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On Tech Brief today: rumours of yet another Google social network, a security flaw gets patched in Foursquare, plus Alan Turing, ultimate information pioneer.

• Orkut, Wave, Buzz, the list of Google's attempts to break into social networking may be on the verge of growing yet again, :

"Yesterday, Digg CEO Kevin Rose tweeted that he'd heard a 'huge rumor' that Google was planning to launch a Facebook competitor called 'Google Me', sparking off a wave of speculative reports (Rose has since removed the tweet). Now Adam D'Angelo, who was Facebook's CTO for years and is now founder of hot Q&A service Quora, is weighing in with more details. And from what he's hearing, Google Me is indeed very real, and it's gunning for Facebook."

If true, Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch is sceptical about Google's ability to take on the social networking giant:

"Even if Google has an amazing site in the pipeline, creating the next Facebook is going to be easier said than done -- nearly 500 million people already have their content stored on Facebook, and despite what Facebook has claimed about being open, I doubt they'll make it easy for anyone to jump into the arms of a competitor. Not to mention the fact that Google has had shortcomings with its social sites like Buzz, Wave, and Orkut."

• Foursquare, the web service that lets you update your friends with where you are, . Wired explains how a programmer named Jesper Andersen identified the problem:

"On pages like the one for San Francisco's Ferry Building, Foursquare shows a random grid of 50 pictures of users who most-recently checked in at that location -- no matter what their privacy settings. When a new check-in occurs, the site includes that person's photo somewhere in the grid. So Andersen built a custom scraper that loaded the Foursquare web page for each location in San Francisco, looked for the differences and logged the changes."

Wired also quotes an e-mail from Foursquare programmer Jon Hoffman explaining how the hole came about:

"The privacy leak on the venue page was something that was overlooked when we added privacy-protection features to the 'who's here now' section of the venue page on the mobile clients (the data that's exposed via the API)," Hoffman wrote Tuesday morning. "There already is a privacy toggle on the /settings page to control privacy for that feature, but it did not extend to the 'who's been here' section of the venue page on the website. We've recently locked down the 'who's been here' section so that it respects the 'Who's here' privacy toggle."

• Slashdot is reporting , which takes advantage of software which mimics, or "spoofs" another person's caller ID:

"If the target has not added a voicemail password (the default is no password), you will be dropped into a random menu of their voicemail and eventually can drill up or down to get what you want. You can change greetings, erase messages, send voicemails out of the target account, and much more. How many politicians up in arms about Google Wi-Fi sniffing will want to know more about this?"

• Who knows, but perhaps Google, which created Android, will consider remotely killing the software that allows users to spoof another person's mobile phone number. The Register points out that :

"The announcement came by way of a blog post from Android security lead Rich Cannings. 'After the researcher voluntarily removed these applications from Android Market, we decided, per the Android Market Terms of Service, to exercise our remote application removal feature on the remaining installed copies to complete the cleanup,' Cannings said."

Whilst some are likely to be concerned about Google's ability to remove applications, this sounds like it might be a smart way for Google to deal with malicious software on Android phones. However, the company also has a command that can remotely install applications. Jon Oberheide, the programmer who exposed the original problem to Google, told The Register that it worries him:

"It may be possible to spoof these INSTALL_ASSET messages to deliver a malicious application payload. If Google's GTalkService servers were compromised, the malicious impact would obviously be a bit more widespread ... You better believe that myself and others are taking a careful look at these code paths."

• Finally, for today, a follow-up to a story we mentioned in a recent Tech Brief. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT has revealed the winner of its search for the "ultimate information pioneer" of all time. :

"Celebrity Kate Russell, who fronted a short film in support of Turing's bid, said: 'I was thrilled that Alan Turing took such an early lead, even managing to fight off a sudden dash from Hedy Lamarr in week two of the voting! The fact that the votes for Turing have remained steady over the course of a month, securing him a solid victory, goes to show that his appeal and importance to the world of technology is as universal as his early machines were!'"

And Kate Russell's film about Alan Turing .

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ plans to close its final salary pension scheme to new employees and cap contributions to existing members, to tackle a £2bn deficit. that trade unions are threatening industrial action and it could be a model for the public sector.

Two award-winning posters for the clothing firm Diesel have been banned by the advertising watchdog for showing images of young women "likely to cause serious offence", .

In the US, the news that Larry King, the 76-year-old CNN talkshow host, has announced he will step down in the autumn, after months of speculation following a fall in ratings.

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is under fire over its Wimbledon coverage, . On messageboards, some viewers say it's focusing too much on low-cut dresses and canoodling couples in the crowd. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ says it seeks to bring home the atmosphere and has had no complaints.

the Open University is claiming a world record for the number of academic downloads on iTunes - as the first to reach 20 million.

The newspapers are mostly unimpressed with the Russian 'spy ring's' espionage efforts, .

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Commentators discuss the exposed Russian spy ring.

that using UN offices is nothing new in spying:

"During the Cold War, the U.S. limited Soviet officials' freedom to travel to a 25-mile radius around the U.N. headquarters building. The Soviets used it to great effect, erecting a massive listening station in its U.N. mission, and purchasing an apartment complex for Russian diplomats in the Bronx and a beach mansion on Long Island for visitors and vacationing Russian diplomats. 'The rooftops at Glen Cove, the apartment building in Riverdale and the mission all bristled with antennas for listening to American conversations,' Schevchenko wrote in his book Breaking with Moscow."

disappointment:

"The saga of the Russian spy ring is yet more evidence that whatever defence spending is about, it has nothing to do with defence. The FBI and the CIA have bust an operation that must have cost the Russians millions and yielded nothing that could not have been gleaned from the New York Times, Washington Post and political blogs. Why not leave the spies at it? I am sure they were paying tax. It is laughable that they posed any threat to the American people."

that Russia had the money:

"By far the biggest shock of this story is the sheer scale of investment that it represents in terms of time and money. These were obviously professionals. They would have been highly trained before being deployed. And there were an awful lot of them.
Ìý
"It takes an enormous operation to put these people in place and support them - as evidence from their expenses claims shows. They have to build up their credibility and their contacts, with no protection and no political cover, and sustain it over many years."

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev as "the man who presents himself as Russia's moderniser but struggles to convince":

"[T]he indictment could not have made comfortable reading for anyone in Moscow who prides themselves on guarding the secrets of the nation. In it, Russia's external intelligence service, the SVR, appears to show a professional ineptitude worthy of Inspector Clouseau. Peter Sellers could not have done better."

if Russian intelligence services are embarrassed by the methods discovered:

"False names, invisible ink, dead drops, brush passes - these antiquated tricks of the espionage trade were supposed to have become obsolescent when the Iron Curtain collapsed 20 years ago. Instead, we discover that the hapless group of Russian agents, many of whom had been living humdrum, suburban lives as part of a 'deep cover' operation since the mid-1990s, relied heavily on a Smiley-esque array of old-school techniques to maintain contact with their Russian handlers.
Ìý
"In a world where advanced satellite technology allows the world's spy-masters to eavesdrop on the phone conversations of Taliban commanders calling from remote mountain passes, and where sophisticated computer hackers can infiltrate government databases at will, there is something rather quaint about these Russian spies' archaic methods."

The creator of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ spy drama Spooks that fact can be less credible than fiction and revels in the parody and nostalgia of the affair:

"What the alleged spy ring is demonstrating is something we already know: that the oldies are still the goodies. We have seen every wrench and spanner of the cold war toolkit on display - dead drops, maps with stamps on, code words and even a 'C'."

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• Guardian | Russian espionage: Spies like us
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On Tech Brief today: Microsoft thinking on Windows 8 is leaked, court documents indicate Dell may have known about computer faults years before it acknowledged them, and Nokia's advice on holding mobile phones.

• The blogosphere is excited about the leak of what appear to be documents illustrating Microsoft's early thinking about the future of Windows. Whilst the company is not commenting, , according to Stephen Chapman at Microsoft Kitchen:

"There appears to be considerable planning taking place as to how a user will access Windows. Right off the bat, one of my favorites is [a] prototype which shows a user logging in via facial recognition! Basically, you enroll your face, then all you should have to do from that point forward is sit down, have your webcam get a look at you and then log you in based on facial recognition."

If so, presumably the boffins in Redmond have thought through how to avoid someone logging in by simply holding up a photo of a person whose computer they want to hack in to! The documents also indicate that Microsoft may be a little jealous of Apple's success with customers, as Mr Chapman explains:

"Included in these presentations is a rather telling (but obvious) slide which shows that Microsoft is clearly paying attention to Apple while planning Windows 8. Titled, 'How Apple does it: A virtuous cycle,' Microsoft has broken down Apple's UX/Brand Loyalty cycle and cited its value. Though it's fairly obvious, the takeaway here is that Microsoft is aiming to give Windows the very same 'it just works' status that Apple's products are known for."

• The New York Times has been :

"Documents recently unsealed in a three-year-old lawsuit against Dell show that the company's employees were actually aware that the computers were likely to break. Still, the employees tried to play down the problem to customers and allowed customers to rely on trouble-prone machines, putting their businesses at risk. Even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers, according to e-mail messages revealed in the dispute."

Dell declined to comment on the case to the New York Times, and it has yet to come to trial. But Ashlee Vance highlights some interesting discussions between Dell employees:

"In one e-mail exchange between Dell customer support employees concerning computers at the Simpson Thacher & Bartlett law firm, a Dell worker states, 'We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had 'issues' per our discussion this morning.' ... In other documents about how to handle questions around the faulty OptiPlex systems, Dell salespeople were told, 'Don't bring this to customer's attention proactively' and 'Emphasize uncertainty.'"

• Over at The Guardian, Charles Arthur . The terms are drafted in such a way that just reading them implies your assent. But most notably perhaps, you apparently need the organisers' permission even if you want to just link to one of its pages:

"About linking by hypertext to our website: Before providing a link to our site you must seek our permission. To do this, email admin@edfringe.com with details of the URL to which you wish to link and the URL of the page on which you will be displaying the link. We do not permit the display of our web pages in any HTMLl [sic] frame unless we have expressly authorised this."

The organisers told the Guardian that the Fringe website's terms and conditions are kept under review.

• In the battle for web access supremacy, :

"Chrome nabbed the spot with an 8.97 percent share, following behind Internet Explorer with 52 percent and Firefox with 28.5 percent. Safari ranked fourth according to their stats with 8.88 percent. Globally Chrome has been in third place for some time, but this is the first time it's surpassed Safari in the United States."

Finally, for today, after Apple's much reported issues over iPhone signal declining when the latest model is held in a particular way, , and highlight a few popular styles, like the "Four Edge Grip":

"Regardless of the size of your hands, the Four Edge Grip (FEG, for short) is a universal grip which involves all of your fingers and thumb, each having hold of one edge of the device (the middle and ring fingers actually double up to provide an opposing force to the much stronger thumb). You'll find a little gap develops between the back of the phone and the palm, which is useful. For something."

JBC goes on to have a little dig at Nokia's rival, Apple:

"Providing a wide range of methods and grips for people to hold their phones, without interfering with the antennae, has been an essential feature of every device Nokia has built ... Of course, feel free to ignore all of the above because realistically, you're free to hold your Nokia device any way you like. And you won't suffer any signal loss. Cool, huh?"

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

commercial radio could include direct commercial references in programmes, under proposed new rules from Ofcom. The move is designed to ensure radio is not put at a disadvantage once product placement is allowed on commercial television. TV programmes which include paid-for products will have to show a symbol on the screen.

Also the government should stop Rupert Murdoch buying the 61% of BSkyB it doesn't already own because it is not in the public interest.

Senior managers at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ will be paid at least 10% less than their equivalents in the commercial sector, .

nearly 18 million viewers watched England crash out of the World Cup on Sunday afternoon, an 82% share of the TV audience.

Television Centre is celebrating its 50th birthday.

an unlikely headline - "A proud day for British sport" - given the football-induced misery of recent days, but Andy Murray's latest win is on many of the newspaper front pages.

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Commentators discuss the exit strategy from Afghanistan and whether there should be talks with the Taliban.

that he is waiting for talking with the Taliban to start:

"There is no military solution, Britain's generals and their political masters agree. The only question is when to talk to the enemy. The smartest generals, including Sir Graeme Lamb, former adviser to sacked General Stanley McChrystal, and smartest diplomats - notably Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, Britain's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, who has just resigned - believe the time to talk to the Taliban is now. That view is shared by MI6, which has long advocated talking to the enemy, whoever it may be."

that although US strategists don't seem to be on board, support for talks with the Taliban is growing:

"Talking to your enemy is not exactly a new idea, but the fact that Britain's most senior soldier is endorsing it, at the very moment when Britain's war dead surpasses the three hundred mark, provides the latest clue to military and government thinking on the major foreign policy issue of our time.
Ìý
"From talking to Whitehall officials, my sense is that those who do nothing but think about Afghanistan have concluded that talking to the Taliban must happen as soon as possible, because the military strategy- retooled by General Stanley McChrystal last year and implemented this summer - is producing disappointing results. I think General Richards knows this, and that his supposedly "private view" is being aired now as a very deliberate and public warning to the United States that they must engage, as Britain is, with the idea of a negotiated retreat - though of course nobody will couch it in these terms."

The there is a growing logic in talking to the Taliban:

"The military effort can help to reduce the Taliban's ability to destabilise the government of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president; but the ultimate solution to the conflict lies in a lasting political settlement. There are undoubtedly elements within the Taliban, such as Mullah Omar, the movement's founder, who have no interest in reaching a deal, and remain intent on establishing the uncompromising form of Islamist theocracy that terrorised the country prior to the September 11 attacks. But they are the minority. The majority of Pashtun tribesmen who support the Taliban do so because they feel disfranchised by Mr Karzai's government, which relies heavily on the minority Tajiks and Uzbeks for its support."

that a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan would be bad in the long term:

"The bleakness of this Plan B is the best argument for giving our military the time it needs to try to make a counterinsurgency succeed. We can't hold the current course indefinitely, and we won't: President Obama's decision to set a public deadline was a mistake, but everyone knows there are limits to how long the surge of forces can go on. But of the options this White House seems willing to consider, it's the one that holds out hope of enabling a real withdrawal from Afghanistan."

"The question remains: does occupying Afghanistan recruit more than 50 terrorist for al Qaeda? At 51 new Jihadists, we are creating more terror than we are defeating in Afghanistan. And since the only way to tackle al Qaeda in Pakistan is by exactly the kind of tactics that Biden - and not Petraeus - has suggested for Afghanistan, one has to ask if pursuing counter-insurgency in one place and counter-terrorism in another is ... well, spectacularly incoherent. You get all the human and fiscal cost of counter-insurgency occupation and all the blowback and Jihadist-recruitment of counter-terrorism."

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On Tech Brief today: Apple rapped over transparency, internet access may be going underground, and natty glasses which convert audio speech to text in front of the wearer's eyes.

• Germany's justice minister has requested that Apple opens its databases to German data protection authorities, :

"'Users of iPhones and other GPS devices must be aware of what kind of information about them is being collected,' Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger told the German weekly [Der Spiegel]."

It is the introduction of a clause that allows Apple to anonymously collect data on the geographic location of its users that concerns Ms Leuthesser-Schnarrenberger:

"The justice minister said it would be 'unthinkable' for Apple to create personality- or location-based user profiles... 'Apple has the obligation to properly implement the transparency so often promised by (CEO) Steve Jobs,' she said."

• You might say "it shouldn't happen to a computer security firm", but according to Softpedia, :

"One of the flaws is located in a language selection field on symantec.com/connect/, a site dedicated to the company's community of business customers and partners. A second one is found in a feedback form loaded from seer.entsupport.symantec.com, a subdomain associated with the knowledge base for enterprise products. The third one is in the German section on the service1.symantec.com subdomain, which is part of international support site."

Lucian Constantin says the type of vulnerability, called XSS, and uncovered in this case by a researcher calling himself d3v1l, is a common problem on the internet:

"Cross-site scripting, also known as XSS, is one of the most common type of vulnerabilities on the internet today. The bugs stem from a failure to properly sanitize input passed via forms, giving attackers the ability to pass content that gets interpreted as code... Fortunately, the vulnerabilities discovered by d3v1l are non-persistent in nature and can only be exploited by opening a malformed URL. However, these flaws can still be leveraged to enhance attacks, especially since they are located on the website of a trusted security vendor."

• If you're one of those people who likes the technological peace and quiet of underground railway services, London may not be the place for you in the future. Broadband Expert says, :

"He said: 'The truth is that I'm on the side of progress if we possibly can do it. We could do it because I do think people want the facility of looking at their BlackBerrys.'"

Although London would only be playing catch-up with a dynamic counterpart in the United Arab Emirates, where a Wimax network reportedly enables internet access across the whole of the Dubai Metro.

• Finally for today, the folks at PSFK have spotted :

"Called 'Babelfish,' the device combines a receptive audio 'listening' process with text to display messages or conversations in the user's line of sight. Speech is filtered through two microphones and visualized through audio translation software on embedded controllers to display the speech as text via two projectors. The device also add an integrated noise-filtering system to discern other sounds from the nearest conversation occurring."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

As Tate Britain holds its summer party, its 20-year sponsorship deal with BP has been attacked by more than 160 artists and writers, . saying BP's cultural sponsorship masks its damage to the environment.

by Greenpeace's Charlie Kronik and the former head of the Arts Council of England, Sir Christopher Frayling.

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ reports that the government wants to tighten the rules on council-run free newspapers, . Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles said independent local papers should not face competition from "propaganda on the rates".

WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell has likened social media to letter-writing at the Cannes Advertising Festival. He said it could be 'polluted' by attempts to monetise it.

The audience for the final episode of the new Doctor Who series was hit by the sunshine, it's been a triumph. it as "interesting and enjoyable" but "not quite the spectacular conclusion you might hope for".

There are photos from the new Harry Potter film trailer, which is released tomorrow (though the film doesn't come out till November). Meanwhile, the third episode of the Twilight saga is out shortly. the two.

England's World Cup exit dominates the newspapers, reports .

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Commentators discuss the weekend's G20 meeting in Canada.

if David Cameron was "just a stooge for Obama":

"Obama has enough nasty, real surprises to handle, without ones arising from micro-managed meetings with friendly powers. So why allow Cameron to appear as if he's dictating a new line on Afghanistan - the certainty of troop withdrawals by 2015, the year our next General Election is due?
Ìý
"Perhaps because it helps Obama. After winning the presidency, he had announced his hope to bring troops home from Afghanistan in July 2011. He realises this isn't possible any more, but his shift can be presented as the preference of the U.S.'s coalition allies.
Ìý
"Might there also be a link with Obama's attacks on BP - or 'British Petroleum' as he called it - over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill? Cameron was blamed for not tackling Obama firmly enough. Allowing Dave to lead the G8 discussion on Afghanistan could be an olive branch of sorts. What an awful mess."

British Prime Minister before the talks which anticipating the criticism the talks would attract:

"Too often, these international meetings fail to live up to the hype and the promises made. I'm sure other leaders would admit that. A lot of money is spent laying them on. Host cities are disrupted for days or even weeks. The cavalcades roll into town. Good intentions are shared in productive talks. Then, somehow, those intentions rarely seem to come to fruition in real, tangible global action."

the G20 meetings are not worth the money it costs to police them:

"The fact that so much attention has been directed towards the policing is largely due to the lack of anything newsworthy coming out of the summit itself. Even David Cameron, attending for the first time as British prime minister, published his own desperate plea in the Canadian press this week for summits to be turned into something more than the hot air and photo opportunities they have been in the past. (How this relates to his stated intention to take time out to watch the second half of the England v Germany game with Angela Merkel was not made clear.)
Ìý
"As an invitation-only club whose membership was literally drawn up on the back of an envelope, the G20 never laid any claim to legitimacy. Now it is also in danger of losing any credibility as a forum for global economic governance. Its failure to address any of the structural problems that caused the financial and economic crises of the past three years has certainly not gone unnoticed in Toronto, let alone its complete refusal to deal with the challenge of climate change.
Ìý
"Unbelievably, the G20 is scheduled to hold its next summit in just a few months. If the Canadian experience has taught us anything, it is that such meetings are simply not worth the candle."

[subscription required] that the G20 group deserves its bad press for being inept:

"Reaching agreement was not the main challenge in Toronto this weekend. They knew that was not going to happen. Mainly, they hoped to put the best face they could on disunity.
Ìý
"How much do these divisions matter? The main bone of contention in Toronto was fiscal policy. Here, I would argue, simple ineptitude seems to be a bigger problem than disinclination to co-operate.
Ìý
"In 2008 and 2009 it was obvious that powerful fiscal and monetary stimulus was necessary everywhere. When everybody wants the same thing, co-operation is easy. How easy? You would have got the same result without it. Last year, co-operation cost nothing and, as compared with the alternative, achieved nothing. In 2010 circumstances have changed. Some countries still have room for fiscal manoeuvre. Others have less and some have none. Co-operation is therefore more difficult - and, you could argue, more necessary."

[registration required] that the big problem concerning the G20 countries is international trade:

"Much of the international mayhem associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s was prompted by competitive currency devaluations, as countries fled the old gold standard and tried to beggar their neighbours. Things are less dramatic now, and those rock-solid foundations do militate against a serious trading bust-up between America and Europe. Nevertheless, there are dangers: first, that progress in liberalising global trade will be even further postponed than it already is; but second, and more serious, that in the absence of transatlantic unity an apparently technical fight over trade, probably over how to deal with environmental rules and taxes, could soon undermine the whole World Trade Organisation system."

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On Tech Brief today: Power, privacy, and what cosmic rays can do for you.

• The controversy over US plans to fit the net with a "kill switch" that can be thrown in the event of a cyber attack are overblown, say American politicians. Why? Because the president can already do that thanks to...

"a little-known clause in the Communications Act passed one month after the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese."

The revelation came when a debated the cybersecurity bill that wants to beef up POTUS powers to shut down bits of the net. .

"The original bill gave the president indefinite emergency authority to shut down private sector or government networks in the event of a cyber attack capable of causing massive damage or loss of life. An amendment passed Thursday limits that authority further, requiring the president to get Congressional approval after controlling a network for 120 days."

• Speaking of power and beef, the European Commission wants the UK's Information Commissioner to be able to take more concrete action in the event of privacy breaches. .

"I urge the UK to change its rules swiftly so that the data protection authority is able to perform its duties with absolute clarity about the rules. Having a watchdog with insufficient powers is like keeping your guard dog tied up in the basement.""

• Continuing the privacy theme, the US Federal Trade Commission has rapped Twitter's virtual knuckles .

"The FTC had originally accused the social media service of making private tweets and the login credentials of users easily available to "hackers" between January and May of 2009. During that time, someone was able to gain administrative access to Twitter's system (and therefore access to thousands of user accounts, passwords, direct messages, and more) simply by using password-guessing software. That user reset numerous user passwords, allowing others to access those accounts."

So far, Twitter has escaped fines but the FTC is ready to pounce if more problems occur.

"The FTC is not seeking any monetary damages as part of the settlement. Instead, it plans to keep a tight leash on Twitter, with the ability to impose $16,000 penalties per incident if future security breaches occur."

• There are computers, super-computers and now .

" Not known for taking the demure route, researchers at DARPA this week announced a program aimed at building computers that exceed current peta-scale computers to achieve the mind-altering speed of one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second."

• Finally, geek of the week is Nelson Elhage who found that the Universe was ranging its awesome might against his desktop computer. .

"For me, bitflips due to cosmic rays are one of those problems I always assumed happen to "other people". I also assumed that even if I saw random cosmic-ray bitflips, my computer would probably just crash, and I'd never really be able to tell the difference from some random kernel bug."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

The that the Government is to scrap three-quarters of its websites to save £100m, according to Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude.

Ten million viewers saw England beat Slovenia to go through to the last 16 in the World Cup, the .

There were queues in many cities yesterday for Apple's new iPhone4, and some complaints about the price . But the some people have reported an apparent fault.

The that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Trust has ruled that Radio 1's Harry Potter Day gave undue prominence to the release of the film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, breaching editorial guidelines. Commercial radio said the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ had "fallen under the spell of celebrity" and been "hijacked" by a commercial product.

The the government's changes to the age at which men will receive the state pension is widely discussed in Friday's papers.

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Commentators discuss government plans to raise the state pension age for men to 66, possibly by as early as 2016.

that people reaching retirement age are being punished for the mistakes of bankers and politicians:

"We are in the extraordinary position whereby elderly people - who've done as they were told by experts, be it bankers or governments, and saved over their working lives - are seeing those savings produce nothing to live on as interest rates vanish.
Ìý
"They're having to live on capital - if they have any - and now their age bracket is being told they've got to go on working until they drop, to qualify for the pensions they've worked for all their lives.
Ìý
"I'm fortunate because I'm rich. But that doesn't mean I don't understand how ordinary people are being hit. A year ago, I was getting £1.5 million in annual interest. Now, it's basically nothing."

Labour MP this will come as a shock to people on lower incomes with shorter life expectancies:

"The previous Labour Government planned to bring in this change in 2024, giving people plenty of time to plan. Now it is to be brought forward eight years.
This change is, for people approaching retirement, just around the corner.
Ìý
"This may not mean a lot to those who have a good occupational pension or some other income stream. But for those who rely on the State it is further unwelcome news from the Coalition."

The the policy has a "cold logic" as people shouldn't be forced into unsuitable jobs:

"With life expectancy rising, anyone saving for their own retirement would have to devote ever more of their wages to achieve the same pension at a particular age. If people were acting individually, at some point their desire to stop working tomorrow would be tempered by their need for money today. There is no reason why collective policy should not respect the same logic. All the more so since the pensions minister, Steve Webb, seems determined to override business objections and scrap rules that allow bosses to turf workers out on grounds of their age."

The the rise in pension age "unavoidable":

"The speed with which the Coalition is moving on pensions is welcome after the drift of recent decades. It is crucial that the reforms do not get bogged down in endless consultation. Meanwhile, one thing is certain: future generations will look back on today's retirees with envy."

Blogger the news as "sensible" and suggests the retirement age goes up to 75:

"The state pension is a form of social insurance: insurance against outliving your rational savings. Not a form of assurance, a way of saving for something which is likely (or certain) to happen. As such it should be paid at around and about the average lifespan."

James Bartholomew, who wrote a book criticising the benefits system called The Welfare State We're In, how the changes have come through without opposition:

"The politically impossible is sometimes possible. And how has it been done in this case?
1. Long preparation of public opinion over many years by many people, gradually bringing home to middle-of-the-road people that welfare is not working very well and has had all sorts of perverse consequences. This got to the point where all parties were committed to reforms, often unspecified, of welfare benefits.
2. Barely mentioning the whole subject during the election.
3. Consequently not having to make promises that would be broken such as 'we will not cut housing benefit'."

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

England's World Cup match against Slovenia prompted a 30% rise in internet traffic. At one point, 800,000 people were watching the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s live feed, the .

But Declan Donnelly of Ant & Dec missed much of the match because of the power cut in West London.

the background to the Rolling Stone interview that costs General McChrystal his job.

Channel 4's new chairman Lord Burns says it doesn't need public subsidy, unlike the previous chief executive Andy Duncan, who pressed the Government for a deal with ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Worldwide. Despite the plunge in TV advertising, C4 stayed in profit last year, thanks to its digital channels, .

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ executives are still taking first-class train journeys, . The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ says it only happens when that's the cheaper option or for reasons of privacy or a meeting.

The that Google has won a landmark copyright ruling over the use of video material on YouTube.

The England's World Cup win and the decision by US President Barack Obama to sack the US commander of international forces in Afghanistan vie for the front pages.

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On Tech Brief today: Google maps, Android apps and the danger of being you.

• Google and the Chinese have not seen eye-to-eye for a while and the relationship looks to get even frostier thanks to new regulations demanding that anyone who provides mapping services in the nation can only do so if they have a license. :

"China cited the need for the new regulations to protect state secrets and set out the requirements for a license to include having map servers storing data within the country and no record of information leakage within the last three years."

• A Windows PC might be the playground of the hi-tech criminal but there is growing evidence that mobile phones and the apps they use have their security failings too. A survey by SMobile Systems found that 20% of 48,000 apps on the Android store want access to more of your phone than they actually need. :

"it might be true that 20% of Marketplace applications request access to personal information, but if those applications are social-networking-integration apps then they're going to need access to that data."

• You know that Tauren Druid you spend a lot of time questing with in World of Warcraft? Now you can know who they really are. Blizzard has introduced an ID and chatting system for users of its Battle.net service to bring people together. :

"World of Warcraft is only very, very peripherally a role-playing game in the sense that your character may or may not be human and may or may not cast spells at mobile bags of improvement called 'monsters'. However, to this point, players have had the ability to be anonymous. That is gone."

He predicts problems:

"If I wanted to be known as 'Lum the Mad' - which, in every MMO to date, I have had that option to do - to protect myself from people who, just as a random casual aside, may have an unkind word or two to say to the real person behind the author of many of these blog postings - I would either have to change my name in Blizzard's accounting system (which I'm not even sure is possible) or simply shrug and say, oh what the hell, it's not like there are unstable people out there on the internet! I mean, it's not like I'm female or anything."

• Warcraft intruding ever more into the real world is a continuation of a trend that is seeing the real become more virtual and, as such, subject to ever more manipulation. Given the power to mould the world with mouse and fingertips, what should we make? thinking carefully before shaping those pocket planets and your own private universe:

"Worlds of imagination cannot be true or false. They can be good or bad - that's the moral question - but what makes them good or bad? The answer must involve aesthetics. Judging the moral worth of an imaginary world begins with its aesthetics. Is it Beautiful? Apt? Shocking? Thought-provoking? Balanced? Engaging?"

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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Commentators discuss President Obama's sacking of the top US commander in Afghanistan following the publication of a Rolling Stone article in which Gen McChrystal and his inner circle made disparaging remarks about administration officials and the appointment of Gen Petraeus.

[subscription required] how Gen McChrystal made such an obvious mistake:

"Gen McChrystal's background is almost exclusively in Special Forces, a cadre that naturally (and not entirely unfairly) looks down on others, even within the military, as lesser beings. Theirs is also a world that necessarily does not often interact with the media. Yet Rolling Stone's editor confirmed on Wednesday that all those quoted by their reporter, who was embedded with the general, were clear when they were on and off the record.
Ìý
"There is little excuse for such a prolonged lapse of judgment in front of a journalist. Indeed embedded reporters often complained to me while I was in the army that we did too much to encourage soldiers not to let down their guard with journalists. This is exactly why a team as elite and professional as Gen McChrystal's should have known better."

if Gen McChrystal's replacement is over-hyped:

"The appointment of Gen. Petraeus is likely to squelch any such discussion before it gets started. The near superhero status Petraeus enjoys isn't simply due to his intelligence or capability as a leader - it's also the result of media mythmaking about the Iraq War. Despite the ease with which the country has come to adopt the narrative that the 2007 troop escalation and the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy singlehandedly turned the Iraq War around, it remains untrue... there were a number of factors involved, including ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, the Sunni tribes turning on al-Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq and the Sadr ceasefire."

this could be the second time Gen Petraeus has bailed out a president, referring to his time in Iraq:

"Afghanistan 2010 may be an even tougher nut than Iraq 2007. Sure, Iraq looked like a mess back then, but the Americans hadn't tried a lot of good ideas. In Afghanistan they have been trying them out and not finding them working very well. Counterinsurgency was a novel idea in Baghdad back then. It is not anything new in Kabul right now. Our biggest problem in Afghanistan is the government we are supporting there, and it isn't clear to me what Petraeus can do about that."

that the tension between US politics and military is to do with more than just President Obama's inexperience and unease at the Afghanistan war:

"But perhaps the main reason why Obama's problem with the generals is bigger than McChrystal is the continuing impact of the post-9/11 legacy. George Bush defined the US as a nation perpetually at war. The Pentagon produced a theory to suit: the Long War doctrine postulating unending conflict against ill-defined but ubiquitous enemies. Unquestioning patriotism became an official ideology to which all were expected to subscribe."

setting a deadline to exit Afghanistan is the root of the tension between President Obama and Gen McChrystal:

"In explaining the mess, we had better start with President Obama. He inherited the war from George Bush. He has always been sceptical about whether it is winnable, and anguished for three months last year - to McChrystal's now acknowledged fury - about whether to authorise reinforcements.
Ìý
"In the end, he agreed to send more men, because he feared the wrath of the American Right if he was seen to be the U.S. leader who 'lost Afghanistan'.
Ìý
"But he imposed a tight timeframe, saying that U. S. troops would start to pull out in July 2011. According to the soldiers, this was a huge mistake. It never looked likely that McChrystal's forces could grip the country so quickly."

The story has prompted former US secretary of state about army strategy in Afghanistan. He says the deadlines for exit are unrealistic:

"Afghanistan has never been pacified by foreign forces. At the same time, the difficulty of its territory combined with the fierce sense of autonomy of its population have historically thwarted efforts to achieve a transparent central government.
Ìý
"The argument that a deadline is necessary to oblige President Hamid Karzai to create a modern central government challenges experience. What weakens transparent central governance is not so much Karzai's intentions, ambiguous as they may be, but the structure of his society, run for centuries on the basis of personal relationships. Demands by an ally publicly weighing imminent withdrawal to overthrow established patterns in a matter of months may prove beyond any leader's capacities."

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On Tech Brief today; why the writing's on the wall for e-readers, carbon nanotubes give batteries a boost, and how to "de-vuvuzela" the World Cup.

• The honeymoon is well and truly over for the e-reader market, .

There's a new kid on the block in the form of the iPad, and retailers Amazon and Barnes & Noble have both slashed the prices of their e-reader devices (but not the actual books) since its arrival.

"The 'give away the razors and sell the blades' model doesn't work with dedicated e-book readers because Amazon and Barnes & Noble's customer base is increasingly becoming iPad and iPhone users, and shortly will also be Android phone and tablet users."

The fierce undercutting means that devices marketed by smaller rivals such as Plastic Logic and Kobo will "almost certainly be gone within the next few months" Mr Perlow warns.

• The clever folk at have found a way of making batteries last 10 times longer by using carbon nanotubes as positive electrodes, :

"The prototype batteries possess the positive characteristics of both capacitors in their ability to deliver very short high bursts of energy and still have the energy content of state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries, around 200 Watt hours per kilogram. This combination makes them attractive for Electric Vehicles (EV) technology that requires quick bursts of power for acceleration."

The research has been published today in [subscription required].

• It's coalition time again - O2, Orange and Vodafone have teamed up to trial IMB (Integrated Mobile Broadcasts) in London and Slough, UK. IMB is a more efficient (which of course means cheaper) way of streaming TV and video using existing 3G networks, :

"It is increasingly becoming apparent to operators that it is more practical to use their own 3G networks than it is to build more expensive DVB-H broadcast networks. News of the IMB trial by the international operators makes it even less likely that DVB-H will ever achieve widespread deployment."

• For any football spectators who might be irritated by the World Cup vuvuzelas, this will be music to their ears.

. It dampens the noise of the incessant horns to make the commentary more audible.

The researchers analysed the various sounds from a live match and noted:

"The commentator, then, is the loudest thing here... Somewhat lower in level are the nearly-flat horizontal tracks of the massed chorus of vuvuzelas. It appears that although these instruments vary, most of them are clumped in a fairly small range of fundamental frequencies - around 230Hz, roughly the B-flat below middle C. This unvarying pitch suggests why some listeners may find them so troublesome."

Best of all, the devuvuzelator is free to download.

• Finally, a bit of an oldie but it's too good to miss. The coach of the North Korea football team has told sports broadcaster that he has been receiving training tips from the country's leader Kim Jong-il via an invisible phone. :

"Jong-il, a man of many talents, is said to have developed the technology himself. Before you laugh in disbelief, remember this is the man who scored 38 under par in his first-ever game of golf -- with five holes in one -- making him the greatest golfer of all-time. No word yet whether North Korea also has an invisible vuvuzela in the works."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

The Budget confirmed that Labour's broadband phone tax has been dropped. The expansion of broadband will be funded from private sources, with pump-priming from the TV licence fee. The and the report that rural groups fear that won't be enough.

England's football omens today are good, if previous TV coverage is any guide, according to the and the . Since 1982, they have won twice as often on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ than on ITV, where the two previous matches were shown.

The that the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has defended the number of staff it's sent to cover Wimbledon, the World Cup and Glastonbury.

The shows most of the papers paint a pretty gloomy picture after Tuesday's Budget.

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Commentators dissect the Budget and predict how it will affect the next four years.

that Osborne's Budget marks the start of a dismantling of the Brown Legacy:

"Mr. Osborne does not have a radical reputation--his record suggests that he is overly focused on short-term tactics at the expense of a longer term strategy. But in a well-received and cleverly presented budget he chose to be rather bold. At the centre of it was the argument that private sector activity will drive recovery and that an over large state will crowd it out.
Ìý
"This might sound uncontroversial, but not in contemporary Britain, where the state is almost 50% of the economy. Throughout the Brown years, ever higher public spending was fetishized as being an undeniable good. To question such assumptions was heretical."

that the Budget is one of ideological choice and not of necessity:

"There was nothing "unavoidable" about adding £40bn to Labour's already eye-watering pledge to halve the deficit in four years. There was no necessity to create a surplus in six years, returning to depression economics with mortal risk of sinking the country into second recession or slump. This was the budget to fulfil old Tory yearnings: it promises to shrink the state below 40%, which Mrs Thatcher never achieved."

that hacking back the defence budget and the civil service is going to change Britain's position on the world stage:

"This Budget marks a break point in British history. Since World War II, Britain has always arrogantly believed that we are automatically entitled to a place at the top table in global politics, while the nation has taken for granted an extravagant lifestyle which has long ceased to reflect the reality of our economic place in the world.
Ìý
"In effect, Britain over the past ten years has resembled an old but moribund aristocratic family, whose wealth has been dissipated but which still has exalted ideas above its station and is determined to live way beyond its means."

that George Osborne may be acting too hastily:

"Osborne's basic premise sets him on a dangerous path, an assumption that balancing the books is necessary by the time of the next election. As far as the coalition is concerned, any debt is bad even if interest repayments are generously low and the consequent spending keeps the economy alive.
Ìý
"Although debt is falling faster than predicted, Osborne is restlessly impatient to wipe it out altogether and take a bow as a grateful electorate pay homage to his revolution in a few years' time. It is no exaggeration to talk in terms of a revolution. Osborne hopes to re-cast the state and to do so in ways that make it politically impossible for future governments to reverse."

A cabinet minister in the Thatcher government and former vice-president of the European Commission [subscription required] how the Thatcher government responded to criticism from economists about their cuts:

"In the first place it was essential to distinguish clearly between our genuine long-term aspirations and the overwhelming need to take action to restore public finances. Putting our house in order was a necessary precondition to meeting those long-term aspirations in a way that would be sustainable.
Ìý
"We had to reiterate these points again and again with clarity and forcefulness, and not assume that our message had got through just because we were getting bored with repeating it so often. We had to persuade our own supporters that our aspirations were genuine and would be met as soon as the crisis was over. We succeeded in doing so."

the VAT increase marks a Class War:

"[M]aking the "one in every 25 pounds spent on VAT vs one in every seven pounds spent on VAT" argument fails to realise that on the one hand you have someone spending their money, and on the other you have someone spending money that that's been taxed once already and given to them for free.
Ìý
"I'm not arguing that they shouldn't be given the money, rather that trying to make out VAT unfairly hits those on the lowest income ignores the reality that the money spent on many of the services that are subject to VAT isn't really "income" in the traditionally earned sense."

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General Stanley McChrystal, the top US military officer in Afghanistan, has been summoned to Washington . Here is some of the US media reaction:

Jason Linkins at the Huffington Post says between the general and the president were wide of the mark, but now had to admit he might have been wrong.

"My instincts tell me that we're about to endure a fancy bit of White House shame-pageantry: McChrystal comes hat in hand, he and the President have a heart-to-heart, and in the end, everyone gets back to work."

Jenn Kepka, , cannot see what the fuss is about, instead focusing on the general's record in Afghanistan.

Are there really still presidents (and vice presidents) who believe they are loved and feared completely on the fields of war? Are there really that many diplomats in Washington who have such fragile feelings that they must vent their displeasure in person, removing a general from the theater of war, to feel their honor has been adequately satisfied?

At the liberal firedoglake blog, that President Obama has an opportunity to sack General McChrystal, but probably won't:

"It'll be hard to fire McChrystal without ripping the entire Afghanistan strategy up, and I've gotten no indication from the White House that it's interested in doing that. On the other hand, if senior administration officials are and I just haven't picked up on it, McChrystal just gave them their biggest opportunity."

In the conservative journal National Review's President Barack Obama has a case for firing General McChrystal, but adds:

"The most important consideration should be what's best for the war. The commander-in-chief must have confidence in his field commander. But if the Obama-McChrystal relationship can be saved, obviously the least disruptive option is for McChrystal to stay."

The New York Times :

"The piece seems destined to raise questions about General McChrystal's judgment, and to spark debate over the wisdom of Mr Obama's strategy, at a time when violence in the country is rising sharply and when several central planks of the strategy appear stalled. Two important American allies, the Dutch and Canadians, have announced plans to pull their combat troops from the country."

The Washington Post

"It also raises fresh questions about the judgment and leadership style of the commander Obama appointed last year in an effort to turn around a worsening conflict."

The Wall Street Journal :

"The article, titled "The Runaway General," has already caused nervousness inside the Pentagon, where memories are still fresh of another blistering profile that got a top commander in hot water: an August 2008 cover story in Esquire on Adm William "Fox" Fallon, then commander of all US forces in the Middle East and Central Asia. The article eventually played a part in Fallon's resignation two years ago.

"In that Esquire piece, however, Fallon appeared to directly contradict White House policy on Iran and other parts of the Middle East; the Rolling Stone article makes no such allegation, but rather is full of jokey put-downs of important Washington players."

Politico :

"It will be hard for the White House to get past this since the remarks appear to amount to some level of insubordination."

The Atlantic's , wondering what the general was thinking:

"I don't think McChrystal intended to do this. Nevertheless, he did. And as for whether there was some miscommunication about attribution, or whether McChrystal thought no one would really notice, or whether he thought a tick-tock like this would help his cause ... those questions are unanswerable right now."

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• Politico | Furious President Obama summons Gen. Stanley McCrystal to explain comments

On Tech Brief today; The new way to text, criticisms of the engine that will power the highly anticipated new iPhone and how children are wooed by high tech.

• The iPhone version 4 may not be available until later in the week but already the criticism of the engine that will drive it is mounting.

Apple's iOS 4 has been released ahead of the phone and will be available for old-generation mobiles as well as the shiny news one. It promises 100 new features, including a way to make organising the ever-growing army of applications easier but the Twittersphere is already full of criticisms, with many saying it has made their iPhone's slower.

Many, including the criticisms. One disgruntled user told the technology news site:

"Not happy! Just installed ios4 and it's made my iPhone sooo sluggish and slow it's unbelievable!!"

• Now the Hollywood stars that turned out in force for the glamorous E3 gaming show have gone home, questions are starting to be asked about the products shown off there.

Most were impressed with Microsoft's Kinect and saw it as a game-changer but now, with analysts estimating it could cost up to £100, many including whether it will be too pricey to appeal:

"An Xbox plus the Kinect starts becoming a lot more expensive than a Wii-style impulse buy, even if the tech is sexier. In that case then you have to wonder why there weren't more 'core' style Kinect games shown at E3 to attract the early adopters likely to be the initial purchasers and family opinion formers."

• Swype is a new technology that allows phone users to drag their fingers from one letter to another rather than tapping out individual letters,

It is the brainchild of Cliff Kushler, who previously invented predictive text software, which might not endear him to all.

Won Park, Samsung's director of technology sourcing, appears to be a fan although he seems to miss mobiles off the list of potential homes for the new technology:

"It could become the de facto standard for tablets, next-generation TVs or next-generation remote controls. It has tremendous potential."

Playwrights aren't generally known as fans of technology and Professional Foul author Tom Stoppard is no exception. He children are ignoring books as technology increasingly vies for and wins their attention.

He muses on how the moving image is more popular than the pages of a book to youngsters:

"I think that's to the detriment... I just don't want the printed page to get swept away by that."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

The that Channel 4 is to cut a quarter of its senior managers as its new chief executive David Abraham restructures his team. Channel head Julian Bellamy is to be acting chief creative officer.

that children's love of books is in danger as the printed page is edged out in a world of technology.

Alan Yentob has defended the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s decision to withdraw its offer to Christine Bleakley in a

what this means for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s future dealings with talent. Here's an excerpt:

"To lose one One Show presenter may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness. And to lose both to a rival who will re-unite them on a new breakfast show could turn out to be particularly unfortunate.
But not everyone who has made the move from ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ to ITV prospers there."

The that the chancellor's first Budget is previewed in the papers, with the Sun warning that "things are about to get nasty".

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Commentators discuss what they would save and what they would scrap in today's Budget.

[subscription required] that she isn't convinced that Tory Big Society rhetoric will match up to the practice:

"[I]f benefits are frozen, as has been suggested, then it will hit the poorest hardest. It will look increasingly unfair if wealthy pensioners continue to receive free bus passes, winter fuel allowances and eye tests and if bankers' wives can carry on receiving child benefit until their children are 18. There will also be some tough decisions about the long-term unemployed."

[subscription required] that it is possible for this Budget to create a small state which supports the Big Society concept:

"The first challenge is increasing incentives to work. The last government oversaw a 40 per cent increase in welfare, but left 5m on out-of-work benefits. Some 1.4m under-25s are now not working or studying, while working-age poverty is at its highest level for 50 years. Huge spending to alleviate poverty has done little but create a massive barrier, both structural and cultural, to work.
Ìý
"My wife and I run a rehabilitation project for ex-prisoners, some of whom live in state-subsidised private flats. The moment they get a job, they lose both their Jobseeker's Allowance and housing benefit. Quite right, you might say: except this means earning £15,000 a year just to earn as much as the dole. Long-term unemployed ex-offenders rarely find such jobs immediately, and therefore have strong incentives to stay on welfare."

some benchmarks for judging the Budget:

"If commentators are only talking about pain when Mr Osborne sits down on Tuesday he will have failed. If we are also talking about reform and a new economy he will be on the path to success...
Ìý
"This should be a reforming budget that - over time - will deliver a smaller state and lower, simpler, fairer taxes."

the bureaucrat:

"The drive for more accountable government had translated into hiring thousands of accountants.
Ìý
"That, in short, is the story of shrinking the state. Taxpayers need to know that their money is being spent sensibly, but recipients of public funds are now under such hot-breathed pressure from the politicians to footnote exactly what they are doing that it gets in the way of the work...
Ìý
"And now the connotations around the word are all to do with forms in triplicate and paper jams and call centres. But at its best bureaucracy can mean collecting, analysing and applying information that helps all of us."

that George Osborne isn't cutting for the fun of it:

"Believe it or not, Tories are politicians too; and I have never met a politician who does not seek popularity above everything else. David Cameron and George Osborne would like to be liked by the electorate, every bit as much as did Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They know that cutting public expenditure by significant amounts is a guaranteed path to unpopularity for any government...
Ìý
"Now, I realise that it is difficult for Labour's leading lights - especially while they are vying with each other to prove to their own internal electorate just how good he or she would be as leader at clobbering the Government - to admit that the Conservative-led coalition is trying to act in the national interest."

that George Osborne looks at an alternative to savage cuts:

"As the Institute for Public Policy Research suggests, a staged 3p increase in the basic and higher rates of income tax would raise £15 billion and rebalance the planned 80:20 split between cuts and tax rises that makes it virtually impossible to shield the less well-off. He could also impose a tougher levy on bankers and financial institutions. All would produce howls of pain, but anything would be better than a fate that threatens all citizens, irrespective of age or wealth.
Ìý
"In the name of averting ruin, Mr Osborne risks rounding up the generation on whom the future of this nation depends and forcing it down the long road to perdition."

on how Labour should respond to the Budget

"There is an alternative. The Conservatives and Cleggite Lib Dems will be desperate to estabish that this is unavoidable, harsh medicine. To rebut that attack we have to suggest the outlines of an alternative. That choice needs to be built on creating growth, so we therefore need to be talking about measures to support private sector job creation and these can't be simply extensions of State Aid. I'd be looking at capital and R&D tax allowances, the creation of special enterprise zones in high unemployment areas, increased support for high skill employers for training, and infrastructure investment in transport, research and housing provision."

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On Tech Brief today: Dell mulls shipping computers with Google's Chrome operating system, open data enables a live map of London's tube network, and news of a recording deal for an iPhone musician.

• :

"'We have to have a point of view on the industry and technology direction two years, three years down the road, so we continuously work with Google on this,' Amit Midha, Dell's president for Greater China and South Asia told Reuters in an interview."

Google's Chrome operating system is expected to launch in the late autumn, and if Dell chooses to install Chrome OS on its computers, it would be a major boost for the rival to Microsoft Windows.

• It took less than a week for a computer whiz to come up with something clever that makes use of newly-available data about London's transport network. . But as Wired points out, the map can sometimes be amusingly inaccurate, though it's not clear whether that is the fault of the data, or the program written to use it:

"Watch for a few minutes, and you'll no doubt see some of the errors in the data feed - trains travelling far faster than could be possible, or taking wild routes off the track, haring off below parks or housing estates as if they'd suddenly decided that they'd seen enough of the same old boring routes, and wanted to try something different."

Wired's Duncan Geere has admiration for the people running the train network:

"Zooming in close to a busy station such as King's Cross or Hammersmith also reveals some of the difficulties faced by the Underground's controllers and drivers, with trains entering and leaving the station as often as every 5-10 seconds."

• Perhaps fearful that modern technology threatens to make them irrelevant, librarians at the University of Illinois found in games like Doom and Second Life. Project co-ordinator Jerome McDonough explained why to Ars Technica:

"The really simple, one-sentence answer is because games are important. In the United States we're looking at about 80,000 people who are directly employed by the gaming industry and maybe another 240,000 people involved in related, tangential industries that rely on gaming companies for their existence. So just as a monetary phenomenon, games are important. You probably saw the sales for Modern Warfare? We're talking a single game that realized over a billion dollars in sales."

But Mr McDonough said that it's not only monetary value which justifies the efforts of the Illinois team:

"You also can't understand some other parts of our cultural world unless you preserve some of the game world. There's a lot of sort of interpenetration of media. On the importance of preserving a game like Doom - well, if you're preserving something like The Simpsons, you're not going to be able to understand the Doom references that they made visually in a few Simpson episodes unless you've got a copy of Doom sitting around."

We're tempted to say "Cowabunga, dude!"

• For music lovers, including Amnesty, Friends of the Earth and the NSPCC. One of Fair Share Music's founders, Lee Cannon, told Music Week that part of the inspiration is a carrot rather than stick approach to illegal file-sharing:

"The music industry needs to motivate people into purchasing music rather than prosecuting people that don't. Our unique music platform is a step forward in the download-to-own market - not only doing good for recording artists and song writers, but is also doing good for a wide range of extremely worthy causes."

• Finally for today, who knows, perhaps YouTube phenomenon applegirl002 will soon be selling records on that site and elsewhere, after signing a recording contract. :

"Kim Yeo-hee, a Korean woman best known as applegirl002, has garnered enough viral Internet stardom and following to sign a record deal with a label in her home country. Using iPhones and music-generating apps to accompany her, the classically trained musician has received more than 4.2 million views on YouTube."

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On Tech Brief today: HD voicemail, the limit to unlimited (not a tribute to the 90s techno band, pictured thanks to DJ Vernon) and the chance to pick your pioneer.

• that it will launch its new HD voicemail on the 3G network at the end of the summer. who attended a demonstration of the service:

"We... were pleasantly surprised at how it filters out background sound and provides crystal clear voice quality. Indeed, it seems as though it has a similar quality of voice to that on a DAB radio. Certainly, any tinniness is removed."

It is currently being trialled in Bristol, Reading and Southampton, after a successful launch in Moldova (and why not?).

• If the halcyon days of "unlimited broadband" packages ever existed, their days are numbered. reports that the is going to investigate whether the rules governing the use of the phrase "unlimited" in broadband package adverts need to be revised:

"The move has been prompted by the increased popularity of devices like the iPhone and services like the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ iPlayer, which are squeezing network operators' ability to keep up with demand."

A spokesperson from the ASA told Tech Brief that while the regulator had not been "inundated" with complaints, there was a "fair volume" from people who felt mislead by the claims of the broadband providers, many of whom have a fair usage policy buried in the small print.

, as Lewis Carroll wisely declared.

• Mark Zuckerberg might not want to plan a holiday in Pakistan any time soon. that the founder of Facebook is the subject of a formal complaint to the police known as an FIR (First Information Report), which can pave the way to a trial.

He is accused of blasphemy following the controversial images of the Prophet Muhammad which appeared on the social-networking service.

Under Pakistan law, blasphemy is punishable by death or lifelong imprisonment - although Mr Zuckerberg could not be extradited from the US to stand trial.

Says Simon Davies of Privacy International:

"This order by the High Court to the government essentially means that a prima facie case has already been made against Facebook's founder, clearing the way for a charge and prosecution to follow."

• for your favourite information pioneer. At time of writing, Alan Turing is firmly in the lead, so if you want Sir Clive Sinclair, rather bizarrely championed by ex-cricketer Phil Tufnell, or Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Hedy Lamarr or Ada Lovelace to be in with a chance, then get clicking. It's like . Only good.

On the BCS website, actress Miranda Raison presents a video tribute to movie star/inventor Hedy Lamarr:

"If you're watching this film right now on a wireless connection... that is, in part, thanks to Hedy Lamarr. And of all the many roles she played, that of inventor is probably the most amazing."

You've got until 30 June to cast your vote.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Worldwide, the corporation's commercial arm, says it will pay bonuses to senior managers, as it prepares to announce record profits. it is competing for expensive talent in America and Australia. It's in contrast to the publicly-funded ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, where executives have had their pay and bonuses frozen.

that Christine Bleakley is leaving the One Show to join Adrian Chiles on ITV's new breakfast show, after the corporation withdrew its offer of a new contract.

Earlier, MPs had criticised the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ for making her a reported offer of £450,000 a year, .

The Evening Standard is about to move into profit, a year after being turned into a free newspaper, . It's about to increase its print run from 600,000 to 750,000.

TV audiences this week face 18-19 hours of sports coverage daily across ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳1, ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳2 and ITV1 as Wimbledon coincides with the World Cup. .

ITV's former World Cup pundit Robbie Earle says the broadcaster supplied him with 400 tickets for the tournament. that he was fired by ITV after some of the tickets were used as part of an ambush marketing stunt.

the BSkyB board wants assurances that Sky News would not be turned into a partisan "Fox News-style" service if it accepts an offer from News Corporation to take full control.

, the day before the government reveals its plans.

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• Read Monday's Media Brief

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Commentators discuss Tuesday's emergency Budget.

that George Osborne can afford to be bold with his cuts:

"Given the vast size of the hole in the public finances, he could be forgiven for thinking that he's in a difficult position. In fact, he's in the strongest position in which he will ever be. Everyone knows the situation is not of his making and the support of two of the three main parties should sustain public support for the difficult decisions that lie ahead."

Conservative MP [subscription required] that "wielding the axe will not work without a radical effort to boost the private sector"

"[The Bank of England] next need judgment and understanding of the economic cycle to give the economy the cash it needs to function without encouraging another credit-fuelled inflation. Their money-printing kept the public sector economy going, but did not filter through to the private sector, because of strict constraints on banking cash and capital. New regulation is needed to balance the economy, rather than hogging all the cash for the State and driving the pound down too far in an inflationary manner."

The : "the Tories have a plan for cuts but do they have a plan for growth?":

"Cut Government spending on keeping the economy running and unemployment will grow and the burden on the state will increase.
Ìý
Instead of the deficit decreasing, it will increase as more and more people join the dole queue. That's why cutting the public sector before you have got private sector prosperity is dangerous for all of us."

that Tuesday's Budget will be a sombre occasion for George Osborne:

"Osborne is not expecting to get a good press, but is comforting himself with the old Ken Clarke dictum that the worst budgets are those that get the best headlines the following day. His argument will be that the risks to growth from deficit reduction are smaller than those from the increase in interest rates that would result from the financial markets cutting up rough."

that Mr Osborne has to find the right language:

"There is very little that the Chancellor can do to promote growth. So many of the factors are not under his control. The two most important are the animal spirits of the British middle classes, and luck. This is where the politics comes in. He has to get the tone right. While not shirking the bad news, he must persuade us that it will not last for ever. Although it is difficult to find fresh ways of expressing those traditional Conservative themes, opportunity and enterprise, Mr Osborne must find the language. The speech needs three phases: grimness, aspiration, inspiration."

Mr Osborne of seeing the economy "as a giant seesaw":

"There is a seam of orthodox economists, and rightwing politicians, who have believed that the simple act of cutting public sector jobs will create them in the private sector - that because it can be written as an equation the real world must fall into line. But, as the Office of Budget Responsibility notes, the recent past teaches us that government support for demand can make a difference."

[subscription required] that this Budget is going to be a test for the coalition government:

"If the Budget is shown to have discriminated against the poor or against the less prosperous regions beyond the M25 - whatever the coalition might say - tensions inside the Lib Dems are likely to emerge."

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Commentators relive BP chief executive Tony Hayward's time explaining the oil spill to Congress and the apology given to him.

the event highlights how Congress has changed over the century:

"Once they were not only riveting political theatre but events that could turn US history. In 1954, hearings destroyed the reputation of the malign Senator Joseph McCarthy. The televised Watergate hearings of 1973 and 1974 helped bring down Richard Nixon, and the Iran-Contra hearings of 1987 almost did the same to Ronald Reagan. That rarely happens now...
Ìý
"That became clear at the outset, when the senior Republican on the House Commerce and Energy panel turned his fire not on BP but on the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, accusing it of a '$20bn shakedown' by forcing BP to set up a compensation fund for victims of the spill. The disaster is thus a subplot of November's Congressional mid-term elections."

that Congressman Joe Barton's apology to BP has handed the White House an easy way to change the subject:

"Until today Republicans had been confident that Dems would be hard pressed to make the story about anything other than the president and his impotence. But Barton's gaffe has given the White House its best opening yet to use the spill to make the global case against the GOP and ensure that its approach to governance is part of the national conversation about the disaster."

that no-one will accuse Joe Barton of following the whims of political opinion:

"If Barton wanted to keep heat on the White House over its interactions with BP, this is a poor way of going about it. BP doesn't require any apologies at the moment, at least not until we know what happened. There may well be some serious questions about federal overreach and interference with the due process of claims after the establishment of this fund, but it's a little overdramatic to claim that BP didn't get due process in creating the escrow account. They surrendered on that point without bothering to fight. Plenty of lawsuits and even criminal charges get settled without going to court when both parties agree on a settlement, usually one produced under some kind of duress to one or both parties."

an apology for President Obama's behaviour was warranted:

"I am rarely at a loss for words, but I was briefly stunned into silence by Barack Obama's words during his Tuesday night speech that he would 'inform' BP's CEO that he 'is to' create an escrow account. The president has no authority to do such a thing - but neither did he have authority to cram down Chrysler and GM bond holders for the benefit of the UAW. Law is irrelevant, probably not even considered as an afterthought, by this president.
Ìý
"BP is not a victim here. They're not in the least bit sympathetic. But this is the nation that presumes innocence before guilt, that is founded on the rule of law rather than of men. How strange it is that we elected a president who wants to give terrorist murderers the benefit of the doubt, give them access to legal protections they're not even entitled to, but treats a major international corporation - which had already said it would pay all legitimate claims - the way Al Capone treated a rival moonshine distributor."

there was a communication breakdown between Tony Hayward and congressmen who used the word "shakedown" - which means extortion. Mr Keller argues that Hayward must have misunderstood the word given his answer.

that this week could mark the end of the beginning for BP:

"It could still all go wrong, especially if the relief wells fail, but Hayward can at least reflect, perhaps to himself this time, that this is not the end, not even the beginning of the end. But it could be the end of the beginning."

I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

, including the National Film Centre at the South Bank and the Stonehenge Visitor Centre, and .

and that Sky Sports News is leaving Freeview and will go pay-only

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park opens today in Orlando, Florida. , as has Harry Ptter and friends' drink of choice - butterbeer.

Disney's "promoted tweet" for Toy Story 3 is the first-paid-for trending topic on Twitter, .

that UK newspapers have suffered the most dramatic sales falls of any country outside America, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

that the public spending cuts announced to the Commons by Danny Alexander are the focus of many the front pages, along with BP boss Tony Hayward's appearance in front of a US Congressional committee.

• Read Thursday's Media Brief
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Regional experts have been debating who is behind last week's violence in southern Kyrgyzstan, in which more than 170 people died in fighting between Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbek. An estimated 250,000 people have fled their homes. Interim president Roza Otunbeyeva, who took over after the overthrow of President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in April, has struggled to retain control in the south of the country.

, a professor atÌýColumbia University'sÌýHarriman Institute: "I don't believe in a narrative of long-simmering ethnic tension," he tells the paper:

"Indeed, ethnic distinctions between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz are so slight as to be hardly distinguishable, Professor Cooley and others say. Both are predominantly Muslim and they speak a mutually comprehensible Turkic language. The most notable distinction, the one that is most responsible for the animosities that led to the recent violence, Central Asian experts say, is economic: Kyrgyz are traditional nomads, while Uzbeks are farmers."

Professor of political science at Stetson University in Florida that the fighting was not a spontaneous outbreak of ethnic violence among communities which, he says, have been leaving together largely peacefully for centuries. Instead, he says, the likely instigators were Kyrgyz backers of Mr Bakiyev, which links to the drugs trade:

"This was... a well-orchestrated and well-financed effort by armed groups to provoke conflict between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks. There are reports that these groups distributed weapons and ethnically explosive propaganda to each side with the aim of unleashing a conflict between the two communities. It is important to emphasize that although the ethnic Uzbek population appears to have suffered the most, with many now seeking safety in neighbouring Uzbekistan, ethnic Kyrgyz have also been targets of the violence.
Ìý
"We don't know for sure who is behind it at this point, but it seems likely that local drug lords and criminal groups joined forces with individuals close to the ousted president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev. Both groups have an interest in destabilizing the situation and not permitting the holding of a planned constitutional referendum on June 27."

this explanation lacks credibility:

"There is an oft-repeated tendency to blame criminal groups for carrying out the violent attacks and to blame politicians and/or deposed leaders for the manipulation of these groups. Basically, blaming criminal groups and power figures absolves the teenagers and young men from the neighbourhood.
Ìý
"To put too much stress on criminal groups is to avoid, or lead the reader to miss, a discussion of ongoing tensions and conflicts in the community...
Ìý
"That being said, Bakiyev's patronage network (in all its possible vertical and horizontal manifestations) could very well be responsible for the initiation of violence... However, the formula of 'Bad guy gives order to foot soldiers to let loose the dogs of war' oversimplifies the initiation of violent conflict.
Ìý
"People without power sometimes make their own decisions - out of fear, hatred or material benefit - to kill their neighbours based on their ethnicity, a concept that they can, in many places, consider quite important."

a history of tension in the region. Inter-ethnic violence broke out in 1990, triggered by a dispute over access to water. Soviet troops had to be called in to deal with the unrest, he says:

"A group of Uzbeks settled on a patch of land that had water running through it - the Ferghana Valley is also the breadbasket of Central Asia, it's the agricultural area that really feeds almost the whole population of greater Central Asia. That situation erupted. Some Kyrgyz felt that the land that was given to the Uzbeks wasn't fairly given to them...
Ìý
"There has been a lot of reconciliation between the Uzbek and Kyrgyz populations since 1990, but that isn't going so far as to say they put all their differences aside. This was always a tinderbox that was waiting to be lit up again."

An editorial in :

"What is taking place in the cities of Osh and Jalal-Abad in southern KyrgyzstanÌýis an old-fashioned central Asian pogrom,Ìýa brutal act of ethnic cleansing.ÌýThe departure of the Bakiyev clan triggered a competition for resources in the south. The Uzbeks, who ran the local markets, were accused of a political power grab, and a weak government in Bishkek - a coalition of opposition forces - could do little to prevent the resulting explosion.
Ìý
"So everyone keeps their heads down: the Americans who lease an airbase vital to their interests in Afghanistan, the Russians, the Chinese. Watching from the sidelines is the order of the day. Help us, the Uzbeks cry. Who will tell them nobody isÌýlistening?"

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On Tech Brief today: Ads, ads everywhere and why you need to be bored more often.

• Working out how to make money from Twitter has been a parlour game among the digerati for a long time now. Twitter started to square that circle with promoted tweets and has now gone further with the debut of what it snappily calls promoted trending topics. That's "adverts" for us mortals. These pop-up on profile pages accompanied by a yellow box announcing they are "promoted". The first is for . :

"First, it's interesting that Twitter is putting these at the bottom of Trending Topics rather than at the top. Still, the yellow badge draws your eye naturally to it. Second, the Promoted Trending Topic appears no matter which city or country you set your Trending Topics to. In the future, you can imagine these Promoted Tending Topics being even more highly targeted to just certain regions/cities."

• From the "This will not end well" department comes the story of . Well, almost.

"There's only one catch to what Perez is calling David On Demand: it must be legal."

Despite this limit on the fun that can be had with this solo experiment in crowd-sourcing, the results are being streamed to a set up to record the results. The experiment starts on 21 June.

• You would think that Iceland has had its fill of bad news given the dolorous state of its economy, but the nation has declared its willingness to become a haven for free speech and news organisations keen to ensure their voice is not suppressed. .

"[I]n one major test case of cross-border online libel law, 'publication' was deemed to occur at the point of download -- meaning that serving a controversial page from Iceland won't keep you from getting sued in other countries. But if nothing else, it would probably prevent your servers from being forcibly shut down."

• The pundits are revolting. . :

"So why is this a problem? It sounds like I was super-productive. Every extra minute, I was either producing or consuming. But something -- more than just sleep, though that's critical too -- is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose. Boredom."

Who would choose to be bored? You should, according to Mr Bregman:

"My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These "wasted" moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital. They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They're the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen."

• Spam could be about to make the great leap from cyberspace to your living space. HP and Yahoo are teaming up to send targeted ads to that snazzy printer you have just hooked up the web. .

"HP's ePrint printers, some of which will become available next month, are connected to the user's home router, which means they will have an IP address. IP addresses can be used to identify an approximate area where the web-connected device is located, opening the potential for targeted advertisements based on location."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

that the writer of Doctor Who Stephen Moffatt has hit back at claims by Stephen Fry that British TV has become "infantilised" and resembles, , chicken nuggets. Fry made his comments after giving .

The the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ won't be part of the government's public-sector pay inquiry to be conducted by Will Hutton. This is because it has an independent revenue stream - like Royal Mail, also excluded.

ITV's former World Cup pundit Robbie Earle may be interviewed by South African police, after tickets allocated to him were used for an "ambush marketing" stunt by blonde women in orange dresses. ITV dropped him after the incident, .

The what the Independent calls a "presidential spanking" for BP and George Osborne's shake-up of City regulation.

• Read Tuesday's Media Brief
• Read

Commentators look at the abolition of the current system of financial regulation.

that the Financial Services Authority won't be missed.

"[F]ew will shed tears for the Financial Services Authority, invented when Labour gave the Bank control over monetary policy in 1997. The late Eddie George, then Bank governor, would be smiling today, because he almost resigned over this matter. The FSA was far too gentle on the City for so many years, and never commanded great respect from the major financial institutions - which were on occasion openly contemptuous about its capacity to comprehend a burgeoning array of new financial instruments. (It later emerged that the leaders of our banks did not understand them either.)
Ìý
"The FSA's efforts to control excessive levels of leverage and debt in the market were perhaps no worse - but certainly no better - than those of the very different American and European regulatory regimes. It was very much a creature of its time. Until the recent speeches by Lord Turner on the role of the financial markets in the economy, the FSA scarcely provided any intellectual leadership in the debate about the credit crunch, or on the emergency measures taken after the crash."

why he thinks Mervyn King is the real winner:

"Mervyn King has officially emerged as the credit crunch's great - and perhaps only - winner, even though his policy of keeping interest rates excessively low was the single most important domestic driver of the bubble (something which for some reason, unlike in the US, nobody wants to talk about in this country). Of course, the real culprit was Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, who forced King to follow a narrow and deeply destructive mandate, focusing exclusively on targeting the consumer price index and largely ignoring asset prices, the soaring money supply and the rest. Many monetarist, Austrian and other non-mainstream economists warned for years that a bubble was under way, only to be dismissed."

that the new system looks like it will be more sophisticated:

"Under the new system the Bank should have a much more complete picture and as in pre-FSA days will have tools, other than interest rates, to restrain policy. It could increase capital requirements in times of excessive credit growth and potentially place restraints on mortgage lenders - such as changing the loan to value rules - if it thinks the market is getting ahead of itself.
Ìý
"None of this guarantees that supervisory blunders will not be made. The Bank's supervisors largely took the rap for the failure of Johnson Matthey Bank in the 1980s and BCCI's closure in the 1990s."

what the negative effects of concentrating so much power in one institution might be:

"Then there's the problem of group-think. Central banks tend not to be transparent organisations. When the country's entire financial regulatory workforce reports to Threadneedle Street, will debate flourish and dissent be heard? Not all of those complaints about King's performance in the early days of the banking crisis can dismissed out of hand. King's version of events - that the Bank was hamstrung by inadequate powers - has prevailed but some decisions could surely have been made differently."

The [subscription required] is hopeful:

"It looks like the darkest part of the night is over in the regulation of banking. The cost of regulatory failure has been very high. This Mansion House speech starts the correction."

On Tech Brief today: Google goes house-hunting, a robotic companion that is actually quite useful and how digital graffiti is so much easier to clean up than old-fashioned spraypaint.

• Google seems to have bounced back from r over how much information it is collecting with a new service that snoops around houses.

Ok, I should probably clarify that slightly. In fact the search giant has added a property finding service to Google Maps UK which will allow people to search for houses in any given location and get all the vital statistics on rooms, price and location. It has signed deals with a range of estate agents, including Countrywide and online agents Zoopla and Zoomf

what prompted the latest service:

"We want Google Maps to be a map that contains all of the world's information. We know that many UK home buyers are already using Google Maps in their house-hunting, and by adding property listings to the map we're putting everything together for them in one place."

• US telephone company AT&T is not enjoying a great record on user security at the moment. Last week it was revealed that 114,000 iPad users' e-mail addresses, including those of White House staff, had been exposed.

Now that customers trying to order a new iPhone 4 are being redirected to other users' accounts, with access to some of the their personal information, including their phone numbers and addresses.

AT&T customer Ethan told Gizmodo:

"I logged in to Att.com in the pre-order frenzy. I was immediately greeted by someone else's personal information. Fearful that I had accidentally registered my iPhone to someone else's name I refreshed the page. This time my account info came in correctly."

An unidentified AT&T insider told Gizmodo the issues were related to a weekend outage:

"Over the weekend there was a major fraud update that went down on all of AT&T's systems, from Saturday overnight to Sunday early morning. All systems were down and agents were unable to use any systems."

• Indeed it seems the whole iPhone pre-ordering system is in chaos with lots of news sites and blogs, including that Apple's online store is struggling to cope with demand for pre-orders.

It also seems those hoping to order a white iPhone 4 could be disappointed with none available on either Apple or AT&T's sites. For those who like to be on Apple's bleeding edge it could be back to the old-fashioned way of buying goods by standing in what promises to be a long queue outside an Apple store on release day, 24 June.

• Robotic companions often tend to look cute (in a geeky, metallic kind of way) but are often of limited practical help. LuminAR reverses that trend. It looks just like a desk lamp - but its simple exterior hides a range of exciting technology, including a pico-projector, camera and wireless computer. All that means it can respond to commands, so a swipe of the hand moves it to one side, but more interestingly, it also creates an interface on any surface or object.

the project:

"The project radically rethinks the design of traditional lighting objects, and explores how we can endow them with novel augmented-reality interfaces."

Turning on the light has never been so exciting.

• We are in the season of wellies, loud music and fields but winner of most obscure festival goes to what it being billed as the world's first projection art festival, kicking off in Florida this week.

The festival is dedicated to digital graffiti and computer-generated graphics; animation and video will be splashed onto buildings around Alys Beach, without a dirty paintbrush or pair of wellies in sight.

Now in its third year, judge what the appeal was:

"It was a difficult concept to understand, even for the developers of the event, but once night fell that first year and you could see the projections on the white canvases of the walls of each of the stunning buildings, we all had a big 'ah-ha' moment."

And, unlike other festivals, no need for a big clean-up. Last person to leave switch the lights off.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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Commentators from the US and British media reflect on US President Barack Obama's first speech from the Oval Office, vowing to make BP pay for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and urging his country to end its "addiction" to fossil fuels.

is one of the few to see much to welcome in the president's remarks:

"Obama was right to say that we are drilling a mile deep in the gulf because we are exhausting, with our voracious energy appetite, safer sources on land or in shallow water. And he was especially right to say that the nightmare of the Gulf oil spill won't end until we find alternatives to our economic dependence on fossil fuels...I liked him better Tuesday night than I have in a while - tired, beat-up politically, but not playing to the crowd with easy put-downs of BP CEO Tony Hayward or profit-mongering Big Oil. There's a glimmer of real leadership there, but not yet the bright beam."

sees little of substance beyond good will in the president's remarks:

"I am really not entirely sure what the point to this Oval Office address was! Were you looking for something that resembled a fully-realized action plan, describing a detailed approach to containment and clean up? Or perhaps a definitive statement, severing the command and control that BP has largely enjoyed, in favor of a structured, centralized federal response? Maybe you were looking for a roadmap-slash-timetable for putting America on a path to a clean energy future? Well, this speech was none of those things."

, sees a feeble effort on the president's part:

"Whatever the reason, Barack Obama gave the most depressing Oval Office speech since Jimmy Carter's malaise speech. He didn't just embrace defeat, he wore it on his suit as a substitute for an argyle sweater. He tried to sound upbeat in the way a cop in a movie might sound when his partner lay mortally wounded and the cop needs to get the partner's wife to the hospital without letting her know her husband is dying. It was a false optimism with Barack Obama distracting Americans in a game of three card monte."

also gave the presiden'ts speech a failing grade.

"It was certainly the worst rally-the-nation speech by a US president I've ever watched, and that includes Nixon's cornered-rat addresses of the early 1970s and - an ominous parallel - Jimmy Carter's fireside chat in April 1977, four months into his presidency, to publicise his Plan for Energy Independence... Of course, Obama said that there will be a set-aside clean-up and compensation fund, financed by BP. He tossed the word "recklessness" in BP's direction. But these were timid little puff-ball punches. There was no mailed fist within the glove, no steely legal language about emergency powers, no threats about BP withholding all dividends."

Across the pond, says Mr Obama missed a great opportunity to use the Oval Office to tell Americans what went wrong in the Gulf and what was being done about it:

"This speech fell well short of the mark rhetorically. The language was too broad and the structure too formulaic to break through the media babble. Being an effective explainer-in-chief is all about tone, word choice, confidence. Obama didn't show much confidence. Toward the end, as he discussed the need for comprehensive energy legislation, he spoke fairly strong words, but somehow his face conveyed that he wasn't really sure Congress would listen to him (or maybe I'm reading into that, since I doubt Congress will on this question)."

Commentators from the British press discuss the outcome of the Bloody Sunday inquiry.

The from a non-commissioned officer with the Parachute Regiment on Bloody Sunday. He no longer serves in the British Army and says he wishes he hadn't been there:

"I am not going to say that some innocent people were not killed that day - and I am truly sorry for their deaths, as, I am sure, a lot of other soldiers are as well. But to say that we went into the Bogside on that day to kill civvies cannot be further from the truth. We were ordered to go there and sort out rioters who were hitting the Army for days with petrol bombs, nail bombs, bricks, all sorts; we were told we would be making arrests... I feel sorry for people who died if they were innocent, I feel sorry for some soldiers who they say might now get charged. And I am sorry we were in Derry on that sodding day."

[subscription required] says the cost was worth it:

"[F]or me at least, the truth is worth more than £195 million, and worth taking more than 12 years to establish. Liberal democracies are built on truth -- and they cannot survive without it.
Ìý
"And often the truth isn't pretty. It may be that optimists are happier and achieve more. But the same psychological research that finds this also finds that pessimistic people - ones who don't interpret their own actions and those of others in the most positive ways - are, sadly, on the whole, more realistic. Perhaps the evolutionary process has allowed both pessimism and optimism to survive because we need both sorts of people. We need contentment and optimism to get things done, but we also need realists and truth-tellers."

the inquiry a "grossly misguided excavation of the past":

"The quarrel of myself and millions of British people is not with what Saville reported yesterday, but with the grotesque context of his inquiry. In 1998 Tony Blair chose to indulge Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness by, in effect, placing the Army on trial as part of the price of bringing Sinn Fein into a peace process. Saville has produced more than 5,000 pages of official paper retelling the Bloody Sunday story, reaching almost identical conclusions to those of innumerable newspaper investigations, books and TV documentaries.
Ìý
"Meanwhile the long catalogue of Republican atrocities against the British and Irish peoples goes unexplored."

that Lord Saville missed the chance of deeper healing:

"You can hanker for justice and you can hanker for peace, but only rarely do you get both. In societies riven by conflict, one is usually traded for the other, victims forced to see perpetrators walk free in the name of "reconciliation". When the authorities sit down to decide whether to pursue the murderers of Bloody Sunday, this surely will be part of their calculation of the public interest: will peace be jeopardised by prosecutions or is it sufficiently embedded that it can survive the reopening of old wounds?
Ìý
"As it happens, this vexed dilemma could have been avoided. The Saville inquiry might have had a different remit, one less like a legal tribunal and more akin to South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission. The promise of a South African style amnesty would have encouraged the paras to tell the whole truth, rather than putting up the brick wall of "I do not recall" memory failure that greeted Saville. Such an amnesty would have thwarted those relatives bent on prosecutions, but it might have offered an even deeper sense of healing: seeing their loved ones' killers admit the truth."

The that prosecutions would be in no one's interest:

"[N]o one's interests are served by defending the indefensible. Equally, no one's interests would be served by prosecuting soldiers so long after the event. There were, after all, other participants - notably Martin McGuinness, now Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, whose activities on that day, and subsequently, might warrant investigation. However, after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and the release of paramilitary prisoners, it was accepted, for good or ill, that much would remain unsolved."

The founder of Northern Ireland's Sluggerotoole blog what is next for Northern Ireland:

"But the wider, possibly more important question is, what do we do about our bloody past, and its longstanding social consequences? The Spanish agreed to bury it in the pacto del olvido, or pact of forgetting, which is now - 35 years after Franco's death (and that of many of the victims) - now beginning to break up. No such agreement exists in Northern Ireland. And even once (or even if) the state has discharged its final duties to its citizens, many thousands will be left to nurse their own grief in private."

On Tech Brief today: Apple's policy on iPhone donations rankles, the professional blogger who annoyed "anonymous" commenters by e-mailing them at work, and the future of typing, which may involve drawing.

• The creator of an iPhone app for the popular American radio show This American Life . The company's app terms and conditions prevent organisations from soliciting donations, which Jake Shapiro thinks is a shame:

"Apple is not just preventing app developers from putting 'donate' buttons or any language suggesting that users contribute to charitable causes; it is also cutting off nonprofits from the most powerful direct-payment platform in the mobile marketplace. 1-Click payments are transformative for direct giving, and Apple has tens of millions of users with stored credit cards already accustomed to instant purchases - over 100 million if you add in iTunes users worldwide."

He goes on to argue that Apple gains from public broadcasters and media as a source of material for its devices, but is then denying a major potential revenue source for those non-profit organisations:

"For public media, where contributions from 'listeners like you' are a critical source of revenue, Apple's donation blocking is a particularly acute problem. For one thing, public media content is hugely popular across iTunes and iPhone/iPad - check out the top rankings for NPR, PBS, PRX and other public media podcasts, station streams, and apps. Apple is effectively blocking a major revenue stream to public media while enthusiastically featuring public media content and apps that enhance value for its devices."

• Perhaps this isn't Apple's week. According to Valleywag, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of that popular social network with close to half a billion users :

"In a post to his Facebook wall, Zuckerberg explained that, within one week of acquiring the device, he's already had to buy landline phone service in order to make calls, and a whole mess of chargers in order to move the Apple device from place to place."

But it seems Mr Zuckerberg may be confused about exactly which iPhone he has. Ryan Tate suggested that Apple might provide the latest fourth edition of the iPhone to Mr Zuckerberg before he switches allegiance, then clarified:

"Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat reports this was an iPhone 4, even though... Zuckerberg says the next-generation device is still in his future."

• A blogger named Zach Kouwe who left the New York Times under a cloud, after copying elements of his reports from the Wall Street Journal and others . He had been employed by the Dealbreaker website, which Felix Salmon at Reuters says was another organisation Kouwe had been accused of pinching material from without attribution:

"One anonymous commenter -- and Dealbreaker prizes its commenters' anonymity greatly -- wrote that 'Kouwe e-mailed me the other day to tell me he 'knew' where I worked', and later posted a screenshot of the emails in question. It seems that Kouwe obtained the commenter's email address -- presumably through his privileged access to the commenter login system -- and then emailed the commenter to tell him exactly where he worked."

Felix Salmon points out that Mr Kouwe was not normally inclined to respond publicly to comments on his pieces:

"Kouwe declined to comment on the situation, but it seems that two months of aggressive needling from Dealbreaker's commenters finally got to him. There's no doubt that the commenters on the site -- who are not representative of its readers, and who can be extremely mean -- applied a lot of negative pressure on Kouwe from day one. But at a site like Dealbreaker, commenter anonymity has to be non-negotiable."

• Sticking with e-mail for the moment, NPR has published a list of phrases to avoid using in electronic communications, . It lists a number of phrases that those lawyers exploring the collapse of Lehman Brothers searched for in 34 million or so pages of documents from the bank. Jacob Goldstein explains that, in addition to a range of technical terms, the lawyers also searched for some pretty general phrases as well:

"One search in particular targeted a bunch of words and phrases that anybody might use in an incriminating e-mail. They are:

• stupid
• huge mistake
• big mistake
• dumb
• can't believe
• cannot believe
• serious trouble
• big trouble
• unsalvageable
• shocked
• speechless
• too late
"

• Finally, for today, . Tapping out messages on glass is not everyone's cup of tea, and after getting a Google Android smartphone, Jeremy Wagstaff found he preferred "predictive text", as commonly installed for typing messages on mobile phones for the last decade or so:

"My wife complained that she could tell when I was using the Android phone over my trusty old Nokia because she didn't feel I was 'so reachable'. By which she means my monosyllabic answers weren't as reassuring as my long rambling Nokia, predictive text ones."

Then Jeremy Wagstaff discovered ShapeWriter software for smartphones, which lets you literally draw the word you're after on the glass, instead of tapping the letters individually:

"Typing 'hello,' for example, is done by starting your finger on 'h', dragging it northwest to 'e', then to the far east of 'l', lingering there a second, then north a notch to 'o'. No lifting of the finger off the keyboard. Your finger instead leaves a red slug-like trail on the keyboard, and, in theory, when you lift your finger off the keys that trail will be converted to the word 'Hello.'

"And, surprise, surprise, it actually works. Well, unless you're demonstrating it to a skeptical spouse, in which case instead of 'hello' it types 'gremio' or 'hemp'."

Or, indeed, if you are an intrepid ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ reporter trying out the software, and get: "Go Jeremy slapped edited is not as good as I explicit it would be", instead of "Hi Jeremy, shape writer is not as good as I thought it would be".

He says that it gets better with practice.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

News Corporation has made a bid to take full control of BSkyB but has been rebuffed. It already owns 39% of the shares .

the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ has ignored pleas for public pay restraint with a "multi-million pound offer to boost the salaries of more than 13,000 employees". Last week it offered a pay rise of £475 to all staff earning less than £37,726.

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ is looking for a way to offer viewers World Cup coverage without the loud drone of the plastic "vuvuzela" horns. The horns have prompted many complaints, but many fans in Britain are now buying them and .

Speculation about the Saville report into the Bloody Sunday killings dominates the newspapers .

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• Read Monday's Media Brief

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Commentators discuss the new official forecasts produced by the Office for Budget Responsibility.

the this will bring unexpected problems for the coalition:

"Clearly there are two ways to look at this: the deficit is beginning to sort itself out, and it is time to make the already implied degree of cuts more credible (Labour's position). Or the economy is strong enough to warrant an even more savage axe (the Conservatives)...
Ìý
"The good news for Mr Osborne is that the improvement in the deficit numbers may obviate the need for an unpopular VAT rise. The bad news is it turns down the temperature a little on the need for a much faster rate of deficit reduction.
Ìý
"The independent budget experts have unexpectedly presented the chancellor with some problems."

that, to the Tories' dismay, "something is going badly right":

"The new Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was intended by the Tories to be an authoritative, independent voice telling the truth about Britain's public finances. It would demolish the economic Potemkin Village that Gordon Brown built during his time in Downing Street and reveal the full extent of his fiscal vandalism. Against such a backdrop, a Tory chancellor would be seen to have no option but to make harsh and deep cuts. He would create a new economic guru - Sir Alan Budd - who would lead the OBR and give advice that the Chancellor would have little choice but to heed.
Ìý
"It would have been a fine plan, had the British economy not started to recover."

The that "realism takes hold in Whitehall":

"True, the OBR's figures make uncomfortable reading, with their forecasts that growth will be significantly lower and the structural deficit higher than predicted in Labour's last Budget.
Ìý
"And, yes, they make it clear that sharper cuts will be needed if we're to avoid a £67billion bill (more than we spend on schools) for debt interest alone by 2015.
Ìý
"But after years of rose-tinted Treasury forecasts, the independent OBR offers real hope of new honesty, on which alone responsible decisions can be based."

that basing major spending decisions on OBR forecasts that may well prove wrong is a risky business:

"[T]he Treasury and the OBR could find themselves locked into a strange dance of death if policymakers become too obsessed with eliminating the structural deficit. By downgrading growth forecasts, the OBR has made the structural deficit look bigger. On the government's logic, this means that there is an even greater need to cut urgently and to cut deeper."

she looks forward to Cameron's "audacity of despair":

"Gordon Brown has a reputation as a gloomy curmudgeon who sees a cloud hovering around every silver lining. David Cameron is seen as a sunny optimist, always keen to look on the bright side of life. The Labour man is portrayed as Eeyore to the Conservative leader's Tigger, Lennon to his McCartney, Picasso to his Matisse.
Ìý
"In fact, on the economy, the opposite is the case. Yesterday's report from the new Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) shows that Mr Brown was consistently and conspicuously over-optimistic about the speed at which the economy would grow. The central forecast for 2011 is now 2.6 per cent, rather than 3.25 per cent in Labour's last Budget...
Ìý
"Mr Cameron, by contrast, is obsessed by the size of his deficit. When he looks at the growth forecasts he sees a glass that is half empty rather than half full. When he considers the borrowing bill he sees a glass overflowing with toxic debt. His aim is to rethink the size and scope of the state, a philosophical as much as a political exercise. He has neither desire nor motive to talk up the economy - in fact it is in his interest to make things look as dire as possible now so that he can blame someone else and offer a solution himself."

[subscription required] the role of the newly formed office:

"If there was one message that emerged in capital letters from the new official forecasts produced by the Office for Budget Responsibility it was that Britain is not Greece...
Ìý
"The OBR had nothing to say about that calculation. Its job is technical and Sir Alan and his committee were trying to keep it that way. Sir Alan's politically neutral discovery that Britain was not Greece and that the forecast changes are things over which reasonable people can disagree will, for now, help him stay out of party politics."

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• Daily Mail | At last, realism takes hold in Whitehall
• Rachel Sylvester | Times | Cameron offers us the audacity of despair
• Chris Giles | Financial Times | Official verdict is that UK is not Greece

I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.
The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said the Government intends to put the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ licence fee under scrutiny as early as next year. .

ITV has apologised after viewers watching its HD channel missed England's first World Cup goal because of a "transmission" error. Instead they saw a commercial for Hyundai cars. Technicolor, one of ITV's suppliers, have blamed human error and the .

But the there's speculation that it could have been a betting scam.

The that the unofficial World Cup anthem by James Corden and Dizzee Rascal is top of the singles chart.

Sarah Brown has broken her own publisher's embargo by revealing on Twitter that she's to publish her memoirs about life at Number 10. The that as a former PR professional she should have known better.

The "Crunch Time for BP" runs one headline, as the White House turns up the heat on the company.

On Tech Brief today: Chinese website registrations shrink, a solar powered light bulb, and the real reason for the demise of unlimited smartphone data plans.

• China's .cn internet country code has fallen from being the second most popular top-level domain, to fourth place, . Darthcamaro reckons it's all to do with junk e-mail:

"So why did .cn decline? Spammers. 'Many of these are low-priced promotional names that have now come up for renewal at a higher price,' Pat Kane, vice president of naming services at VeriSign, told InternetNews.com. 'The .cn registration decline was also based on the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) registry's implementation of the real names directive from the Chinese government primarily around verifiable 'whois' data.'"

• We're familiar with solar powered garden lights, which tend to give out about enough light to illuminate a small patch of garden path. But a Hong Kong company :

"The Nokero N100 solar LED light bulb is meant to replace kerosene lamps as a lighting source in the developing world. The company says 1.6 billion people still lack sufficient access to electricity, and many burn fossil fuels for light, which can be dangerous and expensive."

The idea is that bulb owners leave them out in the sun all day, and then bring them indoors at night, to give up to four hours of illumination on a full charge, although Nokero says that a day of charging in the sun provides about two hours of light.

• The World Cup in South Africa is captivating football fans all over the planet. :

"The 2010 World Cup is shaping up to be a major Internet milestone event, with billions of fans relying on the Internet for live and on-demand games, news, scores, and highlights of the most watched sporting event in the world. Whether it's watching live streams of the game in HD video or the ability to share stories, photos, and memories at an unprecedented global scale, fans will experience the World Cup like never before. This tool monitors real time traffic to the global broadcasters delivering traffic over Akamai's network."

At the time of writing, Italy seems to have a particularly strong interest in the Cup. Bear in mind that the map is not exhaustive, although Akamai reckons it carries around a fifth of the world's internet traffic.

• In recent weeks we've seen several announcements that unlimited data plans for smartphones are being phased out, on Vodafone, in the US on AT&T, then on 10 June O2 announced that data would be capped at 500Mb or 1Gb depending on your monthly price plan. , the data-hungry culprits may not be smartphone users at all:

"Closer investigation suggests that this is a sort of collateral damage from the rumblings that preceded the Digital Economy Act - that it's caused by peer-to-peer users who were perhaps worried about the "three strikes" talk, and figured that their landlines (if they have them) might be monitored or throttled if they download a lot of P2P data; or they might be surcharged."

And Arthur reckons a very small number of people have turned a smartphone contract into part of the plumbing for their home PC broadband connection, with a breathtaking impact on the phone networks:

"Those wary folk - put by one network as numbering "in the few hundreds" out of millions - have signed up on "unlimited" plans, taken the SIM out of the phone, and then use it in a 3G dongle to download stuff. Because it's unlimited, they can get what they want. And as they don't mind how quickly it arrives, the speed isn't a particular issue; they're just after volume. O2 says that 0.1% of its smartphone users - that's about 2,000 people - are consuming 36% of its data. Other networks indicate the same."

Finally, it seems some people may be prepared to go to bizarre lengths to get their hands on Apple's iPad. Two men in Arizona face drug supply charges, after allegedly offering an iPod touch and a quantity of marijuana on Craigslist, in exchange for one of the gadgets:

"After receiving a tip about the ad, which included photos of both the iPod touch and marijuana, police officers sent an e-mail purporting to be interested in the exchange. When the police met up under the pretense of completing the trade, 20-year-olds Jacob Walker and Jacob Veldare were instead arrested when Walker offered up the marijuana."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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Commentators reflect on the implications of the BP oil spill for British pensions, multinational companies and the Obama presidency.

on BP's involvement in British pensions and anticipates an increase in shareholder power:

"The average pension fund member is not an expert on finance, oil extraction or fund management. The system here, as in the US, relies on large shareholders to police boardroom behaviour and risk-taking. We now know how utterly they have failed in that duty. Most institutions are strangely timid about confrontations with company managements, despite the billions of pounds under their control."

pensions no longer linked to companies like BP:

"Pensions funds shouldn't be investing in BP plc. They should be investing in UK plc. And West Midlands plc in particular.
Ìý
"That takes a fundamental restructuring of banking and economic outlook which I think neither the Office of Fiscal Responsibility nor the Future of Banking Commission gets, because of their London-centric outlook."

that "the tide has shifted with respect to how much thought mainstream investors are giving to environmental, social, and corporate governance":

"Reversals of fortune of this magnitude aren't as rare as we sometimes think. Recall how the tobacco giants wound up ceding enormous, profit-generating power to the U.S. government and how asbestos lawsuits forced such major industrial outfits as Johns-Manville into bankruptcy.
Ìý
"The common denominator linking BP with these companies is growing clear: They all failed to anticipate risks that could threaten their business foundations."

that "British complaints that BP is being 'scapegoated' will not help reason to prevail":

"A US media frenzy is a disgusting thing to watch. Even so, in all this I have no sympathy for either BP or for those in Britain - such as Boris Johnson, London's mayor - who are complaining about a surge in anti-British rhetoric. That kind of whining does not play well in the US. If you want a real backlash against the UK, keep that up.
Ìý
"Imagine that Exxon Mobil had spent weeks dumping 30,000 barrels of oil a day (the newest estimate, double the previous one: seven Exxon Valdez spills so far and counting) on the British shoreline, with no end yet in sight."

argues that the spill is "a test of President Obama's vision of government":

"He should have moved a lot faster to begin political and criminal investigations of the spill. If BP was withholding information, failing to cooperate or not providing the ships needed to process the oil now flowing to the surface, he should have told the American people and the world."

that President Obama's priority is to convince the nation that he is on top of the situation:

"[Mr Obama] is right that the technical expertise, as well as the financial responsibility, for plugging the leak and cleaning the mess, is all BP's, not that of the government.
Ìý
"But the American public expects the White House to demonstrate control of the situation, and now polls put the government's response to the disaster as worse than the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, a failure from which Mr Obama's predecessor never recovered.
Ìý
"Even the president's friends have moved from expressing understanding and sympathy to outright criticism".

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On Tech Brief today: Virtual fraudsters, virtual festivals and a blizzard of Oz data.

• The computer industry loves its three-letter acronyms but here is a trilogy of initials that AT&T will be less than thrilled to read: FBI. The agency has opened an investigation into the AT&T security breach that exposed the names and addresses of US iPad owners. that the probe is in its early stages but the calibre of the victims suggests it will run and run.

"Those who had their e-mails exposed may find hackers attempting to crack their accounts, however, and that could be a major irritant for some of the officials from the FCC, FAA, NASA, and the Army members on the list."

• Be careful of who you talk to online, they might be a robot. A criminally-minded robot. French security researchers have created software that can act convincingly like a human when communication is done via text. its creators have used it to strike up conversations with folks via instant messaging systems to see if it can defraud them. It can.

"The researchers had plenty of success in their tests: They were able to get users to click onto malicious links sent via their chat messages 76% of the time."

• Europeans are used to having information about where they go online retained and Australians could soon be joining them. by the Australian government that it is in talks with the nation's ISPs about retaining e-mails and browsing histories. Colin Jacobs, head of Electronic Frontier Australia (EFA), does not like what he hears.

"At some point data retention laws can be reasonable, but highly-personal information such as browsing history is a step too far," Jacobs said. "You can't treat everybody like a criminal. That would be like tapping people's phones before they are suspected of doing any crime."

• With summer almost upon us, many people are thinking about which festivals to attend this year. gamers not wishing to be left out can go along to the Weatherstock festival to be held on 12 June on the virtual Weathertop on the Landroval realm.

"Where once Frodo and Aragorn fought off the Nazgûl, these grounds now will be covered in song and spirits. Organized by the Lonely Mountain Band kinship, Weatherstock will feature three hours of music as 10 bands face off to win prizes."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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Commentators discuss the conference held in Sitges, Spain by the Bilderberg Group of politicians and businesspeople.

from Sitges about the atmosphere around the venue:

"The heavyweight weekend retreat kicked off yesterday with hordes of police security and a gag order for employees at the luxury Dolce, whose aptly-named presidential suites overlook the Mediterranean. None of the illustrious guests posed for photos or spouted prepared statements for the media. Instead, activists, journalists and bloggers attempted to stake out positions in the surrounding hills to catch glimpses of this year's participants, guerrilla-warrior style."

a photo gallery of images taken by activists that purports to show delegates arriving at the conference, and is asking readers to identify them:

"[A] few interested souls have slipped past police patrols, clambered up cliffs, fallen off walls, dodged heatseeking helicopters and managed to capture, on film, the richest of the rich and the shyest of the shy.
Ìý
"Have a flick through our gallery of hard-won mugshots and see whether you can spot anyone you know."

looks at some of the speculation about the conference's agenda:

"One website said the agenda this year would include approaches to provoking the kind of economic breakdown that could 'justify the establishment of a full-scale world economic governance.' Another website said the group would discuss manufacturing a global depression to implement their dream of one-world government.
Ìý
"That these assertions sound less wacky than they used to tells you to what extent public and private sectors have become enmeshed and to what degree governments have coordinated their national and regional bailouts."

concludes that the conference may be more mundane than some suggest:

"The reality of these conferences appears to boil down to a group of willy-waggling old men comparing their security details and dreaming of past glories. Admittedly, they are efficient talent-spotters, inviting Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton before they were household names (and thereby fuelling further conspiracies)."

argues that it is easy to anticipate what the delegates would be likely to discuss:

"You don't need a conspiracy site to know what these supposedly elite and powerful people were 'secretly' meeting about. They weren't talking about their golf handicaps; they're talking about the economic shape of the world. They're asking if the euro will survive. They're wondering if America will survive. What will the world look like a year from now?"

Henry Kissinger trying to get into the conference and being met by a reluctant policeman:

- You seem to know an awful lot, mister.
- Of course I do! That's why I'm here. The Bilderberg Group is designed for people who know a lot.
- But you, perhaps, know too much.
- A person cannot know too much, since the more you know, the more you realise how much you don't know. It's a kind of paradox. You see?
- So if you don't know things, why are you here?

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

Two hundred editorial jobs at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People are to be cut, a third of them casuals, .

that four names have been shortlisted for interview as controller of Radio 4: former Newsnight editor Peter Barron, now at Google; Tim Suter, former Ofcom partner; Mary Hockaday, head of the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ multimedia newsroom; and the director of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ World Service's English Networks and News, Gwyneth Williams.

Caroline Thomson, the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s chief operating officer, has said the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s has got its top pay and perks "a bit wrong". The that she was responding to criticism at a conference from the former culture secretary Tessa Jowell, who set up the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Trust and negotiated the current licence fee settlement.
https://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article7147852.ece
The Guardian reports that Jeremy Bowen, the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s Middle East editor, has criticised the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Trust ruling which found him guilty of inaccuracies. Receiving the Charles Wheeler award for outstanding journalism, he said lobbyists on both sides - including John Pilger - were "enemies of impartiality".

the start of the first African World Cup dominates the newspapers, along with President Obama's attacks on BP.

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Read Thursday's Media Brief

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Commentators discuss BP's oil spill and how it is affecting US-UK relations.

The disappointment that David Cameron didn't stick up for BP:

"Soon after David Cameron became leader of the Conservative Party, he promised a new approach to the special relationship with America.
Ìý
"If that relationship was to thrive, he argued, a new frankness would be required, because 'your long-standing friend will tell you the truth, confident that the friendship will survive'.
Ìý
"And now surely it's time for Mr Cameron to tell some of these truths to President Obama, in defence of BP, a vital British company that has been systematically sabotaged by a petty and vengeful American government."

The that Mr Cameron needs to be firm with Mr Obama when he talks to him this weekend:

"In his conversation with the President, Mr Cameron needs to make clear that the long-term financial well-being of BP is crucial to the economies of both Britain and the US. Despite Mr Obama's insistence on associating BP with Britain, it is a multinational company, 40 per cent of whose shareholders are American. Mr Obama is beginning to sound stridently anti-business and anti-oil, neither of which can be in the economic interest of his own country, let alone ours. His impotence in the face of this environmental calamity is understandably frustrating, but this is the time for a cool head and a steady hand. The long-term relationship between Britain and America should not be jeopardised by a presidential response that has been more petulant than statesmanlike."

disappointment at how President Obama has dealt with the disaster:

"I do not carry any candles for BP. Nor am I terribly fussed if a US president thinks there are votes to be garnered by stirring up anti-British feeling. The Brits will get over it. It is fair to say that BP has badly fumbled its response to the crisis. If prior negligence is proved, the company must surely stump up billions of dollars in recompense for the havoc wrought by the spill. All that said, surely the leader of the world's most powerful nation can think of better things to do than to think up new ways to vilify BP's chief executive Tony Hayward?"

that the British element of BP is questionable:

"By continually, and repeatedly referring to 'British Petroleum' the politicos over the water are constantly pushing a subliminal line that it's not America's fault. The key here is to refer to another nationality in order to ignore the reality that many of the staff involved before it went wrong are American. To ignore the fact that the company is a merger of one of America's own oil big boys."

Conservative MP :

"I understand your President keeps referring to British Petroleum, as if the UK was seeking some kind of macabre revenge for the long ago War of Independence which you won rightly and magificently. We share no such feeling. Let me explain. The company concerned is BP. It is a global multinational, with more of its employees and assets in the USA than in the UK. It has global shareholders, with as much of its stock owned by American individuals and Pension funds as owned by British interests. Many of its Directors and senior managers are American. One of its principal forerunners was British Petroleum, but it has changed and grown out of all recognition since those days. It has been a large operator in the USA for many years and has been a pioneer of new and hostile territories for oil exploraiton to seek to meet US demand for petroleum products. In the Gulf it was using an American drilling company and American service companies to seek oil in very deep water."

that associating BP with Britain is forgivable:

"Can you imagine if an American-owned oil spillage of a similar scale had occurred in British waters? There would have been (rightly) outraged condemnation by goodness knows how many British politicians as well as the inevitable anti-American demonstrations in the streets.
Ìý
"President Obama finds himself in office during a truly dreadful and calamitous environmental disaster. I think he can be forgiven for not putting BP's shareholders at the top of his agenda."

Today on Tech Brief, Apple ups the advertising ante on Google, Second Life lays off lots of workers, and YouTube faces a tax bill from a country where it is banned.

• Once upon a time, Apple and Google were the best of friends. But in recent years, as both companies have started to encroach on each other's territory, the relationship has turned a little more sour. John Battelle sees the latest move by Apple, which prevents Google's AdMob ads being delivered on iPhone and iPad apps, as :

"As All Things Digital notes today, Apple this week "clarified" its policy with regard to third party networks, and it's hard to read it as anything other than a direct declaration of war with Google. In short, third party ad networks can run in AppWorld, but only if they are "independent". Put another way, sorry AdMob, you're not welcome here."

Battelle reckons that it will increase development costs for app builders:

"This is all we need now - a major platform war, with marketers and developers having to pick sides, cost of development, ad serving, analytics, and marketing services at least tripled (one process for Android, one for iPhone/Pad/Touch, one for Microsoft or Palm/HP or.... ). That's not what the web is about. It's disheartening."

• Meanwhile, Google may be kicking those fun event-specific logos called Google Doodles off its homepage. The search giant has , and most visitors to the homepage are now seeing a picture by default:

"It looks as though Google is trying to reach the huge mass of people who like some sort of personalisation. The idea of the image is to show you that you can do this to the home page; if you click on the bottom-left link to "Change background image", you get taken to a page where you have to log in - or create - a Google account. So in that sense, this is another, subtle advert to get people to sign up to Google accounts, while putting Google on an equal footing with [Microsoft's search engine] Bing in terms of how the page looks generally."

So is the background image here to stay forever? Charles Arthur certainly hopes not:

"[The image-based search page] means it's hard to distinguish it from Bing, and it means that Google can't do Google Doodles any more. And you have to agree that the latter would be a loss - far more so, in their educational and amusement value, than the gain to be had from an image."

• Once upon a time, it seemed everyone had to have a character, or Avatar, in the virtual world Second Life. But the world appears to have moved on, and its parent company Linden Labs .

"Rumors of the layoffs emerged a few days ago, and paint a more detailed picture of the reductions. The report says Linden Lab closed their UK and Singapore offices, cut the head count of the Seattle office by half, let the enterprise group go, and made staff reductions at their Mountain View and San Francisco offices."

The challenge for Second Life, according to Leena Rao, comes from social networks:

"Second Life's user base has been dwindling and clearly the company is trying to take the virtual world in the direction of social networks, after seeing the popularity of gaming on these platforms. But Linden Lab isn't completely dead. The company was reportedly valued between $658 million and 700 million a year ago. If Linden can turn around Second Life and push the social agenda, the virtual world could rise again. Miracles can happen."

• Chinese hackers appear to have , planting a malicious link into innocent-looking banner adverts, on pages including The Wall Street Journal and Jerusalem Post:

"The sites were infected using SQL injection exploits, which allow attackers to tamper with a server's database by typing commands into search boxes and other user-input fields. The hackers used the exploit to plant iframes in the compromised sites that redirected visitors to robint.us. Malicious javascript on that site attempted to infect end users with malware dubbed Mal/Behav-290 according to anti-virus firm Sophos."

According to Dan Goodin, a group of volunteers quickly managed to take out the destination page:

"Robint.us has been disabled, thanks to a sinkholing effort carried out by volunteer security outfit Shadowserver Foundation. The action will allow Shadowserver researchers to get a complete list of compromised sites and to gather additional information about how the attack was carried out, spokesman Andre' M. Di Mino said in an email. He said the details would be published soon."

• Finally, for today, YouTube :

"'Although the company is not a registered taxpayer, the Finance Ministry has calculated it owes taxes worth 30 Million Lira,' or $18.7 million, Turkey's Transportation Minister Binali Yildirim, whose portfolio includes telecommunications and the Internet, told reporters earlier this week."

According to Thomas Seibert, it all boils down to the fact that Turks can access YouTube, despite the ban. Turkish advertisers have therefore been placing adverts on the site, leading to a tax probe and the multi-million dollar bill. Even the country's leader says he is a fan:

"When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized the opposition over the controversial issue of the Islamic headscarf in late 2008, he told reporters they should go on YouTube to see for themselves what he meant. Stunned, journalists reminded him that access to the site was blocked, but Erdogan was unfazed. 'I can get in,' he replied. 'You can get in as well.'"

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

The that commercial radio wants the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Trust to impose tighter curbs on Radio 1 and Radio 2. The that commercial radio's representative body, the Radio Centre, claims Radio 2 is packing its weekend schedules with "end of the pier" comedians.

New Ofcom research suggests the public is becoming less concerned about bad language, though some words continue to shock and the . Some viewers would like the watershed made later at weekends, but Ofcom says it's not planning changes.

The final series of Big Brother has started on Channel 4, with a New Age monk, a former soldier who lost both legs in a bomb blast and a girl who believes she was an elf in a former life and the .

The one front page saying "a degree of international consensus" is emerging over the need to get tough on Iran and its nuclear programme.

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Commentators discuss the ongoing Labour leadership contest.

The the contest is significant for Britain:

"It is tempting to dismiss the Labour leadership contest as something of an irrelevant distraction from the 'new politics' offered by the coalition Government. But the person chosen to lead Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition could be prime minister within a few years. This is a less fanciful prospect than it was when the Tories lost in 1997 and William Hague was elected Opposition leader. Then, the Conservatives were reduced to a rump of just 165 seats, an electoral low-point from which they could not recover to secure a majority even 13 years later. Labour, by contrast, retains 258 seats in the Commons and is well placed to mount a challenge for power. The choice of who leads the party matters a great deal."

The that Diane Abbott's candidacy has made it an interesting contest:

"Labour remains weary and wounded by defeat. But from the banks to social care, it is not merely that party, it is Britain as a whole that stands in dire need of fresh thinking to challenge failed orthodoxies. None of the contenders have so far articulated it, but by short-circuiting nomination rules that were drawn up during Labour's long years of control-freakery, the party's high command has at least shown itself to be up for the discussion. They have also given us all a contest worth watching - instead of a summer-long snooze."

The why he supports Diane Abbott:

"Cambridge-educated Miss Abbott (Hackney N) is clever. She speaks human. She is not some suited, skinny, blinky Milipede. She is a TV natural (she once worked for GMTV and I am told learned much under John Birt) and is probably better known to the non-political public than any of the blokes. In many respects she is a better candidate than former Foreign Secretary Miliband (D), former Environment Secretary Miliband (E), the bulgy-eyed Balls and the decent but gentle mannered Andy Burnham.
Ìý
"Miss Abbott certainly wins the parliamentary sketch writers' vote. Those refined, gushy, Claire Rayner-ish phrases, delivered with a melodramatic flash of the eyes. That bejewelled wardrobe, glinting under the lights like a distant spear tip."

Blogger where support is expected to come from:

"Trade Unions: Ed Balls is the 50% favourite which looks a good bet.
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Party Members: Here Andy Burnham is the 42% favourite which looks crazy to me.
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MPs and MEPs: Ed Miliband has moved in early trading to the favourite slots at 50% - again I think that's crazy."

what he thinks are the necessary skills for the leader of the opposition:

"After Gordon Brown's failure to connect with the public, there is an obvious need for Labour's next leader to have the necessary presentational skills. That is a pre-condition to success and not enough in itself. I recall Brown noting privately that, as Prime Minister, he could not find the language to convey what he was trying to do, as if this was an optional extra. It is not.
Ìý
"But such necessary skills will not bring about success unless they are accompanied by a clear analysis of how to beat the coalition and, in particular, what form Labour's economic policy will take between now and the next election. It is not fashionable these days to cite Brown as a model, but what he did in relation to Labour's economic policy after the party's fourth election defeat in 1992 was a significant achievement, starting from an even more impossible position than the next Labour leader will do. From the beginning he ruthlessly understood what was required politically to make Labour trusted on the economy, and over time, with the help of others, fleshed out policies that met the essential political objectives."

The that the Labour party needs to do some soul-searching and connect with the electorate:

"There is no clamour among the people for more government, and any candidate that poses state action as the default solution is not so much wrong as beside the point.
Ìý
"The country needs a Labour Party that does not speak only to itself, even during an internal election. There is an opportunity for an honest audit of what was good and what was bad in 13 years of government. The candidate who provides a plain and fair analysis of the Labour Party's past will be the one best equipped for its future."

On Tech Brief today: Google gets a caffeine shot; why the new iPhone display doesn't live up to its name and how to hack a computer in a Hollywood film:

• Back in May, Google admitted that its Street View cars had been harvesting data from private Wi-Fi networks around the world. Countries are still grappling with how to deal with Google. In the meantime, Google has published a [PDF] of the software used to gather the information on its .

"That report, by the security consulting firm Stroz Friedberg, is now complete and was sent to the interested data protection authorities today. In short, it confirms that Google did indeed collect and store payload data from unencrypted WiFi networks, but not from networks that were encrypted."

• Google has also given a power shot to the inner workings of its web indexing system. The new version, called caffeine, promises "50% fresher results". If that means nothing to you, :

"When you search Google, you're not searching the live web. Instead you're searching Google's index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need."

The firm's software engineer that caffeine overhauls this system to suck in fresh pages and data when it comes available. That's a lot of data:

"Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second."

• from research firm Hitwise that suggest that UK traffic to social networks has overtaken traffic to search sites for the first time. The stats also show that Facebook dominates the web social scene for Brits with 55% of the market.

"But if Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla of social networking, Google is the 10-tonne Tyrannosaur of search. When you combine Google.co.uk's 87.8 per cent of all UK searches with Google.com's 3.9 per cent, over nine out of every ten May UK searches were Googly."

• Earlier this week, Steve Jobs strode on to stage in San Francisco to . One of the features he was keen to show off was the new high-resolution screen, called Retina, which he claimed displayed "awesome text, awesome images, and awesome video." But science blogger :

"To achieve the highest resolution discernible by the human eye, the iPhone would need a resolution of 1060 ppi, or roughly 3200 X 2100 pixels! My 23-inch iMac has a resolution of just 1920 X 1200. So if you could shrink my computer display to the size of an iPhone display, you'd still need to triple its resolution to match the perceptual power of the human retina."

• Does the internet make you smarter? We certainly hope so. But for a more eloquent answer, try :

"We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies."

• Or for the counterpoint, whether the net is making us dumber?

"If the slow progression of words across printed pages damped our craving to be inundated by mental stimulation, the Internet indulges it. It returns us to our native state of distractedness, while presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to contend with."

• Finally, we all know the scene. The on screen hero needs to break into the villain's computer to retrieve the information that will save the world. But there's just one thing stopping them; they don't know the password. Now all they need to do is log on to College Humour to check out their . Top tip for finding that password:

"Let your eyes roam around the room until they fall on a single item. Stare at it until you suddenly known the password."

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Commentators discuss the possibility of the UN bringing in a fourth round of sanctions against Iran over its nuclear enrichment programme.

the opportunity costs already incurred to Iran due to sanctions:

"While Iran's real growth rate of around five per cent a year for close to a decade has far outpaced that of Western economies, it has been slower than that of the fastest emerging economies like China, Brazil, India and Vietnam, to name a few.
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"Furthermore, and in anticipation of extended sanctions, a number of multinational oil companies have recently ceased supplies of refined petroleum to Iran.
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"Access to foreign technology has been hampered and scientific cooperation with some Western countries has been affected."

how Iran's "propaganda war" against Israel will affect their strategic position in the international community:

"Tehran's strategy will enable it to present any military clash with the US, over Iraq for example, as a consequence of the Islamic Republic's campaign against Israel rather than because of its deliberately provocative and adventurist foreign policy.
Ìý
"Believing that its potential adversaries are weak and indecisive, the Khomeinist regime appears determined to push the region to the edge of war and, perhaps, beyond."

The how Iran works around sanctions:

"Several provisions focus on Irisl, which has been determined by the United Nations to have been involved in a plot to smuggle weapons, in violation of an international embargo that prohibits Iran from exporting arms.
Ìý
"But an examination shows how Iran has used a succession of stratagems -changing not just ships' flags and names but their owners, operators and managers, too - to stay one step ahead of its pursuers. This cat-and-mouse game offers a case study in the difficulties of enforcing sanctions."

why Brazil and Turkey may not support the resolution:

"Naturally there are commercial reasons both Brazil and Turkey have in their trade with oil-rich Iran. While this is hardly surprising, the United States forcing both of these countries to choose between supporting a weak set of sanctions on Iran or a slap in the face to their own prideful diplomacy. Brazil and Turkey will naturally choose the later, no mater how ill-advised and thus bring the odious regime in Iran some serious international support.
Ìý
"In other words to get support for a non-decisive set of economic sanctions, Washington is needlessly alienating Brasilia and Ankara."

The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s UN correspondent reports that a Turkish diplomat explains that Turkey doesn't want to lose diplomatic engagement with Iran. the effect of the Turkish and Brazilian opposition to sanctions:

"The opposition of these two powerful emerging states will not stop the resolution, but will it weaken America's attempts to build an effective international front against Tehran?
Ìý
"Iran sanctions expert George Lopez says no - not if the US has the support of two traditional allies of the Islamic republic."

that an alternative to sanctions - a fuel swap - is looking increasingly unlikely:

"The fuel exchange was a big opportunity that could pave the way for all countries to cooperate on nuclear issues in the future, Mehmanparast said, adding, 'Iran hopes that the Vienna Group uses this opportunity appropriately and puts interaction and cooperation on its agenda instead of confrontation.'
Ìý
"But, with the US and its allies convinced that the "pressure track" is the correct option to pursue Iran at present, the window of opportunity for a breakthrough via the swap deal is fast closing."

I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

The that the Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced new plans to roll out highspeed broadband to rural areas, and to scrap Labour's plans for news pilots to replace ITV's regional bulletins.

He'll also review the cross-media ownership rules stopping local newspapers owning local TV and radio companies .

Lorraine Heggessey is stepping down after five years as chief executive of Talkback Thames, producer of Britain's Got Talent and The Apprentice, the . She was previously controller of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One. It's not known what she will do next.
https://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jun/08/lorraine-heggessey-talkback-thames
In the Guardian Maggie Brown examines what might happen to the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Trust under the new Government. Eight of the Trustees are coming to the end of their four-year terms in the autumn.

The how Wednesday's papers heap praise on Tesco boss Sir Terry Leahy who has announced he is to retire next March.

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On Tech Brief today: The iPad app that was famous for a few hours, a web browser that strips away adverts, and the man who bought his local police website as revenge for a speeding ticket.

• It seems that 12 hours is a very long time in the iPad App world. , yesterday morning Steve Jobs praised the developers of the iPad app, Pulse News Reader, at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.

"But, by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store, after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company that 'The New York Times Company believes your application named 'Pulse News Reader' infringes The New York Times Company's rights.'"

Swisher highlights that even the New York Times had been discussing the success of the Pulse News Reader on its website recently. The App is no longer available, and one of the developers was fairly philosophical about its fall from grace:

"I don't blame Apple, because they have to respond when contacted by lawyers from the Times ... but it was definitely a roller coaster of a day."

• between the apparent demise of Pulse Reader, and Apple's launch of the latest version of its web browser, Safari 5, which Steve Jobs did not get around to discussing at the WWDC. The new browser has a 'Reader' mode:

"According to Apple, 'Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles... So you get the whole story and nothing but the story.'"

After showing a screen-grab of a New York Times story using the Safari Reader, John Lettice points out:

"The NYT branding is gone, along with the author's byline, the audio accompanying the story, an interactive graphic, social links, everything really. Looks like it could be a number of violations of the NYT's terms and conditions to us, if Apple were doing it. But Apple didn't press the button..."

• Over at The Atlantic, which argues that the freewheeling 'Wild West' days of the web, and the supremacy of the web browser, may be numbered, in part thanks to the success of ventures like Apple's App store.

"The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995."

Michael Hirschorn reckons that traditional media companies have contributed to their own demise:

"Ironically, only the "old" entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era's freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet."

• Plenty of employers have blocked their staff from using social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter whilst at the office.

But ReadWriteWeb , as a firewall company has recently activated a "Read-only" mode for Facebook.

"IT managers using Palo Alto Networks firewalls are now able to switch Facebook into a "read-only" mode, thanks to an update released today. There is no relationship between Palo Alto Networks and Facebook - the changes are all within the customer's network. Previously, managers using Palo Alto Networks firewalls have had the option to block all Facebook apps (but not individual apps) as well as Facebook's e-mail and chat features. The update adds the ability to disable posting, making Facebook effectively read-only."

The article discusses a number of potential uses of the technology, suggested by the firewall firm's marketing director:

One idea he mentions, though he's quick to point out the product isn't currently being used by the military, is limiting soldiers read-only access to social media sites in the weeks before a deployment. This would keep sensitive information from being leaked, but allow soldiers to view pictures and status updates from home.

• Finally for today, a Tennessee man called Brian McCrary apparently bought his local police department's domain name, in response to having received a speeding ticket. :

"The web hosting company, Go Daddy, had warned the Police Department that the domain was about to expire some three months in advance and several times since. Once the date was reached, the company posted a message on the site warning visitors that it was about to close, and it was this that gave McCrary his idea."

She says that Mr McCrary is now using the site to provide information on the location of speed cameras and offer fellow citizens a chance to gripe about them.

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

Apple's Steve Jobs claims the iPhone 4 is the "biggest leap since the original iPhone" . The it will contain an e-book reader, threatening Amazon's Kindle.

More than 800 training places are to be created in UK heritage projects under a £17m National Lottery scheme .

Does the film industry really contribute £1.9m to British tourism, as a report for the UK Film Council claims? The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s arts editor Will Gompertz expresses doubts.

The that the British Comedy Awards are moving to Channel 4 after 20 years at ITV.

The newspapers assess David Cameron's comment that public sector cuts would affect "our whole way of life".

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Commentators discuss how BP and the US government are responding to the BP oil spill.

The the handling of the BP oil spill has to the Bhopal disaster:

"What is going on in the Gulf of Mexico today is an example of Newton's third law of motion: for every action by BP there is an equal and opposite reaction by the federal government in Washington. The result is that BP is, rightly, being held to account for cleaning up the biggest oil pollution in US history. But just imagine if the blowout on the drilling rig had caused not 11 but up to 25,000 US deaths; that the compensation Washington finally accepted fell far short of that required even to cover the medical bills of the survivors; that 26 years on , BP had still to clean up the site of the accident which was poisoning the local water supply; and that Britain refused to extradite to a US court the main BP executives responsible.
Ìý
"Unthinkable? Well, that is how the US multinational Union Carbide Corporation, now owned by Dow Chemical, has behaved since it created the world's worst industrial disaster at Bhopal in central India. The difference between BP and Union Carbide is not just a matter of the location of the disaster, although it is plainly that too. It is also down to the fact that successive national and state governments in India have rolled over time and time again to the realpolitik of dealing with Dow Chemical's other investments in India."

that BP should not see the money it makes as profit for its shareholders but instead as provision for future liabilities:

"Pollution has been defined as a resource in the wrong place. That's also a pretty good description of the company's profits. The great plumes of money that have been bursting out of the company's accounts every year are not BP's to give away. They consist, in part or in whole, of the externalised costs the company has failed to pay, and which the rest of society must carry."

BP "needs to tell whining Americans to take a hike":

"Traditional responses won't work. In fact, there are no words BP can use to apologize sufficiently for the damage the leak has caused. Whatever it says, it's still going to be the most reviled company in America.
Ìý
"Instead BP should try a different tack. It should tell the U.S., and everybody in it, to go take a hike. In reality, the U.S. is guilty of the most appalling hypocrisy. It's too late to rescue BP's reputation now; all it can realistically hope for is to salvage as much money for shareholders as possible."

that the
Louisiana Republican governor wrote to the White House to rethink its current ban on offshore drilling because he cares more about the economy than the environment:

"The local politics in many of these states is still supportive of offshore drilling because of the economic situation - because of the jobs.
Ìý
"So what ought to be a teaching [and] learning experience about the true cost of this business is wrapped up in the local needs of these economies which clearly Jindal is pandering to rather than taking a leadership position."

that if the oil industry doesn't change, it shows the US political system is not working:

"You can diagnose whether we have a functioning media in this country by whether or not the country understands that this is a vile and environmental mega-disaster.
Ìý
"You can diagnose whether we have a functioning political system in this country by whether or not the results of this mega-disaster is change.
Ìý
"Big oil has been too rich too care about what it was putting us all at risk for. And we've been too cowardly to change direction and break free from that."

On Tech Brief today: Talking stuff, getting wood and the killer inside.

• If you could tell people about the stuff you own, what would you say? Using barcode technology developed by the project, you can .

"Once the barcode is attached the object, a free iPhone or Android application is able to scan the barcode and retrieve the story. The ability to add comments and further stories to artefacts as they are adopted by new owners offers a network of memory in which things are connected by subject and not time."

• We all know what a woodchuck would do if it could chuck wood, but what about a games journalist? on 's Woodcutter Sim and finds the experience lacking:

"ActaLogic's forests are bleak, deserted places where motionless trees cast motionless shadows upon grassless, needleless earth. Where are the delicate ferns, the buzzing insects, the disgruntled squirrels? Where's the dungeon-like gloom of an unthinned hemlock plantation, the airy brightness of a mature larch stand?"

• The appeal of space trading game can be hard to grasp for those whose heart does not beat faster at the mention of double-entry book-keeping. Help understanding why people play it might be at hand in the form of :

"EVE online has many critics with very valid points, but never in my life have I had a PvP experience like in EVE. I've been gaming for over 20 years and never before EVE had I had a genuine fight-or-flight adrenaline rush. The terror of combat and the thrill of victory are unmatched outside actual combat. I've since quit the game, but I always look forward to watching the 10 man tournaments."

• Following that games theme is a thoughtful piece wondering about the connections, if any, between video game avatars and how soldiers become killers. :

"Deindividuation theory suggests that playing as someone who looks like you would lead you to pay more attention to your internal moral compass (whatever that may be) in the same way that losing your identity behind a costume would make you more likely to adopt the morals of those around you or the ones implied by your environment or even the costume itself."

• Continuing the occasional theme of children and Apple products, . TV execs should find a shoulder to cry on:

"I suspect that my son and other children of his generation will demand a seismic shift in programming - from static, passive video to immersive, interactive and intertwined content available on-demand and on any device. Seamlessly shifting between entertainment, information, competition and e-commerce mindsets, Carson will see limited value to anything meant to wash over him - least of all, TV spots."

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

The Thick of It dominated the TV BAFTAs with three awards, the . Ant and Dec won their first Bafta, Simon Cowell won two.

The that ITV's advertising revenue for June is 30% up on last year, boosted by the World Cup.

The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will make his first speech on media policy this week. Plans to abolish the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Trust are not an immediate priority. Broadband rollout and the reform of local media will be highlighted .

Christine Bleakley, presenter of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One's The One Show has parted company with her agent John Noel. The that ITV says reports that it wants her to join former co-host Adrian Chiles on the GMTV sofa are "speculation".

The that government action to tackle the budget deficit is explored in the newspapers.

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Commentators consider the government's spending cuts.

The the central task is working out how to cut while but distributing the pain fairly:

"Quite apart from their intrinsic undesirability, tax rises will cause a political tempest. Faced with opposition from his own party, Mr Cameron may have to water down his proposals for rises in capital gains tax that were designed to pay for lifting the threshold at which the payment of income tax begins. The decision of Mr Osborne as Chancellor not to reverse a tax rise on pension contributions that he inherited from Labour has brought protests from the business lobby that extra levies on entrepreneurs lose tomorrow a lot more than they gain today."

the Canadian cuts offer a model that the Tories wish to emulate:

"Canada's cost-cutting programme saw its science budget halved, while agricultural subsidies, overseas aid and transport were also badly hit.
Ìý
"But a swift and effective cost-cutting programme turned this deficit into a surplus within five years, while pulling the country out of recession and into economic growth.
Ìý
"Between 1992 and 1996 central government departments saw their budgets cut by an average of 20 per cent...
Ìý
"By releasing details of the spending programmes and public sector salaries approved by Labour, and establishing a 'star chamber' to advise on potentially controversial cuts, Mr Cameron is taking inspiration from the Canadian model.
Ìý
"As provincial governments saw their health grants slashed, thousands of nurses were sacked and hospital waiting times soared. The shortage of new buildings also led to overcrowding and higher infection rates on wards.
Ìý
"But Canadians credit the success of the programme to speed and depth of the cuts. The previous government of Brian Mulroney, a Conservative, had failed to reduce the deficit with a more cautious approach."

in his blog that cutting public spending does not stop recovery:

"There is unfortunately no subsititute for a country like the UK working harder to earn its preferred living standards. There is only so much we can borrow to put off the necessary adjustment to our economy. The UK economy needs to make and produce more to sell in world markets and needs to produce more of the goods and services we ourselves need in an efficient manner. It's no good flexing the credit card one more time when you are nearly bust. You need to get a better paid job and start paying off the mortgage."

that this is the test which will make or break the coalition:

"The Lib Dem leader has set himself a test which is both highly commendable and extremely difficult when he pledges that the coalition can cut without leaving the devil to devour the hindmost. His ability to keep that promise will depend on how much power he truly wields in this coalition and how fierce he is as a champion of progressive values. It is over this issue above all else that we will discover whether the Tories see the Lib Dems as genuine partners or merely useful idiots."

that the cuts are highlighting the problems around a coalition government:

"David Cameron tells his supporters there are years of pain ahead and that deep spending cuts are required. But his political partner, Nick Clegg, says he'll make sure there will be no return to the savage cuts of Margaret Thatcher in the eighties...
Ìý
"Most confusing of all, how can Cameron and Clegg be as one while making announcements which contradict each other? Being former public schoolboys must help. Isn't it ingrained in them to act reasonably, even if they don't feel like it? Privately, they might be enormously vain, selfish creatures, but they are trained to appear otherwise."

that "soothing words from Nick Clegg" may not be enough:

"[L]ike many sensible people I have my doubts about the wisdom of this carefully choreographed exercise ahead of the chancellor's 22 June budget. If they do what they say - I am still hoping that they don't meant it - the cure could be a bit like applying leeches to 18th century patients: worse than the disease.
Ìý
"It was wholly predictable that when they came to power they would open the Treasury books and declare it all to be much worse than they feared. All new governments say that. So it doubtless is in some respects."

On Tech Brief today: Is your humble mobile phone a supercomputer in disguise? And bringing home the reality of the BP oil spill.

• It may have an embarrassing ringtone and a cracked screen but that mobile phone in your pocket is still a little powerhouse, .

Inspired by (most kind), Mr WR used an adapted format of the Linpack benchmarks used to measure the speeds of the world's fastest machines to measure the processing speed of his Android mobile:

"[A] tweaked Motorola Droid is capable of scoring 52 Mflop/s which is over 15 times faster than the 1979 Cray 1 CPU. Put another way, if you transported that mobile phone back to 1987 then it would be on par with the processors in one of the fastest computers in the world of the time, the ETA 10-E, and they had to be cooled by liquid nitrogen."

Walking Randomly's own trusty mobile turned out to be 2.3 Mflop/s - or 66% as fast as a single processor on a Cray 1. How sweet.

• While the rages on, to demonstrate how big an area the leaked oil would cover if it were a little closer to home.

You key in your location and the spill appears there. So if the leak had occurred in Nottingham UK, for example, it would have stretched widthways from Bangor to Grimsby and lengthways from Scarborough to Cheltenham:

"The data used to create the spill image comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA releases a daily report detailing where the spill is going to be within the next 24 hours. They do this by collecting data from a number of sources, including satellite imagery and reports by trained observers who have made helicopter flights back and forth across the potentially affected areas. This data is entered into several leading computer models by NOAA oceanographers along with information about currents and winds in the gulf."

• Oh dear. Wired magazine's weighty 500MB iPad app hasn't gone down very well in some parts of the blogosphere. it to an old-school CD-ROM and says it's a bit too 20th-Century for his liking:

"My gut feeling is that there is a massive opportunity to reinvent the concept of a magazine - yet we end up with something akin to what the web was like in the mid to late 90s. This basically boils down to a print designer's vision of what the web should be like - but in this case it's a print magazine person's vision of what an interactive magazine should be like."

Miaow.

• Good news for the somewhat beleaguered - the UK Treasury used it to release datasets about public spending today, .

"By using BitTorrent to share information with the public, the UK government is in good company. NASA too uses BitTorrent for their 'Visible Earth' project, a massive library of high resolution images of the earth. In addition, several Universities use BitTorrent powered systems to update their computers."

BitTorrent's image has been somewhat tarnished by stories about piracy in recent years, so Ernesto says it's good news for the open-source file-sharer. Tech Monitor remains unconvinced that it's going to get a hero's welcome over at the music industry, though.

• that Twitter is user-testing a "you both follow" feature that will enable tweeters to see whether others follow the same people as them:

"It is not clear whether the new feature, which will appear above the followers box on the right hand nav on the Twitter website will only be available to Twitter website users or be added to the vast array of API options available to developers."

Hmm - so you'll be able to see how your followers are networked to each other and to you. Wonder what Facebook makes of that.

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.
Richard Desmond, owner of the Express titles and the Daily Star, has indicated he would like to buy the Sun. he has a billion pounds to spend on acquisitions. But there is no indication that Rupert Murdoch wants to sell the paper.

, former Capital Radio boss Fru Hazlitt, who oversaw its sale to Global Radio, is joining ITV in the new role of managing director, commercial and online - bringing together its TV and online sales. She replaces Rupert Howell and Ben McOwen Wilson.

Richard Curtis, the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Blackadder, has written the latest Doctor Who script. The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ reports that he was told to redraft it because it was too wordy.

The that the gunman's killings in Cumbria again dominate the newspapers.

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Commentators discuss the Labour leadership contest.

why she thinks the leadership contest is significant:

"Over the past 10 years, there has been a fatal disconnect between party and leadership, be it on the Iraq war or education policy. Party members talk of the weakness of the National Policy Forum and the ease with which Labour leaders have ignored unwelcome views. This has not only ruptured trust between the ground and the leadership but it weakens Labour in the face of the Con-Lib coalition who are now taking frequently unpopular schemes, such as the academies policy much further than any one in Labour dared or imagine.
Ìý

"Without renewed trust between leaders and members, all talk of reinvigorating local democracy will be sound and fury, signifying nothing."

that there may be a lot of candidates:

"[I]t is still possible for all six candidates - David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott - to make it onto the ballot paper... [O]f the 258 Labour MPs, 90 have yet to formally nominate. Excluding Gordon Brown and Harriet Harman, both of whom will not name a preference, and excluding the seven MPs like Alistair Darling who have publically declared for a candidate but are yet to nominate, this leaves 81 nominations up for grabs - more than enough to be spread around."

that none of the candidates has a sense of what Britain is:

"All the Labour candidates assume a narrow focus on 'Britain' that is completely unnamed and unexplored, because it is taken as a given. This is a problem on many levels, because it does not take into account the way Britain has changed over the decades, economically, socially and politically, nor the ways New Labour has changed Britain for better and for worse.
Ìý

"Labour's understanding of Britain has always embraced the conventional view that the UK is a unitary state: one of parliamentary sovereignty and unchallenged Westminster power. Yet the UK is not and never has been a unitary state; it is a union state, made up of different parts and national arrangements. A unitary state would not have allowed for the maintenance of Scottish autonomy that was guaranteed in the Treaties of Union of 1707. Despite this, Fabianism bought into a unitary state interpretation of the UK that has become more and more problematic."

that if too many candidates are up for selection, it will be damaging:

"I simply cannot believe the softheadedness of some colleagues who think it would all be jolly nice and pluralist if poisonous anti-Labour elements such as John McDonnell should be included in leadership election.

Ìý

"If he is wrong, he is wrong, and we should be relieved that there are fewer than 33 Labour MPs deluded enough to disagree."

that the London Mayoral elections are much more important for Labour than the leadership contest:

"Almost unnoticed amid the (comparative) excitement of the Labour leadership race, the party is sleepwalking to disaster in its first big electoral test since losing power.
Ìý

"The 2012 contest to be Mayor of London is the most significant poll between now and the next general election. The campaign goes on for months, with enormous media interest, making it a clear marker of whether Labour can come back nationally."

Today on Tech brief: Wii in your trainers, a pole in your skirt and when Flash is Flash, but isn't.

• Yesterday, we highlighted a that asked if the link-sharing service Digg was "deadd"? into the numbers:

"Conclusion: the killing of the Diggbar, which drew people in from all over without their realising where they were heading, has led to fewer visitors. That's where Digg's visitors have gone: they were unwitting users anyway."

• Woz, Jobs and... Wayne? Like the fifth Beatle, Ron Wayne, co-founder of Apple, has been all but erased from history. To rub salt into his wounds, the man that designed the company's original logo, wrote the manual for the Apple I computer, and drafted the fledgling company's partnership agreement has also :

"That agreement gave him a 10 percent ownership stake in Apple, a position that would be worth about $22 billion today if Wayne had held onto it. But he didn't. Afraid that Jobs' wild spending and Woz's recurrent "flights of fancy" would cause Apple to flop, Wayne decided to abdicate his role as adult-in-chief and bailed out after 12 days. Terrified to be the only one of the three founders with assets that creditors could seize, he sold back his shares for $800."

• Meanwhile, the more visible Apple founder Steve Jobs continues to raise the hackles of some with his aversion to Flash, commonly used to power web video and animations. Apple does not allow the technology on its iPad and iPhone, meaning that people are met with little more than an error message when visiting a flash site. Now, the Register reports that software called Smokescreen promises to help out by converting flash on the fly into something more to the taste of Apple:

"All that's available right now is a selection of animated advertisements, including ones for Microsoft and the Batman computer game, which demonstrate that the concept works but aren't exactly pushing the boundaries of what's possible in Flash. But then such advertisements make up the bulk of Flash content on the internet, and if Smokescreen can't replicate the interactivity of Farmville then everyone could be a winner."

• Scientist Nathan Eagle works in East Africa, developing mobile phone applications including txteagle, a mobile phone application that allows people to earn small amounts of money or airtime in exchange for small pieces of work sent via SMS. contains an intriguing line about the service:

"The txteagle service is currently live, transforming the phones of 15 million East Africans into a platform for income generation. We are on track to soon becoming the largest employer in Kenya."

• Nick Marsh has Wii in his shoes. The for his game's console:

"The Nintendo Wii have made it possible for people to get their own personal sports work out from the comfort of their living room, using hand held controllers and a balance board to participate. So why can't a pair of Nikes work in the same way?

• Conscience is a man's compass, according to Vincent Van Gogh. For a woman, it could be her skirt. , a smart smock with in-built compass. Invaluable for geeks that have lost all direction.

"When I turn, the compass chip lights the appropriate row of LEDs - the row facing north. It's constantly on, and can change faster than I can spin."

If you want to suggest links or stories for Tech Brief, you can send them to on , tag them bbctechbrief on or e-mail them to techbrief@bbc.co.uk.

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Sir Martin Sorrell's M Group is now forecasting a 4.2% rise in UK advertising expenditure, led by TV, .

ITV postponed a Coronation Street episode featuring an armed siege following the Cumbria shootings.

, the world's longest-running sitcom.

The Cumbria shootings .

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On Tech Brief today: Digg may be "deadd", internet scammers get scammed, and the perils of digital journey-planners.

• Whatever happened to Digg, the online service which lets users share stories and links they like, or "dig", with others? Mike Phillips :

"According to the latest Compete.com data (April, 2010) Digg lost an astounding 13.8 million unique visits from March to April, 2010 -- a near 36 percent drop ... The fact is, people -- real people -- are beginning to tire. Submit this, upload that, vote on this, 'like' that, be my 'friend', check in here, suggest this, retweet that ... there's already so much to do. The only thing left to 'Digg' is a grave."

The creator of Digg, Kevin Rose has announced changes to the service, and a recently released video shows how a new version of Digg will work. But Mike Phillips thinks it has lost its relevance:

"By all accounts, it's another social network. An unnecessary one. The main focus is to make friends (starting by importing your social graph from sites like Facebook) and Digg stories. Then, your new Digg page will show the stories Dugg most by all your friends. Sound like something your friends 'liked' on Facebook? Or perhaps something retweeted on Twitter?"

• And now for something completely different. Fans of the British comedy group Monty Python will be very familiar with its famous Dead Parrot sketch. Bruce Sterling at Wired magazine .

Advance-fee scams are e-mails that read like this: "I'm the long lost nephew of Sani Abacha, and am looking for a home for his lost millions. Send me a cheque for £5,000 and I'll send you back £5m."

The characters in the sketch supposedly were promised fame and fortune by someone purporting to be a video producer, who they had tried to scam, if they were prepared to act out the Monty Python sketch.

Its authenticity can not be confirmed, as Bruce Sterling points out:

"I really don't know what to say. Maybe it's a scam. A fraud. A charade. Except it's free, and didn't ask me for money. I'm confused. Also, it's three years old and only had 57,000+ hits. Surely it oughta have at least fifty million."

But it is entertaining, and it definitely deserves a wider airing.

• Anyone who has used a satellite navigation system is familiar with getting sent down a cul-de-sac once in a while. But in the United States, .

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land wonders:

"Are Google's bad guesses also dangerous? I suspect a court is going to find that despite getting bad directions from Google (or a gas station attendant, a local person or any source), people are also expected to use common sense."

But he adds:

"Here's to Google improving its directions and perhaps using more common sense of its own, understanding whether a street is a busy highway and maybe simply not offering routes when it doubt, rather than guessing."

• Lego bricks are famous the world over as a children's toy for building stuff. But prepare to be amazed. A person known only as "squirrelfantasy" has . Kevin Hall is impressed:

"Adorned with LEGO men and, really, only as pretty as it has to be to get the job done, the LEGO printer doesn't look like it's the fastest, though it does create a pretty unique printout. The pen slides back and forth, building images and text one line at a time. It'd probably have trouble with the finer details, though maybe it could just use a finer pen."

• Yesterday on Tech Brief, we heard about Google's move to keep new employees away from Microsoft software, owing to concerns about security. Microsoft wasted no time in . Brandon LeBlanc from Microsoft is adamant:

"When it comes to security, even hackers admit we're doing a better job making our products more secure than anyone else. And it's not just the hackers; third party influentials and industry leaders like Cisco tell us regularly that our focus and investment continues to surpass others."

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I'm the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s media correspondent and this is my brief selection of what's going on.

that a Cheryl Cole campaign for hair products was misleading because she was wearing hair extensions.

, Ofcom's director of radio replies to critics of DAB and the Radio Amnesty.

³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ North - the new centre in Salford Quays - has begun the biggest recruitment drive in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s history. they want to attract people who "previously had neither the opportunity nor likelihood" of working for the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳.

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On Tech Brief today: the future is not so bright, cheap starbases and no Windows for new Googlers.

• You would think that science-fiction writers, as creatures who spend so much time in futures of their own imagining, would be happy when the world catches up. But, no. :

"Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over."

His ennui runs deep but he fears it will be worse for our offspring:

"The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely... more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian."

• There are other authors who can still see drama glittering in that avalanche of stuff. when there is no crime, no wars, no poverty, no famine and everyone is connected to everyone else. All the time.

"But it's not utopia. There are still lots of reasons to be miserable or less than ecstatic. There's still money, but not enough for everyone to have as much as they'd like (so scientists still have to fight for funding, and artists still have to take on tacky commissions), and there are still nation states and governments and politics. There are still some forms of scarcity and the environmental damage of the previous two centuries is only slowly being undone. In other words, it's a future that, right now, I can sort of take seriously."

• You know how it is. You make a small change and suddenly you find yourself knee deep in damage. Think then, how it must be when you do that to the universe you run. :

"Within a day of the expansion going live, players discovered that by refining a combination of cheaper starbase structures, you could obtain all the necessary parts for more expensive ones at a discounted rate. Players rapidly began building large control towers, normally costing 360 million ISK, for as little as 100 million."

CCP intervened by wiping out all the changes. And made it worse.

"[T]his has had the side-effect of making the players that were heavily into refining starbase modules the sole suppliers of that market. Prices on control towers have already risen to 450 million in some regions and those who were gambling on CCP's error are making an even bigger fortune than they previously were."

• Windows and computer security. They go together like fish and bicycles. No surprise then that :

"Google's policies surrounding the internal use of Windows aren't clear-cut, though. Some employees can still install Windows on their laptops, but not their desktop computers. However, Googlers need explicit permission from "quite senior levels" in order to keep using the Windows OS. "

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Commentators respond to the Israeli army's raid on the flotilla of Gaza-bound of aid ships.

Israel is under attack from the world's left-wing and Islamist activists. She says that, in order to win the "information war", Israeli leaders must be stronger with their responses to the storming of the flotilla. They must counter with the "unvarnished truth":

"Israel is the frontline of the free world. Its ability to defend itself and deter its foes is the single most important guarantee of international peace. A strong Israel is also the most potent and reliable guarantor of the US's continued ability to project its power in the Middle East."

in an analysis piece that while everyone expects Israel to do badly in terms of of world public opinion over its actions in Gaza, it should not have done so badly in the technical aspects of the operation:

"Israel is concerned with eminently good reason about the smuggling of weaponry into Hamas-controlled Gaza. It may have felt it had no choice but to intercept a flotilla carrying it knew not what to the Hamas terror state. Why did it not anticipate that the activists and supporters of 'a violent, extremist organization that supports terrorism' would act precisely according to type?"

As news came out of the Israeli Defense Forces' action, the Jerusalem Post reported that it was under what it called a :

"Thousands of abusive e-mails were sent to newspaper staff members and general department addresses in an attempt to crash the system. The spam filter, used to separate junk mail and protect the network from viruses, showed 4,000 e-mails received in a matter of seconds. There were also attempts to hack the firewall, which can flood the network with useless data and allow entry to the newspaper's online operating system."

the damage to Israel's image and diplomatic relations is "the price of a flawed policy" in its blockade of Gaza:

"Someone must be held responsible for this disgraceful failure. There is no way to convince Israel's citizens and its friends around the world that Israel regrets the confrontation and its results, and is learning from its errors, other than setting up a state inquiry committee to investigate the decision-making process, and to decide who should pay for this dangerous policy."

"a fiasco on the high seas" and says the Israeli government has failed to learn the lessons of its own independence struggle from the British. Mr Shavit recalls the British army's attack on the Exodus, a boatload of Jewish refugees, shortly before the mandate crumbled in 1948:

"With a single foolish move, the Israeli cabinet cast the Muslim Brotherhood in the role of the victim and the Israel Navy as the villain and simultaneously opened European, Turkish, Arab, Palestinian and internal Israeli fronts. In so doing, Israel is serving Hamas' interests better than Hamas itself has ever done."

For Reuven Pedatzur in Haaretz, the raid was :

"The inefficiency and the panic that overwhelmed the commandos, leading to the deaths of so many, raises worrying questions about their skillfulness and operational capability."

his support for the Israeli action on his blog, Rabbi's Reasons. He says the US administration should also announce its support for the IDF's raid:

"The violence on board the ship theoretically carrying non-violent protesters was instigated by the passengers, not by the soldiers who boarded out of a legitimate concern for Israel's security."

the US should turn its attention to the growing crisis in the Middle East:

"If history is a guide the Israeli military will conduct a thorough review of this morning's massacre before clearing itself on all counts and accusing any contradicting investigations of anti-Semitism."

the action has done terrible harm to Israel:

"This is a day of disgrace to the State of Israel, a day of anxiety in which we discover that our future was entrusted to a bunch of trigger-happy people without any responsibility."

for what he calls a failure:

"Barak has caused a worldwide public disaster, perhaps Israel's worst. Only time will tell what damage to the State he has caused. He has handed a propaganda gift on a silver platter to Hamas and all the hostile world media. Will Barak now resign? Will he be fired?"

why British politicians are so reluctant to say anything about what happened:

"[I]t is ordinary people, activists, call them what you will, who now take decisions to change events. Our politicians are too spineless, too cowardly, to take decisions to save lives. Why is this? Why didn't we hear courageous words from Messrs Cameron and Clegg yesterday? For it is a fact, is it not, that had Europeans (and yes, the Turks are Europeans, are they not?) been gunned down by any other Middle Eastern army (which the Israeli army is, is it not?) there would have been waves of outrage."

that the the organisers of the flotilla were aware of what Israel's reaction might be:

"For it is clear this escapade was less about aid than about PR. Indeed, on board one of the aid vessels was Swedish novelist Henning Mankell, who wrote the Wallander detective novels. He was primed to discuss his humanitarian odyssey with newscaster Jon Snow at this weekend's Hay Literary Festival. It is hard to imagine a more contrived form of 'debate'."

comments made by Foreign Secretary William Hague:

"[T]he Tories are now in coalition with the Israel-bashing LibDems, who would blame Israel even if jihadis were to sail a flotilla up the Thames and take the entire LibDem leadership hostage."

that the clean-up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse was right about some aspects of the sexual revolution - but not all. The two women often crossed swords in the Sixties.

to publish the expenses story about David Laws, which led to his resignation as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Others disagree, as he reports.

, the broadcasters' joint venture which will connect internet video to the TV set, , after delays in the regulatory process.

of more than 170 civil servants who earn more than Prime Minister David Cameron. The new government has published the salaries of public servants earning more than £150,000-a-year to aid transparency. Papers review.

EastEnders, The Apprentice and other ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One shows will be made in high definition by the end of the year, and more will follow, . A ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One HD channel is to be launched in the autumn, alongside the existing ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ HD channel.

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