Up until now Google’s street view has been limited to a few major cities now it’s been extended to cover 95% of the UK so now you can have a look at where you live, work or whatever takes your fancy.

Hat Tip: Trusted Reviews.

More than 150 people have approached consumer publication Which? Computing claiming to have been wrongly targeted in crackdowns on illegal file-sharing.

ACS:Law has sent thousands of letters to people claiming they have illegally downloaded material and offers them a chance to settle by paying around £500. Source: BBC.

Personally I wouldn’t pay them a penny, Andrew Crossley, of ACS:Law, might say:

That he is convinced the method used to detect the IP address used for illegal downloads is foolproof.

“We are happy that the information we get is completely accurate,” he said. Source: BBC.

Absolute rubbish – ACS:Law aren’t saying how they collect IP Addresses so one can’t identify the loopholes in their methodology – but one thing you can be sure of on the internet and that is, nothing is foolproof.

ACS:Law hasn’t actually been to court yet and I’m with Matt Bath, technology editor at Which? On that point,

I suspect that if they went to court it would be very difficult to proof beyond doubt that a particular individual was responsible for downloading the illegal content. Source: BBC.

As I said don’t pay ACS:Law

France has echoed calls by the German government for web users to find an alternative to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) to protect security.

Certa, a government agency that oversees cyber threats, warned against using all versions of the web browser.

Germany warned users on Friday after malicious code – implicated in attacks on Google – was published online. Source: BBC.

Personally I’ve not used internet Explorer for years – it makes security sense not to use the most popular browsers, hackers aren’t going to bother with one of the less used browsers they’ll want to maximise their potential victims – I’ve been happily using Firefox although that’s gaining in popularity so it might be time to change

Google Chrome
I quite like Chrome although it’s a little bare for some – my wife in particular

Maxthon
Very popular in China and is based around a security patched Internet Explorer engine – but it remains vulnerable to Internet Explorer’s flaws: so it might be out of the frying pan into the fire

Opera
One many mobile phone users will be familiar with and possibly the quickest browser around.

Safari
Developed by Apple and one which Apple Mac users will be familiar.

SeaMonkey
An integrated suite that’s based on the venerable Netscape Communicator – Netscape the browser that dominated in the days when you paid money for a browser.

Wikipedia lists plenty of other browsers – of course there is absolutely no guarantee that these are any better than Internet Explorer – it’s just attempting safety in lack of numbers.

Many years ago I left Demon in disgust at their service and joined the cable company Telewest manly in the belief that only cable could provide decent access speeds – copper will never match fibre optic for speed. Eventually Telewest was merged with NTL to form Virgin Media the beast we now have – the latest scam is the following service reduction to email under the guise of protecting us from viruses.

As a security measure to prevent potential viruses, Virgin Media Mail doesn’t allow you to send or receive executable files (such as files ending in .exe) that could contain damaging executable code.

We also do not allow certain other types of potentially harmful files, with ending as listed here: “.ade”, “.adp”, “.bas”, “.bat”, “.chm”, “.cmd”, “.com”, “.cpl”, “.crt”, “.dll”, “.hlp”, “.hta”, “.inf”, “.ini”, “.ins”, “.isp”, “.jse”, “.lib”, “.lnk”, “.mdb”, “.mde”, “.msc”, “.msi”, “.msp”, “.mst”, “.ocx”, .pages, “.pcd”, “.pif”, “.reg”, “.scr”, “.sct”, “.shb”, “.shs”, “.sys”, “.url”, “.vb”, “.vbe”, “.vbs”, “.vxd”, “.wsc”, “.wsf” and “.wsh”.

Virgin Media Mail won’t accept these types of files even if they are sent in a zipped (.zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz) format. If this type of message is sent to your Virgin Media Mail account, it is bounced back to the sender automatically.

You can send and receive messages up to 20 megabytes (MB) total (including attachments). Any message that exceeds this limit will not be delivered to your inbox and will be returned to the sender. Virgin Media.

Not only that, if you send zipped files

Virgin Media Mail allows you to send and receive zipped attachments, as long as they meet three conditions:

1. They don’t contain executable files or other potentially harmful files.
2. They are less than the maximum attachment size.
3. They are not password-protected or encrypted. Virgin Media.

Zipping up a file and password protecting it is one of the simplest methods of protecting sensitive information – not the best I agree but good enough for most people. Still you won’t be able to anymore. Is it time to find another service provider? The trouble is there isn’t an alternative cable provider; mobile internet is a slow expensive joke so if I want to change I’m going to have to get copper back, which means signing up with BT.

Oh and one other thing

We’re sure you’ll love our new, easy to use, super efficient system. And what makes it so great? Well, it’s provided by Google, of course! Virgin Media.

Not much of an advert for Google – does Gmail include the same restrictions?

Google has moved to head off some of the threat from young rivals such as Twitter and Facebook by announcing plans to prominently display results from social networking sites in its search pages.

The new development, which the Californian technology giant dubs “real-time search”, aims to bring users more up-to-date information as they scour the web for information. Over the next few days, anybody searching online using Google will see their traditional search results augmented by a string of constantly updating messages drawn from social networks, news sites and blogs.

The move is part of a wider push to make Google’s search index even faster and more up to date, as people increasingly use services like Twitter to transmit information about events as they happen. Bobbie Johnson, The Guardian.

Personally I can’t think of anything worse than Twitter – I haven’t the attention span of a Goldfish and like a little detail not the puerile twitterings that occupy 140 character tweets – and don’t get me started on Facebook.

Christ this seems like the human race as a herd rampaging around our collected knowledge like so many china shop bulls – or maybe I’m missing the point

“There’s no doubt that it’s good to have,” said Danny Sullivan, a prominent observer of Google’s activities, writing on his SearchEngineLand website. “It’s incredibly difficult to be a leading information source and yet when there’s an earthquake, people are instead turning to Twitter for confirmation faster than traditional news sources on Google can provide.” Bobbie Johnson, The Guardian.

Personally I turn to the BBC – and what I don’t understand is, in the aftermath of an earthquake who’s going to be twittering from the afflicted area – surely it takes reporters with all the backup that news corporations supply to provide reports – I can’t see what trawling the 20 odd million messages posted each day – Christ next they’ll be trawling my text messages – that’ll make exciting reading – “will you get some milk”, “where are you” and “I’ll be late” – much like twitter.

Is there a serious search engine out there?

There’s more to the Internet than a Google search reveals

Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created “a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System”, or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke’s software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.

“It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about – freedom to communicate,” Clarke says now. “But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn’t the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail.” His pioneering software was intended to change that.

His tutors were not bowled over. “I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky … they said, ‘You didn’t cite enough prior work.’”

Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how many people are using it: “At least 2m copies have been downloaded from the website, primarily in Europe and the US. The website is blocked in [authoritarian] countries like China so there, people tend to get Freenet from friends.” Last year Clarke produced an improved version: it hides not only the identities of Freenet users but also, in any online environment, the fact that someone is using Freenet at all.

Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions (“How much security do you need?” … “NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country” or “MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse”). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of “freesites” available: “Iran News”, “Horny Kate”, “The Terrorist’s Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists”, “How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]“, “Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more”, “Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists”. There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs (“Welcome to my first Freenet site. I’m not here because of kiddie porn … [but] I might post some images of naked women”) and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: “If you’re reading this now, then you’re on the darkweb.”

The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness – its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. “Many many users think that when they search on Google they’re getting all the web pages,” says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. “I think it’s a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don’t know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know.” Andy Beckett, The Guardian.

Back in July 2000 in his white paper The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value, Michael K. Bergman estimated the Deep Web as 500 times larger than the known web which is the figure Rajaraman talks about – Bergman now considers his figure of 500 as an overestimate – but in the 10-years since Bergman made wrote his paper no one has provided an alternative estimate – all that can be said is the Deep Web is vast.

As for Freenet’s claim to be a defender of free speech it seems little more than a fig leaf – in reality Freenet is nothing more than a haven for paedophiles, terrorists, criminals and sad people with nothing better to do with their time.

People around the world certainly need secure communications, many countries implement firewalls that preventing their citizens accessing information on anything from AIDS to birth control then theirs journalists such as those working for Reporters without Borders to name a few.

There are alternatives which don’t produce the mass of abhorrent content that is Freenet. For secure communications there is Tor and for publishing facts to the world there’s the excellent Wikileaks.

Personally I’m steering well clear of Freenet and I’m lucky not to need the services of Tor or Wikileaks – although there are those who’d disagree with me.

Rupert Murdoch is considering a tie-up with Microsoft which would see the technology group pay for exclusive rights to content from his stable of newspapers, including the Times and the Sun, to attract visitors to its Bing search engine. Richard Wray, The Guardian.

Meanwhile

Internet search giant Google has lifted the lid on its operating system, known as Chrome OS.

The free and open source system is initially aimed at low-cost netbooks and does away with many of the features of a traditional program. BBC.

It seems like Microsoft is busy trying to turn itself into Google, whilst Google is busy trying to turn itself into Microsoft – perhaps “turn itself into” is the wrong words I should’ve used “crush”. Either way I’d gladly see the back of that viper Rupert Murdoch – is this the last gamble of a desperate man?

Rupert Murdoch’s plans to impose fees for newspaper websites received a morale boost from research suggesting that as many as 48% of British and American consumers would be willing to pay a few pounds a month for online news.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group found a higher than expected level of willingness to stump up for journalism on the web. Britain and the US ranked lowest among nine countries surveyed, with as many as 66% of Finns, 63% of Germans and 62% of Italians polled declaring themselves open to paying for access to news websites.

At present, only 12% of British readers pay anything for online news – the smallest proportion of any nation in the study. On average, those willing to stump up a fee in the UK say they would be prepared to pay $4 (£2.40) a month – slightly more than the $3 contemplated by American and Australian readers but less than the $7 offered by Italians, $6 cited by Spaniards and $5 offered by German and French consumers.

“The good news is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, consumers are willing to pay for meaningful content,” said John Rose, a senior partner at BCG in New York. “The bad news is that they are not willing to pay much.” Andrew Clark, The Guardian.

A quick straw poll in the office reveals no-one’s willing to pay anything. And here in the UK we do pay something for online news as part of our TV licence – and personally that’s as far as it goes – for all its faults the BBC does a good job – pay anymore no way. The whole thing’s Murdoch’s wishful thinking – that said, Murdoch’s certainly got some tasty assurances from Tory leader David Cameron on crippling the BBC – so we might find ourselves using a different website – but we won’t be paying – Goole News could well be the winner.