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MY INTERNET COLUMN

"Connected" is the (nearly) monthly journal of Connect, the UK trade union for managers and professionals in communications [click here]. I contribute a monthly column on aspects of the Internet and the text of all these articles, with relevant hyperlinks, are filed here. If you would like to comment on any of them e-mail me.

Contents

In the first of a new series of columns, Roger Darlington - Strategy Adviser at the Communication Workers Union and Chair of the Internet Watch Foundation - asks:

WHO IS THE INTERNET FOR?

The Internet started life in 1969 as the ARPAnet - the network of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defense. It was constructed as a distributed system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack.[For a history of the Internet click here]

Subsequently the network was extended to American universities and then other academic institutions around the globe. The World Wide Web - arguably the most useful feature of the Net - was invented in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at the European Centre for Nuclear Research. [For further information on his development of the Web click here]

So is the Internet really for scientists and academics? Should the Internet be a 'free' space with no regulation of content and no contamination by commercial interests?

The Internet has now become a mass medium and, as such, has to be subject to some laws and regulations. There are now as many children using the Net as adults and they need some guidance and protection. These are themes to which we will return in future columns.

Furthermore I see nothing wrong in people making money out of the Net. The likes of Amazon [click here] and eBay [click here] are terrific services and they deserve to make a profit - although I wish the companies concerned would recognise trade unions.

The Internet started in North America and Europe and these two regions of the world still account for almost two-thirds of all users world-wide. However, I am about to visit India and Nepal on holiday and Internet penetration in these countries is only around 0.7% and 0.2% respectively. [For statistics on Internet penetration throughout the world click here]

How are AIDS victims in South Africa supposed to obtain independent information and access to on-line support groups when Internet access in that country is limited to just 7%? How are Muslim women in Nigeria able to have a cross-community and cross-national dialogue about the sharia or female circumcision when a mere 0.1% of homes there are on-line?

So is the Net really for the economically developed countries? I believe that Net has at least as much to offer to Swaziland as Switzerland and we have to find imaginative ways of cross-subsidizing the costs of Internet access on a global basis.

Since the Internet started in the USA and originally focussed on the academic community, the language of choice has always been English and even now some 70-80% of Web content is still in English. Does that mean that the Internet is really for English readers?

I recently saw the James Bond film "Die Another Day" and read a novel by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho. The Warner Brothers' site for the 007 movie is in six languages [click here] , but Coelho's site manages to deploy 14 [click here].

English will always be the premier language on the Internet because it is now the global language, but we should be promoting more multi-language sites and more powerful and effective on-line translation services [for Babel Fish Translation click here].

So - who is the Internet for? In my view, it should be for everyone, regardless of occupation, nation or language, regardless of age, class, or income. This challenge raises a host of issues, some of which will be examined in future columns.

For now, let us start at home.

The British trade union movement owns thousands of national, regional and branch offices located throughout the length and breadth of the nation. In the case of some unions like the CWU, a network of learning centres is being developed.

All of these offices are stuffed full of both Internet-enabled PCs and people who know how to use them. Suppose we threw open these facilities at the evenings and weekends to run low-cost training courses on the use of the Internet, including effective use of e-mail and searching on the Web.

We could show them on-line information sources that would empower and enthuse them and community and newsgroups that would transform their lives.

Part of the training might be use of an interactive program explaining the role and work of unions and part of the package might be introductory membership to the relevant union.

We have six million union members in the UK. If each member approached partner, children and parents, we could potentially reach out to around 30 million citizens, even before we threw the doors open to local communities. Now wouldn't that be something?

Our Internet columnist Roger darlington - Chair of the Internet Watch Foundation for the last three years - poses the disturbing question:

WHAT IS YOUR CHILD DOING ON THE NET?

Most readers have children or have friends with children. The Internet is the first technology where frequently children know more than the adults supposedly supervising them, so just how safe are these youngsters?

Of course, for the overwhelmingly majority of the time that they are on the Net, children are going to have a wonderfully fun experience - contacting existing friends through e-mail, making new friends in chat rooms, playing games on-line, finding educational web sites to help with homework, and much more.

However, allowing young children to surf the Net without guidance or supervision is equivalent to letting them freely browse in a large book store that has sections providing hard porn magazines, race hate propaganda and all sorts of bizarre and disturbing material. Allowing them to use chat rooms or instant messaging without protection is similar to letting them visit parks on their own where there are adult strangers interested in meeting children.

You would not expose your child to such risks in the real world, but you may not be so aware of the dangers - and the action to take - in cyberspace.

The first set of dangers arises from the enormously diverse range of content on the Web.

Children may find offensive content, such as adult pornography or racist propaganda, or receive unwanted spam promoting pornography or scams. Depending on the age, maturity, and cultural background of the child, other material - such as sites celebrating the bizarre or murderous or promoting religious cults or pro-bulimia views- may cause upset or even fear [for examples click here].

What can you do?

Links:
Home Office advice on safe surfing click here
NCH Action for Children click here
Kidsmart safety site click here

More serious problems can occur with the use of chat rooms by children. Paedophiles deliberately target children in some chat rooms and 'groom' them over a period of time to obtain personal information and then physical access to the child with a view to physical abuse.

Girls in their early teens are particularly vulnerable to the idea of meeting a 'friend' whom they believe from on-line chat to be a boy of a similar age.

What advice should you give to your child? Tell them:

Links:
Internet Crime Forum report "Chatwise, Streetwise" click here
Home Office advice on chat rooms click here
Chat Danger site click here

Finally, on a more positive note, many children have gone beyond being mere consumers to become creators of their own web sites, either alone or in conjunction with friends at their school or a community group.

The organisation Childnet International runs a global competition each year to identify and make awards to some of the best such sites and many of the sites they identify are truly outstanding. Maybe you could help your youngster to make a start in this direction?

Links:
Childnet International awards click here
Kids on the Net click here

Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington asks a question which must have crossed the mind of many Net users:

WHO CONTROLS THE INTERNET?

We are frequently told that the Internet is a new kind of communications medium that is not - and cannot - be controlled by anyone, whether individuals, corporations or governments.

This is, of course, nonsense. Somebody has to be running the Internet, otherwise it would not be possible for some 600M users (at the last count [click here]) to be able to communicate almost instantaneously to every country of the world at every second of the day.

But certainly control of the Net is a much more complex and complicated matter than in the case of a newspaper or magazine or a radio or television station.

In fact, there are three main bodies that currently control the global Internet:

Of course, hardly any Internet users have actually heard of these bodies and only a tiny, tiny fraction has any chance of influencing them. Overwhelmingly they are made up of representatives of powerful corporations, mostly American-owned.

In 2000, ICANN held direct elections for almost half its board of directors, theoretically allowing anyone in the world with an e-mail address to vote. The election was a sham and it has now abandoned this method of choosing some of its directors.

In the November/December 2002 issue of "Foreign Affairs" magazine [click here], Zoe Baird - President of the Markle Foundation - wrote: "International institutions engaged in Internet governance will have to confront three significant challenges if they are to achieve legitimacy: increasing participation by developing countries, providing access to non-profit organisations and ensuring democratic accountability".

She is absolutely right and international trade unions should be allying with other civil society organisations to make this a reality.

For the individual Internet user, however, this is all pretty esoteric stuff.

At a more practical level, where does he or she go if one finds child pornography or race hate material on the Net, for advice on how to block access by children to pornographic content, what to do if one's credit card details have been misused on-line, how to respond when you have been defamed on a Web site, how to act when your copyrighted article or music has been used without permission?

In the UK, the only relevant body is the Internet Watch Foundation [click here] and that only has the narrow remit of criminal content. For about 18 months, Home Office officials and industry representatives have been discussing the idea of some kind of 'one stop shop' for Internet consumer problems but, at a time when Ministers are fond of emphasizing that Internet time is shorter than chronological time, progress is glacially slow.

The Internet raises major social, economic and ultimately ethical issues: How can we make the Net accessible to all, regardless of income or disability? How can we extend broadband to all parts of the country? How much free speech should be allowed when individuals can be defamed and ethnic groups can be insulted? What is the impact on children of using chat rooms and on-line gaming?

We have nowhere to debate and discuss these issues. In China - where I have spoken on Internet regulation - they take these matters very seriously and have formed the Internet Society of China [click here]. But this is a country where democratic values are at best embryonic and we ought to be able to do much better.

In short: we need to democratise existing global institutions to empower civic society and we need to create new institutions to empower local consumers. Preferably before the number of Internet users hits one billion.

Link: ITU Workshop on Internet Governance click here

Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington shares your anger:

DAMN THAT SCAM AND SPAM

Have you ever had an e-mail that:

If you have never had such an e-mail, you are not connected to the Internet. Such communications are scam or spam or both. They are the bane of Internet users' lives and they threaten to slow down the Net and render it less effective.

As far as scams are concerned, the golden rule is, if something seems too good to be true, it is almost certainly a ruse. Recipients of such e-mails should never respond, even to express anger or opposition. This simply indicates that one's e-mail address is valid and active which, in itself, is useful information to criminals.

The West African Organised Crime Section (WAOCS) of the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) [click here] leads the opposition to the so-called '419 scam', named after the section of the Nigerian penal code that prohibits it, but individuals receiving approaches should report the details to the fraud squad of their local police force.

Spam is unsolicited e-mail (the colloquial term spam comes from a well-known Monty Python sketch). Most spam is not of itself illegal - although some of it might become illegal in some jurisdictions quite soon. The problem with spam is that, because it so cheap for the spammer, there is so much of it - slowing down the Internet - and much of it is unwanted, time-wasting and even offensive (especially where the promotion of pornography is concerned).

It is estimated that spam now accounts for almost 10% of all e-mail in the UK, almost 40% of e-mail in the USA, and some 80% of e-mail received by Hotmail accounts. Worldwide some 10 billion spam e-mails are sent every day.

Many Internet users wonder how their address has been acquired by those issuing such e-mail. In fact, there are all sorts of technical means and software to search out or create e-mail addresses, even before we ourselves reveal that address by issuing e-mail or accessing web sites. This is particularly a problem for someone using a well-known e-mail facility like Hotmail or someone who has used the same e-mail address for some time. Therefore one option for minimising this type of mail - although it is certainly not a convenient one - is to change one's e-mail address.

In both Europe and the USA, there is such growing concern about the volume and nature of spam that there are now serious efforts to make it illegal to send such communications without either the option to opt out or a requirement to opt in to receiving such material (similar to arrangements that we have for the off-line equivalent which is direct mail, often known as junk mail).

In May 2002, the European Parliament voted to protect European Internet users from spam by adopting a directive, making it illegal to send unsolicited e-mail, text message or other similar advertisements to individuals with whom companies do not have a pre-existing business relationship [for analysis of the EU Directive click here]. Meanwhile, here in the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority [click here] has decided that in Britain bulk e-mail should either require the permission of the recipient or be clearly marked as 'unsolicited', although it is unclear how these requirements will be enforced and, in any event, most spam originates from the USA.

Since all legal measures will take time and will only be partially effective, there are some technical measures which one can take to minimise (but not stop totally) this problem. One can express concern to one's Internet service provider (ISP) and ask what arrangements the ISP has in place to block or minimise spam. Furthermore one can purchase anti-spam software or, at no cost, make appropriate settings to Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft's own answer to spam is that we pay to send e-mail - but hopefully that will be a non-starter.

Links:
Fuller discussion of scams click here
Fuller discussions of spam click here

Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington introduces you to the newest hot feature of the Net

WELCOME TO THE BLOGGER

Currently one of the 'hottest' new features of the Internet is the weblog or blog. This is like an electronic diary, but differs from a paper diary in two major respects. First, it is accessible in real time all the time by every Internet user in the world. Second, it can be linked to any other information on the Net.

When I first started my personal Web site almost four years ago, I thought that soon most Internet users would have their own site. After all, one of the coolest features of the Net is that you can be your own publisher at negligible cost with a potential world-wide readership in the hundred of millions.

But it hasn't happened. Very few Web users have their own Web site. Why not?

There are technical obstacles - it takes time to learn HTML (hypertext markup language) if you want total control, although packages like Dreamweaver make creation of material very easy. Also few people have the enthusiasm or the stamina to ensure that a site is regularly up-dated and indexed with interesting material.

Blogging - the technique of running a blog - overcomes these problems.

Blogs use a standard software which is downloadable free of charge. This software makes the publication of text as simple as typing a Word document. Content-wise all that is required is a few sentences every few days, linked to material one has already accessed or seen on the Web.

It is no surprise therefore that blogs are blossoming. They are easy to create and compulsive to read.

The most commonly used blogging software is called Blogger [click here], but other options include Movable Type [click here], Radio Userland [click here] and pMachine [click here].

The term 'weblog' was first used in 1997. Then, in 1999, a San Francisco-based company called Pyra Labs released Blogger, free software that soon became ubiquitous among the blogging community. This enables anyone to build their own blog, provided you have a title, a user name and a password.

The dreadful events of 11 September 2001 led to a desire for many Net users to want to express their feelings and blogs were an obvious forum. Then, in February 2003, Google gave the 'official' stamp of approval to blogging by buying up Pyra.

Whereas the first Gulf War was the breakthrough of real-time satellite television (like CNN), the second Gulf War was the breakthrough of the Internet as a medium for both receiving and commenting upon breaking news - and the reason is blogging.

Some of the media representatives embedded in the coalition forces ran their own blogs, although one of CNN's correspondents Kevin Sites was told by the company to stop this practice. Some citizens 'on the ground' offered their experiences and views to the world, the most famous for a time being a Baghdad man who used the codename Salam Pax [click here].

In the world of bloggers (called the "blogosphere"), this practice is known as "warblogging". One of the best examples is The Command Post [click here] which, within a week, brought 120 correspondents together into a 'collective weblog'.

Like newsgroups (which use the Usenet system) or community groups (which are hosted by companies like AOL and MSN), weblogs have created communities on the Net. People with similar interests link to one another, make comments on each other's material, and use each other's news feeds.

The exchange of news feed items uses a standard XML (extensible markup language) file called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). This is a format for exchanging new items on news sites and weblogs in a speedy and simple manner.

There are now thousands of RSS news feeds and, if one pulls them altogether, one has a new kind of search engine - one that provides a real-time insight into the content of tens of thousands of weblogs. One example is called Feedster [click here].

Nobody knows how many blogs are out there now, but currently the best estimates start at around 750,000. This number is starting to include some politicians. In the USA, the infamous Senator Gary Hart has one: click here. While here, in Britain, Labour MP Tom Watson has started one: click here.

Starting to use blogs is like starting to use the Web. You probably want to have some sort of portal and you want one or two favourite locations from which you can then follow the links. Look for the blog of someone you know or someone with a similar professional or personal interest.

As a portal to the world of blogs, I recommend a British site about the digital media called mbites: click here

For an initial favourite, let me recommend the blog of a Dutch trade union official and Internet enthusiast who is a friend of mine, Oskar van Rijswijk: click here

Be warned - I'm even thinking of starting a blog myself [I have now done so: click here].

Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington finds that not everyone loves the Net.

E-MAIL: CONVENIENCE OR CURSE?


Like most readers, I have used e-mail for years and regard it as an integral part of my life. However, I was recently on a group trip to St Petersburg [for an account click here] and most of the 60+ year olds on the tour could not understand why anyone would want to use something as strange and impersonal as e-mail when one could send a letter or make a telephone call.

This made me ponder. Perhaps we should pull back a little and remind ourselves of the many benefits of e-mail, while acknowledging some of the undoubted problems with its use.

So, why is e-mail so useful?

For all these advantages, if we are honest, e-mail does have some drawbacks.

We all have to find our own ways of balancing these advantages and disadvantages. Above all, it is important not to be come a slave to e-mail and to have allocated times for dealing with it.

Organisations too have to work out how to maintain a sense of balance. Some companies are now designating one day a week when colleagues should talk rather than e-mail.

Already the mobile equivalent of e-mail - texting - is massive. Many people who would never bother to send a postcard from their holiday destination are happy to text away from the beach or the bar.

The arrival of 3G mobile [for the UK's first such service click here] means that Net connection on the move is going to become easier, faster, and (eventually) cheaper. Then you will have e-mail everywhere all the time - unless you control it.

For all the problems of e-mail, I would not be without it. It has made the world smaller and friendlier.

However, I would like us to make it less prosaic and a little cheerier. I am not looking for more use of emoticons [for the longest list of emoticons in the world click here]. But, as a start, we could make the subject title wittier, so that people actually want to open the e-mail and do so with a smile. Give it a try.

Link: A Beginner's Guide To Effective E-Mail click here

We all use computers, but probably few of us have paused to ask the question posed by our monthly columnist Roger Darlington:

WHERE DO COMPUTERS GO TO DIE?

When I was a boy, I saw one of those black and white films on television in which explorers in darkest Africa discover a secret valley where aged elephants go to die. Of course, this provided an enormous stock of valuable ivory and so the explorers saw the location as a kind of 'El Dorado'.

Staying with this image, one can view old or broken computers as kind of white elephants. So, where do PCs go to die? This is not an academic question. According to Gartner Dataquest, an American research firm, the world computer industry shipped its one billionth PC in 2002 and another billion are expected to be built in the next six years.

The problem of surplus PCs is part of a bigger issue described by the European Commission as Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (amusingly abbreviated as WEEE), known less pedantically in the USA as e-waste, and dubbed by some environmentalists as techno trash. The relentless advance of technology and our consumerist wish for the latest gizmo mean more and more obsolescence and waste.

The UK alone produces one million tonnes a year and this is set to double by 2010. White goods - things like microwaves - contribute 43% of this figure, while IT - including computers - is the next largest component at 39%. Consumer electronics - predominantly televisions - is next on the list at 8%.

So where does all this material go and what is done with it?

Much of it goes into landfills, further spoiling and even endangering our environment. At its worst, it is shipped out to impoverished communities in countries like China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam and Singapore. Here it is broken up to recover component materials of steel, aluminium, copper, plastic and gold.

This is hazardous work. Wires are burned in the open air, creating toxic fumes, to free the metals from their plastic surrounds; computer monitors are broken up by hand to extract tiny amounts of copper; circuit boards are melted over coal grills to release valuable chips but also toxic vapours; leftover plastics are either burned, creating piles of contaminated ash, or dumped into rivers or canals, polluting the water. The people who do this dirty and dangerous work typically receive less than £1 a day for it.

European nations have now signed a total ban on toxic waste exports, although some European waste still seems to be sent to India and Pakistan. But the USA refuses to sign the ban.

Meanwhile the European Parliament has adopted a WEEE Directive and a related measure called "the restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment" (RoHS). These ban untreated e-waste from landfills, bans most hazardous materials from electronic goods, sets recovery and recycling targets for e-waste, and, most crucially, shifts the onus of waste disposal to the producers of these goods in a process called Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR).

So the focus is very much on recovery and recycling, but ultimately we might see a shift to redesign, making greater use of more resource-friendly and reusable components.

However, it would be good to think that at least some of those PCs no longer wanted in the rich West could be refurbished and redistributed to less privileged communities in the developing world.

World Computer Exchange (WCE) is an educational non-profit organisation in the USA focused on helping the world's poorest youth to bridge the disturbing global divides in information, technology and understanding. WCE does this by keeping donated Pentiums, Power Macs, and Laptops out of landfills and giving them new life connecting youth to the Internet in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

In more localised schemes, it is possible to redistribute computers unwanted by businesses to local schools or community centres.

Of course, a really radical approach to the problem of computer obsolescence would be to rethink totally the role of the PC, making it a relatively 'dumb' terminal - requiring less frequent replacement - by putting much more of the intelligence and power in the network. This was model envisaged by Larry Ellison, the maverick head of Oracle, when he talked of the 'network computer' in the mid 1990s. But it will never happen.

Links:
"The High Tech Trashing Of Asia" click here
The current version of the European Directive on WEEE click here
The current version of the European Directive on RoHs click here
Latest progress on the WEEE and RoHS development in the UK click here
World Computer Exchange click here
Environment Agency guide to regulations for the electronics industry click here
"Just Say No To E-Waste" click here
Tools For Schools click here
Computer Aid International click here
US Computer Takeback Campaign click here
Electronics Recycler's Pledge of True Stewardship click here
Cartridges4Charity click here

Whether you want a mate or a date, you would be amazed who you can meet on-line, writes our Internet columnist Roger Darlington

HOW TO NET A MATE

I recently took out to lunch in London a young American woman called Emily who - together with her partner - was making her first trip outside the United States. Although I had never met her, I already knew more about Emily than most people I've known for decades and appreciated that for instance we shared strong criticisms of the Bush administration.

How come? Diligent readers of this column may remember a piece I wrote for the May issue of "Review" concerning the growing phenomenon of blogging [click here]. At the end of that piece, I said that I was even thinking of starting a blog myself - and I did. As a result, I have been in contact with others bloggers around the world, including Emily who runs a fascinating blog from Portland in Oregon.

Several of my friends have used the Net to seek meaningful relationships and, in at least one case, the impact has been life transforming.

Peter (at this point, I switch to fictitious names) is a professional man in his late 20s. His technical skills are stronger than his chat up lines but, in any event, his job takes him all around the country and he has neither the time nor the opportunity to meet many young, single women. So he joined an on-line dating agency.

Mary is a single attractive woman in her early 40s who has had several relationships. She leads a busy life career-wise and certainly has no desire to cruise bars looking for guys who just might share her interests. She has used several Internet dating agencies and met many interesting men as a result.

Paul is in his late 30s and has recently come out of a painful divorce. The idea of dating again was, in many respects, an uncomfortable one. He recognised that he had a fair bit of emotional baggage and that meeting someone who understood him and shared his interests was not going to be easy.

He joined an Internet agency and eventually struck up an on-line friendship with a woman living at the other end of the country whom he who would never have met in the physical world. They got to know each other well through the Internet and phone calls before actually meeting and they now live together at what was her place.

Peter, Paul and Mary (I know!) are just the tip of the iceberg when it come to on-line friendships and dating. All sorts of specialist web sites are now being set up.

For instance, if you are a young Muslim who accepts the notion of arranged marriages but does not want to leave the choice entirely to your parents, there are web sites focused precisely on this situation. Such sites enable customers to specify what branch of Islam and what cultural beliefs and practices any potential partner should follow.

Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages to finding a friend or date on-line.

The main benefits are access to a far wider range of possibilities than is possible by going to parties or bars and the opportunity to establish in advance whether you share important interests.

The principal disadvantage is the risk of emotional hurt if the person one meets is not like the image they created on-line - plus the (remote) possibility that the person may be threatening or abusive.

So, the normal rules apply. Spend some time learning about someone on-line before meeting in the 'real' world and, if in any doubt, meet in a public place and even take along a friend.

Children are much less inhibited than adults in making friends on-line but, of course, they are much more vulnerable too. Many children use chat rooms and sadly some paedophiles enter chat rooms, adopt a false persona, and seek to win children's friendships through a process know as 'grooming'.

So, if you are a parent with a child who uses the Internet, the rules you must insist upon are:

Links:
Udate click here
Dating Direct click here
Face Party click here
Make Friends Online click here
Love @ Lycos click here
Muslim Match click here
Muslim Marriages click here

Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington tackles a question that would have challenged Hamlet.

3G OR NOT 3G? - THAT IS THE QUESTION

For a few weeks in the spring of 2000, some of the brightest business brains in Britain went bonkers. The result was that, between them, five companies paid a total of £22.5B in an auction for third generation (3G) mobile licences.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer was delighted and promptly used this unexpected munificence to reduce the national debt. However, ever since then, analysts have wondered how it would be possible for these services to generate the sort of revenues and profits that would make such investments remotely credible.

Jump forward three or so years and where are we?

Only one of the networks - the appropriately named 3 [click here] - is operating and it is struggling to reach its proclaimed target of a million customers by the year end. Many of its customers have been attracted by its ultra-competitive prices for basic voice services rather than by its more advanced features.

Meanwhile one of 3's shareholders, the Dutch telecoms group KPN, is being sued by its main shareholder Hutchison Whampoa in a dispute over the Dutch company's unwillingness to provide further funding.

None of the other four 3G licence holders has announced firm launch plans. Meanwhile two of them - mmo2 [click here] and T-Mobile [click here] - have substantially written down the value of their investment.

So, what is the future for 3G?

I recently visited 3's offices in central London and got to play with an NEC e606 clam-shell 3G phone [click here]. The technology is, of course, in its infancy, but it is already clear that an exciting range of new services is on the way.

One service - using a version of GPS - tells you where you are or where you want to be and where to find the nearest cash point, cinema or whatever. Using the same service, you can send a friend a map and directions for a meeting or social event.

3G phones can act as a picture phone or a video phone and you can send the picture or the video to relatives or friends. You can download short video clips of weather information, news reports, sports events or music. There are full-colour high-resolution games.

What I really look forward to - and it will come - is broadband access to the Web while on the move.

But the 3G licence holders do face some formidable hurdles.

The first set is technical. 3 has struggled with battery and handset problems. Roll-out of nationwide coverage will be costly and slow because the network requires many more masts than existing mobile networks. Then there are international problems, since three different technical standards are operating worldwide.

The next set of problems revolve around services which can compete in some respects with 3G but at lower cost. Using GPRS technology (known as 2.5G), existing mobile operators can provide similar services - such as shorter, less resolution video clips - for more competitive prices. Then, if one is not on the move, increasingly Wi-Fi can provide a fast and economically priced service.

Above all, 3G does not yet have compelling content, still less a killer application. But more attractive content is coming: news, star interviews, sports clips, music clips, video wallpaper, comedy clips, video trailers. Expect to see next the offer of adult pornography protected by a pin code system, followed by controversy because some under18s find a way round this system.

Furthermore it is not possible to predict how people will use a new technology (who would have forecast the attraction of texting?) and no doubt exciting new applications will evolve. Location-based services and the delivery of public services may be very successful.

In short then, 3G networks have a mountain to climb before those who invested in them will see any sort of decent return, but in time 3G will probably achieve a ubiquity and utility greater than most can currently imagine.

Many new technical developments have been the subject of early cynicism or ridicule, but historically the gap between mockery and mass take-up has often proved to be astonishingly quick.

So 3G does have a future, but it will take some years and strong nerves before it succeeds. Whether all five players will survive is another matter, with the first in the field (3) probably the most likely to be taken over.

New year, new technology, new challenge - our Internet columnist Roger Darlington explains all.

VoIP - THE SMALL ACRONYM WITH BIG IMPLICATIONS

Ever since the Internet 'took off' as a data network - for sending e-mail and browsing web sites - companies have been exploring the option of putting voice traffic onto the Net or other networks deploying the same technical specifications. Since the Internet uses particular protocols (known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or TCP/IP), this development is called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

VoIP has been around for years, but it is now starting to have a major impact on the thinking and planning of telcos like BT - and for good reason.

For business customers, in the past, IP telephony has been plagued by doubts over line quality by end users and concerns about relying on one network (instead of deploying dedicated voice and data networks). However, these problems are now diminishing, as a result of improved technology and greater investment in in-house systems. The major remaining problem is the much greater cost of handsets.

For most domestic customers, VoIP currently means using a pair of lightweight headphones with a PC to make and receive calls at nil cost even if these calls - as is usually the case - are international. However, it is already possible to make VoIP calls over a traditional analogue telephone provided one has a special adaptor connected to an ASDL or cable broadband service.

In future, residential customers will obtain VoIP packaged as a standard item with their broadband provision.

In a number of countries, VoIP has already taken off and Britain cannot be far behind. Examples include:

A report by the Yankee Group, released in October 2003, states that 83% of European operators surveyed by the group are expected to be offering VoIP services within two to three years. The main reasons given are more cost-effectiveness, ability to bundle voice and data services, and provision of more compelling broadband services.

The switch to VoIP will further diminish the core revenues of traditional telcos like BT - already being hit by a combination of ferocious competition, excess capacity and tough regulation. VoIP customers will not pay by calls made, but instead pay a flat-rate charge for unlimited calls along the current model for broadband Internet.

Consequently the whole basis on which tariff structures have traditionally rested could be swept away. Already there are tariff options which are not based on numbers of calls (such as BT Together). Within five years, telco customers will not buy lines or calls at all, but packages and bandwidth.

This will have enormous implications for how telcos market their products and account for their revenues. It will also affect regulatory controls, since market share will no longer be measurable by call volumes.

At this early stage, we can only speculate about the impact on staffing, but it seems likely that over time VoIP will have a significant impact on staff numbers, skill levels, and workplace locations.

For Connect members, the move to VoIP has to be seen in the context of BT's moves to what it calls "the 21 century network" and is more generically known throughout telcos as "next generation networks". BT aims to cut operating expenditure on its network by 30-40% in five years, representing an annual saving of some £1B by 2008.

Key aspects of this new network have still to be decided, notably where the intelligence should reside and how open the network should be. The main purposes of the new network, however, are to reduce the complexity and rigidity of the system so that new services can be provided quickly and flexibly. A good example will be the provision of broadband on demand or what is now being called 'liquid broadband'.

The 21st century network will have fewer exchanges and buildings and lower levels of network staffing. Therefore there will be staffing reductions and relocation and reskilling of many of the staff who remain. It will represent the largest technology/staffing challenge for the company, its staff and its unions since the days of the introduction of System X exchanges and the Customer Services System (CSS).

Links:
My guide to VoIP click here
Wikipedia page on VoIP click here
OECD paper on VoIP click here
Federal Communications Commission Panel on VoIP click here
Vonage - The Broadband Phone Company click here
MediaRing VoIP service click here
Skype P2P VoIP service click here

Secretly and silently a new technology is set to transform our lives. Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington asks:

ARE THEY PLAYING TAG WITH YOUR LIBERTY?

Very few people have heard of it and virtually no one has actually seen it. The technical name is Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), but think of it as an electronic tag.

It is a tiny micro-chip. It measures less than a third of a millimetre wide - little bigger than a grain of sand. It contains a microscopic antenna - invisible to the naked eye - that broadcasts via very low-power radio. It beams information in the form of a 96 digit identity code to reader devices located up to 10 metres way.

It is set to replace the ubiquitous bar code and, in some ways, it is similar to it. The main differences are that it can be read at a distance and it can be encrypted, protected, and written to as well as read from.

It will begin - indeed it has started - with pallets and batches of products. A big boost was given last year when Wal-Mart [click here], the world's largest retailer, insisted that its top 100 suppliers use RFID tags by 2005. Even bigger news was the anouncement by the US Department of Defense that it would require the same from its suppliers.

Meanwhile there is a shop called the Future Store [click here], owned by the Metro Group, in Rheinberg Germany which is already completely based around RFID through the extended supply chain, linking to in-store customer relations management (CRM) and loyalty programmes, and trolleys which are simply swiped past a check-out full of goods.

The next stage is to tag all consumer products and goods. Another major push came with the formation of the Auto ID Centre, a consortium of 100 global companies and five of the world's leading research centres, which has launched the electronic product code (EPC), the successor to the bar code [for details click here].

The EPC system will permit every product in the world to have a unique number. Via the radio transmission of these devices to readers connected to networks, they can all be linked to the Internet in what some people are already calling "the Internet of things".

But why stop at things? Animals with a high financial value, like cows, and animals with a high emotional attachment, like cats, are already being tagged.

Will it end with animals? Certain classes of criminals are already being tagged. What about tagging children so that, if they are lost or abducted, they can be easily found? What about tagging babies with details of blood group, allergies, or congenital problems? As the baby becomes a child and then an adult, one could add data on all inoculations and major illnesses.

Does this sound crazy? Well, a US firm is looking for banks willing to ask their customers to have RFID chips implanted under their skin as a replacement for debit and credit cards [for further information click here].

How quickly will things happen? The current consensus is that it will take around a decade for tagging to reach the level of individual products. I think it will be faster.

There are massive advantages, not all of which can be currently foreseen.

Manufacturers and retailers will be able to revolutionise supply chain management, significantly reducing costs and ensuring constant availability of goods, both benefits which can be passed on to the consumer. The customer will not have to queue at check-out desks because the RFID reader will scan all purchases instantly. If a food product is found to be contaminated, its entire history will be immediately available.

Once at home, tags could highlight when the 'eat by' date of food has passed or indicate if a medicine has contra-indications or if a plug has the incorrect fuse. When the technology develops a little, the smart fridge could order replacement products and the smart washing machine could determine the correct temperature for the wash.

There are an enormous number of applications in the fields of crime and security. London's new bus and tube tickets already work this way [for details click here]. The European Central Bank is working on a project to embed RFID into every Euro note by 2005. What about tagging every gun and rifle?

Of course, as with any new technology, there are dangers - in this case, many threats to privacy.

At its most fearsome, RFID systems could trigger CCTV cameras to record customers buying particular goods (this actually happened in a trial involving Gillette razor blades at a Tesco store in Cambridge)[for details of company use of RFID click here].

Such privacy concerns have prompted the establishment of an alliance of 30 European and American libertarian organisations to issue a statement [for text click here] calling for a voluntary moratorium on the use of RFID until a formal technology assessment process involving all stakeholders takes place.

Some chance. It's already moving too fast - and it's coming soon to a store near you.

Links:
Association for Automatic Identification and Data Capture Technogies click here
RFID Journal click here
Home Office Chipping of Goods Initiative click here
Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering click here
No Tags UK campaign click here
National Consumer Council statement click here
"Tagging goes global" by Jack Schofield click here
"Chips with everything" by Mary O'Hara click here
Possible use of RFID in the NHS click here

Thought e-commerce had flopped? Think again, urges our Internet columnist Roger Darlington.

E-COMMERCE MEANS CLICKS AND MORTAR

Remember the late 1990s? The media was full of e-commerce taking over the world and spotty young entrepreneurs were becoming paper millionaires by opening a dotcom company with the vaguest outline of a business plan.

Inevitably it all went horribly wrong with the stock market crash of April 2000. Since then, we've heard very little about e-commerce - so what's going on?

According to IMRG [click here], the trade body for on-line retailing, UK consumer sales increased by around 80% in 2003, taking the total to £14 billion. This may still be a small proportion of the total retail market, but Net sales are growing at something like 10 times the retail market as a whole. Already Royal Mail believes that on-line sales have overtaken mail order catalogues in its share of the total retail market.

British success stories include such very different businesses as the travel operation lastminute.com [click here], the gadget company firebox.com [click here], and the bra business amplebosom.com [click here].

At the global level, we are seeing some major dotcom companies actually making money. Both Amazon [click here] and Ask Jeeves [click here] have announced their first full-year profits. Google [click here] is planning a stock market flotation.

BBC 2 television recently ran a feature in the Money Programme series entitled "Dotcoms Bounce Back". So, why is it different now, compared to the crazy days of the dotcom boom?

On the supply sides, companies - and crucially their bankers and investors - are now much more tough-minded and realistic about their prospects and plans. On the demand side, we have twice as many people on-line and many are now on broadband.

The other interesting development is that most of the successful companies are not pure on-line operations, but extensions of businesses with real assets and a proven record in the physical marketplace - a case of 'clicks and mortar'.

Here in Britain, only four of the top 20 Internet retailers are pure e-commerce: Amazon [click here], e-Bay [click here], Kelkoo [click here] and CD Wow! [click here]. The rest are well-established retailers like Tesco [click here], Next [click here] and Argos [click here].

In many respects, Amazon is an example of e-commerce at its best.

When I access the web site, because I have already made purchases from the site, it welcomes me by name and makes recommendation as to the books, CDs and DVDs that I might like to purchase based on the tastes revealed by previous transactions. Since the site has a record of my credit card details and my delivery address, I have the option of making a further purchase quite literally with one click.

But not all e-commerce operations are this slick and not all Net users are so familiar with such transactions. The key factors determining the growth of e-commerce can be categorised as the 'four Cs'.

First, connectivity. It is self-evident that you cannot engage in e-commerce unless you have a connection to the Internet and, in spite of recent growth, half the population is still not on the Net and penetration seems to have stalled.

Second, cost. It is essential that consumers can surf at leisure, so that they can compare and contrast e-commerce offerings and take time to choose best value products and services, so broadband prices need to fall still further.

Third, cash. By definition, e-commerce has to involve some form of payment and this is primarily through the use of credit cards, but there are some consumer concerns about the privacy of data and credit card scams, so we need to develop various new forms of e-cash including smart cards.

Fourth, confidence If e-commerce is to thrive, consumers should not fear ordering goods and services because they are concerned whether they will receive exactly what they want and whether they will be able to return easily defective or unwanted items, so we need effective and trusted best practice schemes among e-retailers.

Unquestionably, the main factor holding back consumer e-commerce is concern about security.

IMRG has established a scheme called Internet Shopping Is Safe or ISIS [click here]. This scheme carries out an annual audit of security and service on the sites of its members. The Office of Fair Trading has a section of its web site devoted to shopping from home [click here] and the Department of Trade & Industry has launched a special section of its web site to advise consumers on e-shopping [click here].

Meanwhile most of e-commerce is totally unknown to and unseen by consumers because it is business-to-business (B2B) as opposed to business-to-consumer (B2C). On some estimates, B2B accounts for around 80% of all e-commerce. Such operations link retailers, manufacturers and suppliers, strengthening the supply chain and reducing costs to the ultimate benefit of consumers.

Links:
Introduction to e-commerce click here
E-commerce in Britain click here

This issue, our Internet columnist Roger Darlington considers a subject most of us would rather not think about too much:

EXTREMISM ON THE NET

As regular readers of this column will be aware, I am a passionate enthusiast for the Internet. But I have always been well aware that the Net has a dark side.

My concerns were brought into sharp focus when I was recently interviewed for ITN in my capacity as Chair of the Internet Watch Foundation [click here]. My interviewer was Sue Barnett, the sister of Jane Longhurst who was murdered by Graham Coutts [for information on the case click here]. During the trial of Coutts, the court heard how he had repeatedly accessed web sites depicting violent sex and how elements of his actions mirrored what he had seen on-line.

The issue of violent sexual images on the Net is simply the most high profile of a range of deeply offensive material which includes political fascism, skinhead fascism, white power, white supremacy, militia groups, race hate, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, world conspiracy, religious cults, Islamic militancy, virulent anti-homosexuality, pro-anorexia/bulimia, virulent anti-abortionism, violent propagation of animal rights, sports hooliganism, violent political activism, bombmaking information, and suicide assistance - to name a few.

Of course, some of these categories merge into one another or overlap. For instance, many white supremacy sites endorse conspiracy theories and many Islamic militancy sites are anti-Semitic.

Now these views have always been held and propagated, but with 'old' media - such as pamphlets, books, newspapers, radio and television - outlets are limited and usually come at a price, while publishers, editors and regulators exercise a web of control. In the case of the Internet, anyone can publish any view at any time with virtually nil cost and no controls whatsoever.

It is as easy for a white supremacist to put up a web site as for a multi-national company and the same number of Net users - approaching half a billion world-wide - have the same private access, literally at the click of a mouse. In this new kind of virtual environment, the extremist has a voice of a power and reach that he could never hope for in the physical world.

What is to be done?

First, we have to accept that the Internet will never be controlled like radio and television and, in many respects, this is a strength of the medium. It empowers citizens and democratises our world.

However, governments and legislatures around the globe need to review the relevance and adequacy of laws devised before the Net was even imagined, so that maybe UK laws on obscenity and race hate need modernising to make them more appropriate to the world of the web.

We need to understand though that, wherever the law draws the line, it is likely to be different in different countries and we are dealing with a worldwide network. Furthermore, wherever the line is drawn, there will always be plenty of material on the legal side of that line that is grossly offensive to many and potentially harmful to children.

Therefore, when grossly offensive material is brought to their attention, hosting companies should ask themselves whether they really want to host such material. Understandably such companies do not want to appear to be acting as moral guardians or censors.

However, where the creation of such material involves abuse or harm or where viewing such material may well encourage or incite the viewer to commit harm, there is an obligation on the company to think very hard about their responsibility.

Ultimately, though, all Internet users - and especially parents, teachers and those with responsibility for children and other vulnerable groups - need to accept a measure of responsibility for the use of the Net by those in their charge.

Rating of web sites and use of filtering software certainly have a role to play, but are far from perfect tools. Parents and teachers need to have clear understandings with children about acceptable and responsible use of the Internet and to monitor that use closely and sensitively.

There has been too much moral panic about the Internet, whipped up often by populist newspapers that know little about the web and are mainly interested with selling more copies of their paper. What we need is more informed and balanced debate about what is technically possible and politically acceptable and what role each of the parties - including you and me - have to play.

Links:
"Sex On The Net" click here
"Extremism On The Net" click here

We act as if everyone is busy surfing the web, but half of Britons are still not connected. Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington wonders why and floats an innovative idea.

HAS NET GROWTH STALLED?

Of course, Internet subscriptions and broadband take-up continue to grow - but not as fast as they should. There are now 14.5 million Internet subscriptions in the UK which is 50% of all households. Broadband accounts for 3.5 million subscriptions, about a quarter of the Internet total.

What seems to be happening is that existing Internet users are up-grading to broadband, but the total of Internet users is only edging up slowly, as we appear to reach some kind of plateau.

A similar thing seems to be happening in the USA where the number of Internet users is also increasing only slowly now, although the plateau there is higher at around 60-65% and around four out of ten of those have broadband.

Another interesting point is that those who switch to broadband frequently do so in order to do exactly what they have previously done with a narrowband connection, but with the convenience of an 'always-on' connection and a flat-rate subscription. Put another way, broadband users are not using the extra bandwidth for services which require that additional speed.

Which all leads us to two related dilemmas. Why aren't people connecting to the Internet in much greater numbers and, once connected, why aren't they using the extra bandwidth which is now available?

No doubt cost is factor, especially for lower income groups, and prices need to fall still further. The new communications regulator Ofcom will be looking at the pricing of BT's wholesale broadband product and at the options for competitive wholesale offerings through local loop unbundling.

Certainly we need more compelling broadband services and content. BT has made some useful moves recently with the launch of Broadband Voice [click here] and Rich Media [click here] and other players need to rise to the challenge.

But I suspect that more fundamentally there are two related answers to the questions on slow take up and low-scale usage: lack of confidence and lack of knowledge.

There is a whole generation of consumers - broadly anyone over 40 - for whom computing and the Internet are strange, even frightening, phenomena, unless their work has brought them into contact with these technologies.

These consumers are not comfortable with fitting a modem and connecting to an Internet service provider, they worry about the risk of viruses and spam, and they are terrified at the idea of the PC crashing.

They have no real idea how to make focused use of a search engine, they know very little about how to create and organise favourites, and they know nothing about downloading software or MP3 files. They might be excited about the idea of having a simple web site or weblog but would have no clue about how to start.

Now, of course, many people - typically those under 40 - have used the technology at school, college, university and work. Far from fearing the technology, they love it and delight at searching out new sites and trying out new applications.

So, is there a low-cost, user-friendly way of connecting these two constituencies to enable Internauts to help out Internoughts?

We could have a national web site where those who need help and those who can offer it can register and then a postcode search facility would enable people to find each other. At the local level, churches, residents' associations, community groups, and newspapers could act as 'clearing houses' to put those who need support in touch with those who can provide it.

How would it work?

Albert, a retired postal worker of 64, is visited by Jason, a 19 year old media studies student at the local college. Jason sets up Albert's Internet connection and installs a firewall and anti-virus protection. He calls round for an hour each weekend for the next couple of months to answer Albert's queries and show him how to make best use of his e-mail and the web.

When Albert gets into trouble, he telephones or e-mails - or texts - Jason who immediately offers practical advice and reassurance. Albert and Jason find that they enjoy each other's company, do other things together, and introduce some of their friends.

The scheme - provisionally called NetAid - would benefit from national branding and resources, but essentially would be a local, volunteer-driven initiative. Any takers?

Link: Ofcom's Internet and broadband brief click here

Getting connected to the Net is only the start, argues our Internet columnist Roger Darlington. We want users who are informed and critical or, put another way, media literate.

MEDIA LITERACY IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET

The new communications regulator Ofcom has no less than 263 statutory duties as a result of the Communications Act 2003. One of the least known, but most important, is a specific duty - set out in Section 11 of the Act - to promote media literacy.

The notion of media literacy is an extension to the audiovisual world of the traditional idea of literacy with which we are so familiar in the written world. Originally media literacy concerned radio, television, video and cinema, but Ofcom - in spite of having no responsibility for regulating Internet content - rightly appreciates that the Internet cannot be left out of any initiatives which are taken in this field.

There are many reasons why media literacy must embrace the Internet:

But what exactly is media literacy? And what does it mean specifically for Internet users?

Ofcom's consultation document on media literacy gives a succinct but comprehensive definition, suggesting that "media literacy is a range of skills including the ability to access, analyse, evaluate and produce communications in a variety of forms".

The four elements of the definition are expressed as "the ability to operate the technology to find what you are looking for, to understand that material, to have an opinion about it and where necessary to respond to it".

In the particular context of the Internet, these four elements raise the following issues:

This is only a brief run-though of some of the issues which are raised by media literacy in the age of the Internet, but it is sufficient to make clear that the Net has to be part of any meaningful and comprehensive media literacy programme.

In fact, the specific proposals in the Ofcom document are limited in number, although quite ambitious in scope.

First, there will be an Ofcom programme of research to determine consumer knowledge and needs. This should include what users appreciate about the dangers of illegal and harmful content on the Internet and what they know about the tools available to minimise access to such material.

Second, Ofcom will promote what it calls "connecting, partnering and signposting" to direct people to advice and guidance concerning the new communications technologies. As far as the Net is concerned, this should include direction on how to deal with spam, scams, and viruses as well as problematic content, the danger of chat rooms, and difficulties with e-commerce operations.

Third, Ofcom wants to encourage a common content labelling scheme for electronic audiovisual material delivered across all platforms. A system for labelling Internet content already exists [see the ICRA site click here] and the relationship between Internet content and other audiovisual material must be part of the debate.

It is a substantial agenda but, at its best, media literacy means an efficient worker, an informed consumer, an active citizen, and a protected child.

Links:
Ofcom's strategy on media literacy click here
"What Is Media Literacy?" by Sonia Livingstone click here
"The Changing Nature And Uses Of Media Literacy" by Sonia Livingstone click here
"Assessing The Media Literacy Of UK adults" by Sonia Livingstone with Nancy Thumim click here

As the Web is weaved ever wider and deeper, it becomes more and more necessary to know where to go and how to search. Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington offers some tips and techniques.

HOW TO UNSTITCH THE WEB

In 1994, there were merely 3,000 web sites. Twelve months later, the number of sites had climbed to 25,000. By 2000, it was 7 million. Today the figure is something like 10 million.

Some web sites are literally one page. But one I use a lot contains 32,000 articles. A large number of sites contain rubbish. Many which are not rubbish are nevertheless seriously out of date.

So how can we make sense of this huge information network and find the material we want? The answer is two-fold: creating a comprehensive set of 'favourite' sites and learning a few good search techniques. Many Connect members will be very familiar with such tools but might want to advise and assist less Net-savvy family and friends.

The starting point for any list of 'favourites' should be a couple of good news sites. Personally I think that the BBC [click here] and the "Guardian" [click here] are the best general news sites in the world. Google News [click here] is useful because it syndicates different sources

Weblogs (or blogs) are frequently great sites for news because they are often focused on a particular interest, are usually up-dated very regularly, and display the most recent material at the top of the site.

For instance, Connect members could do worse than check out my blog CommsWatch [click here] which carries news of telecommunications, broadcasting and the Internet. Two other good blogs on communications issues are OfcomWatch [click here] and that of my Ofcom Consumer Panel colleague Azeem Azhar [click here].

Any set of 'favourites' should include a weather site such as that of the BBC [click here] and a couple of travel sites such as National Rail Enquiries [click here] plus a finder or locational site such as Streetmap [click here].

There are now over 100 competing directory enquiry services, but I do not understand why anyone on the Net would want to use them when one can access BT's on-line directory service [click here].

It is a good idea to have 'favourites' which enable you to locate your Member of Parliament, such as TheyWorkForYou [click here] and various Government Departments and your local council, such as Directgov [click here].

Obviously you will want some 'favourites' which reflect your hobbies or interests. For instance, I am a big film fan and there is nothing better for me that the Internet Movie Database [click here]. My favourite television programme is "The West Wing" and I can check out episode synopses and background information on a fan site [click here].

The last type of 'favourite' which is an absolute must-have is some sort of on-line encylopaedia and, for me, there is little to beat Wikipedia [click here].

Most large web sites - including my own [click here] - have a search facility and certainly, when exploring the web as a whole, you will need a good search engine.

Currently the best search engine is Google [click here], but this may not always be the case and it is rumoured that Blinkx [click here] is one to watch. It is worth studying advice on the Google site about the basics of searching and how to conduct an advanced search. This advice includes the following points:

A final tip: when you have a favourite site or find a site through searching, check out the links from that site which will often take you to material of similar nature and provenance.

Links:
The basics of Google search click here
Advanced search on Google click here
10 tips for using Google click here

Thought that the browser war was long over? Well, serious skirmishes continue. Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington reports from the battlefront.

THE BATTLE OF THE BROWSERS

After e-mail, the most used feature of the Internet is unquestionably the web. But no surfer would be able to make sense of the web without a browser, the software that converts masses of complex code into text and graphics.

For most people, this is not an issue because they simply use the browser which comes bundled into their operating system and, since the vast majority of PC owners use Microsoft Windows, that means that they use Microsoft's browser Internet Explorer (IE).

Yet it was not always so. The first mass-market web browser was Mosaic developed by Marc Andreessen. In 1995, Mosaic morphed into Netscape Navigator which is still around. However, Bill Gates quickly realised the importance of the web and paid out $2M to buy browser code from a company called Spyglass and subsequently launch Internet Explorer.

IE was bundled into Microsoft's Windows 95 and war commenced. In 1997, Netscape Navigator was the clear leader with 72% of the browser market, compared to Internet Explorer 3's 18%. But, towards the end of that year, there came IE 4. This was much better than Navigator and, by bundling it into Windows 98, Microsoft dealt a killer bow to its rival. So, within a couple of years (1996-1997), Gates had won a crushing victory over Netscape.

One of the most damaging features of the browser war was that it weakened compliance with standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

For years now, IE's dominance has been near total with around 96% of web surfers using the Microsoft product. Besides the lack of competition and choice, there have been two main problems with this hegemony.

First, Microsoft essentially stopped developing its browser. With only one major up-grade since 1999, IE is now technologically behind its rivals with significantly fewer features.

Second, Explorer is a security nightmare with plenty of flaws that can and have been exploited by hackers and virus writers. Since the browser is so ubiquitous, these flaws literally have worldwide consequences with viruses infecting million of PCs in a matter of days or even hours.

Microsoft has promised that in 2006 it will launch a major up-grade of its Windows operating system code-named "Longhorn". The company claims that this will deliver "major improvements in user productivity, important new capabilities for software developers, and significant advancements in security, deployment and reliability".

In the meanwhile, the battle is not totally over and there is a rumble in the hills. During the summer, it transpired that - according to figures from US analysts WebSideStory - Microsoft's market share fell by a percentage point from 95.73% to 94.73% as rivals started to eat into Gates' lead. This might yet signify a significant turning of the tide.

The competitors include Mozilla's Firefox , Apple's Safari and Opera. According to Mozilla, downloads of its Firefox browser have hit 200,000 per day and I have recently become one of its newest users.

Firefox is open source, completely free, and easy to install. It has several advantages over Explorer and has richer features than the market leader.

It is much more secure and keeps your computer safe from malicious spyware by not loading harmful ActiveX controls. A comprehensive set of privacy tools keep your online activity your business. Also it stops those utterly infuriating pop up advertisements.

It provides a function known as tabbed browsing. This enables you to view more than one web page in a single window. There are open links in the background, so that they are ready for viewing when you are ready to read them.

Another feature called Live Bookmarks is popular with people like me who read weblogs. This is a new technology that lets you view RSS (Really Simple Syndication) news and blog headlines in the bookmarks toolbar or bookmarks menu.

It may be that the battle of the browsers is about to get bloodier. The Net is buzzing with rumours that search engine specialist Google is now working on a web browser. Several weblogs have put together a series of developments which suggest that the search engine is developing new web tools, while one US newspaper has reported that Google has poached former Microsoft workers who created early versions of the Internet Explorer browser.

The war is not yet over …

Links:
The browser war click here
Internet Explorer click here
Netscape Navigator click here
Mozilla Firefox click here

Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington is known for 'thinking the unthinkable', but maybe even he has gone too far in asking:

CAN THE INTERNET SURVIVE?

This was the title of a seminar that I attended recently. The event was held at the London Business School and organised by the Oxford Internet Institute [click here]. The main speaker was Professor David Farber, of the Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. So - in spite of the seemingly alarmist title - the discussion was a serious affair.

At one level, the answer to the question is obvious: 'The Internet has to survive because it is now so critical to so many governments, companies, organisations and individuals'. At another level, though, the answer is very different: 'The Internet is now being used for so many more purposes by so many more people than for which it was designed that it cannot continue to exist in its present form for much longer'.

Above all, the Internet is just so vulnerable to attack and to failure - as a result of viruses, worms, hackers and spammers.

For most people, the major use of the Net is e-mail. But the growth of spam e-mail has resulted in something like 80% of all e-mail now being unsolicited and unwanted. The volume of spam is literally slowing down the Net and it is forcing many people to rethink their use of this incredibly useful and versatile facility.

At the corporate level, companies are suffering 'denial of service' attacks (when web sites are overwhelmed by e-mail from multiple locations) and 'phishing' (when web sites are mocked up to look like genuine commercial sites) plus straightforward hacking and theft. But the Net was never designed to locate the original source of data or a message, so tracking down offenders is often very difficult.

Even where there is no malevolent intent, we have problems. The Net was never intended to operate with the reliability of a public telephone network, yet increasingly it is being used for services where reliability is critical such as telephony itself, airline ticketing systems, and - much more seriously - critical infrastructures such as the electricity network or national security systems.

To understand how all this has come about, we need to start at the beginning. The Internet was first developed and used by a small number of technical and academic individuals (mostly Americans) who knew and trusted each other. Therefore the sociology of the Net is one of an open community - free for anyone to enter and free for anyone to do anything.

These early pioneers had few thoughts about security or commerciality and never envisaged that some users would set out deliberately to frustrate and undermine the experience of others. Therefore the open architecture of the Net makes it a wild frontier for spammers, scammers and hackers, for copyrights abusers, for child pornographers, and many more.

The whole philosophy of the Net is to enable those data packets to get through by one route or the other. The network does not know, still less care, about the content or the importance or even the source of the data.

Vint Cerf - often described as 'the Father of the Internet' - has been reported as commenting: "I think we're still in the Stone Age when it comes to serious networking".

Of course, technically it would be perfectly possible to bring about a fundamental re-engineering of the architecture of the Internet. After all, companies regularly do this with their private communications networks and telecommunications companies periodically do this with their public networks (for instance, the current move to Internet Protocol networks, such as BT's 21st Century Network).

However, there are two huge problems here.

First, nobody owns or manages or regulates the Internet. So, even when one has a new, improved feature - such as IP version 6 which is a decade old - there is no means to enforce or require global implementation.

Second, the companies that invest in the physical infrastructure of the Net are not generally the ones that make money from the Net. The later tend to be service companies like eBay or Amazon. So there is little incentive for manufacturers to make large-scale, high-risk investments.

As a result, there has been no fundamental changes to the core technologies of Internet in a decade or more. So, how are we going to get out of this mess? Well, that will have to be the subject of another article.

Over the Christmas/New Year break, we were all horrified by the tsunamis in south-east Asia. Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington examines the role of the Net in responding to such an unprecedented disaster.

THE WAVE AND THE WEB

The Boxing Day earthquake off Indonesia and the resultant tsunamis across the Indian Ocean resulted in the greatest humanitarian disaster of our lifetimes. The Internet is the most dramatic technological development of our lifetimes. How has one responded to the other?

There are three answers to this question.

In the hours between the shift in the tectonic plates and the slamming of the tsunamis into coastal communities in 11 countries, there was a total failure to use the technology at our command. In the days and weeks following the catastrophe, the Net provided an extraordinary means of communicating the true scale of the horror and of mobilising unprecedented funding and resources to the stricken communities. In the months and years ahead, we will have to see whether the Net can be used to maintain a focus on what is happening and what is needed.

The tsunamis took several hours to reach most of the shorelines where they caused the damage, yet no one was warned that the waves were coming. Two days after the event, I wrote on my weblog [click here]: "I understand that a sensory system as sophisticated as the one operating in the Pacific Ocean is expensive, but why were there not phone calls and e-mails to the local and national officials of the countries about to be hit and why were radio and television warnings not issued?"

I am still amazed and angered that the relevant authorities did not use all the means of modern communications, including the Net, to warn the threatened communities.

In the first few hours and days after the tsunamis hit, the traditional media could not keep up with the pace of developments as the death toll rose hourly and the true nature of the havoc became more apparent. Only news web sites like the BBC could begin to track what was happening [click here].

In days, bloggers explained to web users how the Richter scale is constructed [click here] and how a tsunami is created [click here]. Then people who had witnessed the events posted dramatic photographs and video clips of the waves coming inland and the destruction that was caused. In the most remote or damaged regions, Net access was not possible, but observers used mobile phones and SMS messages to send information to friends who then put the news on web sites or weblogs.

The newly created South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog quickly became an enormous source of information and news, with sections to post offers of help and requests for help in each of the affected countries [click here]. The Wikipedia site immediately set up a special section to provide detailed information on all aspects of the tsunamis and their aftermath [click here].

In a matter of days, hundreds of others created dedicated spaces on the web. For instance, LabourStart - which reports trade union news around the world - opened a special section to report trade union responses to the disaster [click here].

As the scale of the disaster became clearer, people everywhere wanted to help in some way and the most obvious was to donate money. The British public responded with unparalleled generosity as they contributed to the Disaster Emergency Committee [click here] and other charities, a process made easier by the opportunity to donate on-line. At its peak, the DEC was taking around £1 million an hour, helped considerably by its web site.

All this led the "Guardian" in a leader to refer to the Internet as "an angel of deliverance" [click here].

Then, a couple of days later, there came the news that a hoaxer in Lincolnshire had been charged with e-mailing the relatives of British people lost in the tsunamis to announce that they were dead [click here]. Also, around the world, there were a number of Internet scams seeking to exploit people's willingness to contribute money to the tsunami victims [click here].

What of the future? We know, from sad experience, that the traditional media will soon move its attention and coverage away from south-east Asia to the latest media 'hot spot'. It will be left to web sites and weblogs to maintain the attention on and the pressure for reconstruction efforts that will take years to restore lives, communities and economies.

In short: the events of the last few weeks have underlined that the Net is now so much a part of our lives that its use, abuse and non-use will be a feature of every human activity and event.

Links:
British Foreign & Commonwealth Office click here
British Department for International Development click here
United Nations Reliefweb click here
Telecoms Sans Frontieres click here
Blogs from Thailand click here
Blogs from Malaysia click here
Blogs from Sri Lanka click here

Something momentous is happening to television. Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington warns that it's coming soon to an aerial near you.

THE BIG SWITCHOVER

Since its launch in Britain in 1998, digital television has grown faster than almost any other electronic household good or service and currently some 56% of households obtain digital TV through satellite, cable or terrestrial means.

There are real benefits from going digital: better signal quality, much broader range of programming, new interactive features, and - possibly - a different way of accessing the Internet from buying an expensive PC.

However, not everyone lives in a part of the country that is cabled, not everyone wants to subscribe to satellite, and Freeview - the digital terrestrial service backed by the BBC - can only be received by 73% of homes for technical reasons.

The only way to make digital terrestrial available to virtually all homes in the country is to boost the signal; this can only be done if more spectrum is made available; and more spectrum can only be released by switch off of the existing analogue signal.

Once analogue is switched off, not only does digital TV become accessible to all, but also the new spectrum that becomes available could generate significant income for the Treasury and stimulate the development of new communications services.

So, in September 1999, the Government announced that, at some point, the whole country will go digital in a process characterised - depending on your point of view - as switch off (of analogue), switch on (of digital) or (more neutrally) switchover.

In fact, it will not happen all at once. For complex technical reasons, the process will be carried out television region by television region.

The likely order (but not the timing) has already been announced. The indicative switchover order – subject to final Government decision - is follows:

It will be a massive and immensely complicated operation. We currently have 1,154 transmitters in a variety of locations - all of which will need to be converted.

There are about 25 million television households which contain around 75 million television sets - set-top boxes will need to be installed, some aerials will need to be adjusted, and viewers will need to master a new type of remote control and an electronic program guide (EPG).

Not everyone wants to go digital - they are content with their existing range of programmes and do not want the expense and trouble of switching just to access (as they would see it) a lot more of the same stale material.

Then there are particular groups who will be especially vulnerable in this exercise and the Ofcom Consumer Panel - of which I am a member - has produced a special report for the Secretary of state Tessa Jowell on how best to support these most vulnerable consumers. Our proposals would cost between £250M-£400M.

But the so-called 'refuseniks' and the vulnerable are not going to have a choice. Switchover is going to happen and the Government will have to sell the case and massage the political sensitivities.

In a practical sense, the whole exercise will be managed by a cross-industry group called SwitchCo, headed by broadcaster Barry Cox.

Berlin has already gone digital, but it is only a city, not an entire country. Some countries - like Italy and Spain - have already announced a deadline for conversion, but in reality they are far behind the UK. We are likely to be the first country to make the switchover.

So, when will it happen? The Government has not yet decided but, once the date is determined, it will take around two years to plan and another four years to execute. A good guess is that the first regions will convert in 2008 and the whole process will be complete by 2012.

A lot of organisations - notably electronics manufacturers - are pushing the Government to announce a firm timetable for switchover. They point out that currently consumers are still buying analogue televisions at twice the rate they are purchasing the set-top boxes to make them digital.

This will not change much until consumers believe that switchover will actually take place and know when it will occur. At that point, a massive public awareness programme will need to be launched. But all this will not happen until we get the General Election out of the way.

Links:
DTI/DCMS web site on Digital Television Project click here
"Driving Digital Switchover" - a report from Ofcom to the Secretary of State (April 2004) click here
"Persuasion Or Complusion? Consumers And Analogue Switchoff" - a report from the Consumer Expert Group to the Broadcasting Minister (October 2004) click here
"Supporting The Most Vulnerable Consumers Through Digital Switchover" - a report from the Ofcom Consumer Panel to the Secretary of State (November 2004) click here
"Ofcom Spectrum Management Update: Technical Planning For Digital Switchover Around The UK" (February 2005) click here
"DTI/DCMS Cost/Benefit Analysis Of Digital Switchover" (February 2005) click here

As the nation awaits a general election, our Internet correspondent Roger Darlington looks at the new electronic relationship between government and citizen.

E-GOVERNMENT RULES, OK?

A quiet revolution is taking place in government departments and council offices around the country: one service after another is going on-line. It has taken five years and several billion pounds, but the intention is that by the end of the year all national and local government services will be available electronically.

In practice, 96% of central government services and 98% of the services offered by our 468 councils should meet the target. The aim is to improve services and save costs.

One example of service improvement comes from East Riding council in Yorkshire [click here] which has cut the time taken to process assessments for home care from 24 days to one day. An indication of the financial benefits that might be expected is found in the London borough of Westminster [click here] which expects net savings of £2.86 million in 2007/08.

The first local authority to claim to have all its services e-enabled was the borough of Tameside in Greater Manchester [click here] which hit the target two years ago. Another pioneer was Bracknell Forest in Berkshire [click here] whose leader attended a recent ntl-sponsored breakfast seminar on e-government that I co-chaired.

In preparation for this event, I checked out the web site of my own council which is the London Borough of Brent [click here]. I was impressed: it is available in four non-English languages, it is speech enabled, 100 forms are available on-line, 50 services can be accessed on-line, and there are links to 2,500 other useful sites.

However, e-government has the potential either to confuse or to simplify. On the one hand, the number of e-government sites is now enormous - about 4,000 in the UK. On the other hand, one of the other benefits of e-government is that it enables government to be more 'joined up'.

For instance, all the five councils in Dorset are taking down their individual web sites and they are all now using one county-wide site [click here]. London has 32 boroughs and many other bodies responsible for public services, but soon we can look forward to a portal from London Connects which pulls all these together [click here].

Even more useful is a portal run by the Cabinet Office's E-government Unit which is designed to be a first port of call to all levels of government [click here].

Credit should be given to our government for driving this process. In the latest United Nations survey of e-government [click here], the UK was beaten only by the USA and Denmark in a league table of 143 countries' "e-government readiness".

A hint of where we might go comes from the experience of Fairfax County in Virginia, USA [click here]. This is reckoned to be the most e-enabled authority in the United States and it receives over a million visitors a month. It provides a brilliant range of services from on-line payment of local taxes to its own local television station. There are even sections for parents, teens and kids.

However, we are only at the start of putting government services on-line. The challenges for the future are developing new services and new ways of relating with citizens and enabling and encouraging citizens to make full use of these services and propose new ones. An ntl-sponsored survey has found low awareness of such services.

E-government is very difficult to promote with citizens because most people's interaction with government is infrequent. Therefore they need to be offered incentives: quicker service, cheaper service, new services, and relevant and up-to-date information and advice.

The ideal would be the kind of personalised service that Amazon offers to the site's established customers so that, following a registration process, citizens could be directed to those services or that information most relevant to their needs and circumstances.

Also currently the e-government agenda is all about delivery of services. In the future, it needs to encompass empowerment and participation, so that citizens have more interaction with their elected representatives, more involvement in local issues, and more control over local government.

Of course, all this is irrelevant if one does not have Internet access. Over 40% of UK homes still do not have even an narrowband connection and those citizens who would benefit most from e-government - especially poorer and older citizens - are precisely those groups least likely to be connected. So e-government makes the digital divide an even more relevant and urgent issue.

Links:
Government Connect click here
Financial benefits of e-government click here
E-co-operation between UK local councils click here
UK's position in e-government ratings click here
Solving the authentification problem click here
How it's done in Canada click here

Increasingly you need help navigating yourself around the growing choice of TV channels, as our Internet columnist Roger Darlington explains.

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO TELEVISION

Many readers will remember when you could count the number of available television channels on one hand. However, these days more than half of us have digital television - whether delivered terrestrially or by cable or satellite - so we have access to many hundreds of channels.

As Ronald Reagan might have put it: "You ain't seen nothing yet". The arrival of high-capacity Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) means that both off-line and on-line you will have access to an unbelievable volume and range of television and other video material.

How will you cope? Never fear. The electronic programme guide (EPG) is already here and it is set to become of increasing importance in how we access visual material.

Over half of homes in the UK already make use of an EPG because it comes with their access to digital television. Most users think that the EPG they know is the only one and have no idea of how it is likely to develop.

The most familiar EPG is that supplied by Sky [click here] to its satellite television subscribers, but cable operators Telewest [click here] and ntl [click here] have their own EPGs, the video on demand (VoD) company HomeChoice [click here] has its own, and there are already several others on the market especially for those using digital terrestrial set-top boxes (such as those made by Thomson [click here] and NetGem [click here]).

In the cut-throat competitive world of television, all channels want to be displayed on all guides and they want to be in a position and prominence that encourages viewer access to their programming. Ofcom regulates the way in which channels are displayed on all these broadcast EPGs, but it does not have the power to regulate on-line guides (such as DigiGuide [click here]).

In practice, all the guides place the five public service broadcasting channels - BBC1, ITV 1, Channel 4, Five and S4C - in the first five slots. Usually other channels are organised thematically, so that for instance all the film, sports or music channels tend to be together, but this arrangement does not necessarily suit all viewers.

The functionality of EPGs and the range of programme information to which they provide access will both increase. Indeed, instead of information simply on the current and next programme, many EPGs already offer schedules for the next week or fortnight.

Instead of simply a sentence or two describing content, you will have an indication of the frequency and nature of strong language, violence or sexual imagery to assist your control of the viewing of your children. This process will be assisted by the increasing use of meta tags on programmes, so that parents can more easily block access by their children to programmes which they judge unsuitable.

Increasingly we will see a 'personalisation' of television access, so that viewers will modify their EPG to arrange the channels in the order they want (a bit like 'favourites' or bookmarks' in the Web world) and the PVR will learn the series we watch and the programme types we like and automatically record this material without us having to set each individual programme.

As the technologies develop, the EPG and the PVR will become increasingly useful to those with hearing and/or visual impairments.

So far, we have been talking about conventional television programmes accessed over a conventional television. However, digital terrestrial television (DTT) tuners are now being built into personal computers (PCs), turning the PC into both a television and a PVR.

When you can access programmes and video clips from around the world and record and store months of viewing, you will need to be able to search the Web and your hard drive for the material that you want to view at the time in the same way that you do now with sites on the Web and documents on your PC. The EPG will then be a searcher as well as a guide.

Of course, these technical developments will totally transform the world of broadcasting. So-called linear viewing and the notion of the 9 pm watershed will become almost irrelevant, as viewers can watch what they want when they want.

The strong regulation of broadcasting will collide brutally with the non-regulation of the Internet, as regulators and parents seek to enforce the taste and decency standards with which they are so familiar on television to the visual material streaming over the Net.

Links:
Ofcom consultation on the regulation of EPGs click here
Ofcom Code of Practice on EPGs click here
Blinkx TV video search click here

The Net provides the most accessible medium in the history of humankind for both consumers and creators. Our Internet columnist Roger Darlington explains the implications.

THE NEW WORLD OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Before Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1438, there were only about 30,000 books throughout the whole of Europe, nearly all Bibles or biblical commentary. By 1500, there were more than 9 million books on all sorts of topics.

Five centuries later, the world is undergoing a digital media revolution every bit - sorry about the pun - as profound. This is because we now have technologies and networks that allow us easily and cheaply to access vast volumes of information and, just as significantly, to create our own material for our own audiences.

This latter phenomenon has been dubbed 'social media'. This social media - as opposed to conventional media - is the use of digital technology and digital networks to enable consumers to create their own media content and experiences.

Before the advent of the Internet, it was not easy to publish a book or a pamphlet or even to have a letter published in a newspaper. Furthermore editors and publishers shaped the material and how it was presented.

In the realm of social media, the user becomes the contributor, the editor and the publisher combined. A member of the digerati called Doc Searls has put it this way: "Social media is an example of the demand-side supplying itself".

Examples of social media include:

This is just the start. Already it is possible for anyone with minimal resources to open a radio station on the Net (see, for instance, Radio LabourStart [click here)]. Soon one will be able to set up one's own web-based television channel (see, for example, Narrowstep [click here]).

Of course, as with any new social development, there are some problems. First, one of the benefits of conventional media is that the editing and publishing processes ensure a degree of reliability as to the information in the newspaper or book. On the Net anyone can publish anything, however spurious or unsubstantiated. So, when accessing the Net, we need to be media literate and use critical thinking skills.

Second, there are important privacy issues. Someone may be happy to debate politics at a dinner party, but they may not want their views subsequently reported to the world via a blog. A parent may be very proud of his new baby and regularly post news reports and photos, but that child may be less than thrilled in years to come to find intimate details of their life available to everyone. So we need to exercise discretion.

Third, there can be copyright issues. A lot of social media involves reworking other people's material - commenting on, quoting from, parodying or remixing text, pictures and sound. But maybe McDonalds does not want its yellow arch to be associated with Islamic fundamentalism. So be careful.

Fourth and most importantly, there is a real risk of harm - whether it is a false allegation against a teacher in respect of child abuse or a footballer for taking bribes, whether it is web site or newsgroups that targets staff who work in abortion clinics or research establishments experimenting with animals or that promotes anoxeria or even suicide. Especially now that broadcasting and the Internet are converging, we need a debate about what controls on Internet content are necessary or possible.

One thing is for sure: in this age social media, it is a whole new more open, more democratic, more confessional world that provides power but also confers responsibility.

So far the communications revolution has been provided over networks that were essentially designed for plain old telephone