Neuromarketing: The search for the brain's 'buy' button

By David Rowan

It is 7pm in the body-imaging unit at Ulm University Hospital, southern Germany, and with the day's last patients returning to their wards, Dr Henrik Walter finally has the clinic's vast MRI scanner to himself. The angiograms pinned to the observation-room wall, their snaking arteries a humbling portrait of human vulnerability, are an awesome tribute to the life-saving wonders of magnetic resonance imaging - a technology that has revolutionised the way doctors visualise conditions ranging from tumours to ruptured tendons. Tonight, thankfully, Dr Walter's mission has nothing to do with medical diagnosis. He wants simply to peer into your innermost desires.

As neuroscience paints an ever clearer picture of how our minds work, researchers such as Henrik Walter are coming to understand how we process feelings that affect our purchasing decisions. By mapping out which parts of the brain are active when we choose a favourite breakfast cereal, or lust after a sports car, they claim to have discovered "objective" ways to predict which designs or marketing pitches will appeal most to us. It is, they fully admit, a relatively new branch of neuroscience, but that has not stopped some of the world's largest corporations paying close attention. For if brain images can tell them which brands trigger the strongest subconscious responses, and which commercials or logos touch us most deeply, then why would they have any further need for unscientific focus groups?

This quest for marketing's holy grail is already persuading multinationals such as Unilever and Ford to pay scientists to scan volunteers' brains. Hollywood studios are testing brain responses to film trailers, and food manufacturers are using neuro-imaging to fine-tune multi-million-pound product launches. They call the technique "neuromarketing", and hope that it will open up the consumer's inner mind like never before. All that remains is to convince the public that neuromarketing is not simply a powerful new tool designed to manipulate us.

As a paid volunteer removes his shoes to lie down in Ulm's white-and-pink Siemens scanner, Dr Walter - a clinical psychiatrist by day - explains that tonight's research involves studying how the brain responds to expected financial rewards. When the young man, wearing a pair of specially adapted Sony virtual-reality goggles, sees various symbols come into view, he must press one of two buttons on a hand-made keypad to win 20 cents or a euro. At times, the computer program will trick him and pay him nothing at all, but that is all part of the test. For what Dr Walter, his researcher and the technician watching behind the glass want to see on their monitors is which parts of the brain light up when we face sudden disappointment - as well as an extended winning run.

Tonight's work is designed to stretch our understanding of a powerful neurotransmitter called dopamine, and may perhaps eventually benefit the schizophrenia patients Dr Walter treats in his day job. But if you ever plan to buy a Mercedes-Benz, a Jeep, a Chrysler or a Smart car, Dr Walter's brain-scanning studies may also affect you. The Ulm neuroimaging research is partly funded by DaimlerChrysler, which hopes that Dr Walter and his colleagues - by looking deep inside the human brain - will eventually reveal the secrets of designing and selling a more universally appealing car.

"At first they just wanted a better understanding of man-machine interaction," explains Dr Walter, a thoughtful 41-year-old whose short greying hair lends him an air of distinction. "They said, 'Well, we know how to improve cars, but we're limited by the way people interface with the cars'. So we put people into the MRI scanner with a driving simulator, to see what happens in the brain when you're both driver and passenger.

"Then their consumer department approached us and said they were considering various car interiors, and wanted us to test the reactions in people's brains to tell them which would go down best. We explained that we couldn't do that, as the stimuli were too similar, but we said we could test the cars' exterior designs. So we devised a way to measure which cars rated as the most attractive, according to the brain's reactions."

The lab recruited a dozen young men, who were asked to rate photographs of cars on a scale from one to five. "Then we looked into their brains," Dr Walter explains. "We had three types of cars: sports cars, small cars and family cars. When we compared what happened in the brain, we found several areas were more active when looking at sports cars. One of the most interesting was the nucleus accumbens - a very deep and small area linked to reward. Other researchers have found that it is activated if you take cocaine, or look at sexual stimuli, or get food you like such as chocolate. Yet we found the same effect for non-natural objects such as motor-cars. It was fascinating."

You might not think a brain scan would be necessary to determine that men generally rate Ferraris above Ladas. But Dr Walter is more interested in tracking the neurological circuits that underlie such preferences. He found that cars deemed attractive, for instance, trigger activity in a brain area called the fusiform gyrus, thought to specialise in our perception of human faces, and in the lateral occipital complex, normally active when we are analysing shapes. "People often say shape is a very important criterion for them in judging a car's attractiveness," Dr Walter reflects. "And maybe they feel comfortable when the design reminds them of a human face."

Yet what makes the experiment so potentially valuable to firms like DaimlerChrysler was the scanner's ability to confirm which cars the volunteers told him in interviews that they liked or disliked. Because the MRI results tallied with their spoken preferences, Dr Walter knew they were being honest. "Where things get interesting is when there are discrepancies between what people are telling you and what's actually happening in their brains," he explains. "They might say, 'Oh, I don't like that car' -but their brain could be telling you otherwise. The next question," he adds, "is what this means for selling cars."

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Magnetic resonance imaging was first used to scan a full human body in 1977. But it was not until the early 1990s that neuroscientists adapted standard MRI scanners to produce three-dimensional images of brain activity at any particular moment. Mental processes, they understood, trigger an increased flow of blood in the specific part of the brain that is involved. What this new technique, called "functional MRI" (or "fMRI"), let them do was pinpoint these tiny changes in blood flow as brightly coloured areas on computer screens.

As they have learned more about which regions of the brain correspond to specific emotions or instinctive thoughts, neuroscientists have been able to "read" these fMRI images to map out where, and possibly what, somebody might be thinking. If you identify strongly with a magazine, for instance, your brain may buzz with activity in a region known as the medial prefrontal cortex. If a corporate logo inspires anger, an fMRI scan might show activity in your amygdala. And whatever you might be telling market researchers that you think of their products, your brain images could be revealing a deeper "truth" that you yourself may not even have acknowledged. No wonder marketing consultancies are talking up fMRI as the key to unlocking the consumer's mind.

Neuromarketing was first put on the map by the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences, working out of the neuroscience wing of Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Launched in June 2002 to give corporations "unprecedented insight into their consumers' minds", BrightHouse promised nothing less than to "change the marketing world forever".

For the first time, the company claimed, neuromarketing could let companies "understand the drivers of their consumers' behaviour". "What it really does is give unprecedented insight into the consumer mind," Adam Koval, chief operating officer, explained later that year to the Canadian Broadcasting Company. "We will enable our clients and partners to design advertising, marketing campaigns and eventually products that will more effectively engage and drive their target audience's behaviour." Marketers were promised concrete result "in higher product sales or in brand preference or in getting customers to behave the way they want them to behave".

Marketers, by their nature, tend towards hyperbole. Yet BrightHouse's message - promising an end to "advertising clutter", and the secret to "loyal, long-lasting consumer relationships” - has been greeted with the utmost seriousness among civil-liberties activists. Last December, Ralph Nader's campaign group, Commercial Alert, denounced the agency's research as "something that could have happened in the former Soviet Union for the purposes of behaviour control". It demanded that Emory University immediately ban "neuromarketing experiments on human subjects" as unethical - an accusation that the university and the company strongly dispute.

Such denials do not faze Gary Ruskin, Commercial Alert's executive director. "This is about the corruption of medical research to induce disease and human suffering," Ruskin explains, as gifted as his opponents in the art of shaping a persuasive message. When asked how, exactly, this non-invasive scanning technology could cause "disease", he replies quick as a synaptic brain signal. "People are subjected to an epidemic of marketing-related illnesses - obesity, Type II diabetes, alcoholism - and millions of children will eventually die from the marketing of tobacco," he says. "So any small increase in the effectiveness of advertising could be devastating on public health."

Commercial Alert is demanding legal restrictions on this "Orwellian" research. "Because the dangers are huge," Gary Ruskin insists. "What happens if these firms take on political clients? The history of the twentieth century is the history of the catastrophic deployment of political propaganda that swallowed whole countries in a genocidal frenzy."

For all its visionary credentials, BrightHouse has been caught off-guard by Commercial Alert's campaign. So, in response to a blitz of damaging publicity, the agency has been busy tweaking its own marketing message. It has dropped the phrase "Thought Sciences" from its name - it is now "BrightHouse Neurostrategies" - and has toned down its website claims to stress that "our focus is decidedly from the consumer perspective". Still, BrightHouse admits to conducting neuromarketing research for one Fortune 500 company. It will not name the corporation, but the agency has existing "client relationships" with Coca Cola, Hitachi and Delta Air Lines among others.

Dr Justine Meaux, a neuroscientist employed by BrightHouse as "research scientist and marketing strategist", says she receives on average a call a day from pharmaceutical companies, consumer-product giants and other businesses looking to find magic answers from neuromarketing. Yet despite the evident profits to be made - and BrightHouse may charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for a project - Dr Meaux must often turn away potential clients. "Companies looking for the brain’s 'buy button' will likely be disappointed with neuroscience, as there is no magic brain area that can predict whether or not people will buy a product," she explains. "Neither neuroscience nor marketing can read someone’s thoughts or inject messages into a consumer’s mind."

Rather than predict what a consumer is thinking, she says, brain scans can help explain how they are thinking: how they develop relationships with brands; how brand loyalty can be identified through neuroimaging; and what brain patterns define a "positive" brand relationship.

For instance, a recent BrightHouse study - intended for submission to a neuroscience journal - examined how "preference" is encoded in the brain. Dr Meaux and her scientific director, Dr Clint Kilts, asked 13 volunteers to begin by rating how much they liked or disliked various items ranging from commercial brands (Coca Cola bottles) and celebrities (Madonna) to generic vegetables (broccoli). The volunteers were then placed inside Emory's MRI scanner and, as they studied images of each item, their brain activity was recorded.

The results sent a flurry of excitement through the nascent world of neuromarketing. When the subjects were looking at objects that they "really loved", Drs Meaux and Kilts noticed intense activity in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex. This area had been shown in previous experiments to correspond with thoughts about a person's sense of self. In a marketplace obsessed with self-image, could BrightHouse have found a way to identify when a dress or a mobile phone makes a consumer feel: "Now, this really is me"?

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There is nothing new in corporations co-opting scientific research to sell us cigarettes or soap powder. Almost 50 years ago, Vance Packard's best-selling book The Hidden Persuaders exposed a world of "psychology professors turned merchandisers [who] are subtly charting your inner thoughts, fears and dreams so that they can influence your daily living". Packard's concern was the new "motivational research" industry, which used "insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences" to channel our thought processes. "Typically," he warned, "these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a sense, ‘hidden’. The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated."

Since then, corporate marketers have tried everything from focus groups to galvanic skin response meters to try to discover how we really feel about their products. Dewar's Scotch used group hypnosis to explore early memories of the drink; an agency working for the National Lottery operator, Camelot, tested one of its Billy Connolly commercials on a panel wearing headsets that captured their brains' electrical signals. (Camelot says it used the agency "purely to run focus groups".) Now even Hollywood studios are looking inside our heads: a Los Angeles marketing firm is working with Steven Quartz, who runs the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the California Institute of Technology, to scan film-goers' brains as they sample movies. "Participants will watch trailers while in a scanner, and we'll provide a report that covers both global and scene-by-scene reactions to the trailer, as well as casting responses," Dr Quartz explains. His service, launching this spring, will also be available to magazines and television channels.

The unanswered question is how much useful information marketers will actually learn. "Suddenly everyone's very keen to do fMRI studies, because they know they can produce impressive pictures of the brain with yellow and orange blobs in all the right places," Henrik Walter says, not entirely convinced by some of the current hype. Tim Ambler, a senior fellow at London Business School who has studied the brain's responses to brands, worries that bogus claims are being made for neuromarketing before the technology is sufficiently precise. "I'm reminded of the quacks who emerged when x-rays were invented and said they could make you better," he says. "Instead they killed a lot of people. In 30 years we'll definitely be able to pre-test advertising using neuroscience, and it will replace focus groups. But I don't buy today's claims, unless we can independently evaluate them."

Michael Brammer, an fMRI specialist at the Institute of Psychiatry, in London, agrees that the corporate world is becoming "over-enamoured" of the technology's current capabilities. "You're actually only measuring tiny changes in a very noisy [brain] signal," cautions Dr Brammer, one of Britain's most experienced practitioners. Still, that has not stopped him setting up his own commercial neuromarketing agency to capitalise on the growing demand.

His Oxford-based company, Neurosense, offers neuroimaging and psychological tests to help companies plan "product launches, sales promotions, packaging design, point-of-sale displays and advertising strategies". Although Dr Brammer will not disclose too many details, The Times has established that his biggest fMRI client is Unilever, whose brands include Domestos, Sunsilk and Birdseye. As with most companies we contacted, Unilever declined to discuss its brain-imaging studies.

But Dr Brammer, 55, who brims with passion for his research, is happy to explain what commercial clients are looking for. "They are asking questions such as, 'Should we go with this product or this product?'" he says. "Mounting a large advertising campaign or developing a new product is an extremely expensive business. Neuroimaging offers an extra dimension, providing additional, and probably more numerically accurate information about brain responses, than were available before."

Neurosense conducts its research using a clinical MRI scanner at the Institute of Psychiatry, in south London, with the permission of the ethical committee. Michael Brammer has thought a great deal about the ethical implications of neuro-imaging, and he is well aware that the technology could be used for socially questionable purposes. "I suspect that somewhere on this planet, someone's thinking, 'Should we give our senior executives a brain scan to see how suitable they are?' And I'm sure there are people in politics in this country who'd be overjoyed by an objective measure of their popularity."

Dr Brammer would, for his own part, refuse to help corporations "peddling harmful substances". "When people are engaged in research that has the capability of being used for malign ends, they need to take an ethical stance," he reflects. "I would have reservations if I could seriously see that what I was doing was being translated into an attempt to control and manipulate, rather than simply learn more about brain function. It's a fine line."

Concern is growing among academics about the use to which neuro-imaging discoveries may be put. Steven Rose, the Open University neurobiologist whose next book is called The Future of the Brain, has deep reservations about the unregulated use of fMRI. "Much of what these neuromarketing firms are selling is snake oil, but I have real ethical concerns about where brain control and brain manipulation are going," he says. "It's not that these techniques will necessarily work, but if people think they work, we'll become an ever more monitored society."

He cites research by the US military aimed at monitoring fighter pilots' brain patterns to predict when they are likely to lose concentration. "We are also hearing claims that you could use brain imaging in advance of someone committing a crime, because some criminals have shown a particular brain response. Does that mean we'd scan the population to determine who is likely to be a psychopath? I can see potential intrusions on personal freedom, and it's time we had an informed public debate."

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In the meantime, the world's corporations are clamouring to learn how scanning volunteers' brains might boost the bottom line. After running a series of fMRI experiments last summer at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, Texas, Dr Read Montague, a neuroscience professor, received an inquiry from PepsiCo Inc. The company's concern to learn more about his academic research was not, perhaps, surprising: after all, Dr Montague, who runs Baylor's Human Neuroimaging Lab, had reenacted the "Pepsi Challenge" with the help of MRI brain scans.

The original challenge, made famous through 1970s TV commercials, pitted Pepsi against Coke in blind taste tests. Although Coke was ahead in sales, more people seemed to prefer the taste of Pepsi. By feeding his subjects squirts of Coke and Pepsi while they lay inside the scanner, Dr Montague hoped to understand why. Sure enough, when his subjects were told that they were drinking Coke, the fMRI scans showed more activity in the brain's medial prefrontal cortex, a region where we process feelings related to reward. This happened even if they only thought they were drinking Coke, but were actually tasting Pepsi.

"There is something about the way Coke is pitched to us that references something very familiar, warm and fuzzy inside us," Dr Montague concludes. "It may have nothing to do with Coke's rationally thought-out branding strategy, but somehow the memory and brand image of Coke insinuates itself in the nervous system in a way that affects our behaviour. And Pepsi's does not. It could be as simple as the hard consonants in the word 'Coke', or it could be something about always using red. Whatever it is, we could see the effect."

Such findings, Dr Montague believes, will only encourage corporate marketing departments to delve deep within the human subconscious. As a scientist, this causes him some concern. "I'm a true believer that companies can really be evil," he says. "Just look at the tobacco companies. We're not safe just leaving this technology in the corporations' hands - they could put people into the scanners in search of all the signatures that correspond to behavioural biases."

The technology, meanwhile, continues to attract new corporate admirers. As MRI scanners become cheaper, smaller and more portable, Dr Montague can see neuromarketing specialists moving into most large corporate marketing departments. "Because that's neuroscience's goal, right? To decompose us into a set of computations that we can quantify. And if companies can turn feelings into numbers, and understand how the biological parts of our brains give rise to them, then think what they'll do with that knowledge." He pauses. "I can see why some people don't like that idea."

(Written for The Times Magazine, February 5 2004)

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Media: Patricia Hodgson and the BBC chairmanship (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

PATRICIA Hodgson has not bothered applying for the BBC chairmanship. Nor, indeed, will she do so before Friday's deadline, claiming to lack the senior "chair level" experience demanded by the job ad. Still, you can safely assume that the former television regulator has every expectation of being "sounded out" for a job that she has told friends she so keenly wants. For a political operator as astute as Dame Patricia, even silence constitutes a carefully considered strategy.

Such reticence has not stopped her being widely tipped as a frontrunner for the £81,320, four-day a week job. A former BBC policy chief, considered a "soulmate" by John Birt in his divisive battle to reform the Corporation, she has already made her credentials known through a forthright appearance on Newsnight and a Financial Times article critical of the Dyke era's ratings obsession.

In her view, she wrote, BBC confidence would be restored by a chairman "free from any suspicions of cronyism, with the experience to know where changes are needed and the authority to deliver them".

And who, she neglected to add, could offer more experience than this 30-year BBC veteran? "She's always had an eye for the main chance," recalls a former BBC finance director who suspects a Hodgson chairmanship will be defined by Birtist "processes" rather than a flair for creative programmemaking. "She would always be very decent to you, and would keep in with all the right people politically, but you always ended up wondering how much you could trust her." Another former executive - like most, reluctant to be named - fears a return of the "armies of management consultants" she would impose on the Corporation. "She did love spending millions on useless projects that were dismantled once the Birt era ended," the executive recalls. "Maybe she was just trying to please Birt, but she wrote ridiculous memos in his management jargon."

UP against formidable competitors, Hodgson, 57, is the back-to-basics candidate. Although she would not be interviewed, the Evening Standard has established Hodgson's own priorities for the role - and "me too" popular programming for its own sake will have no place. Some of the Corporation's more ratings-driven departments are likely to face her early scrutiny. As she will tell the Westminster Media Forum today, the BBC needs to consider whether entertainment channels such a Radios 1 and 2 are sufficiently distinctive from commercial rivals to merit public funding.

Programmes such as Fame Academy will also need to justify their use of licence money. By returning to "real fundamentals" - forcing it to re-examine its historic mission to "inform, educate and entertain" - she believes Hutton may actually save the BBC.

Even her critics accept that Hodgson is a committed BBC insider. She joined in 1970 to make Open University history programmes, rising to become policy chief. But in this policy role, she was accused of a weakness for extravagant layers of management and expensive McKinsey consultants. She also made enemies for enthusiastically pushing through some unpopular Birt reforms, her jargon-laden memos offending some programme-makers.

Birt's memoirs are full of praise for this "extraordinarily smart operator", although she insists that she gave equal support to Greg Dyke.

"She's clearly ambitious," recalls a friend, who worked closely with her at the BBC and later at the Independent Television Commission. "But fundamentally Patricia is a huge BBC loyalist. It was her whole life, and leaving was extremely hard for her." Besides, having failed to get the job running Ofcom, Hodgson is available.

If interviewed by the selection panel, she will doubtless point to the two licence-fee settlements she secured, and for her role in pushing through what she calls the "digital properties" - meaning new radio and TV channels - in the face of strong internal opposition. She certainly has a reputation for determination. "The word people use mostly about her is formidable," one recalls. "She's tough and gets things done, and she has incredible political skills." But not enough to persuade Greg Dyke: under him, she left to become the ITC's chief executive. Here, she soon attracted criticism for her "News at When" negotiations with ITV executives. In an unworkable compromise, denounced by Jon Snow as "odious", News at Ten was required to go out at 10pm for three nights a week. She was also accused of being commercially naive in some advertising negotiations.

Hodgson, married to a teacher, was born in Ilford, Essex, and went to Brentford High School before reading history at Newnham College, Cambridge. She developed an interest in party politics: she stood as Conservative candidate in Islington South in 1974, and spent four years editing the Bow Group's journal. But she is not, she insists, "a party person", pointing out that her Tory links ended in 1981.

This may work to her advantage.

For despite all the Government's protestations that the appointment of a BBC chairman will be scrupulously non-partisan, there remain strong suspicions within Westminster that No 10 will have its fingermarks on the decision. "Downing Street will make the appointment, whatever 'due process' they put it through," says a former senior BBC executive who was close to a previous appointment. The Conservatives have already withdrawn from the selection process.

Margaret Spurr, an ex-governor, is equally sceptical. "I'm sure there will be interference, and I don't believe a word of what the Government is saying. Why, they've got John Birt advising the PM." And that, as some observers are pointing out, can hardly harm his former soulmate's prospects.

(Evening Standard, February 25 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - Toy trends/Viruses/Belle de Jour

By David Rowan

HERE'S AN EARLY tip for Christmas: start stocking up on batteries. This year children's toys will be more high-tech than ever, with microchips embedded in everything from Barbie dolls to Brio wooden trains. As toy manufacturers struggle to compete with booming sales of DVDs and computer games, their response has been to design toys that respond to specially enhanced TV shows. And not all parents will be pleased.

At last week's American International Toy Fair, the New York trade show that determines next Christmas's bestsellers, the buzz-word was "interactivity": toys that a child can use while simultaneously watching the box. For Mattel, that means a Batman range which responds to signals transmitted by a new Batman TV show, and a cat that sings when prompted by a Barbie DVD.

Hasbro has updated its Wheel of Fortune game to pick up signals broadcast with the TV game show, so that you can play along in real time. Why, there is even a wireless controller from Fisher Price that lets younger children play along with DVDs featuring their favourite cartoon characters.

There's no stopping progress. But I cannot help recalling the quaint notion that children might benefit from playing with their toys rather than watching TV.

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THERE IS NOW another reason never to click on unsolicited e-mail attachments: if a virus infects your PC, you could become an unwitting participant in a nefarious black economy. We have known for a while that viruses called trojans are designed to hijack PCs and use them to distribute spam. Now, it seems, the virus writers are actively selling the internet addresses of infected machines -so that anyone could buy access to your desktop without you knowing a thing.

The German computing magazine c't claims to have bought the internet addresses of infected computers from the authors of one such trojan. Anyone with the internet protocol (IP) addresses of compromised terminals could use this information to send out illegal junk mail, or launch denial-of-service attacks, while protecting the perpetrators' identities. One distributor of these viruses who offered to sell the magazine a bunch of IP addresses lives in Britain. Virus writers are usually assumed to be motivated largely by ego. If they are working for profit, we should worry.

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FOR MONTHS I've wrestled with the ethics of sending readers of The Times to visit a London call girl. But what the heck. If you have a spare moment (and a robust tolerance of the salacious), you might like to visit an extraordinary online diary at belledejour-uk.blogspot.com. Purportedly the personal journal of an unnamed prostitute in her twenties, this stylishly written confessional has become one of the year's most talked-about weblogs -and not simply for its prurient content.

Much of the buzz concerns its alleged veracity: could its author be an established literary figure capitalising on the weblog format to generate word-of-mouse attention?

Inevitably the publishing world is scrambling for the rights, and we can expect the usual tabloid chase to identify Belle de Jour's true identity. But if Belle proves to be fictional, she will at least have confirmed the weblog's arrival as a cultural force. After all, when Sex and the City began life in the mid Nineties, its author had to rely on that stuffy old medium, a newspaper column ...

(The Times, February 24 2004)

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The Times: Inside the kidney trade

A pound of flesh for sale: As MPs debate the shortage of organs, David Rowan talks to a practitioner in the booming trade of 'transplant tourism'

If you happen to need a new kidney in a hurry, Jim Cohan has a business proposition for you. From his office in Los Angeles, he can offer you a fresh replacement, fitted in any of the ten countries he regularly deals with. He describes his kidneys as "the healthiest young organs, from hard-working people, many of them vegetarians, and generally in the best of health".

Not only will Cohan source your new kidney but he will arrange the transplant in the foreign hospital, all the tests and medication, your food, accommodation and follow-up care, and even the flights for you and your partner. There is the small matter of his $125,000 (£66,000) fee, but he sees that as a small price for a second chance at life. Besides, as his website boasts, he will "manage every step, from the time the recipient leaves home to the time of their return".

His customers - four or five hundred over the past dozen years, he claims - do not seem to mind that Cohan, 63, is by trade a nutritionist, with no medical qualification. After all, they hope to return with a new organ, he takes his commission and not too many questions are asked about what happens at the other end. As Cohan tells it, his partner hospitals use kidneys taken only from cadavers, obtained "through government-regulated programmes" in accordance with local laws. But his management role doesn't extend to vetting the individual hospitals, which may be in the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China, South Africa or South America. "I deal with reputable hospitals and have never had to send someone back for a replacement or another operation." He could not, however, produce one of his successful transplant patients by the time we went to press, saying there might be a problem getting them to co-operate with the media.

Depending on your viewpoint, he is either a benevolent entrepreneur who saves lives, or a cynical middleman out to profit from sick people's desperation. By matching patients from countries where organs are scarce with foreign transplant teams better stocked with supplies, he is, in effect, an organ broker. Cohan dislikes the term, preferring to see himself as an "international organ transplant co-ordinator". "I'm not involved in buying, selling or trafficking organs," he stresses. "I just co-ordinate things - if you need a kidney, I'll send you to a country where presumed consent applies."

"Presumed consent" is the legal assumption that organs and tissue may be taken from a brain-dead patient unless he or she has previously registered a refusal. In countries that hold to presumed consent, such as Spain or Singapore, transplant waiting lists tend to be far shorter than those in Britain or the US, where donors must actively agree to have their organs reused. But, as lurid media exposes regularly reveal, the trade does not rely solely on donors who are dead. With kidneys fetching between a few hundred and a few thousand $on the international black market, there are strong incentives - from Moldova to the Maldives - for the healthy poor to sell their body organs.

"That goes on," Cohan admits, stressing that he never solicits from live donors.

He claims that what he does is ethical. "As long as a few thousand people die every year who are on the (transplant) waiting lists, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. Everyone wins."

Although he insists that the operations he arranges are legal in the host country, he has at times had to convince law-enforcement agencies. In 1998 he spent five months in an Italian jail on charges of organ-trafficking and criminal association but he was released after no evidence was brought that he had broken any laws. He has faced separate investigations by Interpol, the FBI and the California attorney-general's office, but each time no offence has been proved.

So J Cohan & Associates continues its high-turnover trade, with customers invited by his website and through e-mail solicitations to send an initial $500 "good faith" deposit and a photograph, followed by a further $10,000 with their completed application form. Once that has been banked, and provided that funds are available for the full $125,000, "within a couple of days you can be on the plane". Nor is the menu limited to kidneys: for $240,000 Cohan can also find you a heart, liver or lung.

His numerous critics sneer at his claim to take just 2 or 3 per cent of his fee as commission, with the majority going to the hospital. If his claimed transplant rate is to be believed, his business will already have generated tens of millions of pounds. He protests that his motivation is altruistic rather than financial.

Protected by a loophole in US law, Cohan is just one of the more visible practitioners of today's booming trade in "transplant tourism". More typically, these deals are brokered by less media-friendly middlemen who pay cash to live donors. In India you can pay as little as $300 for a kidney, in Indonesia the rate is $2,000, in Turkey $5,000 and in Israel $20,000. And, although the sale of organs is illegal in Britain, there is growing evidence that the mismatch between supply and demand - with 19,500 people on dialysis but just 1,775 kidney transplants last year - is prompting NHS patients to look to the global market.

The National Kidney Federation, which represents renal patients, has serious concerns about the lack of quality control in this unregulated transplant trade.

"We started to notice that people in our local groups were disappearing, going abroad for 'holidays' and not coming back," Timothy Statham, the chief executive, says. "Presumably they died." Statham, who has had arguments with Cohan over the latter's attempts to contact his members, worries that dire kidney shortages are being exploited.

Two years ago, the documentary-makers Brian Woods and Kate Blewett set out to follow the trade from Brazil and Birmingham to Israel and India. They came away convinced that partial legalisation was the only way forward. "We started out thinking there'd be this murky world of deception. But, in fact, you find lots of people who think it should be legalised," Woods says. In the meantime, the unregulated broker holds all the cards. One broker introduced Woods to Srinivasan, a 38-year-old Indian man from Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, who sold his kidney and cornea after running up business debts of £5,000. He was paid £1,000 for his cornea, not realising that the market rate was £2,400. Now he is looking to sell half of his liver.

Shimrit Orr, an Israeli woman who obtained a kidney last year from a live donor, has nothing but contempt for the Israeli broker who arranged the operation at St Augustine's hospital in Durban. "I paid $125,000. The donor got $20,000, the hospital got $40,000, the hotel and flights might have been $10,000. So that's something like $55,000 for the broker."

Some kidney specialists believe that only legalisation of the trade will stop the profiteering and minimise the risks. Last May, Nadey Hakim, a transplant surgeon at St Mary's Hospital, London, and president of the Royal Society of Medicine's transplant committee, urged the Government to license the sale of human organs in the UK as a way of eroding transplant tourism. Such a Bill is going through the Israeli parliament. If passed, it will make Israel the first country to legalise the live organ trade by paying compensation to those who "donate" a kidney to the state.

Not everyone is convinced. Robert Evans, a British MEP, has been building support in the European Parliament to make it illegal for any European to go elsewhere in the world to buy an organ from a healthy live donor. Evans, who estimates that 1,000 Europeans travel abroad each year to buy a kidney, believes the trade is unethical. A better solution to the organ shortage, he believes, is for presumed consent to become the norm.

The National Kidney Federation also favours a change in the law to presumed consent, together with more transplant surgeons and a "change in culture" in A&E units so that organ donation is considered a priority when a patient dies. Even today, the wishes of donor card- holders may be overruled by their families: 49 per cent of relatives say no when asked by surgeons for organs at the point of death. The issue has been prompting impassioned arguments in recent weeks at Westminster, where two conflicting Bills have been examining the issues surrounding presumed consent. Earlier this month, the Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh introduced a Bill supporting presumed consent. But although she has the backing of bodies such as the British Medical Association, the Government has made clear its firm opposition. Instead, the Human Tissue Bill, currently passing, will specifically require active consent for organ donation.

In the meantime, the unregulated trade will continue and yet more British kidney patients will spend their savings travelling to foreign lands in search of a new future. For Jim Cohan, who hopes that they discover his website first, this means that business prospects continue to look healthy.

(The Times, February 21, 2004)

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The Times: Op-ed - Whacked by Google

Why the search engine war matters. Op-ed by David Rowan

Geeks love an underdog. So when Bill Gates told the World Economic Forum last month that Google had "kicked our butts", you could almost hear the cheers over on the Slashdot message boards. The world's most useful search engine, whose founders' first principle was "Don't be evil", had finally humbled the Goliath which once neutered Netscape and pulped Apple.

It was a well-intentioned and fashionably anti-corporate response, marred only by one flaw. Google, the online world's dominant information provider, is now so powerful as to constitute a potential monopoly. If Yahoo! and Microsoft fail to squeeze Google's market share in the search engine wars now being fought, every internet user will be the poorer.

This is not to diminish Google's remarkable achievements. In little more than five years, it has proved the easiest way to search 4,285,199,774 web pages, 880 million images and more than 845 million news-group messages. You can use it as a translation service, a calculator, a dictionary or a product catalogue. From automated telephone voice searches to an electronic news-stand, Google has come close to being the only digital research tool that many of us use.

Therein lies the problem. Any company that controls around 80 per cent of web search requests is starting to wield an unhealthy influence on our access to information. If your opinions fall foul of Google, who can stop it from dropping links to your web page? Already the Church of Scientology has used legal threats to have anti-Scientology pages removed from the search index, albeit temporarily. And when Google was negotiating with China to have access restored to the country's web-surfers, there were rumours of compromises, never confirmed, that had blocked sites that might embarrass Beijing.

There are growing rumblings of discontent about Google's use of its unspecified "editorial guidelines". It recently banned the text advertisements bought by an environmental group on the ground that its pages criticised the sewage treatment policies of a major cruise line. Dame Anita Roddick has found her outspokenness a problem for Google, which removed one of her advertisements. The site, apparently, was unhappy that her personal weblog had called John Malkovich a "vomitous worm". Should a supposedly neutral information source be making such editorial judgments?

Its dominance in selling text advertisements, the paid-for listings that accompany search results also raises concerns. Although the company does not disclose how much it earns from the listings, the market is estimated to be worth a couple of billion dollars, and growing at a vast rate. If you want your message to be seen widely, you have little alternative but to buy up Google "keywords". Even the BBC bought up search terms relating to the Hutton report last month to ensure that surfers could find its side of the story.

Companies such as DaimlerChrysler boosted their online ad spend by around a third last year because so many of us now use the web when deciding to buy cars. As we spend more on online purchases, Google's influence is set to grow. Even today the company can make or break a business according to the way it lists the company's website. When it altered the way its algorithms prioritised websites last autumn, there were howls of protest from companies, formerly rated within the top search results, that suddenly found their revenue collapsing. Let's hope for their sakes that Yahoo!, MSN and others grow to offer these companies a second chance.

All this should not, of course, prevent the ordinary web surfer from using Google in preference to some of its increasingly effective rivals, such as Teoma.com and Vivisimo.com. But if you do, you might like to know that Google stores for years a detailed note of everything you search for, and at what time of day, which it logs according to your computer's address. It may, it says, "release specific personal information about you" to the powers that be. You're not feeling quite so lucky now, are you?

(The Times, Comment page, February 20, 2004)

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Evening Standard: Conrad Black in trouble

Text to follow

(Evening Standard, February 18 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - Hacker risks/Women virus writers

By David Rowan

A FEW WEEKS ago, Scott Granneman, a technology lecturer at a Missouri university, invited an FBI computer-security expert to brief his class on hackers. What the agent, Dave Thomas, said shocked Granneman, a columnist for an IT security website. It is, he was told, easier than ever for hackers to take control of people's computers. Without your knowledge, the PC in your study might even now be trying to blackmail banks, distributing spam or setting up fake websites to "phish" for credit-card numbers.

Most instructive was Agent Thomas's claim that the Feds avoid running Microsoft Windows wherever possible. "He told us that many of the computer security folks back at FBI HQ use Macs running OS X, because those machines can do just about anything," Granneman reports.

Another week of painful headlines for Microsoft's security team has left owners of Macs and Linux-based PCs again looking smug. It is not simply that Microsoft, with more than 90 per cent of the market, is the more obvious target for hackers. MS's entire culture, for all its commitment to "trustworthy computing", still puts commercial considerations before customers' expectations of secure software. We would not tolerate pharmaceutical companies releasing new products without complete or at the least rigorous testing. Yet it seems acceptable for IT companies - not just Microsoft - to throw products on to the market, then wait to correct remaining or hidden flaws. In such a competitive business, no one wants to wait longer than necessary to release a new program. That barely matters with open-source software, because users will gladly test and improve it for the greater good. But why should Microsoft treat its customers as an unpaid testing lab, correcting flaws albeit only in response to their experiences?

Of last week's headlines, the more worrying concerned the "critical", flaws affecting Windows 2000, NT and XP, about which the company was warned six months ago. It is beyond belief that a company proclaiming its security awareness should have taken so long to release a software patch (which you really ought to download from the Microsoft website). The news that Windows 2000 and NT code has leaked on to the internet is more damaging to the company's image than are its operating systems.

We are promised that Microsoft's next operating system, known as Longhorn, will solve many of these problems. But Longhorn is not expected before 2006. Meanwhile, see the warnings posted at www.microsoft.com/security.

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Forget Lara Croft, Hollywood producers in search of a new cyber-heroine should head for Belgium. "Gigabyte", a legendary female virus-writer, was arrested last week outside Brussels and charged with "computer data sabotage". It should make a fascinating court case: the 19-year-old computing student is a potential feminist icon in a macho underworld. Her targets have ranged from "the Great Satan" (Bill Gates, naturally) to an anti-virus firm's spokesman whose "sexist" comments annoyed her. So she designed a computer worm that, in a fairground-style game, let its victims knock off the man's head. Gigabyte's story encompasses a romance with "Nostalg1c", whose hacking group once defaced the White House website.

(The Times, February 17 2004)

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Interview: Ash Atalla, producer, The Office (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

AS you might expect from the producer of The Office, Ash Atalla is not taking his new found celebrity entirely seriously. At the Hollywood party to celebrate winning two Golden Globes last month, he decided to have an argument with Jude Law over which of them was the biggest "ponce" for using lip balm.

Later, when trapped in a painfully bland interview for the E! channel, he had some fun making his host admit on live TV to not having seen the show. The Office may have made Atalla the hottest comedy producer in town - and today's hangover comes from partying with BBC1 boss Lorraine Heggessey and Kim Medcalf from EastEnders - but all he really wants is to have a laugh.

He never expected to win, for a start. At the awards rehearsal, Atalla, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis were too busy " mucking about" on the red carpet to take in the run-through. By the time The Office beat Sex and the City to win best comedy series, and Gervais trumped Matt LeBlanc as best comedy actor, Atalla's heart was pounding so loudly that he could barely hear the audience's bemused mutterings.

"The Americans must have been absolutely furious," he says grinning, back home now and sitting in a Fitzrovia café. "I heard that when our names were read out, Clint Eastwood was seen mouthing, 'Who the f*** are they?'" Still, he achieved his ambition of visiting the set of 24, whose cast, like The Simpsons' Matt Groening, are huge fans.

Other than that, he did not share Gervais's appetite for schmoozing with the Hollywood honchos.

"You can get a meeting with anyone in LA when you've won," he says. "Your first reaction is to be massively flattered, but I was just thinking, this isn't my town. I'm not going to get seduced, having meetings that will probably go nowhere. I just love London too much." Besides, Atalla, 31, has a new challenge. Next Monday, he leaves the BBC to join Talkback, the company behind such comedy hits as I'm Alan Partridge, Smack the Pony and Da Ali G Show. His brief is to develop new talent.

WHAT, then, will be the next Office? "It's actually been a fairly quiet year for comedy, " he reflects. "I'm hearing lots of people quoting Little Britain - it's being treated a bit like The Fast Show was. After shows like The Office, which are quite downbeat and slow, and Phoenix Nights, people are ready to laugh again at men in wigs and silly catchphrases." He rates Channel 4's Peep Show as "brilliant", and is a fan of the US series Curb Your Enthusiasm. "I'm more attracted to the dark side, but I also laugh at stupid news stories - like that girl who had too much Sunny Delight and turned orange.

That was great!" He does not rule out working again with Gervais and Merchant, now writing "another observational comedy about a man who says exactly what he's thinking".

"But I've left the BBC, and they haven't, so there are no firm plans at the moment." He is relieved not to be working on NBC's own version of The Office, although Gervais and Merchant are consultants.

"It might work with American characters," he says delicately, "but what's amazing is the amount of people saying it's going to be a f***ing disaster.

The track record with US remakes of British shows is not great." He thinks the British version was such a hit because the characters were so recognisable. "They're a bit like The Spice Girls - you might identify with Baby or Sporty," he says.

"People say to me, 'I know a Brent or a Gareth', or 'I'm Dawn'. There was something for everyone. It also took head-on the reality of people's lives, never quite earning enough but still managing to have fun on the weekend." The show was not, he insists, cynical about the working lives portrayed. "While we all have our dreams, the reality is there isn't room for 100,000 illustrators or painters in Britain. But actually, a massive call centre has just opened up the road that needs 3,000 staff.

That's life. It doesn't mean everyone has failed." How much of The Office was his input? He pays full credit to "the boys" for the most accomplished script he has ever seen, but his budgeting role seems to have helped shaped Wernham Hogg's wider family. "The plan was to hire extras, but I worked out that it wouldn't cost much more to use actors. Out of that process grew characters who weren't in the original script. At some point in the first series, Ewan Macintosh started doing that very slow, eyesclosed delivery that was brilliant - and so grew the character of Big Keith." Atalla is often asked if he was the inspiration for Brenda, played in a wheelchair by Julie Fernandez.

After all, he uses one, having developed polio as a baby living in Egypt.

He came to London as a boy when his father's job moved. "I'm sure Ricky and Steve would have seen someone in a wheelchair before me," he says. "It was never intended to be anything more than a comic device." He, for instance, had never been abandoned at the top of a flight of stairs.

Although he once co-presented a Channel 4 series on disability, Freak Out, Atalla is no campaigner. "I don't know if that's a letdown to the disability-rights groups, but I don't think I've ever experienced prejudice because of it," he says. "Yes, I get patronised all the time - I've certainly been pulled away from tables in the pub - but it just washes off me. And while I've failed plenty of times, I can't say I failed because of my wheelchair." Today he lives - as he has for years - with his younger brother in King's Cross. He has done well financially out of the show, particularly DVD sales, but will say nothing more specific than "I can now afford curry sauce on my chips".

He did a degree in business and finance at Bath University. He then took some "wrong turns", including brief careers as a stockbroker and a currency trader. Then, at all of 22, he faced a "midlife crisis", decided to try television and found unpaid work on BBC Watchdog.

"You start off being a runner - but as I can't walk, let alone run, they never sent me out to get coffee," he recalls.

Instead, he worked as a researcher to Anne Robinson, and then Carol Vorderman, until he transferred temporarily to the comedy unit. He wrote scripts and sketches for radio.

"That was the first time in my life I thought I might actually be good at something," he says. He met Merchant, championed his training film about Gervais's "Seedy Boss" character ... and the rest is history.

It was Atalla who persuaded the BBC's head of comedy, John Plowman, to adopt and push The Office, but did he ever fear that the series might bomb? "I was terrified that the first episode began so slowly and drably that it would put people off," he admits. "But Ricky and Stephen held their nerve." Still, the initial audiences were worryingly low. "The BBC did some research, and the only thing that week that was less popular was women's bowls. Which I'm surprised about, because I love women's bowls."

But now it has proved such a success, was it right to end it for good? "Absolutely - the last episode tied things up so well. But maybe," he grins, "we should start a channel where Big Keith just eats Scotch eggs ..."

(Evening Standard, February 11 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - IM wars/Un-free email/Virus hype

By David Rowan

COULD the days of e-mail be numbered? As spam, which already accounts for 60 per cent of e-mail traffic, heads for 80 per cent by Christmas, more and more companies are turning to instant messaging. You can chat with colleagues in real time, look at files held on their computers, and even talk to each other without a phone. No wonder number-crunchers such as Ferris Research are predicting the number of business users to rise from 23 million last year to 182 million by 2007.

Home users are also becoming hooked on "IM" (get used to the abbreviations the genre has inspired a shorthand that makes text-messaging look verbose). AOL, for years the dominant player, says that 93 per cent of its teenage customers regularly use its proprietary instant-messaging software -and 75 per cent of them spend more time doing so than e-mailing. Of course, AOL has an interest in talking up its products, but ask younger internet users and they will probably be swapping notes about NM (nothing much) before they have GG (got to go) to finish their HW (homework). Where teenagers go today, the rest of us follow tomorrow.

The biggest obstacle has been the incompatibility of the rival IM systems: if you use AOL's system, good luck communicating with friends using Microsoft's MSN Messenger. The fragmentation of the competing systems has, until now, had one major advantage over e-mail: users have not tended to receive much "spim", the unsolicited sales pitches that are the IM equivalent of spam, but that is starting to change. Last week Apple released a new version of its iChat software that lets Mac users video and audio-chat with AOL subscribers. Enjoy chatting freely while you can - but expect to be joined some time soon by an avalanche of junk.

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Free e-mail may be a thing of the past if some powerful IT companies have their way. Two weeks ago Bill Gates told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the best way to kill spam may be to make all of us pay to send e-mails. One plan being considered by Microsoft is a "Penny Black" system that would charge a fraction of a penny per message to root out bulk e-mailers. Yahoo is considering a separate e-mail postage plan being developed by a company called Goodmail. These desperate measures would work only if every internet service provider imposed similar charges. Nor is there any guarantee that the spammers would not find ways around the system. Wouldn't a more workable solution be for lawmakers to impose brutal penalties on the spammers? The weak anti-spam laws passed recently here and in the US almost make Viagra- peddling seem a worthwhile career option.

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Wasn't the world meant to have ended by now? As MyDoom panic hit last week, security firms such as mi2g were desperate to warn us of its $38.5 billion (£21 billion) cost. So how did mi2g, a British "security intelligence provider" that originally specialised in car data, come up with this figure? It claims to have calculated everything from "productivity erosion" to "management time reallocation". Rob Rosenberger, whose Vmyths website has tracked mi2g's previous claims, calls the figure "completely absurd". Yet the media quoted it without question.

Here is another number, from the research company IDC. Spending on IT security will rise from $16.9 billion in 2001 to $44.5 billion by 2006. Alas, I cannot say how much is due to media fear-mongering.

(The Times, February 10 2004)

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Interview: Mark Byford, acting BBC director-general (Evening Standard)

By David Rowan

GREG Dyke's replacement made an early morning dash to the Today studio yesterday. Not, you understand, that Mark Byford wanted personally to sign off an innocuous 6.07am report on the US primaries, as fond as he is of robust editorial interventions. "I just wanted to be there," explained the acting director-general afterwards. "I recognise that this organisation is in pain, and I just told them to be confident in who they are and in the programme."

The father-of-five has been dispensing a great deal of pain relief in recent days. Barely a week after the Hutton report threw the corporation into crisis, Dyke's former deputy has decided that a little touchy-feely magic is the way to heal its wounds.

When the Evening Standard joined him yesterday, Byford, 45, repeatedly stressed his "passion" for his "brilliant, talented, professional" colleagues - and, more tellingly, for his popular ousted predecessor. "I love Greg," he said more than once. "I think that's what people feel when they work closely with him."

Such unalloyed displays of emotion may appear uncharacteristic in a man sometimes described as a "John Birt clone" or a "Birtist Dalek". But his early caution - notably a noncommittal Radio 4 interview last Friday, whose circumlocutions left the presenter, Eddie Mair, audibly impatient - have provoked murmurings within the BBC that this corporation lifer lacks the charisma required to lead its 27,000 staff. Hence his frantic visibility among staff this week to earn the support he will need if formally appointed as DG.

Besides, he refuses to accept the "Birtist" tag - a matter, he suggests, of sloppy journalistic reliance on newspaper cuttings (ouch). "You haven't talked to enough people. People who know me well, right, they'll say that I'm a bit of Greg and a bit of John." He recalls Birt, who plotted to make Byford rather than Dyke his successor, as a "fantastic" director general who took the BBC into the digital age. But Dyke, too, was "an outstanding, accessible, dynamic leader" who helped define the values "that are the flywheel of this organisation". "Greg and I respect each other in our different positions, and there's not an ounce of animosity between us," Byford said.

What, even though Dyke was reported yesterday to have pitched Peter Salmon, BBC head of sport, for the job? "No he hasn't," Byford insisted - until the BBC press officer informed him of the news. After a brief silence, he lowered his voice but refused to betray any disappointment. "Listen," he said. "I've got a lot more important things to achieve this week than worry about that kind of stuff."

The priorities of his unspoken leadership campaign - apart from showing sympathy to a staff he recognises as "angry, bewildered, stunned" - are to "re-emphasise the BBC's values and trust" and rebuild confidence among its journalists "while learning lessons". So does he accept Lord Hutton's conclusions about the extent of the BBC's mistakes? This is what he told Eddie Mair when pressed last Friday: "It's clear from my perspective that the BBC is unequivocally saying that it apologises for the errors that it made, so it is actually saying that it made errors and for those errors it is apologising and it is saying it's going to learn." Not entirely convinced, the Standard tried again. Byford, a large man whose boyish jokiness can suddenly give way to stern-faced impatience, suddenly grew colder.

What did he really think? "Lord Hutton has published his findings, and we must recognise that," he replied, displaying a politician's ability to state the obvious, slowly.

"We also recognise that we made some errors - we admitted mistakes in the inquiry and since - and we're going to learn from them. It has been a bumpy week, but out of it can come a stronger BBC - one that says sorry when we get things wrong. What's wrong with that?"

Such maddening evasiveness has proved invaluable in a career that began in 1979, when Byford's persistence gained him a "holiday relief assistant" job at BBC Look North. Born into an establishment Yorkshire family - his father was a Chief Inspector of Constabulary - he had planned to become a barrister until an episode of Panorama helped convince him that the BBC held his future. His rise has been swift, moving from running UK newsgathering and regional broadcasting to replacing Sam Younger (in another coup backed by Birt) in charge of the World Service.

He proved a popular and innovative boss, who boosted coverage in areas such as Afghanistan and brought all 43 language-services together for an Aids special. But his reforms were not all trouble-free: there was fierce opposition to his modernisation programme, which included the closure of some regional services and cutbacks in North America. At the time, some critics condemned him as a "bean-counter" interested only in the bottom line. Could he understand the charge? This proved the wrong thing to mention. "That's a misguided, misinformed piece of journalism reenacted [from newspaper cuttings] because you're lazy," Byford shot back. Ouch again.

"The World Service under my tenure has actually received more money from the UK government in settlements in 2000 and 2002. Bean-counter? That's offensive. Do something for me as a favour." His stern expression appeared to be reddening. "Just go to Bush House, wander round the corridors, go in the newsroom, and say, 'What do you think of your bean counter?' You'll last 10 seconds."

The Standard, merely citing other people's accusations, you understand, paused before asking Byford about his alleged editorial caution, evident this week in nervous BBC reediting of a radio comedy which joked about the Prime Minister's honesty. Nonetheless … was he likely to pull the corporation back from hard-hitting investigative journalism? The fear was raised after Byford, standing in for Dyke in October, pulled Michael Crick's five-month Newsnight investigation into Iain Duncan Smith's private office.

"I say, talk to the people who have worked around me," he replied. "I was brought up around BBC journalism and its values. They'll say I'm a courageous editor, a tough editor, a supportive editor who's rigorous in his editorial discussions, but very supportive of strong journalism. If sometimes you say we're not ready to run with something, that's not a weakness - it's a confidence." He is, he said, "passionate" (that word again) about investigate journalism - indeed, as director of regional broadcasting, it was his call to name the IRA's army council.

DID he believe the BBC had become too big, threatening commercial competitors? His answer avoided any substantial comment, beyond his "passionate view" that the BBC's commercial services serve to benefit the licence-payer. Similarly, on whether BBC1 has become too ratings-focused, he would say only that ratings were "important but not everything".

For a man who claims to be "passionate about programmes, and passionate about the creative side of the BBC", Mark Byford betrays a remarkable reluctance to give specific opinions about his passions. He will not even comment on his favourite programmes, beyond saying that The Office says "everything about the BBC - brilliant writing, perceptive and original".

Such political astuteness may well impress the BBC governors - but Byford's staff seem to be looking for something more.

(Evening Standard, February 4 2004)

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The Times: Tech column - Spammers' literary tricks/Virus hype/Urban myths

By David Rowan

Purveyors of spam are getting more sophisticated. To beat the junk e-mail filters that block their pitches for Viagra or printer ink, they are turning to children's literature. By including paragraphs from such authors as Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum, spammers are managing to over-ride filters that block e-mails according to linguistic analysis. One recent solicitation for penis-enlargement products, received here, ends with the surreal line: "Dorothy and the Wizard exchanged startled glances, for they remembered how often Eureka had longed to eat a piglet." Having traced the line to Baum's 1908 work, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, we can confirm that penile extension plays no part in the plot.

Because the spam got through, the literary flourish clearly convinced our filter's Bayesian language-analysis software that this was personal correspondence. The practice -known as "hash busting" -also involves generating random word sequences that bear comparison with James Joyce. A typical example -in an e-mail selling search-engine listings -contains such a madly surreal string of text that it is almost beautiful: "Highland alberich rampart discovery barnet clothesman walpole boot brainwash ..." It may not make the resulting junk any more pleasant to receive, but it does suggest a whole new branch of poetry.

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If you wanted to know your chances of developing avian flu, you wouldn't take advice from a salesman peddling a miracle cure. Yet when it comes to computer viruses, we are happy for private vested interests to decide for us how bad things are. Predictably, this week anti-virus firms have been scrambling for media attention by denouncing MyDoom as "the worst e-mail worm incident in virus history".

If it can bring down the website of a software giant such as SCO, the coverage implies, shouldn't the rest of us be updating our security products? Well, probably, in the case of MyDoom; but it's about time we gave a disinterested government department, or an independent global body, the resources to determine such threats objectively and work to counter them. Viruses are causing serious damage - crashing hospital IT systems and disrupting air schedules. But while the Department of Homeland Security has started to educate Americans about specific computer-security threats, in Britain we rely on press releases from anti-virus companies. Doesn't domestic security deserve more than sales pitches?

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The urgent e-mail from the British Transport Police has been spreading fast, thanks to PC Denise Harris's determination to warn women of a new night-time crime at petrol stations. The warning concerns a woman who has just paid for fuel. As she returns to the car, the kiosk assistant calls her back and explains that he has seen a man slip inside the vehicle. She looks round to see a man running off.

As PC Harris's e-mail says: "The new gang initiation is to bring back a woman and/or her car. One way they are doing this is crawling under women's cars while they're filling with petrol or at stores." The e-mail fits the pattern of urban myths perfectly - no names, a terrifying warning, a plea for it to be widely forwarded (when we reached her this week, PC Harris said: "The fact that these stories are not true does not negate the basic message.") But what makes this particularly tasteless is that along the line someone has added an advert for their business. Urban myths, it seems, are just another e-mail marketing tool.


(The Times, February 3 2004)

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