Daily Archives: March 15, 2012

Virgin Media wins tube Wi-Fi contract

March 15, 2012
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London Underground Wi-Fi service, to be free for the Olympics, will be rolled out to 80 stations

Virgin Media has been awarded the contract to provide Wi-Fi access on London Underground platforms, with mobile internet services set to be available in time for the London Olympics.

The service will initially be rolled out to 80 stations by July, and 120 by the end of the year, following a competitive tender run by Transport for London.

The Wi-Fi connections will only work at station platforms, though – not while trains are travelling through the tunnels.

“Millions of passengers will now be able to connect to their work, friends or access the latest news and travel information whilst on the move,” said London mayor Boris Johnson.

“This is a fabulous new and free resource which will be in place from this summer when London is being showcased on a global stage and playing host to millions.”

The service, which will give access to mobile internet via a TfL portal offering travel, news and entertainment bulletins, will remain free for Virgin Media customers after the Olympic Games.

Other users will only be able to access a limited amount of free content on the TfL portal, with full mobile internet services offered on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Virgin Media is building the Wi-Fi network from a total capital expenditure budget of about £640m for 2012, set at between 15% and 17% of the cable company’s £4bn in revenues.

“With the eyes of the world on London this summer, we’ll be showing off our capital as a leading connected city on the global stage,” said Neil Berkett, chief executive of Virgin Media.

 

 

© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Apple subpoenaed over Google search deal

March 15, 2012
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Antitrust investigation expands to include mobile search, where Apple and Google split $1.3bn of revenues in 2011

A US antitrust investigation into Google has subpoenaed Apple to find out more information about the deal by which the search giant provides services for the iPhone and iPad, according to Bloomberg, citing sources inside the Federal Trade Commission which is carrying out the probe.

The FTC began investigating Google’s position in the US search market last year to determine whether it unfairly increases advertising rates for competitors, and whether its search results are skewed to favour its own businesses – such as its burgeoning social network Google+.

US authorities have now demanded that Apple hand over the agreements by which Google is the default search and mapping engine on its mobile devices. According to Bloomberg other mobile handset makers as well as mobile networks have also been subpoenaed.

Rivals to Google, such as Microsoft, have called the agreements anticompetitive. Together, Apple’s devices and mobile phones running the Android mobile operating system give Google about 75% market share of the mobile market in the US at present, more than it has in the desktop realm where its share there is 66.4%, according to ComScore. In Europe, where the European Commission is also carrying out an antitrust investigation into the company, Google’s desktop share is closer to 90%. It is not known whether the EC is also probing Google’s deal with Apple, though a decision on its investigation is expected next month.

Details of the Apple-Google relationship may show whether the latter is abusing its dominance of search to boost revenue in the mobile phone advertising market, Allen Grunes, an antitrust lawyer at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck in Washington, told Bloomberg. “As mobile search gets more widespread, the default setting becomes more significant,” said Grunes, who does not represent Google or its rivals.

Google has been the default search engine on Apple’s mobile devices since the iPhone was unveiled in 2007, though Apple is believed to have pursued talks with Microsoft in 2010 to use its Bing search engine instead. However, Google wound up with the continuing contract; Apple and Google are understood to share ad revenue from Google searches on iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads.

The FTC’s probe of Google is also understood to be investigating whether the company is using its control of Android to harm competition. That’s because “it’s very likely in the next few years, we’ll see mobile search outstripping desktop search,” Ben Schachter, a New York-based analyst with Macquarie Capital told Bloomberg. He estimates that by the end of 2012 mobile searches in the US will make about 25% to 30% of all searches, up from 15% now, and that people will use whatever is the default on the device, even though it can be changed in the settings.

“Most people don’t even know what default search means – they just know there’s a box they can use to look for information,” Schacter said.

Apple and Google have declined to comment on the subpoenas.

Google in 2011 earned $1.3bn in search-related revenue on Apple products, according to a report released on 8 March report by Macquarie Capital, which said that the revenues were then split to give Apple $1bn and Google just $335m.

In January, eMarketer, a New York-based research firm, estimated Google’s share of US mobile advertising revenue was 52% in 2011, driven by searches. Google earns about 95% of all US mobile-search ad revenue, the firm said.

The FTC’s subpoena is the latest twist in the relationship between Google and Apple. The two companies were linked for much of last decade, with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt serving on Apple’s board of directors. But that changed when in 2008 Google announced it would introduce Android to compete against the iPhone.

Schmidt left the board in 2009, the same year the FTC said it was examining whether Apple and Google were violating antitrust laws by sharing board members. Schmidt, then Google’s chief executive, said the FTC probe did not prompt his decision to step down from Apple’s board.

Conflict between the two companies intensified in 2010 after Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs opened a patent battle against companies whose mobile devices run on Android, including Samsung and HTC.

Joaquin Almunia, the European Commission’s antitrust chief, said on 5 March that he will decide next month on the future of the EC’s 18-month antitrust probe into Google and notify the company about any concerns.

 

 

 

Xbox at 10 in Europe

March 15, 2012
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It was on 14 March a decade ago that Microsoft launched the original Xbox console in Europe. Tech journalist Pat Garratt has written an exhaustive history of the machine, and here we discuss its strengths, weaknesses and impact on gaming history

The games industry was a very different place 10 years ago. Still dominated by Japanese games and Japanese games machines, Microsoft’s plans to launch its own dedicated console were met with skepticism.

A few years before, EA co-founder Trip Hawkins had tried to wrestle his way onto the games hardware scene with the 3DO – an abject failure against the might of Sony’s PlayStation. Many thought the Xbox would go the same way.

It didn’t. Instead, it changed the industry, bringing broadband connectivity and hard disk storage to consoles for the first time and introducing us to important new franchises such as Halo and Project Gotham.

Not bad for a project that originally started out with a two-man team (Microsoft engineers Otto Berkes and Ted Hase) as something of a hobbyist attempt to create a Windows games machine.

Games journalist and vg247.com founder Pat Garratt has released an extensive history of the Xbox on Kindle. Here we discuss the history of the machine and its lasting legacy on the industry …

Keith Stuart: What was the reaction to the Xbox announcement back in the early 2000s? Microsoft hadn’t been hugely involved with consoles before that point – apart from providing a modified version of the Windows CE operating system for Sega’s Dreamcast. I remember journalists being rather cynical.
Pat Garratt: I think there was a general air of disbelief around the time of the announcement. PlayStation owned the core market and Nintendo was at the height of the Game Boy craze with Pokemon. We thought Microsoft’s intentions were ridiculous.

Bill Gates appeared on stage in person to announce Xbox at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose in 2000, and still no one could believe it would ever work. Microsoft was a PC company and didn’t understand the console world, which was Japanese. The whole thing was blatantly engineered to build a bridge from the PC games business to the living room, and we all thought it was doomed.

There was a lot wrong with it, but the fact Microsoft was able to make a gamble of that size in the face of so much opposition from the press, the development community and even gamers themselves shows just how badly the console market needed shaking up. We didn’t believe there was a gap, and we didn’t bank on Microsoft’s tenacity.

I think there were maybe two important things about the launch. One was the built-in hard-drive, which clearly took the games console into the era of downloadable, digital entertainment. The other was Halo.
The hard drive was a major step for consoles. Microsoft used it as a method of differentiation, as PlayStation 2 had no hard storage. The origin of the hard drive on the original Xbox is interesting. It became a PR tool, in that Microsoft said it was important for playing online games – and yes, it allowed people to play digital music and all the rest – but it was only ever included in the first instance because Windows needed it to boot. The hard drive was just a technical thing, but the consequences were dramatic.

The drive meant shooters like Halo were playable like PC games, with no load times between areas. It was also possible for Halo to be a proper networked shooter, as data could be read quickly from the HD. Online games were only really possible on PC before that. PS2 couldn’t really do any of it because it didn’t have dedicated storage.

Yeah, I mean, there were a few PS2 Net Link games, but they were difficult to set up.
Whereas Xbox was built from the ground up to enable proper multiplayer. Halo was revolutionary, really. It’s funny to look back at the reaction to Halo. Before it came out, the press couldn’t fathom a first-person console game with a green and grey colour pallete; everyone was used to anime-styled, neon-coloured Japanese games. When Halo launched alongside Xbox, UK magazine Edge reviewed it at 10/10 and suddenly everyone loved it. It was a turning point for console gaming as a whole.

Apart from the hardware and software itself, I think the really important thing about Xbox was that it was made by Microsoft, an American company. I saw Gates unveil Xbox at GDC, and the crowd was in rapture. It was as though Bill Gates, the all-American tech hero, had come to save the US games trade.

Halo’s protagonist, Master Chief, connected deeply with the American psyche at that point. Superman’s resonance with the US market has been compared to Master Chief’s. America was facing the start of its “war on terror” and had just been through 9/11, while Superman became popular in the US after [the second world war]. I think young Americans needed a hero, a fantasy in which everything works out against all odds. Master Chief was in the right place at the wrong time.

I think the fact Xbox was American was a big factor in its ability to get a foothold in one of the main world games markets.

It’s interesting to look back, though, and realise that it was far from a perfect launch. The game line-up was pretty poor – only Halo and Project Gotham really stood out. And Halo had no online multiplayer mode – it had to be set up via a LAN connection to allow 16 players to take part, with four machines running four-player splitscreen – a pretty obtuse set-up. When you were researching your history of the Xbox, did you find out why the machine didn’t launch with Xbox Live? If online connectivity was part of the vision form the start, which Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer would have us believe, why didn’t Xbox Live turn up until later in 2012?
It’s important to remember that general broadband availability was in its infancy in 2002. There were only 700,000 households in the US with broadband in 2000, and predictions at the time of launch were that there would be 12.6m by 2006. There was no such thing as mass penetration; we were all using dial-up at home.

Xbox, in many ways, was a console ahead of its time, and banking exclusively on broadband was probably the greatest risk Microsoft took with the machine. Sega’s Dreamcast came out in the west in 1999, but shipped with a dial-up modem as broadband was seen as a future technology. Microsoft refused to use anything other than broadband for Xbox, though, as the vision for Live was a system that allowed downloadable patches, new maps and other pieces of content, voice communication and lag-free action gaming in intense real-time genres such as first-person shooting. Gates was a hugely believer in the internet – Microsoft still is, obviously – and Xbox essentially shipped with an online component that very few people could actually use as a result.

I didn’t specifically ask why Live launched after the console itself, but I’m going to assume it wasn’t ready. The entire Xbox development period was a horrific crunch for Microsoft, and I’d guess someone just took the call to move Live into “phase two” as broadband penetration wasn’t extensive.

Halo was originally intended to be a PC and Mac title, with large teams of players on each side, but Microsoft bought Bungie specifically for the game in the run-in to Xbox’s launch. The first Halo as it appeared on Xbox was never designed for online play as Live didn’t even exist. I think the simple answer would be that Gates and Ballmer were totally commited to broadband gaming with Xbox, and that was the reason Halo launched without full online play.

Microsoft released a 10-year anniversary edition of Halo towards the end of 2011 that featured online competitive play and online co-op for the first time, which was a big deal. Halo was the first shooter I ever played cooperatively, and I know for many fans it was a real dream to be able to play it online with friends using voice comms. The original game was only playable via LAN or split-screen, as you say.

What do you think were the other key games for the console though? I guess it was Project Gotham, Splinter Cell, Knights of the Old Republic. But did any third-party publishers really exploit the hardware fully? The 233 MHz NVidia GPU and Intel Pentium III CPU were technically in advance of the PS2, but it just felt a lot of the time that publishers were doing as little as they could in the conversion process.
I think a lot of developers and publishers aimed for the lower PS2 specs when they developed cross-platform titles. Xbox didn’t really get going as a truly competitive entity until Xbox 360, I’d argue.

That doesn’t mean people didn’t produce good content for Xbox, though. Splinter Cell’s a great example of how a publisher was able to create something technically exceptional by focusing on the increased Xbox specs. I remember seeing it for the first time at E3 with a colleague who was big on PC games, and the sight of Sam Fisher crawling down a vent with a rotating fan causing real-time shadows on his back was enough to make him buy an Xbox. PS2 couldn’t handle anything like it.

But yes, I’m sure companies were putting games onto Xbox as an afterthought to PS2. I worked on an Xbox magazine at the time, and sometimes it was tough to fill the pages. There just weren’t that many games compared to PS2. To my mind, though, the third-party games that made a mark through exploiting the extra grunt were BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic; Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive 3; Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell; Starbreeze’s The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay; and Namco’s Soul Calibur 2, which was, amazingly, at 720p. I’m sure there were more, but those are the ones that spring to mind and using Xbox’s technical specs to good effect.

Being on an Xbox mag, do you feel the console really had an identity through its games at that time? A few years before, I was on a Dreamcast mag, and its big games – Sonic, Jet Set Radio, Chu Chu Rocket – were unmistakably Sega. I think in its early days, Xbox suffered from the same problem as the 3DO – it lacked those first-party and second-party relationships that Sega, Nintendo and Sony all achieved. In the end, does Xbox have a legacy of its own, apart from Xbox 360?
I think it struggled, especially with third-party content, but it certainly does have a legacy and it did have a distinct feel at the time. Xbox was for grown ups, for early adopters willing to pay for the best visuals and hardware. Halo and Project Gotham Racing are indicative of Xbox’s essence. The first-party content really made it.

There was also a large mod scene around the hardware itself, which never really appeared around PS2. Dreamcast had it to an extent, but because of Xbox’s hard drive and relatively open systems it could be converted with new user-made dashboards to create a powerful media centre, and it had loads of emulators. You could play Mario Kart on an Xbox if you knew how. Xbox felt quite underground to us when we worked on the magazine. We ran articles about BIOS flashing and other community modding topics you didn’t really find on the Japanese machines.

Even in the early days, there was a lot of power in the brand. We paid for one guy to get an Xbox tattoo in one issue; he had the logo put on his arm. He was a fully paid up member of the multiplayer community, and just lived for it. Xbox’s legacy was all about bringing console community to the west, I think. There were some key games, but I definitely look on those years with rose-tinted specs thanks to the sheer daftness of it all.

• Microsoft has released its own timeline of Xbox history

Keith Stuart


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Maude praises UK progress on open data

March 15, 2012
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Almost two years after Ordnance Survey data was made free, businesses are making profitable use of free data – but government still has to get ministries into line, say users

An “open data” revolution kicked off by a Guardian campaign is gathering pace in the UK. The Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, is trumpeting the UK’s success in making government data freely available – and pointing to examples of companies that have sprung up to create commercial businesses around free data from public bodies.

Maude says that “companies including SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises] and startups are using open data to improve public services and create innovative products.” But, he adds, he wants both “data holders” in government and new data-driven businesses to “promote the open data revolution”.

The Cabinet Office cited a number of startup businesses which use government-supplied free data as their core input, from Parkopedia – which uses live data from local authorities to help drivers find free care parking spaces, and now covers more than 20m space in 25 countries – to Placr, which pulls together data from public transport operators to provide a nexus of data which is then available to users, developers and service operators themselves. Other companies cited include CycleStreets and the Barclays Bike Hire scheme in London, which offers real-time data to developers who have in turn created a dozen apps for smartphones to help people find the nearest and best-stocked bicycle hire station to them.

One of the newest apps to appear using government data is an iPhone all called Your Taxi Meter, which uses live data from local councils to find out from a car’s registration number whether it is a licensed taxi – so that would-be passengers can check on it before they get in. It also gives taxi fare estimates for more than 360 districts across the UK, using fares set by local government. “Without the data provided by the local councils for free, the service would not be possible,” says Tom Macmichael, its creator.

The explosion in open data in government followed the success of the Free Our Data campaign, launched in the Guardian in March 2006. That advocated making non-personal data collected by government available for uncharged re-use, whether by individuals or businesses – and was adopted by Tom Watson, then Cabinet Office minister in Gordon Brown’s administration. That led to a key move in April 2010 when Ordnance Survey map data, which had previously been charged for, was made available for free – along with a database of postcodes and their geographic locations.

In a speech on Wednesday, Maude will praise the efforts of both government and developers. He will say that “The digital age has made transparency an irresistible, unstoppable force,” and that open data “will be the essential characteristic of future public policy”. He points out that data about cardiac surgery led to the discovery of huge variations in mortality data across the UK, and thus to the elimination of bad practices. “It can save lives,” he says of the open data movement.

The availability of open data from government – in effect making data collected with taxpayer funds available back to them – has led to commercial businesses which are just getting off the ground. Jonathan Raper, the chief executive of Placr, was on Tuesday visiting Blackpool where he hopes to seal a contract offering his company’s services – which are built around public data – that will cement its position.

Placr already employs three staff, and the tax bill was probably enough in 2011 to pay for a teaching assistant at a school, says Raper: “so we feel we’ve begun to do our part.”

But Raper said that there is still huge amounts of work to do inside government, where willingness to making data open is still variable from ministry to ministry. “I’d give the government six out of ten so far – the have tried hard. But now they’ve reached a checkpoint. Reforming government isn’t easy, but at the same time this is the time, economically, when we desperately need growth. When we have data lying around inside government that we could reuse for free, at no cost, then why does that task get put into the ‘too difficult’ box?”

He said that investors in private companies using public data still needed persuading that the government would give them both the continued backing and guaranteed access in future to open data – something that Maude has repeated, but which is yet to be enacted through legislation.

Charles Arthur


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Yahoo files lawsuit against Facebook

March 15, 2012
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Internet company claims Facebook infringes patents covering advertising, privacy controls and social networking

Yahoo is filing a lawsuit against Facebook claiming infringement of patents covering advertising, privacy controls and social networking, following through on a threat it made last month.

In a court filing , the former web giant – which has been reduced to a shadow of its former self as internal strife and the rise of Facebook have eaten away at its position – said that Facebook, founded in 2004, infringes 10 of its patents.

Yahoo had first threatened the suit last month. It demanded that the giant social network, which is preparing to go public in what may be one of the largest public offerings ever, should license the patents.

Facebook, in response, pledged to defend itself vigorously against what it called “puzzling actions” by Yahoo. “We’re disappointed that Yahoo, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation,” the company said in a statement.

The patent claims could cast a spotlight on Facebook’s vulnerabilities as the company tries to complete an initial public offering of stock this spring. At the end of 2011, only 56 US patents had been issued to Facebook. That’s a relatively small number compared with other big tech companies. Yahoo, founded in March 1996, has filed more than 1,000 patents covering various aspects of its operation.

Lawsuits over patents, even in the realm of software rather than physical hardware, have become increasingly common in US business, where the US Patent Office is seen as more willing to grant patents on programmatic functions. Oracle is currently suing Google over patents that it claims to have which relate to the Java computing language and which it says are infringed by the Android mobile operating system.

Similarly, a number of software developers who have written apps for Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android software have been targeted by companies in the US claiming ownership of patents covering their functions.

But software patent lawsuits often fizzle out. Oracle has withdrawn a number of those which it claimed to have, while Microsoft and a number of other companies succeeded in defeating a claim in February by Eolas, which claimed a patent on the “interactive web” – one in which Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, personally testified.

Yahoo defended its lawsuit, saying it has invested “substantial resources in research and development” over the years that have led to patents of technology that other companies have licensed. “Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved,” the company said in a statement.

Yahoo, which has seen its revenue fall steadily over the past three years, made hundreds of millions of dollars from a patent settlement that it reached with Google just before that internet search leader went public in 2004. That covered the system used to generate the advertisements seen beside search results: Yahoo owns Overture, the company which first came up with the idea of keyword-targeted adverts to go with searches.

Yahoo will be hoping for a similar result this time round. It has been steadily losing share to Facebook in online display advertising: in 2008 it hit a high, when Yahoo’s share of US display revenues peaked at 18.4% and Facebook had just a 2.9% share. According to eMarketer, in 2011 Facebook’s share of overall US display advertising revenues grew to 14%, up from an 11.5% share in 2010, while, Yahoo’s share of US display ad revenues fell to 10.8% in 2011 from 14% in 2010.

• Twitter has bought the blogging site Posterous, “This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple – a goal we share,” Twitter said in a statement. “Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.”

Posterous has previously raised $10.4m in venture capital funding, with $5m being injected last September, which implies that its sale price will have been well above that value.

Charles Arthur


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Wi-Fi takes power from mobile phone mast

March 15, 2012
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Most internet traffic on smartphones is carried by Wi-Fi, suggesting mobile networks could be sidelined

From Norwich to New York, hotspots are pulsing on every street. A messy urban patchwork of Wi-Fi signals is being gradually woven into a blanket of coverage which may soon be equal to the signals pumped out by mobile phone masts.

Wireless Fidelity (a non-scientific term invented by marketing people) is considered easy to hack, and the signals can often be weak, or password protected. But they are usually free and once in, they work at speeds well above the average mobile connection.

Even for phone users, Wi-Fi has become the most popular way of accessing the internet. So why are mobile phone companies planning to spend billions connecting us to the internet via 4G phone masts?

Vodafone says creating its 4G network in Europe will cost €30bn (£25bn). New evidence has reached my inbox which fuels a growing suspicion that it could be about to waste a lot of money on what may one day become a niche technology.

In the UK in January 2012, only 19% of all internet traffic on smartphones was transmitted by a mobile network, according to researchers at Informa. They worked with Mobidia, whose app measures how much of your data allowance your phone has used up. The information was drawn from about a third of Mobidia’s 600,000 users.

Globally, Mobidia found 70% of smartphone internet traffic is carried by Wi-Fi. In the US, the total is two thirds. The picture is similar in Hong Kong, Germany and Spain. Among the major markets, only Japan and Singapore show an even split between networks. Informa says this is helped by the fact that they already have superfast mobile broadband, but more importantly because customers are sold generously sized or unlimited data plans at competitive prices.

Informa analyst Thomas Wehmeier, author of Understanding Today’s Smartphone User, published in February, said:

The expansion of Wi-Fi into hundreds of millions of private homes and offices around the world, the deployment of more than 1m public Wi-Fi hot spots by the end of 2011 and the growth of a vast and mature ecosystem built of thousands of devices has established Wi-Fi as the most heavily used wireless technology in the world in terms of volume of data transmitted … Wi-Fi is the primary form of connectivity for the overwhelming majority of users and it is apparent that Wi-Fi has become firmly entrenched in day-to-day usage.

Informa last year forecast 5.8m open to all Wi-Fi hostpots worldwide by 2015, provided by public bodies such as town councils. BT Group’s own network, not strictly public but widely available, now numbers 3.5m. It consists mostly of domestic Wi-Fi signals which home owners have agreed to share with other BT customers who might be passing within range.

Even mobile operators, conscious that their own masts will soon be creaking under the strain of data traffic, are moving into Wi-Fi. At O2, they have promised a network of 15,000 sites, in public places like coffee shops, open to customers and non customers.

Analysts Thomas Seitz and Jerry Dellis at Jefferies bank believe Wi-Fi is not as previously billed just a useful offload or back-up technology for mobile networks. Rather, it is threatening to eat their lunch.

We believe evidence continues to mount suggesting Wi-Fi should no longer be viewed solely as a complement to mobile networks, but increasingly should be looked at as a potential disruptive substitute.

Wi-Fi is not just an offload avenue for wireless data traffic, but in fact may be the primary means by which wireless data is consumed. Given that the bull case for mobile operators hinges on capturing revenue from the exponential growth in data volumes, we believe these trends need to be monitored closely. In our view, how the relationship between the mobile networks and Wi-Fi evolves could be a key determinant in the investment attractiveness of the wireless services sector.

In the UK and elsewhere, operators have mostly stopped selling unlimited data at a fixed price. We now have allowances. When they are breached, heavy penalty charges kick in. Dellis and Seitz argue this change is driving smartphone users on to Wi-Fi.

It is a grassroots technology, promoted and funded by a ragged coalition of trade bodies, cafe owners, universities, town councils, entrepreneurs and the occasional telecoms company. Despite this, it is gaining ground against lavishly marketed mobile networks.

Wi-Fi is triumphing against the odds, suggesting it is the natural choice for carrying most internet traffic, even on mobile devices.

How often, outside of a car or a train, do we need an internet connection on the move? It will be Wi-Fi that finally provides a phone signal for passengers on the London Underground, with the service due to be live for the Olympic games.

Of course we still need 4G networks. A signal that works without having to fiddle about with passwords is always going to be worth paying more money for. For many rural householders, whose homes are difficult to reach with fibre cables, the technology offers the best chance of a fast internet signal. When it comes to keeping cities connected, however, Wi-Fi is slowly draining the power of the mobile phone mast.

Juliette Garside


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Google’s privacy policy ‘too vague’

March 15, 2012
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UK data protection boss David Smith concerned how Google is sharing information between mail, calendar, call logs and searches

Google’s privacy policy is too vague for users to control how their information is shared, according to Britain’s data protection boss.

In his first public comments since Google’s revised policy came into effect on 1 March, deputy information commissioner and data protection head David Smith said he was concerned that information was now being shared between some 60 Google services, including mail, calendar, Android phone call logs and search histories.

“Google’s privacy policy is too vague,” said Smith. “The requirement under the UK Data Protection Act is for a company to tell people what it actually intends to do with their data, not just what it might do at some unspecified point in future.

“Being vague does not help in giving users effective control about how their information is shared. It’s their information at the end of the day.”

Last week the French watchdog CNIL, acting on behalf of Europe’s national regulators, asked Google not to introduce its new policy on the grounds that it breached data protection laws. The company pressed ahead regardless, saying that after publicising the change for a month that a reversal would confuse consumers.

For the first time Google plans to share data amassed by separate services, but the company, which controls 80% of European searches, 30% of European smartphones and 40% of online video globally, has not spelt out in detail what will be shared and with whom. One of the examples given is that if other users already have your email, or other information that identifies you, Google may show them your publicly visible Google profile information, such as your name and photo.

CNIL warns that Google will be able to display ads on YouTube that relate to a user’s recent search activity or data collected from an Android phone. Advertising could in future be tailored to the location of meetings logged in a user’s Google calendar service. The company says this is not currently happening and users will be warned of changes.

Google said: “The most important product-specific privacy explanations have been incorporated into our main privacy policy. And there are lots of ways to communicate more about our product-specific privacy practices without creating formal privacy notices.

“For example, we use our privacy centre, help centre articles, in-product notifications, published FAQs and our good to know website to explain what information we collect and how we use it.”

Smith said that he wanted to see search engines like Google included in European legislation being drawn up to give consumers a “right to be forgotten” by the internet. The “Facebook fired” phenomenon has seen a wave of employees lose their jobs because of information revealed about them in social media.

“Google can’t just say: I’m just a messenger, I have no responsibility at all for the messages I carry,” he said. “Given their dominant role and their huge influence here they have a responsibility to ensure they operate in a fair and reasonable way.

“Where things are drawn to their attention and it can be established they are delivering content which is defamatory, where it is harmful to individuals and there is no public interest justification Google have a responsibility not to serve up that information.”

The law for now protects Google from prosecution over defamation. The high court recently ruled that the company could not be sued for allowing damaging comments about a Conservative councillor, Payam Tamiz, to be published on its Blogger.com service.

The CNIL will report its preliminary findings on whether Google’s privacy policy breaches the law at the end of March, and national regulators have vowed to take co-ordinated action.

Smith said depending on the findings, the information commissioner could order Google to stop sharing information “in a way which hasn’t been properly explained” or which people had not consented to. The commissioner’s sanctions include fines and criminal prosecutions.

“We have to keep these massive tech giants in check,” said Georgina Nelson, a lawyer for the consumer group Which?. “People need to be reassured that they are dealing with their data in the right ways.”

• This article was amended on 8 March. The original said that “According to Google, Android’s servers collect and store phone call logs with numbers dialled and the time, date and duration of calls.” This is not the case, and has been corrected

Juliette Garside


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Vatican becomes latest Anonymous victim

March 15, 2012
By

Italian branch of the hacking collective takes down Vatican website in retaliation for misdeeds throughout history

The Italian branch of the hacking collective Anonymous took down the Vatican’s website on Wednesday in retaliation for the “corruption” of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican website was still inaccessible on Wednesday evening, although a spokesman said he could not confirm the crash was caused by the hackers group.

The action comes the day after the FBI issued charges against an individual alleged to be a member of Anonymous, and four people alleged to be principal members of its sister hacking collective LulzSec.

In a statement on its Italian-language website, the collective accused the Catholic Church of being responsible for a long list of misdeeds throughout history, including the selling of indulgences in the 16th century and burning heretics during the Inquisition.

“Anonymous decided today to besiege your site in response to the doctrine, to the liturgies, to the absurd and anachronistic concepts that your for-profit organisation spreads around the world.

“This attack is not against the Christian religion or the faithful around the world but against the corrupt Roman Apostolic Church.”

It also accused the Vatican of being “retrograde” in its interfering in Italian domestic affairs.

Anonymous is a group of online “hacktivists” – individuals from around the world who engage in hacking attacks and other actions in the support of various causes, including targeting private security firms, Middle Eastern regimes, and the Church of Scientology.

The group rose to prominence after a string of “denial of service” attacks – a simple hack which temporarily takes websites offline – after the release of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. It targeted politicians who had denounced the leaks, the US department of justice website, Visa and Mastercard for blocking WikiLeaks’ payment streams, and others.

The group had previously been better known for online pranks and mischief-making, particularly based from the internet bulletin board site 4chan.

David Batty


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Game warns investors as shares collapse

March 15, 2012
By

Game Group shares, which have already lost more than 95% of their value over the past year, crashed a further 65% this morning

Game Group, the high street computer game retailer that is unable to sell keenly awaited new games including Mass Effect 3, Mario Party 9 and Street Fighter X Tekken, has officially warned investors that it is on the brink of collapse.

The company said it had put itself up for sale but warned that “it is uncertain whether any of the solutions currently being explored by the board will be successful or will result in any value being attributed to the shares of the company.”

Game desperately needs cash before the end of the month to pay its quarterly rent bill. If it fails to pay up it could be pushed into administration, putting 10,000 jobs at risk and wiping out any shareholder value. The warning sent the shares, which have already lost more than 95% of their value over the past year, crashing a further 65% to 1.2p, valuing the company at just £4.3m.

Ian Shepherd, the chief executive, has told senior staff to brace themselves for administration, according to trade magazine MCV.

The boss of Electronic Arts, one of the world’s biggest game publishers, has said it “now looks like all but a certainty” that Game will go bust. At a conference in New York this weekend John Riccitiello, EA’s chief executive, said: “It was a risk a month ago. Now it looks like a fact, although we’re still praying for the lenders to get rational and keep them in business. You probably know who I’m talking about.”

EA, the publisher of Mass Effects 3 the UK’s best-selling game, is one of three leading game publishers to have withdrawn their latest hits from sale at Game over fears they will not be able to reclaim the stock if the company goes bust.

Capcom, the Californian company behind Street Fighter X Tekken and the Resident Evil games, have also refused to supply Game stores with their forthcoming games, and Nintendo has withdrawn its latest hit Mario Party 9 from Game’s stores. Game has conceded it is involved in “ongoing discussions” with other suppliers also threatening to pull out.

Customers have taken to industry blogs, including Eurogamer, to offer the company their advice. “Game please remember that you will need to stock some games,” said jrc1985. Vibroguy added: “I think it would be easier if you just listed what Game is actually stocking :) .”

In the glossy brochure sent to shareholders following its interim results, Game boasts: “Our vision is to be our customers’ first choice for all of their gaming needs.”

The company has appointed investment bank Rothschild to find a buyer, but it is likely to be difficult to find one before the looming deadline. Game’s Spanish arm could attract the attention of US rival Gamestop, but its British, French and Australian divisions may be sold through a controversial pre-pack administration. Deloitte has already been in discussions with the firm about how to handle an insolvency. Game has 1,270 stores, some trading under the brand Gamestation, in nine European markets and Australia. There are 600 stores in the UK employing about 6,000 people.

The company, which has debts of about £70m, has already warned the City that it expects to report losses of about £18m for the year to the end of January.

Talk of its imminent demise could hasten Games’s collapse as its 18m reward card holders rush to spend roughly £10m worth of loyalty points.

Game’s woes have largely been caused by its failure to keep up with fast-moving internet retailers and supermarkets, who often sold titles as loss leaders to tempt people in to buy less popular older games.

The industry is also moving away from physical games to rapidly growing, and highly profitable, digital downloads. Instead of splashing out £40 on a video game CD for a £200 console, increasing numbers of consumers opt for 69p smartphone apps such as Angry Birds.

The launch of the new Wii U this year, and the mooted launch of an updated Microsoft Xbox 360 next year, should provide a fillip to the physical video games market. But, the new Microsoft Xbox will reportedly not have a disc drive meaning everything will have to be downloaded.

Game is still in talks with its lenders, led by Royal Bank of Scotland, which are allowing it to continue to trade after a renegotiation of its debts.

Peter Smedley, an analyst at Charles Stanley, said: “Barely five weeks since Game secured a lifeline from its lenders in return for commitment to an updated strategic plan, Game has confirmed speculation in the weekend press of how perilous its financial position has now become. Imminent collapse into administration is now a real possibility.

“The IMS [interim management statement] warns that the solutions being explored may not lead to any equity value left. There is simply too much uncertainty and considerable risk in a highly fluid situation for equity investors to become involved. We put our recommendation under review, with a view to suspending coverage.

“Game’s financial position [it has debts of about £70m] highlighted in the 3 February IMS has become crushingly more pressing than was apparent. That has dramatically foreshortened the time Game has had to take radical action in a precipitously evolving situation.”

Rupert Neate


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