The Times: Tech column - VeriSign mischief/spellcheck hell

By David Rowan

The internet was stolen last week. A faceless multi- billion-dollar corporation hijacked millions of web addresses for its own financial benefit, forcing ordinary surfers to visit its web pages, from where they are lured towards those of its commercial partners. As if this audacious land-grab were not scandal enough, the hijacking was done in a way that makes it harder to stop spammers sending you junk e-mails from nonexistent web addresses. It may also make it harder to keep your web-surfing habits from companies that will pay to target you.

The corporation responsible for this outrage is called VeriSign, and it happens to run the biggest registries of internet domain names, those ending in .com and .net. Two weeks ago this column mentioned with concern that VeriSign was considering redirecting any misspelled web addresses with these suffixes to pages on its own servers. Suddenly last Monday it went ahead with its plan, which redirects anyone who mis-types a .com or .net address to a VeriSign page which recommends (paid-for) options.

"Typo-squatting", as the practice is being called, has been turned into a huge commercial opportunity. VeriSign says that 20 million web addresses are mistyped every day, so there is clearly money to be made. The $4 billion company argues that the business, called SiteFinder, will simply improve "the user web- browsing experience", but internet service providers and web administrators are fuming. As well as breaching all sorts of web technical standards, they say, it makes it harder to stop spam and more difficult to know when you have mistyped someone's e-mail address.

There are also privacy concerns: a "web bug" has been found in the SiteFinder source code, which places a cookie in your computer that lasts for five years.

Though VeriSign says that it does not harvest personal information, privacy consultants say that it could, in theory, use data that it already holds about millions of people and match it against their surfing habits.

Smaller websites are threatening to sue the company for anti-competitive practices, and web administrators are designing "patches" that can bypass the system. But Icann, the body supposedly in charge of domain names, is merely asking VeriSign to "suspend" SiteFinder voluntarily until these issues can be addressed.

That is not enough: the US Government must end the practice now to stop the web becoming one company's commercial sideline.

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A FASCINATING linguistic theory has been zapping around the internet over the past week. "Aoccdrnig to rseearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy," thousands of websites are reporting, "it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are in; the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteers be in the rghit pclae.

"The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef, but rthaer the wrod as a wlohe." Isn't taht itnerseting?

Some versions locate the study more specifically at the University of Cmabrigde - sorry, Cambridge. Yet one small detail bothers me: I cannot find any evidence of the original survey, conducted at Cambridge or any university.

Back in 1976, a PhD student at Nottingham explored randomised letter orderings, and in 1999 Nature published an American paper dazzlingly entitled "Cognitive restoration of reversed speech". But it is impossible to locate the source of the current memo (one of those "idea viruses" that the internet propagates at vast speed). Is it a hoax? All we can prove scientifically is that a plausible verbal trick will jump around the world in minutes. Even one that sends The Times's spellcheckers into meltdown.

(The Times, September 30 2003)

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The Times: Gadgets for Christmas

By David Rowan

Forget the video-messaging mobile phone and the plasma-screen television. This season's must-have gadgets are the family submarine and the £40,000 racing car with built-in games console.

The latest techno-toys, on display yesterday at the StuffLive 2003 exhibition at Olympia, West London, suggest that manufacturers have not relented in their constant pressure for us to upgrade our kit.

From a £299 pair of sunglasses that offer the wearer a private video show to the multimedia furniture kits that hold your cigar while you flick television channels, there is no shortage of Christmas ideas for the high-spending consumer.

Not all may wish to fork out £500,000 for the personal submarine marketed as an "underwater sports car" - but that has not stopped the consumer electronics industry from a splurge of new gadgets.

While much of Britain continues in its struggle to programme the video recorder, the neo-Luddites who fail to master the text message must now face yet more pressure, from spy cameras disguised as cigarette lighters to sound speakers that turn shop windows into "whispering" product displays.

One of the busiest stands was run by John Lewis, which was doing a brisk trade in iPod digital music players. The latest digital cameras were also selling well at the Casio stand. Retailers appeared to have learnt the lesson of the Innovations catalogue, which folded last spring after poor sales of such products as heated eyelash curlers, unlikely to appeal to today's younger, cash-rich consumer.

Ian Fogg, an analyst at Jupiter Research, said: "The pace of change is every bit as quick as during the boom years of 1998 to 2001, and our research shows that consumers are still prepared to spend money.

"As broadband internet penetration grows, it seems that we're laying a foundation that makes the digital lifestyle more pervasive."

No one knows how much we are spending on personal technology; the US Consumer Electronics Association estimates that Americans will spend £63 billion on gadgets this year, and analysts say that Britain is likely to spend "tens of billions" on DVD players, PDAs (digital personal organisers) and MP3 players. This is largely because the pace of innovation remains so great.

"It's a time of fast-moving technological advance," Mr Fogg said. "Ten years ago, a digital camera required a suitcase full of batteries and modems, and photos were of worse quality than those you'd get from a disposable camera. Today, the quality from a miniature digital camera is broadly comparable. We're expecting explosive growth."

According to Jupiter's research of regular internet users, a fifth of adults are planning to buy a digital video camera in the next year. Laptops are also attracting growing demand. Mr Fogg said: "As laptops have dropped in price, they have started doing lots of things people want from a home computer, from playing games to connecting to their camera. So in the UK, 14 per cent are thinking of buying a laptop in the next year."

James Beechinor-Collins, editor of the gadget magazine T3, said: "Who doesn't now have a DVD, a mobile phone, or a home PC? When T3 started seven years ago, we had to focus on loads of cool technology that would one day be here. Now the future has arrived, which means home cinemas that offer real cinema experience, and never again having to sit through someone's seven-hour wedding video, because they've edited it on their PC."

A BIG TOY FOR DAD

An underwater sports car

The Gemini personal submarine, from Subeo, a British company, claims to be the world's first underwater sports car. It will take a little persuasion to get your family to agree to trade up from the Mondeo - at £500,000, it will not leave much change for the congestion charge - but at least it has three seats. It is powered by lead-acid batteries and can accelerate to just four knots. Hold on to your chequebook for now, though: only if enough orders come in from the Middle East will it move from prototype to consumer product.

Cost: £500,000

SOME HELP FOR MUM

A robot vacuum cleaner

The Electrolux Trilobite is a small, red circular device that resembles a carrying case for old LP records. Set it free from its recharging station, and it will glide across the floor, scanning the carpet, and vacuum any dirt it finds. In a demonstration for The Times it seemed to miss a few dust spots, but maybe it was simply depressed at its own limitations. Like the Daleks in Doctor Who, the Trilobite cannot cope with stairs - and you'll recall how quickly the Daleks became extinct.

Cost: £999

TECHNO FOR A BOY

A vibrating sound lounger

With teenage boys spending unhealthy amounts of time either lying in bed, playing computer games or listening to loud music, here is a product that lets them do all three at once. The Pyramat interactive "sound lounger" is a portable mat with three built-in speakers that lets you lie down and "feel your audio" through 100-watt mid-range speakers. It also incorporates a "rumble seat" backrest that vibrates along with the music - which should particularly appeal to the adolescent male.

Cost: £100

GIFT FOR A GIRL

A mirror with built-in TV

The trouble with being a 14-year-old girl is that you must constantly monitor your appearance using the nearest mirror, while never actually missing any MTV. The mirror TV screen from Ad Notam offers the solution: a small television screen is integrated in the corner of a large mirror, which can then be hung on the bedroom wall. It's a bit pricey, but then no price can be put on a young lady's vanity.

Cost: £1,000

...AND GADGET FOR GRAN

A light-switch-in-a-plant-pot

What might be seen as the exhibition's most naff product was actually proving one of its bestsellers last night. The Plant-A-Lamp is a combination of wicker plant pot and ordinary household lamp that can be switched on simply by touching a leaf.

Keep holding the leaf and the lamp dims; touch it again and its switches itself off. It works by detecting a small electric charge carried from the hand to the leaf. And thousands of them have apparently been sold in the past year.

Cost: £29.95

(The Times, September 27 2003)

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The Times: Op-ed - Why Microsoft is really giving up on chatrooms

Bill Gates gets no ker-ching ker-ching from chat. By David Rowan

Bill Gates has always been a charitable kind of guy - giving away £100 million here to wipe out malaria, £70 million there to combat Aids. So naturally, as a responsible father of three, Bill's late-night instant messages to his wife, Melinda, have lately been fired with concern for the safety of innocent children. With paedophiles lurking behind every mouse-click, an altruist as public-spirited as Gates saw no alternative but to disconnect Microsoft's internet chatrooms. No matter that 1.2 million British consumers might now defect to less principled rivals: its MSN network simply had to act "to help safeguard the children".

Well, LOL!!, as they say in Bill's chatrooms - you might as well Laugh Out Loud at the man's sheer audacity. Microsoft, never known for putting public interest before profits, had some far more pragmatic reasons for announcing its chatroom closures. The fact that it garnered millions of £worth of largely uncritical newspaper coverage in the process is merely an added bonus for this most single-mindedly revenue-driven of corporations.

Chatrooms do not generate much revenue - particularly, as with MSN's, they are mostly free to consumers. In those linguistically distorted bubble days when "monetising eyeballs" was all that mattered, a website's "traffic" was an automatic determinant of value. Today, traffic counts only if advertisers or users are prepared to pay. And in MSN's case, the cash has not been flowing quickly enough.

Besides, those pesky regulators have once again come knocking at Microsoft's door - in this case, the Home Office, keen to enforce chatroom guidelines designed to give children greater protection. And if that will cost money, so will the potential flood of legal claims for negligence. Far cheaper in the long run, surely, to let teenagers take their idle chat to the smaller websites - even if these sites, unlike Microsoft, could never afford to employ that expensive chat-monitoring hardware known as human beings.

This is not to deny the seriousness of the risks facing children on the net. There have been at least 15 cases in Britain of children being physically attacked by a man they first met in a chatroom. Academic studies have painted depressingly detailed pictures of paedophiles' cynical strategies for grooming children, first flattering them, then isolating them, and finally gaining their trust to arrange a private meeting.

Yet none of this is news to Microsoft. If it felt so concerned "to prioritise the safety of children", as this week's press release declared, why did it not close its chatrooms three years ago, when Kenneth Lockley, of Derby, was jailed after going online in search of an underage sexual encounter? Why did it not act when Patrick Green was jailed at Aylesbury Crown Court in 2000 after meeting a 15-year-old girl he met in a Yahoo! chatroom? Why was it so inactive when the Western Mail exposed the dangers of its own MSN chatrooms, where a reporter posing as a 12-year-old girl was bombarded with adult requests to meet or engage in phone sex?

The company's answer then was that it was "not directly responsible for user-created chat", merely its facilitator. Don't bother asking why Microsoft chose not to "facilitate" the provision of enough chatroom moderators to ensure children's safety.

Incidentally, the day after the chatrooms are withdrawn next month, Microsoft's increasingly dominant instant messaging service will shut out rival firms' software. Now, wouldn't it be convenient if exiled chatters found that this provided an alternative and helped Microsoft to push AOL aside?

The author is The Times's technology columnist

(The Times, Comment page, September 25 2003)

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Evening Standard: What future does ITV have?

Text to follow

(Evening Standard, September 24 2003)

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Evening Standard: Will a merged ITV end up foreign-owned?

By David Rowan

THEY blew a billion pounds on a knitted monkey, watched their main audiences dwindle away, and enraged shareholders by taking fat-cat salaries as their stock prices tanked. Now ITV's two most powerful men are preparing for what could be the final scene in Britain's most extraordinary television drama - one which their critics say will end with the death of ITV itself.

In two weeks, Patricia Hewitt, the Trade Secretary, is expected to give the go-ahead to Carlton's £4 billion merger with Granada to create a singIe dominant ITV company. Michael Green of Carlton and Granada's Charles Allen have spent a year arguing that the merger is the only way to preserve the network as a distinct public service broadcaster, and the City has broadIy welcomed an end to uncertainty. Yet in the past few days it has become clear where a green light is likely to lead, as foreign investors have been queuing up, eager to acquire ITV on their own terms. And Allen, and especially Green, are being blamed for letting commercial pressures threaten the interests of British viewers.

Delegates at the Royal Television Society conference in Cambridge last weekend were left in no doubt what the Green-Allen deal will mean. Hain Saban, the US-based billionaire behind Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, brashly told the conference that he would make a takeover approach within days of an official go-ahead. "We will have a couple of weeks of internal studies followed by a meeting with CharIes and Michael," he said, adding ominously that he would not invest "one dollar" if regulators imposed strict conditions.

Mel Karmazin, who runs Viacom, owner of MTV, Paramount and CBS, said that he too had a "strong appetite for doing business here", and could see "synergies" in acquiring ITV.

Publicly, Green was playing down the prospects of a takeover. "I don't think it is even on the cards," he told the conference. He was, though, keen to portray the merged ITV as "a very attractive company" that would appeal to investors. Rival executives who do not want to be named - surprising, given their strength of feeling - are suggesting that after presiding over a painful few years at Carlton, Green is privately delighted at the prospect of selling up to enable him to make a smooth getaway - a claim strongly denied yesterday by his office, which insists that Green and Allen will run a merged operation.

Green, the 55-year-old son of a Brixton shirtmaker who is now valued at £50 million in The Sunday Times Rich List, is an exuberant figure and demanding boss who tends to enjoy the good life. He left Haberdashers' Aske's school with moderate O-levels and started a stationery business, becoming a millionaire by the age of 2. He made the most of his social contacts. He married Janet Wolfson, daughter of Lord Wolfson, chairman of the GUS mail-order empire, although they Iater divorced. He normally shuns publicity, rarely giving interviews. although Iast September he took the unusual step of condemning a John Pilger documentary on his own channel, which he said was unfair to Israel.

Yet senior figures in broadcasting are happier to put their names to criticisms of what foreign ownership will mean. Richard Eyre, the network's former chief executive', believes that foreign investors will "milk ITV for cash for a couple of years, but then you'll be left with a dead ITV". They will wriggle out of their statutory commitment to offer public-service programming, such as local news and education, by quickly switching from analogue to digital broadcasts, he says. "We would all be impoverished if public-service broadcasting were Iost ... we really have to intervene to stop the market making all the decisions."

It may already be too late. Michael Grade, the former Channel 4 chief executive, believes that Green and Allen have already abandoned their public-service commitments to the BBC and Channel 4. "To sit here in 2003 and pretend ITV has anything to do with public-service broadcasting any more is a joke," Grade says.

The City sees a US-type takeover as a no-brainer. "A merged ITV will be a particularly attractive launch pad into the UK market for overseas predators, especially if they have access to English-speaking programming,'' says Simon Baker, media analyst at SG Securities.

For viewers, this is likely to mean more low-budget foreign programming - a scenario causing angst both within ITV's head office and among viewers' groups. "It won't be sudden, but over five or 10 years there will be an erosion of British Ianguage, culture and values," says Jocelyn Hay, chair of Voice of the Listener and Viewer. "Already we've got a situation where fire officers visiting Sussex schools are asking children what they would do if they saw a fire and they're getting the answer 'Dial 911'. Imagine how much worse it will be if there are yet more cheap American programmes."

It remains unclear how Ofcom, the new regulator, would stand up to a determined foreign owner. To the alarm of viewers' groups, Ofcom has 20 per cent fewer staff than the regulators it replaces at the end of the year, yet is charged with 263 separate monitoring tasks, more than twice as many as its predecessors.

But it is the advertisers who are most worried about a foreign takeover. "If ITV were sold off to foreign investors, we in the advertising community would have deep concerns," says Chris Hayward, head of TV buying at Zenith Optimedia. "Would they understand the peculiarity of the UK market? Television has to be about more than churning out the maximum profits." A venture-capital-backed bid led by David Elstein, the former Channel 5 and Sky executive, would at least reassure Hayward - Elstein, after all, knows about British tastes.

Green did not respond to his critics last night. His office insisted it was "fairly hypothetical" talking about a takeover whiIe he was focused on the merger "and on strengthening ITV". Besides, he had worked to push £250 million a year into ITV's public-service programming, a sure sign of his commitment to the network he helped build up. He has, though, told friends privately of his frustration at the level of old-fashioned, sentimental thinking about public-service television in Britain.

Green's reassurances have not convinced those with concerns about his strategy "If shareholders see a way of saving £250 million by dropping their public-service obligations, you can be sure they'll find a way to do so," says Richard Eyre. "And that matters a Iot. We're talking here about something that's part of our culture."

(Evening Standard, September 24 2003)

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Evening Standard: Profile - Ian Monk, celebrity PR

By David Rowan

HAD things gone differently this week, Carole Caplin would have been preparing for a busy day tomorrow meeting two TV production companies, a national television broadcaster, a publishing house, and, time allowing, executives from a health farm. As it is, the 41-year-old "lifestyle guru" to the Blairs has put on hold her commercial ambitions after a spectacular public falling-out with her business manager and PR agent, Ian Monk. Normally, PRs avoid letting themselves become part of the story. But caught between Caplin and the No 10 spin machine, Monk has emerged from the shadows, fighting to save his own reputation as a celebrity spinner to rival Max Clifford.

Monk will not admit that it was his doing, of course, but somehow on Monday his resignation letter to Caplin reached the Press Association. By having friends brief the press, Monk wrote, she had "made what has always been a difficult job for me impossible". In line with her "changing personal and professional agenda", she had clouded potential business deals he had arranged which, according to press reports, included a tell-all book about the Blairs rumoured to be worth up to £1 million.

Caplin denied through her lawyer that she had ever planned to write such a book, but the damage had been done. Monk was not prepared to be spun against - especially if he could milk the ensuing publicity to promote his consultancy.

Some have called Monk "the new Max Clifford" for his wide influence in Fleet Street and a growing roster of clients ranging from TV celebrities to company directors caught up in scandals. He winces at the comparison, seeing himself as a far more upmarket media operator. "I do hope he's not the next Max Clifford," says his former colleague and friend, the PR Brian MacLaurin. "I don't believe that the Max Clifford style of PR represents what he does. It's just that Ian's got this incredible ability to maximise coverage and manage the flow of news - and with the media being such a powerful animal these days, you need powerful animals on your side who know how journalists bite." A former executive on the Daily Mail, the Express and The Sun, Monk, approaching 50, has earned respect among journalists for his tenacity, his steeliness and his ability to understand their needs.

"He's very dedicated to his clients, and he knows how celebrity-driven papers work," says one tabloid executive. Others grumble that he plays papers off against each other, so his " exclusives" sometimes appear in more than one place, but they accept that he has his clients' interests at heart. "I don't always like the way he spins, but he is a skilful operator," says a showbusiness writer.

Monk always wanted to work in Fleet Street. After graduating from Bristol University he started at the Bucks Free Press and, by the age of 24, was at the Daily Mail. After three years as a reporter on the Star, the Mail poached him to run its foreign news desk and he rose to be executive editor.

It was as deputy editor of the Express in 1996 that Monk's reputation sustained a damaging blow. His wife was arrested in possession of a prepublication copy of a biography of the Duchess of York, allegedly with the intention of offering it for sale to The Sun to spoil a Daily Mail serialisation. The couple had to pay £125 each in damages and faced £60,000 in costs, and Monk lost his job. He still regrets the incident.

BRIAN MacLaurin then tempted him to join him as a PR, representing clients such as Chris Tarrant. When the business was sold for £6 million two years ago, Monk made a six-figure sum. In his new venture, Ian Monk Associates, he represents celebrities such as Claire Sweeney and Ruthie Henshall, and corporate clients including Hachette UK.

"He's the Daily Mail to Max's News of the World," says Mark Borkowski, another celebrity PR. "But because of his Fleet Street connections, his A-list clients will be slightly nervous about whether he'll ring up an old mate if there's a great story. Can you take the journalist out of the PR man?"

His next task is to stop people thinking of him as the man who represented Carole Caplin. They were introduced last November, just as the "Cheriegate" scandal was breaking over Cherie Blair's relationship with Peter Foster, Caplin's former boyfriend (whom Monk does not represent). The arrangement began well: Caplin saw huge commercial opportunities in identifying herself as Cherie's "life coach" and Tony's fashion adviser, and agreed that Monk would be paid a fifth of all she earned. Monk explored options ranging from fitness videos and her £70,000 contract with The Mail on Sunday, to a series of books. He claims that Caplin was intending to write an autobiography featuring health and fitness advice, rather than a damaging inside view of No 10.

After stories leaked last weekend that Caplin had been banned from the Blair household, her "friends" were quoted explaining that she felt betrayed and was keen to tell her story in a book. Monk insists that he expressed none of these sentiments, and suspects Downing Street of placing the stories to make Caplin think that he was briefing against her.

Blair's entourage had, he believes, decided to keep her on the inside rather than let her cause damage in the company of Monk, known for his Conservative politics.

Monk still likes Caplin, whom he sees as loyal, often naive and occasionally misused. He does not believe that she will now sell her story. But if she does escape Downing Street's clutches, he may well be available to reschedule those business meetings.

(Evening Standard, September 17 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - A Euro DMCA/airline data/Scientology

By David Rowan

UNTIL NOW Britain has been spared the draconian penalties of America's notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) - used in recent days to identify children swapping music on the Net, and threatening them with £95,000 fines for each song downloaded. Only in America, you might think, could the record labels track down 12-year-old Brianna LaHara, a New York schoolgirl, and make her "apologise" for her crime and hand over $2,000 (£1,300). But if the European Union has its way, the writs could soon be landing on our doormats too.

Prompted by the music and film industries, MEPs are considering a wide-ranging law modelled rather too closely on the DMCA. The draft "Directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights" targets piracy by giving copyright holders tough new powers. But as well as giving record companies access to your personal details if they suspect you of downloading the latest J-Lo single, it also criminalises all sorts of other behaviour.

The directive would make criminals of street musicians; it would also prevent you playing a copy-protected CD anywhere that its manufacturer had not consented.

Every European state, in fact, would have to criminalise all violations of intellectual property that might have some commercial purpose. So if the manufacturer of your computer printer said you must use only proprietary ink cartridges, forget about using a cheap alternative that bypassed the printer's microchip. And so on.

It is not just consumers who stand to lose. Computer programmers and researchers say that they will be prevented from taking apart a company's products to understand how they work - a process known as reverse engineering. Two years ago the Recording Industry Association of America used the DMCA to prevent a Princeton academic from exposing flaws in digital watermarking technologies. The proposed European law would do much the same.

Around 40 European consumer and civil rights groups have written to the EU expressing their concerns. Let's hope that MEPs think carefully before debating the directive next month.

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STILL, Europe does not always see eye to eye with the Americans. A huge row is brewing in Brussels over US demands for European airlines to share passenger data, ostensibly to help Washington's fight against terrorism.

Since last March, airlines such as British Airways and Air France have had to give the US authorities access to 39 separate elements of passenger information - from your choice of in-flight meal (halal? kosher?) to your travel history and any remarks the check-in crew may have made about you.

The trouble is that US standards of data protection are far more lax than our own - and the Americans say that they will share your details with a wide range of agencies, for much more than simply counter-terrorism.

The European Parliament wants to block the automatic transfer of passenger data from next month. The Americans say they'll stop planes from landing. The fight is intensifying: if you're planning a US holiday, you had better be quick.

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BAD NEWS for the Church of Scientology. After an eight-year legal battle to silence its web critics, the group has finally been defeated in the Dutch Court of Appeal. It had pursued Karin Spaink, a writer who had cited damaging internal documents, claiming that she and her website host had breached Scientology copyright. Last week that claim was roundly defeated - so it is now perfectly safe for you to visit www.spaink.net and learn just what the "church" wanted to hide.

(The Times, September 16 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Typosquatting/Drudge profits/TiVo

By David Rowan

IF you want to become a multimillionaire without working really hard, have you considered the vast fortunes to be made out of other people's spelling mistakes? Just ask John Zuccarini, an American entrepreneur who has apparently been pulling in up to $1 million a year by registering internet domain names a letter or two away from those of established websites.

At the last count, Zuccarini, 53, owned 5,359 of these misspelt web addresses, catching anyone who called up Micosoft.net, SonyMuisc.com, or not-quite children's sites such as BobtheBiulder.com. The only problem is that Zuccarini redirects most of these addresses to porn sites, to which his various companies charge referral fees for each click. And that has made him most unpopular. He has already lost 53 state and federal lawsuits and had 200 web addresses confiscated. Last week, the US authorities caught up with him in Florida and he faces four years in jail if convicted under a law designed to protect children on the internet.

But even as he prepares for his trial, Zuccarini's dubious domains are continuing to boost traffic to a Dutch "amateur video" website, earning him up to 18p commission a time. He also makes it difficult for visitors to leave these sites, using a dubious practice known as "mousetrapping" - attempts to click on a browser's "back" button or to close a page merely prompt further windows and pop-up ads to fill the screen.

It will be interesting to see how Zuccarini justifies his targeting of children as potential porn-site visitors - children being more likely than adults to misspell the names of The Teletubbies, the Disney Store and The Simpsons (all part of Zuccarini's portfolio). The case offers yet more evidence of the inadequate way the web is policed by regulatory bodies such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers which failed to disable his websites despite sanctioning him scores of times in the past.

But even if Zuccarini is stopped, the lucrative business of "typo-squatting" (as it is known) will not go away. Indeed, only last week we learnt that one of the biggest legitimate internet companies also sees huge commercial possibilities in redirecting traffic from misspelt domain names. VeriSign, which runs the largest registry of internet addresses, is said to be testing a new service that will let it decide where this traffic should end up - and charging a commission in the process. It is enough to make a surfer take a spelling refresher course.

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WHO says there is no money in non-subscription news websites? The Drudge Report may have lost its sparkle since the Monica Lewinsky days, but the big bucks are now rolling in. With more than six million visitors on a typical day to read a selection of headline links and rumours, the site is charging £2,800 a day for banner ads, even as other sites mourn the banner's demise. Matt Drudge, who still runs the site from home, says he is making almost £800,000 a year from the ads and his radio broadcasts. He has been known to misplace the odd fact, but if Drudge is right, that would buy him a lot of hats.

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IF YOU like TiVo, the hard-disk recorder that learns which television shows you like, then stand by for its free alternative. Freevo is an open-source version of the personal video recorder which means the software can be adapted and improved by anyone who is interested. It already lets you watch and record TV, play music and video, and view photos. But soon it should also let you "pause" live programmes on your PC. The Linux-based system (at freevo.sourceforge.net) is gaining a following among users with technical proficiency. Let us see how long it takes for lawsuits to begin.

(The Times, September 9 2003)

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The Observer: Matthew Taylor profiled

Labour's new head of policy keeps a low profile but you will be familiar with his ideas. As head of the think tank, IPPR, he dreamed up baby bonds and public-private partnerships. A party activist, he's used to being abrasive when necessary, and thinking independently. How will that go down at Number 10? By David Rowan

When Matthew Taylor won his last two big jobs, as the Labour Party's assistant general secretary and then heading its favourite think-tank, he celebrated by opening a bottle of champagne with his long-term partner, Claire. Last week, when Taylor was confirmed as Number 10's new ideas man charged with shaping its policies for a third term, there was no such frivolity. Instead, Taylor - the arch moderniser who invented Labour's 'rapid rebuttal' department and centralised its policy-making machine - was actually rather subdued, even downbeat.

Perhaps, friends suggested, it was not simply that after five years he was leaving behind the Institute of Public Policy Research - which ranks with his family and West Bromwich Albion as one of his great loves - but also because he knew he would now have to think the expedient rather than the provocative, to curb his telegenic charm in favour of back-room power games and fight for influence with rival policy wonks. The question now on Taylor's mind is how far his instinctive belief in party politics as a force for good will be tarnished by the cynical realities of power.

'He's been inside once, and I did warn him not to go back,' says his father, the sociologist and broadcaster Laurie Taylor. 'I told him I was concerned that what I like about his idealism, even if I don't always agree with it, was going to be shattered after he'd seen the workings of power at close quarters. Matthew's response was almost Pauline. "There comes a moment," he said, "when you realise you just have to take a chance."'

Taking that chance, Taylor, 42, will have lead responsibility in planning policy for the next Parliament and in strengthening links between Number 10, the Labour Party and 'the wider policy community'. He bequeaths 'the most influential think-tank in the UK' as the Daily Telegraph has described it, whose proposals - from baby bonds to public-private partnerships - have walked straight into government speeches. To some, Taylor's unquestioned party loyalty made him more government stooge than free-thinker - 'so New Labour,' as Roy Hattersley put it, 'that he is almost pre-natal.'

He joined the Labour Party in 1978, a grassroots activist, and was soon canvassing for Douglas Jay in Battersea North. He stood for Labour himself in 1992, against Sir Dudley Smith at Warwick and Leamington, and although he lost, he managed a swing of 5.4 per cent that helped his party take the seat in 1997. His campaign included a typical piece of Taylor showmanship: he multiplied the number of MPs' outside interests by the sum of Commons votes they missed to create 'the Apathy Greed Index', and put Sir Dudley at the top.

His press release was too controversial for the local paper but Taylor soon learned how to play the media, eventually becoming a regular pundit for Channel 4 News and Newsnight, skilled at making complex issues comprehensible.

Taylor defines himself as a 'social democrat with radical liberal leanings', and favours the New Labour buzzwords of empowerment, social justice, decentralisation and public engagement. Where he may hit a wall in Number 10 is in his stated wish for greater transparency in policy development, urging Ministers to 'engage' with ordinary people in place of focus groups and Cabinet briefings. On the awkward question of tuition fees, for instance, he thinks the gap in university funding should be explained to the public, with the Government acting on the best solution that emerges. Let's see what Tony Blair says about that.

Taylor is no Downing Street poodle, occasionally speaking out too freely for the spindoctors' liking. He has called for higher income tax and demanded a cap on party donations just as Labour was taking a cheque for £1 million. He has condemned the public finance initiative for failing schools and hospitals and even accused David Blunkett of lacking the political confidence to lead a debate on crime.

Yet left-wing critics will always see Taylor as the man who undermined party democracy by designing and pushing through 'Partnership in Power', sold to conference in 1997 as a means of increasing party membership and effectiveness by centralising policy-making in a National Policy Forum. As Tribune's editor Mark Seddon put it, he had conceived 'an effective control system for a party whose members could not be trusted'.

His decision to move to Number 10 will confirm the widespread view that IPPR is merely 'the New Labour civil service'. After the 1997 election, 15 staff defected to government jobs. Taylor, who took the headcount from 20 to 53, remains sensitive about a perceived lack of independence. 'My first contact with him was very hostile,' says David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine. 'We printed a diary story on how absurd it was that the IPPR had charity status given that it's so obviously the Labour think-tank and Matthew had come from a very senior Millbank job. He got very shirty, and there were even legal threats.'

For Taylor was not always a Labour favourite. In 1993, he failed even to get shortlisted for a job as the party's local government officer and prepared for an academic career. But then in early 1994 his name was put forward to set up a rebuttal unit to score propaganda points over the Tories. He was rapidly promoted, to director of policy at the 1997 election and then assistant general secretary. With Labour in power, he received a serious approach to go to Number 10 but said no.

Matthew Taylor's early decision to back Labour was something of a rebellious act, considering his father's past as a revolutionary socialist. Laurie split from his wife, Jennie, now a community activist in Bermondsey, south-east London, when Matthew was five. The boy spent his years shuttling between them in council flats and academic digs in Leeds, London and York. He attended seven primary schools, never settling, and recently explored the importance of giving children a stable family life in What are Children for?, a book written with his father. Laurie Taylor, the raffish don said to have inspired Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, had thought parenting a 'thoroughly reactionary' pastime, and made it clear that he had become a father 'by accident'.

By the time Matthew started secondary school - Emanuel School in Clapham, south London - he was known as something of a rebel. His instinctive Labour views were not entirely appreciated at this traditional, rather authoritarian boys' school, and he let friends know that he would refuse to take part in the school prize-giving the year Margaret Thatcher was guest of honour. In fact, he accepted a book token from her as the English prize. Left-wing critics may see the act as emblematic of New Labour compromise.

Taylor was no academic, taking five O-levels and initially failing his A-levels. He drifted into a job in an Australian bank in London, and then took a sociology degree at Southampton University. Here he gained a first and met Claire, now a lawyer and chair of governors at the local primary school in south London where they live with their two sons, Joseph, 10, and Cornell, seven. Politics extends to their social life: they share holiday villas with friends including Karen Buck MP and Frances O'Grady, TUC deputy general secretary.

After university, Taylor took a series of jobs - with a teaching union, the National Economic Development Council and a health research unit. He also had an unremarkable stint as an academic at Warwick Business School. But it was as a councillor at Warwickshire County Council, from 1985, that he developed a taste for power. Still, he was pragmatic enough to work closely with a Tory councillor, Gordon Jones, to integrate special-needs children into mainstream schools. Jones, he later wrote, was the most important influence in his life.

His work at IPPR, has, in turn, earned Taylor respect on the Right, albeit grudging. 'He's a brilliant media performer, who can be very persuasive and clever, and he's tremendously well-connected,' says Tim Knox, editor at the Centre for Policy Studies. 'He's also one of the first political pundits who ostentatiously wears casual dress. It's very much a part of his relaxed, contemporary style - attempting to speak with a normal voice as opposed to rhetoric.' Martin Jacques, co-founder of Demos, agrees that IPPR is now the premier think-tank. 'He's given it a distinct identity, where it used to be rather stodgy and predictable, and it now makes waves.'

The question is to what extent Taylor will be allowed to make waves in Number 10. 'Instead of being a heckler, he'll now have to kick the ball about,' says a leading political commentator to whom Taylor griped, while at Millbank, that he could not get policy taken seriously. 'Will Blair have an appetite for his radical ideas? And even if he does, will Gordon be out to veto them?'

Martin Jacques, too, finds it difficult to see what Taylor will be allowed to achieve. 'It's really back to the drawing board now for New Labour, but it's hard to know even what that drawing board looks like. What's it going to be remembered for beyond winning two, maybe three elections, and defying public opinion over Iraq?'

As he takes his boys for a run in the park this morning, Matthew Taylor may be wondering that very thing.

MATTHEW TAYLOR


Age: 42

Education: Emanuel School, Clapham; Southampton University (a first in sociology)

Family: Lives with Claire, a lawyer; two children (Joseph and Cornell)

Former job: Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research ('New Labour's civil service')

(The Observer, September 7, 2003)

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The Times: Tech column - Gaming and health/biometrics/flashmobs

By David Rowan

COULD PLAYING computer games be good for you? It has always been a first principle in media reporting of gaming that five minutes with a console will turn you into a short tempered, violent misfit. Yet a growing stack of academic research this year suggests that playing Doom or Half-Life can sharpen your physical reactions and improve your social life.

Last week a team at Oxford University published research suggesting that computer games could enhance children's listening skills and improve their language acquisition. A game called Phonomena, devised by David Moore at the university, has, he claims, proved so effective at teaching children the phonemes that make up words that in a few weeks their educational progress was advanced by up to two years.

In a separate paper a few weeks earlier, Daphne Bavelier and Shawn Green, at Rochester University in New York, suggested that games players of all ages also have better visual skills than the rest of us. Students who had played games such as Grand Theft Auto3 and Spider-Man almost every day for six months (tough assignment, this) could locate a target on a busy screen more quickly than non-gamers, and also scored better when identifying objects that flashed up for an instant. When non- gamers took up playing for an hour a day, their sight quickly improved - which Bavelier attributes to the complex demands placed on players' brains and their heightened sensory awareness. As for the stereotype of the sad solo gamer, other research from Talmadge Wright, at Loyola University, Chicago, suggests that fans of first-person shooter games such as Counter-Strike are better than non players at building the trust and co-operation that gives rise to strong communities and good friendships.

Of course, academics will never entirely agree - a couple of more downbeat studies from Japan reinforce the notion of young gamers as more aggressive and less creative than non-players. But since Britain now spends almost £1.1 billion each year on games, compared with £755 million on cinema and £476 million renting videos, this is now such an established branch of the entertainment industry that the old stereotypes really should be blasted out of the sky. You would not know this from the tabloid headlines, but the average age of video- game players is 29, according to new research for the Entertainment Software Association - and almost a fifth of players are aged over 50. And more than a quarter of gamers are now - gasp! - women over 18. Did someone tell them it was healthy or something?

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MEMO to David Blunkett: maybe your plan to introduce biometric identifiers such as fingerprint readers is not as foolproof as you would have us think. Two German hackers, Starbug and Lisa, have just demonstrated in Berlin how they took a digital photo of someone else's fingerprint which they transferred to a latex patch that they wore over a finger. The trick appears to have fooled a fingerprint scanner.

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THREE WEEKS AGO, when the papers were full of mobs bursting into furniture stores in mobile-phone-co-ordinated stunts, this column dismissed "flash-mobbing" as a "silly-season media fad that will disappear once the novelty wears off". The bubble has already burst: parody flash-bobbing is the latest trend. The Antimob Project, for instance, is a web-based phenomenon that "lets you go about your ordinary business and yet know that you are part of a profound cultural event", largely by avoiding crowds. Then there is Flashmugging.com, devoted to joining groups of young, naive, wealthy, bored fashionistas, then mugging them.

(The Times, September 2 2003)

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