBC offers a large selection of niche news feeds, from foreign coverage to Harry Potter updates. And if you are a geek, a site such as Fresh News will give you the headlines from any or all of 30 specialist sources in the time it takes to load a single web page.

The power over how online news is used is shifting rapidly from the content owners to the consumers. The personal newspaper so long predicted by futurologists has arrived in the guise of RSS. Mainstream publishers who fail to keep up will miss out on increasing volumes of traffic.

(The Times, August 22 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Flash mobs/phone locating services

By David Rowan

MAYBE ONE should not read too much into the storming of Macy's department store in New York earlier this summer by a crowd demanding "love rugs" for their "suburban commune", or the apparently spontaneous requests from hundreds of customers in a Rome bookshop for a paperback that does not exist. After all, the "flash mob" phenomenon of localised crowd stunts co-ordinated by e-mail and mobile phone - which reached Central London last week, causing brief mayhem in a sofa store is the perfect silly-season media fad that will disappear once the novelty wears off.

Yet behind these defiantly pointless instant gatherings lurks a potential social revolution that could have a huge significance for politicians, businesses and the media. More than ever before, the mobile phone, e-mail and weblogs are giving ordinary people the power to co-ordinate and mobilise themselves at extremely short notice. These ad-hoc social networks are being used to animate political campaigns, promote anti-corporate activism and report "news" otherwise missed by the mainstream media. Sofa-shop takeovers notwithstanding, the ubiquity of these technologies is slowly shifting the political balance towards electronically connected campaigners who know how to organise.

Protesters against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle four years ago co-ordinated street battles using mobile phones and instantly updated web pages. In January 2001, Joseph Estrada lost power in the Philippines after a blitz of text messages helped to bring a million demonstrators on to a Manila square. Even our own road-fuel protesters relied on text-messages, e-mails and mobile phone calls back in autumn 2000 to ensure rapid road blockages whenever tankers were seen leaving petrol depots. It's no coincidence that Howard Dean, the most technologically tuned-in of those competing to be the Democrats' candidate for US President, has vastly raised his profile using a regularly updated weblog and grassroots meetingco-ordinating websites such as MeetUp.com.

Howard Rheingold, one of the web's most creative thinkers, calls such digitally powered gatherings "smart mobs" and sees their potential as, literally, revolutionary. "Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for co-operation," he says. Imagine the impact that a "smart mob" could have on Britain's next large-scale political demonstration. The next revolution may not be televised, but it will certainly be texted and e mailed.

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MOBILE phones now have another use, which their owners might not find quite so progressive. A new range of phone-locating services has hit the marketplace, allowing other people to determine where you are through the signal your handset is generating. Carphone Warehouse has just started offering the mapAmobile service, which for £30 a year and 30p per request claims to locate people to within 50 yards "without disturbing them". It is being sold as a way of "knowing where your loved ones or colleagues are at any time", particularly to parents keen to keep track of their children.

FleetOnline, meanwhile, has also recently launched a business service that offers employers the chance to "position" their members of staff for 25p a time. Beware all you travelling salespeople who plan an extended lunch break.

Both companies state that people's phones will be tracked only after they have signalled their agreement in response to a text message, but it's easy to imagine where such freely available commercial services will lead. Sometimes there's nothing more attractive than the idea of returning to public pay phones.

(The Times, Apgust 12 2003)

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Evening Standard: Analysis - crisis at the Mirror

By David Rowan

PIERS Morgan must be cursing the moment he first saw Helen Adams on Big Brother two summers ago. The famously inarticulate instant celebrity - the "halfwit from Wales", as Morgan put it - prompted an epiphany that led him to relaunch The Mirror as a "serious" newspaper that would pursue "comment and analysis" in place of showbiz trivia. This week, that miscalculation finally cost him more than 50 editorial staff, two magazines, and placed a question mark not only over his own position as editor but of the paper's future within the Trinity Mirror group.

In the brutally sharp words of Sly Bailey, the group's chief executive, "serious news" was being dropped in favour of "seriously good popular journalism". Bailey has been vigorously wielding the axe this week at the paper's Canary Wharf offices, and the scale of the job cuts - following 28 already lost recently - is prompting serious concern among commentators over the paper's editorial quality.

With Morgan's £20 million relaunch serving only to take circulation below two million, and a disastrous price war with The Sun causing the paper serious financial problems, Bailey has decided that the paper must focus on "fun" in order to survive. Gone are the education and medical correspondents, not to be replaced; gone, too, are the Saturday magazine, M, and The Look, a listings magazine.

As for Morgan's own future, when Bailey was asked last week if his job was safe, she replied: "I don't think I could say my job is safe. No one ever knows if their job is safe." The cuts are part of a wideranging plan to reduce the group's costs by £25 million within two years, and a total of 550 job losses have been announced across the company. But the scale of the editorial redundancies on the flagship national daily are leading City analysts to speculate that Bailey is merely trimming the paper so that it can be offloaded, along with its Sunday stablemate and the troubled Sunday People.

Bailey has denied that the papers are for sale - the value of the business "as a whole is undeniably more than the sum of the parts", she insisted last week - but the level of cost-cutting is prompting dark mutterings about the damage she is inflicting on editorial quality.

"Bailey may have a good background in regional journalism, but she just doesn't understand national journalism," says the paper's former assistant editor, Geoffrey Goodman, the leading advocate of traditional Mirror journalism. "This is a serious error of judgment, and I get the impression the accountants are now in charge. If they want to take on The Sun, let alone the Mail, they won't do it by cutting staff like this. They may find in a year's time they have to sell while sales are falling."

Nor is the City convinced about the cost-cutting strategy. Anthony de Larrinaga, a media analyst at SG Securities, says that Bailey is addressing the symptoms of the paper's long-term decline rather than seeking a cure. Readers will notice the editorial "loss of value", he says. "Cutting costs is not a long-term solution. The danger is that the new celebrity focus might not appeal as much to readers as to the focus groups. It's difficult to get away from the impression of falling revenue being chased by cost-cutting in the national papers, and the jury is out on whether it will work."

Analysts point out that The Mirror has been suffering a long-term decline in circulation revenue of around five per cent a year. The Sunday Mirror and Sunday People are doing even worse, falling by around 5.5 per cent each year over the past five years. With circulation accounting for more than half of a red top's revenue, the papers need to make their cash elsewhere - but with tabloid advertising revenue rising by just three per cent a year, all Trinity Mirror's national papers are in trouble.

It will be hard for readers not to notice such losses as M magazine, which has gone for obvious commercial reasons. For four years it has been costing the company around £9 million a year, according to insiders, yet failing to boost circulation sufficiently or to attract enough glossy advertising.

But the loss of key editorial specialisms may affect the paper's ability to get the exclusives that set it apart from rivals. The headcount is being cut from about 370 to about 320 - still 50 more than when Morgan took over seven years ago, but a more brutal cull than current staff can recall. Executives at the paper describe the cuts as a "sensible restructuring", and talk of job losses merely as "a streamlined headcount". Morgan did not resist them - he met with Bailey and Ellis Watson, the general manager, to agree the cuts as he understood them "to be for the long-term benefit of the paper".

THE company has told Morgan not to give interviews, but he is known to be furious at rival papers' suggestions of a "slash and burn" approach; he calls it a "trim and improve" strategy. Most of those affected, he has been saying, have come into his office to thank him for the generous redundancy terms. Certainly the mood among staff has been surprisingly upbeat: many had feared even more ruthless firings.

Besides, former executives point out that the paper has not always had a dedicated education correspondent. Bill Hagerty, a former deputy editor, says: "This is not a Richard Desmond-style purge, and the terms have been generous." Will the paper be put up for sale? Senior Mirror executives claim that they just do not know.

"Bailey genuinely believes that the company is worth more as a whole," says one. "I just don't know if her game plan is to fatten it up for a sale or simply to try to make more money out of it. It all depends on performance, I suppose." Morgan himself has been typically brash about his own future.

He is denying speculation that he is looking for an exit to television - his recommissioned Tabloid Tales series was just a bit of "fun" that took eight mornings' work in five months - and insisting that his editing job is safe "at least until the end of the week".

It is a typical Piers Morgan joke, of course. But Trinity Mirror's shareholders stopped laughing £20 million ago.

(Evening Standard, August 6 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Picture-phones/Last FM

By David Rowan

IT IS NOT always easy to predict the social impact of a new technology. When the latest picture-messaging phones hit the market, it was a safe bet that they would be used for distributing holiday postcards, football highlights and, naturally, pornography. But the phones are heralding a broader cultural revolution, with already some fascinating consequences.

Most attention until now has focused on the less salubrious opportunities offered by the combination of highly portable digital cameras and fast internet connections. An alleged rape in a Brighton pub this summer, said by police to have been filmed on a camera phone, was only the most prominent of many reports highlighting the potential appeal to voyeurs and paedophiles of the phones - which has led many fitness centres to ban them from changing rooms.

Last week, by contrast, a report from New Jersey showed how this technology is also being used to prevent crimes. A 15-year-old boy, allegedly grabbed in the street on Tuesday night by an older man, pulled out his phone camera and snapped the man and his car number plate. Police used the images to arrest and charge a man.

It wasn't the first time the phones have been used in this way. Recently, an 18-year-old woman in Yokohama, Japan, used her camera phone to photograph a man who was fondling her on a train; after seeing the images, police made an arrest at the next stop. In Sweden, a shop manager used his Nokia 7650 last May to photograph a teenager who was demanding cash at knifepoint. Minutes after the manager sent the images to police, they found and arrested him. The crime fighting scope of picture-messaging has not been lost on the phone operators: in the US, Nextel Communications is marketing a Motorola phone to police as a way to broadcast colour mugshots or missing-children photos.

The technology is also having an unforeseen impact in health care. At the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in South Wales, junior doctors use the phones to send X-ray images for investigation - which, they say, cuts waiting times.

Other business users to benefit range from estate agents (sending property details to clients' phones) to Hong Kong's pimps (offering their customers previews of the delights on offer). As with text-messaging, it is you the user, rather than the phone companies, that will determine which applications take off.

As these digital eyes become ever more ubiquitous, the mainstream media, too, will find camera phones shaping more of their output. Broadcasters such as Japan's NHK are already accepting viewers' phone-cam news footage, and magazines are inviting readers' snatched photos of celebrities. Could 3G's ultimate legacy be to put an amateur paparazzo on every street corner.

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IF YOU can't find a radio station that matches your tastes, how about one that gets to know you personally, then plays only the music it thinks you'll enjoy? Various entertainment websites are now offering a level of personalisation previously only dreamt of, thanks to filtering programs that figure out what you want. They use various statistical models to analyse your choices - AOL has one called MyBestBets, which relies on something called Bayesian modelling - but the most interesting is a London-based web radio station, Last FM (www.last.fm).

Each time you play a song, you indicate whether or not you like it. Last FM remembers your choices and, using a system called collaborative filtering, compares them to other listeners to predict other music that you will favour. The idea is not entirely new - Launch.com was using collaborative filtering four years ago - but Last FM has a huge following. Try it, you never know what you'll learn about yourself.

(The Times, August 5 2003)

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