Into Tech

“The Justice Department has quietly hired one of the nation’s best-known litigators, former Walt Disney Co. vice chairman Sanford Litvack, for a possible antitrust challenge to Google Inc.’s growing power in advertising,” says The Wall Street Journal. “Mr Litvack’s hiring is the strongest signal yet that the US is preparing to take court action against Google and its search-advertising deal with Yahoo Inc. The two companies combined would account for more than 80% of US online-search ads.”

For weeks, US lawyers have been deposing witnesses and issuing subpoenas for documents to support a challenge to the deal, lawyers close to the review said. Such efforts don’t always mean a case will be brought, however.

Later, the story says:

It is relatively rare for the Justice Department to hire a special counsel from outside the department. David Boies was brought in as a special counsel to build the landmark antitrust case against Microsoft in 1998. Stephen Axinn, another well-known New York litigator, was hired to challenge WorldCom Inc.’s proposed buyout of Sprint Corp. The companies abandoned that transaction in 2000 after the department and Mr. Axinn challenged the deal.

Here’s an interesting game project by Nick Diakopoulos, Kurt Luther, and Irfan Essa of the Georgia Institute of Technology. AudioPuzzler involves listening to snippets of dialogue drawn from a selection of short videos, then accurately transcribing and re-ordering the contents to make cogent sentences. Once you’ve completed a puzzle, you get to watch the video.

It’s sort of like Typing of the Dead, but with a useful purpose - Diakopoulos and co are looking into ways of creating high accuracy video transcriptions, which don’t rely on automatic methods. Perhaps a game like AudioPuzzler could be used to create close-captioned videos without requiring lots of staff and financial resources.

Have a go anyway - it’s quite unusual.

(Via WaterCoolerGames)

In 2001, a website briefly attracted attention by publishing Britney
Spears’ Guide to Semiconductor Physics. It was, said Scientific
American, “one of the stranger approaches to teaching science that
we’ve seen lately”. For me, however, it was a sign of changing times.
Originally one part of the internet (a network of networks) was SPAN,
the Space Physics Analysis Network, and the web was invented at Cern,
Europe’s atom-smashing centre, to help make scientific papers more
readily available. Today, it’s used to track the orbits of Britney
Spears, Paris Hilton and other “stars” unknown to space physics.

Perez Hilton, Pink is the New Blog, PopSugar, Just Jared, E! Online,
TMZ … There are dozens of them, all much the same, albeit some are
snarkier than others. They all focus on celebrity indiscretions and
wardrobe malfunctions, heavily illustrated with paparazzi photos and
snatched videos.

The thing is, nowadays not even high court judges can get away with
not knowing who Paris Hilton is (assuming it’s possible not to know),
or Madonna or Amy Winehouse, but the lesser lights are harder to
track. Something like TMZ is one way to keep in touch. And if TMZ
misses anything, it has a terrific blogroll on its front page, with
links to a vast array of sites from Absolute Punk to Young, Black and
Fabulous. (Sorry, I wish it went from Aargh! to Yeeeah!)

TMZ stands for the Thirty-Mile Zone around Hollywood, beyond which
stars were “on location”. In sum, it’s the centre of the celebrity
universe. However, at least one other city is known to exist – Las
Vegas – mainly because H-Wood celebs go there to party or, sometimes
accidentally, get married. But TMZ also has plenty of political
coverage, at least during elections. Recent examples include
Unprotected Sex Has Its Perks, and McCain’s VP – Beaver Roundup.

TMZ’s blog-style home page has little news and even less to read,
though stories are sometimes picked up by mainstream media. But casual visitors are more likely to be attracted by the photo and video
galleries, or by the celebrity listings section. This shows Britney
Spears (1,408 stories) streaking ahead of Paris Hilton (893) and
Lindsay Lohan (598). Other significant figures include Nicole Richie
(196), Brad & Angelina (148), Madonna (137) and Pamela Anderson (120). However, any “naughty bits” are obscured by little stars.

TMZ loves collecting groups of photos around a common theme, such as celebrity tattoos, or celebrity yachts. For the Olympics, it did
Olympic butts. Some are presented as quizzes: can you guess the star
from the six-pack? (No, I can’t.)

While some celebrity sites are done by amateurs for fun, TMZ is a
serious business. It was launched in 2005 by AOL and Warner Brothers’
Telepictures Productions, both of which are owned by the mighty Time
Warner. In 2007, it followed up its web success with TMZ on TV, a
programme syndicated on Fox and other local stations across America.
At least for now, it seems there’s plenty of cash in trash.

Building Britain’s next generation of super-fast broadband network, which can download music in seconds and movies in minutes, will cost between £5.1bn and £28.8bn, according to the government’s independent advisory group.

The estimate from the Broadband Stakeholder Group, published today, comes before reports on next-generation access networks by government-appointed adviser and former Cable & Wireless boss Francesco Caio and regulator Ofcom next week.

BT will spend £1.5bn rolling out the sort of fibre-optic network needed to achieve the speeds common in Korea and Japan to 10m homes over the next four years.

Virgin Media, meanwhile, is installing technology that provides broadband at more than twice the speed possible on BT’s best broadband line. But it will only ever reach about half the country.

The BSG report reckons that the technology that BT plans to deploy in cities - which only connects cabinets at the end of streets to the new network - will cost £5.1bn. Stretching the fibre networks all the way into every home in the country could cost £28.8bn.

Anthony Walker, chief executive of the BSG, said the main cost of the project is digging up the nation’s roads to bury fibre, and the economic case for such deployment - based on take-up of about 30% of potential homes - can relatively easily be made for about 70% of the country.

It is highly unlikely that the government will provide any financial help to plug the digital divide that looks set to appear between urban and rural areas.

In a recent interview with Television, the monthly magazine of the Royal Television Society, Caio, who was asked by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform to investigate next-generation networks, said he was minded to advise the government that it leaves the job to the market rather than recommend state intervention.

As Google prepares to blow out the 10 candles on top of its birthday cake this Sunday, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin can be forgiven for cracking a wry smile as they reflect upon the fire they have just lit under Microsoft.

The conflagration that has the creator of Windows running for the fire extinguisher was caused by Google’s launch of its own internet browser. The arrival of Chrome, announced in typically idiosyncratic style through the medium of an online comic strip this week, represents more than just a challenge to Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer. It represents a fundamental fight over the future of the computer.

Microsoft, as so many potential rivals have found over the years, has a stranglehold over the market for the software that runs computers thanks to its hugely successful Windows operating system. So Google has taken heed of the old adage that if you cannot win, change the game.

The rise of broadband internet access has finally created an environment where applications such as word processors or spreadsheet programs do not need to reside on a computer. Instead they can be run on the internet and the documents created can be stored on web servers so they can be accessed from anywhere a person can get online. In a world where such web-based applications abound, it does not matter what operating system a computer runs because all it needs to have is an internet browser and an internet connection. In that world, a user could even opt for a free operating system.

It’s a change that Bill Gates himself foresaw when 13 years ago he wrote an internal memo in which he assigned the “highest level of importance” to the internet and warned his colleagues that it was a potential “tidal wave” that could fundamentally alter the rules.

That memo mentioned then market-leading browser Netscape as having the potential to “commoditize the underlying operating system”. That infamous memo was one of the catalysts of the browser wars of the late 1990s, which ultimately saw Internet Explorer crush Netscape Navigator, and it also included a line about ensuring that makers of computers ship their machines with a Microsoft browser pre-installed. That practice landed Microsoft in court and led to the effective split of the company. But by then the damage was done and Netscape ended up in the hands of AOL before disappearing all but completely.

When Gates testified as part of the anti-trust case brought against the company 10 years ago he was asked what that line about “commoditizing the operating system” had meant. He replied: “They were creating a product that would either reduce the value or eliminate demand for the Windows operating system if they continued to improve it and we didn’t keep improving our product.”

Firefox cub

Ironically, Chrome, which has been roughly two years in the making, builds upon innovations made in browser technology by Microsoft’s rival Mozilla, custodian of the Firefox browser, some of whose technological DNA comes from Netscape Navigator.

But the browser wars of a decade ago do not live on just within the technology of Chrome, but in Google’s decision to create it in the first place. The search engine’s chief executive admitted after the launch that “the browser wars of 10 years ago were right: the browser matters”.

Brin added that “operating systems are kind of an old way to think of the world. They have become kind of bulky … We [web users] want a very lightweight, fast engine for running applications. The kind of things you want to have running standalone are shrinking.”

That is bad news for Microsoft, which makes a significant chunk of its revenues from its Windows operating system and Office suite of software, both of which sit upon the computer itself.

Google, of course, makes pretty much all of its revenues from online search. It has gone from a doctoral project at Stanford University to the world’s largest search engine in 10 years, blasting through the traditional media and advertising industries on the way. It is now one of the world’s most trusted and recognised brands.

Over the past few years, the company has moved into online applications and services such as email, word processing, calendars, instant messaging, maps, spreadsheets and even bought the online video phenomenon YouTube.

But ultimately everything it does is about persuading people to do more with the internet. The more time people spend online, the more likely they are to search for something and the more likely they are to generate revenues for Google or queries that help improve its search algorithm. So why would it want to dabble with browsers?

Firstly, the sense that Google’s executives have given over the past few days is that if the rest of the industry had produced good enough browsers, there would have been no need for them to create Chrome.

Announcing the launch of Chrome - which was leaked after a Google staffer posted a copy of the 38-page comic that heralded the move - the company said on its website: “People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

“We realised that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.”

Android attack

Chrome, according to early testers, is certainly faster than many of the browsers already in the market - especially the current version of Internet Explorer - and it has been engineered so that if one website being visited freezes up, the entire program does not crash.

Google has moved into another area - mobile phones - for roughly similar reasons. The creation of its Android operating system for mobile phones - the first device that runs it is expected in time for Christmas - owes much to the fact that the mobile internet has been promised for years but the industry’s love of proprietary systems has held back its arrival.

The first gadget to deliver on the promise of the mobile web, Apple’s iPhone, owes some of its success to the fact that it is an “open” platform, so anyone who uses common web standards can create applications for it. Android is also an open mobile platform, in the same way as Chrome is an open browser platform.

But Chrome is also a crucial defensive play for Google. If you rely - as it does - on people having access to the internet to make your money you not only want to make it as simple as possible but ensure no one gets in your way.

The new, eighth version of Internet Explorer, which is due out soon, includes the ability to view web pages anonymously. Erasing a user’s online footprints would make it harder for Google to collect the data about visitors that it uses to improve search results and serve relevant adverts.

Chrome also has an anonymous browsing mode - which has quickly been dubbed “porn mode” because it hides details of where the user has been from other users of the same machine - but Google will still know what that user has been doing online.

Then there is the fact that browsers increasingly contain search boxes within them, raising the risk that a popular new browser could slowly squeeze Chrome out of the market by signing up with a rival search engine.

Google has already been hedging its bets. It has a deal with the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit-making organisation that funds the development of Firefox, the web’s second most popular browser, to have its search box within the browser itself. Just last month Google extended that deal - which has recently generated more than three quarters of Mozilla’s revenues - until 2011. Google’s toolbar is already standard on Apple’s Safari browser and can also be downloaded and installed on Internet Explorer.

Chrome has excited the tech world but ultimately it
all comes down to money and for Google that means more people searching more often. As Citigroup put it in a note to clients this week: “Given that search has become such a fundamental part of internet usage, anything that impacts overall internet usage is important for Google.”

Backstory

Google is either more than 12, nearly 11, exactly 10 tomorrow or not quite 10 years old, depending on which event is taken as its birth. While still at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on technology that would become the forerunner of Google by January 1996. It was called BackRub, because it analysed back links - essentially the links to a site from other sites.

BackRub was “let loose” in March 1996. Brin and Page had created an algorithm that ranked pages by importance - PageRank, which is still at the heart of Google today. The bigger the internet got, they reckoned, the bigger the search engine would get, which led them to name it after googol, the term for the numeral one followed by a hundred zeros. Google was launched in August 1996

Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, invested $100,000, making the cheque out to Google Inc, which did not exist. So on September 7 1998 Brin and Page incorporated Google as a company.

One day this month will mark Google’s official 10th birthday. The company will probably celebrate with a blog post and a special logo and we’ll see a slew of articles about how much they’ve accomplished in those 10 years. A few publications couldn’t wait and got their Google tributes out last month.

But when exactly should we be celebrating? Almost certainly on September 27. But the real answer is way more complicated than that.

Google is actually nearly 13-years-old, if you go by their corporate history page: “By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyse the ‘back links’ pointing to a given website.”

But if you go by when the Google.com domain name was registered, September 15 1997, the company will turn 11 next week.

However, the date Google celebrates as their birth month is a year later, September 1998. They celebrated on September 7, the date of the company’s incorporation, until 2005. Since 2005 (and also randomly in 2002), they’ve celebrated on September 27.

So why do they celebrate it on the 27th? According to Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who wrote about this mess last year, they pushed the date forward in 2005 to allow for the announcement of an index-size milestone (ie the record-breaking number of pages the search engine was sifting through).

At least Google is consistently inconsistent: “Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.”

So Happy 10th, 11th and/or almost 13th birthday Google! The first three people who sing Happy Birthday to Google in a video comment below (all the way through, full volume, go for it) get a TechCrunch T-shirt.

Not many people have heard of graphic designer Dennis Hwang, but he has millions of fans, and probably more than a billion people have seen his work. But the 29-year-old has a unique platform for his skills: he does the “Google doodles” – variations on Google’s colourful logo - that appear on the search engine’s popular home page.

The doodles that celebrate special days such as Christmas, Halloween and Google’s birthdays signal that Google is a different kind of company: a playful one. “It’s not a gimmick,” says Hwang. “It really grows from the core culture. It comes from the founders, Larry and Sergey, their quirky personalities and drive for innovation. At a time when the company logo is considered sacred, they’re saying ‘Let’s have fun with it’.”

I met Dennis in 2005 when he judged a Doodle 4 Google competition, which invited British schoolchildren aged four to 18 to design their own logo. It was a delight. Google’s office filled with kids, and 11-year-old Lisa Wainaina got to see her winning design on the Google UK home page.

“These kids are competition I wasn’t aware of,” quipped Hwang. “My job security just went out the window.”

In reality, doodling is a sideline, and started by accident in 1999 when Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were going to the Burning Man festival in Nevada. “Sergey added a tiny symbol to the home page logo to communicate directly with the users,” says Hwang.

The next doodles were done by outside contractors, but then Brin discovered that Hwang was studying art at Stanford, as well as computer science. “He said: ‘Hey, Dennis, why don’t you give this a try’,” says Hwang. He did Bastille Day in 2000, and he’s been doing them ever since.

The staples are Chinese New Year, St Valentine’s Day, Easter, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year. These are supplemented by major events such as the Olympics, where there can be half a dozen doodles telling a little story.

Painters are an obvious temptation for a graphic artist, and there have been doodles to celebrate the birthdays of Vincent van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Andy Warhol, MC Escher, Claude Monet and Piet Mondrian, among others. But often Hwang surprises us: there have been doodles for Ray Charles’s birthday, Bloomsday, the transit of Venus, leap year and the opening of Google’s lunar office – on April 1. One 2001 doodle that attracted particular attention celebrated Korean Independence Day, and Hwang was interviewed for the Korea Herald. Although born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he grew up as Hwang Jung-moak in Gwacheon, South Korea. “When I was at school, the teachers didn’t like my doodling habit, but my parents always supported me,” he says. “Something that used to be frowned on turned out to be my greatest asset.”

Hwang returned to the US in 1992 when his father was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, and had to cope with the American education system while unable to speak English. He still made it to Stanford University, where Google was founded.

The doodles are produced on computer, but “everything I do is hand drawn”, says Hwang: “I have some tools and tricks to make it look as though it’s done on pencil and paper.” He’s been using a Wacom graphics tablet and a stylus for input, and adopted a Tablet PC so he could work directly on the screen. “That’s my secret weapon,” he says. “It shaves two to four hours off how long it takes to draw one.”

• Google’s doodle competition

Since its launch in 2003 the UK’s fifth mobile phone network 3 has tried in vain to persuade customers to watch TV and video-call each other; experimented with a pile-’em-high-sell-’em-cheap strategy that saw prices across the industry collapse; infuriated its customers with clunky technology and poor coverage; blown through £10bn of its owner’s money; and more often than not been dismissed as a bit of a joke.

Now, after just over a year in the job, chief executive Kevin Russell reckons he can make it the one thing it has never been: a success. “We have spent all of 2007 and part of 2008 just getting back to the starting line,” the 42-year old Scot admits, seated in his office at the company’s headquarters in Maidenhead, Berkshire. “The key for us in the rest of this year and for the next five years is we have to be growing, not consolidating. We have got to more than double the customer base.”

That’s a tall order. The company has been stuck between 3 million and 4 million customers - it currently has just over 3.7 million active users - for the past three years. Even if Russell succeeds, 3 would still be only about two-thirds the size of its nearest rival, T-Mobile. He also has to stem the company’s losses as owner Hutchison Whampoa, the Hong Kong-based conglomerate that created Orange, seeks to push its entire mobile business - which includes operations in Italy and Australia - from a half-year loss of £228m into the black before financial charges by the end of this year.

But Russell reckons he has already scored a notable success with the company’s mobile broadband service, which has attracted over half a million users in a year. He has also clinched a crucial network-sharing deal with T-Mobile that will cut costs and moved the majority of the firm’s distribution into almost 300 own-brand stores.

The main problem now is the regulatory regime in the UK, which is preventing him offering the sort of all-you-can-call packages seen in countries such as the US and Germany. At issue are mobile termination rates. These incredibly complex charges are levied by the mobile phone companies on each other and fixed-line operators such as BT for the privilege of connecting calls to mobile customers. EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding wants to see them come down substantially and last week Ofcom raised the idea of scrapping them altogether when its current set of price caps expires in 2011.

But 3’s rivals are screaming in horror at the prospect of charges that make up almost a quarter of their revenues - several billion pounds a year - being taken away. Vodafone warns that 40 million Europeans could be forced to abandon their mobile phones as the mobile networks increase call charges and put up handset prices. If termination rates are scrapped, others have warned, mobile phone users will be charged to receive calls, not just to make them.

This is utter rubbish, according to Russell. “If you cannot economically justify termination rates all you have left is scaremongering, the essence of your argument is weak and all you have is rhetoric.” He adds: “We would not, categorically not, charge customers to receive calls.”

It’s a far cry from the company’s position before Russell’s arrival. He inherited a long-running spat with Ofcom in which the company was trying to defend its right to charge an even higher termination rate than its rivals.

Russell, who joined as deputy chief executive at the start of last year having got 3 Australia to break even and reach a million users before taking the top job last June, is reluctant to criticise his predecessors in public. But he has executed a complete strategic U-turn. Now he wants Ofcom to move even faster to scrap termination rates so the mobile phone industry can start offering the sort of flat-rate deals already seen in the fixed-line world.

“You expect your local regulator not to give you a leg up but to give you a level playing field to compete on. That has not happened in the UK in my view,” he says. “Ofcom’s recent mobile sector assessment is really encouraging. But - and it is a big but - the idea that we will deal with everything in 2011 … is not good enough. If you have identified an issue and you know it is not right then it should be dealt with earlier.”

As well as his U-turn on regulation, Russell has dumped any pretensions that 3 had of being a multimedia company. When the service launched under Colin Tucker, who had worked with Hutchison on the creation of Orange, it was all about video calling and football clips, but take-up was slower than expected and early customers found the handsets clunky and the network patchy. Less than a year after launch, the regulator was receiving 14 times more complaints about 3 than about any of its rivals. But the multimedia theme is one that Tucker’s successor, Bob Fuller, returned to as he looked to improve margins after trying to grab customers by slashing prices.

Russell, however, has little time for such grandiose ambitions. “We are quite simple - we provide communications-based services. I do not see us pushing to create a whole series of revolutionary behaviours - what I do see is us helping people to do what they do today, when they are out and about.”

With that in mind, he would rather like to get his hands on the iPhone if Apple’s exclusive deal with O2 comes to an end. He is also not particularly bothered by Nokia’s attempts to get into mobile music and mobile gaming because “I am not sure that we have done enough to own the content space. If Nokia or someone else comes forward with a product which provides a better experience than we can provide, we need to be open to that.”

It’s a refreshingly pragmatic change from the view of some of the other mobile phone companies that they can be all things to all people and is characteristic of Russell, who is plain speaking without the arrogance that often entails.

The question, however, is whether Russell will get the chance to see out his five-year plan. Ever since 3’s launch there has been speculation that Hutchison will sell out, having done so well out of other mobile businesses such as Orange and Hutchison-Essar in India, with T-Mobile seen as an obvious buyer. But Russell is adamant that “you cannot build a business with one eye on an exit” and his five-year plan is his idea, not that of his boss, Canning Fok, or Hutchison’s chairman, Li Ka-shing.

Russell has worked for Hutchison since 1995. At the time, he was working as an accountant and playing semi-professional football - a rather useful centre forward, apparently - in Hong Kong, having settled there five years earlier while backpacking round the world.

That is about all the personal information you can squeeze out of him, other than the fact that he has a house in Sydney and anyone who visits from Australia has to bring four packets of Tim Tam biscuits with them because he can’t buy them in the UK. He simply does not buy into the “cult of the chief executive”.

“I have quite clearly come with a view that by 2011/12 this is going to be a successful business. If I have done my job well then I will have brought through leaders and managers who can take this business forwards arguably better than I can. I do believe that chief executives have a finite value to add.”

His bosses in Hong Kong will be hoping the value he does bring to 3 will be the sort you can put in the bank.

CV

Born

July 22 1966

Education

Dunblane High School; Heriott-Watt University (accountancy and computer science)

Career

Accountant, Ernst & Whinney; group finance manager, Hutchison Telecommunications 1995; director of finance and operations 1996-98; chief financial officer, Partner Communications (Israel) 1999-2000; chief executive,3 Australia 2001-06; deputy chief executive 3 UK January 2007-May 2007; chief executive June 2007-

Family

Married with two sons

Hobbies

Sport, espec
ially football

Electricity-free charity

I am a small, private donor to a developing world charity helping a village with no electricity. So far I have been able to give them a clockwork radio and torch. Are there any cheap computers designed for this market?
Chris Berg

JS: The most widely publicised device is the MIT-inspired XO-1 laptop, which has been developed under the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. You can donate a laptop for $200, but you can’t direct it to a particular village (laptopgiving.org). Alternatively, have a look at UK-based Aleutia (aleutia.com). This company has developed the low-power E2 Mini Computer (£199), which can be powered by a foldable solar panel, and is suitable for use in Africa. The project started after Mike Rosenberg, the founder, set up a cybercafe in Takoradi, Ghana, to work with street children. The site’s wiki says: “We package the E2 with low-power LCDs, folding solar panels, and rugged batteries to form a 3kg, $900 kit that can be dispatched anywhere and set up in minutes, and is used by aid workers in the field.” (wiki.aleutia.com).

The Ethical Superstore may suggest some cheaper non-computer ideas: ethicalsuperstore.com.

Photo recovery

I have accidentally deleted some photos (grandchildren, special events etc) that I thought were backed up on my slave drive. I used Active File Recovery to undelete them, but I cannot open them. Irfanview says “cannot display header”.
Tony

JS: Try using PhotoRec, which is designed for “digital picture and file recovery”: it’s not guaranteed to work but at least it’s free. Image Recall may be even better: it costs £24.99, but there’s a demo version. Programs that will try to reconstruct damaged image files include Pix Recovery and EasyRecovery Pro.

They want your money

I’m seeing much more spam with zip attachments. The messages are carefully crafted to induce any busy office worker to click on them without thinking, and often seem to be targeted at individuals within the company. I’m not about to click on one of these, but if I did, what would happen?
Roger Wilson

JS: This is a common way of distributing botnet-controlled Trojan files, such as the ZBot banking Trojan, ideally a variant known as Prg. The basic idea is to capture and simulate all the keystrokes used to access your (preferably commercial) bank account to perform a fraudulent money transfer that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. ZBot can also attempt to disable your firewall, steal credit card numbers, takes snapshots of your screen and download extra components as required. Anti-virus software should block it, including online scanners such as Kaspersky. However, anyone who finds it would also need to change their banking and other passwords.

Email alerts

In the film Sleepless in Seattle, an onscreen alert box popped up every time a new email was received by one of the characters. I use Hotmail, Gmail and the Microsoft Vista successor to Outlook Express, but none of them seems to offer this convenience. Why not?
Michael McCarthy

JS: It’s one of those things that sounds like a good idea but can easily become really annoying. Still, many, if not most email programs have some form of alert, including Windows Live Mail, and you can set a sound for New Mail Notification in the Control Panel’s Sounds and Audio Devices applet. If you have Windows Live Messenger, you can get email alerts that, if clicked, will launch your Windows Live Mail program. For Gmail, you can use the Gmail Notifier - still in beta - but if you install the Google Talk client, you will get email alerts automatically.

There must be dozens of email alert programs and add-ons, many of them free. You can browse a selection. Otherwise, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in both Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, and I have not seen either.

Backchat

Richard Cooke wanted a PC to edit native AVCHD hi-def movies with Pinnacle software. Neil says he edits it with Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. There is a free trial version of the Sony software at Softpedia.

Annie Hall wanted to send newsletters from her Talk Talk mailbox. According to comments on the Ask Jack blog, Talk Talk can send an email to up to 50 recipients, but kds1767 reckons Talk Talk will solve the problem by soon offering Hostopia’s Announcer service. AttendantLord says: “My partial solution is to send bulk emails using the email facility of the hosting company for my website (Vision Internet).”

Last week, I mentioned Windows Easy Transfer Companion but Microsoft has withdrawn it. A Microsoft staff member said in a forum: “I think the download link is removed because [it] is not compatible with Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows XP Service Pack 3.”

Get your queries answered by Jack Schofield, our computer editor at jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk

Passengers on London Underground could be using their mobile phones to get through the ticket barriers and even pay for their lunch within the next two years, after a trial in the capital by O2 and Transport for London.

O2 incorporated Oyster card technology and a Barclaycard into a Nokia 6131 handset and gave it to 500 testers, who spent six months using it as an electronic wallet. They made more than 50,000 tube journeys and bought items from shops such as Eat, Yo Sushi and Krispy Kreme.

Claire Maslen from O2 said the company was putting together a consortium to launch a full service within two years. “The 2012 Olympics are an obvious target to aim for, but I think that is a very conservative timeframe,” she said.

The trial used near-field communications (NFC) technology, as used in the Oyster card. The “e-wallet” can be topped up from a bank account and used to pay for items under £10. In Japan similar phones have been used for more than four years.

Philip Makinson from Greenwich Consulting said mobile wallets had failed in the past because of the number of users needed to make any system viable.

“It requires cooperation, not just between handset manufacturers and network operators, but third parties such as Visa or Mastercard and banks and retailers. To reach critical mass you really need to have at least three of the big [phone] operators involved,” said Makinson.