Privacy is likely to be one of the defining challenges of the digital era, a problem that has to be solved before the internet takes its place as the engine of post-recessionary economic growth. Yet the UK authorities seem to be increasingly doing whatever they can to convince people they will have no privacy rights online at all.

The Sunday Times last weekend picked up on a story that Computing ran late last year about European Union plans to allow police to remotely hack into home computers without a warrant – with the Brussels edict now being adopted in the UK.

Not surprisingly, civil liberties groups are outraged. I’ve been critical in the past of privacy campaigners for what I’d often perceived as knee-jerk over-reactions to anything technology or database related. But in this case, they are absolutely right to protest.

The government has spent years trying to educate home computer users on the importance of security – often drawing the obvious analogy that you wouldn’t leave your front door open and allow thieves to walk in and steal your property, so why do the same online.

Yet this snooping plan allows the police to do just that – and without a warrant. Any suggestion that the police could randomly walk through your front door and inspect your premises at will would rightly be condemned. Just look at the furore when they did precisely that to Conservative MP Damien Green in his workplace.

We have already seen how local councils have abused powers that allow them to undertake legitimate surveillance under anti-terrorist laws, by instead snooping on how people use recycling bins, for example.

The idea that it will be legal for police to perform acts that, if undertaken by you or I would see us rightly branded as hackers, is absurd. We have become sadly used to organised crime realising how they can make use of keylogging software, downloaded malware and drive-by access to wireless networks. To think that the police will be copying them is beyond acceptable limits.

There has to be a balanced and reasoned debate about what privacy means in a digital world where old physical boundaries and principles no longer apply. The government seems to be taking an approach that sees it keep extending its powers until someone will finally say stop.

There are very good reasons why, in the right circumstances, law enforcement authorities should be granted access to digital information that promises to give as much of a boost to evidence gathering as did the development of DNA matching.

But the lines of acceptability in the internet age are blurred and yet to be defined. Those definitions need to be put in place soon – the privacy debate cannot be delayed further.

The public response to the 10 Downing Street e-petitions site instigated by Tony Blair has led to politicians becoming eager to connect with the common man and woman on the street through the web.

After more than one million people signed up to an e-petition against road pricing, the government seemed to be swayed and apparently backed down in the light of such a vociferous – if well-orchestrated – protest.

Subsequently, prime minister Gordon Brown has talked about using e-petitions as a parliamentary tool to bring the voice of the people into the House of Commons (surely that’s what MPs are meant to do, but that’s another matter…).

Measures have been discussed to say that e-petitions gathering sufficient votes will be brought before select committees of MPs for consideration – the Tories have gone even further, suggesting full parliamentary debates over the highest-profile issues raised through this new form of online democracy.

And next week, the Liberal Democrat party conference in Bournemouth will discuss the use of e-petitions as a means for the public to veto unpopular legislation.

Strangely, someone beat MPs to the punch by nearly 40 years– before even the internet was born or Sir Tim Berners-Lee had heard of the word “hyperlink”.

In 1970, British comedy genius Peter Cook – doyen of Private Eye and half of Pete ‘n’ Dud (and Derek and Clive for the more X-rated humourists among you) – starred in a little-known and little-watched movie called The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer.

In the film – shown on television only three times according to the IMDB web site -  Cook plays the eponymous hero, a wildly-successful advertising executive who turns his devious skills to politics.

Rimmer soon becomes prime minister after promising the electorate – who have become disconnected from politics and distrustful of MPs – that new technology will allow them all to have a say in the running of the country.

Rimmer introduces voting through the television – a national electronic referendum on every parliamentary debate. The people love it – for a while.

As more and more tedious procedural votes interrupt their favourite soaps and sitcoms, public enthusiasm for the move evaporates. Rimmer, ever the populist leader, offers a solution: One last vote – to make him the first president of Great Britain, with executive decision-making responsibility for all those boring votes.

The movie closes on a freeze frame of Rimmer’s face, the look in his eyes betraying the successful conclusion of his long-standing plan.

So, e-petitions, eh? Be careful what you want, you just might get it…

Happy 10th birthday to Google – an event celebrated by the creation of thousands more web pages about Google that Google can search for you. So here’s another one – 10 nice and nasty things about the most influential web site in the world.

Nice: The simplicity

At the heart of Google’s success is the elimination of complexity and those awful cluttered portals that we used in the early days of the web. A clean white screen, with a simple white box, and beyond it is everything you need to find on the internet. This has been perhaps the biggest factor in Google’s success, and also a critical element of making the web the global phenomenon it has become. Google has eliminated techno-fear among the masses and brought the complex nature of the internet to a non-technically aware audience.

Nasty: Advertising dominance

Google is still trumpeted as the anti-Microsoft, but how long before its dominance of the online search advertising market makes it a target for the same enemies of monopolism that dragged Microsoft through the courts? Google’s growing share of global advertising spend – in all forms – is changing the media landscape, and not always for the better.

Nice: Do no evil

Google’s corporate motto promised a new era of compassionate capitalism, and even when it entered the stock market the company’s off-the-wall approach to its dealings with Wall Street pleased users and shareholders alike.

Nasty: China

Human rights activists such as Amnesty International are still up in arms about Google’s acceptance of censorship for its Chinese web site. Critics say that the internet is such a force for good in human rights that to accede to the wishes of a repressive regime makes a mockery of Google’s good intentions elsewhere.

Nice: All the world’s information

Google’s stated aim to “organise the world’s information” offers the ultimate democratisation of knowledge and learning. At its simplest, how handy is it to resolve those arguments or remember those half-forgotten song lyrics in seconds with a Google search? One of the most-used phrases by web users the world over must be: “What did we do before Google?”

Nasty: Copyright and intellectual property infringement

Google has trodden on plenty of toes with plans to digitise books, reproduce news content, and the availability of copyrighted content on YouTube. Accessing all the world’s information is a great thing – but much of that content does actually belong to people, many of whom make a living out of it.

Nice: Larry and Sergey

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have managed to combine the geek-made-good image of Bill Gates with the coolness of Steve Jobs – but avoided the monopolist criticisms made of Microsoft’s founder and the smugness of Apple’s chief. Two smart guys with a bright idea who made good – everything Silicon Valley was meant to be about.

Nasty: Eric Schmidt

Google’s chief executive is the man who brings cold-hearted capitalism to the wacky Googlisms. Schmidt is the corporate rottweiler, there to stand up to Microsoft’s pitbull chief executive Steve Ballmer. And his background at Novell – a company that never recovered from Microsoft taking over its established market – means there is a score to settle with Redmond.

Nice: Free software

Free wordprocessing, free spreadsheets, free email, free web browser, free video – Google is not afraid to invest the billions it makes from advertising into a blatant attempt to change the software industry and slowly destroy Microsoft’s cash cows. The products aren’t perfect – but they are generally good enough, and if concerns over security and quality can be overcome, Google could lead the computing world into the cloud.

Nasty: Data collection

The biggest threat to Google’s future are the growing concerns over privacy, data protection and the use of our personal information. Just what exactly does Google do with all the information it compiles about each of us from our search profiles? How much can it learn by scanning the contents of our Gmails? And as more people use Google Apps to store personal documents and financial spreadsheets, what is being done to allay Big Brother fears over correlation of disparate data sources and how  much marketing and advertising firms can find out about us? Microsoft knows this is its rivals weak spot, and the next version of Internet Explorer will include a function to prevent historic search data from being collected by Google.

What do you think? Let us know your top likes and dislikes about Google and join in the 10th birthday fun…

Private Eye brought us an insight into the world of Google-chasing last week.

The satirical magazine and media-baiter revealed the “secrets of the Telegraph’s online success” after the newspaper claimed to have became the most-read daily paper on the web.

To quote from the Private Eye story: “News hacks [at the Daily Telegraph] are now sent a memo three or four times a day from the web site boffins listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those key words into the first paragraph of their story. Hence, if the top stories being Googled are ‘Britney Spears’ and ‘breast cancer’, hey presto, the hack is duly expected to file a piece about young women ‘such as Britney Spears’ being at risk from breast cancer.”

This sort of behaviour – relentlessly and shamelessly chasing the maximum number of hits from Google searches or Google News – is one of the unspoken facets of the internet news age.

From an editor’s point of view, one of the great things about the web is that you can track precisely what stories are being read and which are not. It is valuable information to understand the topics that matter to our audience – but some web sites take it to the sort of extreme described above.

In the IT world, if Computing were to publish more stories featuring Linux, Apple, open source product names, Microsoft product names, virus names, music downloads, iTunes or iPods – among others – it would comfortably provide a boost to our page impressions. The fact that we don’t reflects our desire to serve the needs of our target audience –senior IT decision-makers in the UK, whose interests lie in best practice technology implementations, case studies, market intelligence, skills and careers issues, leadership, management and how technology relates to the key business issues of the day.

If we really went hell-for-leather for hits, we could work in the occasional mention of Britney Spears or UFOs or Kate Moss. I’m sure Britney and Kate own a PC, so there’s bound to be an IT angle. In fact, I bet they own a trendy Mac, so double those hits.

The internet has been great for journalism – and more importantly for readers – but a future of Google-chasing strategies benefits nobody.

Readers would end up with the same old re-hashed stories about the same old topics, with little differentiation or editorial agenda to make them interesting beyond the basic facts. Worse, you would lose the diversity of topics needed to inform, entertain and educate.

For journalists, Google-chasing is the antithesis of good investigative reporting. If a specialist web site breaks a fantastic, exclusive, authoritative, ground-breaking story, Google will largely ignore it because its news selection algorithm assumes that the more web sites are featuring a particular story, the more important it must be. If one site breaks a great exclusive that does not go into the mainstream, it will barely be read. Chasing hits means chasing the stories that rank highest on Google, not necessarily the stories that matter.

And for advertisers – without whom, of course, there would not be the multitude of news sites available on the web – they lose the ability to target potential customers that comes from the in-depth understanding of a particular audience and their unique needs and interests.

If you want to read about reality TV stars and minor celebrities everywhere, the Google-chasing future will be for you. If you prefer bold to bland, diversity to conformity, special interests to special offers, then I hope your needs will be met too.

As SAP’s latest user conference draws to a close, what should the software giant’s customers and prospects expect over the coming months?

The event was fairly news-lite, with no big announcements from the supplier that would really shake up the market. But it was clear that there are certain messages that your friendly SAP sales rep will be pushing to IT leaders the next time he or she comes to call.

At a strategic level, the phrases you will hear most frequently this year are collaboration, “business networks” and “strategic agility”. The latter, in particular, strikes me as a classic IT marketing buzzword that means very little in the real world of running an IT department. But overall, SAP is predicting that its customers will need to become more flexible, more open, and more connected with their supply chains from customers to staff to suppliers.

The biggest SAP users – the likes of Nokia, Colgate-Palmolive, Rolls-Royce or Kraft Foods – who presented at the conference exist in a global environment with many outsourced functions and a potential for complexity that would cripple a business that does not adequately support critical processes with technology. They rely on close co-operation with suppliers and fast response to customers. They have all adopted the principle of ruthless standardisation for their IT.

For the many thousands of companies that are not operating on such a huge scale, the concepts of flexibility and collaboration will still be recognisable – if a little scary. Opening up the organisation, becoming connected to external partners, and sharing internal information do not come naturally or easily to many companies – but they will be key characteristics of successful businesses in the internet age.

At a technology level, SAP is going for a big push on its latest customer relationship management (CRM) release, SAP CRM 2007.

Insiders at the supplier privately acknowledge that SAP’s previous CRM offering was maybe not as good is it could have been, but with the new product the firm hopes to better compete with Oracle / Siebel, as well as mid-market alternatives such as Microsoft. There seems to be a big internal push on making 2008 a successful year for CRM 2007 – so expect the sales rep to come knocking soon.

This was my fourth Sapphire, but my first for a few years. Overall, I would say this is one of the better IT vendor conferences – purely because SAP is very good at getting high-profile customers to speak about what they are doing and to share their experiences with their peers. Of course, if you want to delve into products and technologies, there’s every opportunity, but as an occasion to learn from IT leaders at some of the world’s top companies, it is a worthwhile way for any IT professional to spend a couple of days.

Oh, and Berlin has some pretty good bars too… 

Most times I am rather dismissive of the latest technology conspiracy theories.

I’m somehow not convinced that microwave signals are being used to turn inner-city kids into mindless zombies.

Nor was I convinced that the breakdown in submarine cables that led to problems with internet access in the Middle East earlier this year were down to some strange covert underwater sabotage activity.

But for once, the FBI and the US government are doing themselves no favours and providing public domain material to fuel those who are convinced their every electronic move is being watched from afar.

In a House of Representatives judiciary committee hearing last week, FBI director Robert Mueller told California congressman Darrell Issa that, among other things, he sees the need for the FBI to have on the internet “some omnibus search capability utilising filters that would identify the illegal activity as it comes through and give us the ability to pre-empt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point as opposed to the point where it is diffuse on the internet.”

In other words, monitoring all web traffic as it enters the US (and bear in mind that most international connections route through the US at some point) to prevent the cyber attackers getting inside in the first place. It’s almost an electronic version of having to remove your shoes at the airport before being allowed to enter the country.

Issa also suggested to Mueller that there be a “Cyber Initiative” whereby “ISPs that hypothetically got consent from every single person who signed up to operate under their auspices” – effectively a permanent search warrant issued through every ISP giving permission to the FBI to look at anything we do on the internet.

And to be honest, if I had read that on a conspiracy theory web site, I’d have scoffed.

Putting aside the obvious legal, moral, ethical and technical obstacles to such a move, the FBI must be pretty confident in its ability to play into paranoid US government fears to get backing for exploring such an idea.

Of course they would like to do it – and probably already do to some degree. Anyone remember Carnivore, the proposed FBI internet monitoring device that would, in theory, act as a physical firewall between the US and the rest of the world, enabling US authorities to literally disconnect the country from the internet and vice versa – the electronic equivalent of grounding all the planes after 9/11.

Carnivore was meant to have been scrapped, but it would surprise nobody if it still existed in some form.
So who is the biggest danger to civil liberty – the cyber terrorist or the paranoid administrator? Discuss...

The spirit of Frank Sinatra may be singing a few lines to the Yahoo board today.

“And now, the end is near, and so we face the final curtain,” seems a highly appropriate lyric, although whether anyone could say Yahoo’s executives are doing it their way is doubtful.

According to Reuters, Yahoo is today expected to tell Microsoft that it is not opposed to a deal with the software giant, but it believes the company is worth more than the initial $31 per share offer price.

Since Microsoft made its hostile takeover bid in February, Yahoo has seemingly conducted a desperate search for a sugar daddy / white knight (delete according to opinion) to prevent it falling into Redmond’s clutches. Apart from a few opportunistic sniffs of interest from potential partners no doubt looking for a good deal when Yahoo was desperate, nothing has materialised. No surprises there.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer wrote to the Yahoo board over the weekend giving an effective three-week deadline before he starts to play nasty by trying to oust the board and appoint directors sympathetic to the deal.

If Yahoo does indeed respond as the reports suggest, then it is just down to negotiations on the price now – the endgame for the internet pioneer has begun.

Relegation-threatened Fulham Football Club, currently second bottom of the Premier League, have come up with a survival plan. They want to buy Derby County.

OK, of course they don’t. But if the latest rumours about Yahoo are true, then maybe this is the sort of business precedent we can expect.

According to reports, Yahoo is considering a bid for AOL now that Time Warner has apparently decided to sell of much of the business that it was once acquired by for $164bn at the height of turn-of-the-century dot com madness.

So, to repel an unwanted takeover bid by Microsoft, ailing Yahoo decides to buy sickly AOL. If I was a Yahoo shareholder, I wouldn’t be inspired with confidence that this is the strategic plan to restore my stock valuation.

Let’s not forget, Yahoo has delivered eight straight quarters of disappointing financial results. It has lost share in online advertising when the rest of the market grew by about 25 per cent – and Google by even more. And the search firm’s stock price fell 40 per cent in the three months before Microsoft’s offer was announced.

As a shareholder, you’d need some convincing that this was a business going places, regardless of how big its customer base or how innovative its product development.

It is no surprise that Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s first bid – surely only us Brits accept the first price we are offered in a haggling contest. And investors clearly expect a higher offer, since Yahoo’s share price last week reached the value of Microsoft’s $31-per-share proposal. Yahoo’s newly-inflated stock value reflects only the expectation of a quick profit when Microsoft ups its bid. If Microsoft played the ultimate hardball and withdrew its offer completely, watch the Yahoo share price plummet.

"It's good negotiating tactics to try to get a higher price from Microsoft," Laura Martin from Soleil Securities Group told the San Jose Mercury News. "But if they really reject the offer they are going to have a litany of shareholder lawsuits. It's clear there are no other bidders for anything close to this price."

As far as profit-seeking Yahoo shareholders go, Microsoft’s bid is the only game in town. Buy AOL instead, and they simply wait another year or two before YahAOL goes the same way.

If you’re consumed by doubt over who killed President Kennedy, intrigued about whether or not the Pentagon was actually hit by a plane on 9/11, or if you’re still out to get Prince Philip for driving the white Fiat that took out Princess Diana, then the world of undersea cables is probably taking up a lot of your time at the moment.

Over the past week, four telecoms cables at the bottom of the sea connecting the Middle East and North Africa have “failed”, disrupting internet traffic and telecommunications – and hence electronic trade – in several countries across the region.

Broken undersea cables are, as you can imagine, not a frequent occurrence – but it does happen often enough to warrant a small fleet of repair ships ready to take action.

The unusual number and the particular geography of these problems have kept the internet conspiracists very happy.

First reports suggested that a trailing anchor had damaged a couple of co-located cables near Alexandria, until the Egyptian authorities denied the presence of any ships in that area.

Since then there have been suggestions of CIA dirty tricks, plans to spoil a new Iranian online oil exchange, or even botched attempts to install covert listening devices on the cables themselves.

Matt Walker, a senior analyst at Ovum RHK, gives a very good – and sensible - account of the likely circumstances:

“Of the four reported and confirmed failures, two are on cables in the Mediterranean, two in the Persian Gulf; at least one of these may be a power failure, not a cable cut, and hence the landing station is the likely culprit,’ he wrote.

“The Persian Gulf is shallow but the Mediterranean reaches depths of several kilometres not too far from the coast. Without knowing the exact depth of the Mediterranean outages, accidental damage from fishing/anchors/dredging is certainly possible there, and highly likely in the shallow Gulf. Four breaks in two separate locations in a single week are rare but hardly impossible, or proof of a conspiracy.

"To paraphrase Henry Kissinger, though, even the paranoid have enemies; there may indeed be something sinister lurking. Even if all the outages occurred in shallow water, that doesn't prove that accidental damage from, e.g., a fishing trawler, was the cause, but merely suggests it was physically possible. Intentional sabotage is, after all, probably more feasibly done in shallow waters than deep, and cable security in shallow waters is only modestly more practical. Clearly, undersea cables are a ripe target for those with an interest in wreaking havoc on international communications, whatever their motivation. Another consideration is that undersea cables have been used for submarine/surface surveillance purposes as far back as World War II, with the cooperation of private industry,” he said.

Walker concluded: “In my view, the most likely outcome of this is that a credible explanation for the coincidence will be presented soon, and a few weeks from now, all will be forgotten.”

Believe what you will. The most significant aspect of this incident is to highlight the critical importance that the internet plays in global trade, even in developing nations such as Egypt.

The fact that a temporary and relatively minor disruption to that service in a pressure-cooker region of the world has produced such an outburst of conspiratorial hand-wringing shows that the internet is well and truly as much a part of international relations and political diplomacy as it is central to the corporate IT strategy.

I would like to announce quite categorically that Computing has no plans to buy Yahoo.

Despite speculation around the office that our team might invest our beer fund and chip in a few quid each, I can now confirm we will not be making a bid for the internet firm. Microsoft, you can rest easy. We'll save that battle for another day.

I just wanted to make sure that readers are clear on our position, because over the next few days and weeks there will hardly be a large internet or media company that is not going to be linked - idly or otherwise - to some sort of purchase or alliance with Yahoo, now that the company is "in play" following Microsoft's $44.6bn hostile takeover bid.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, one of the world's biggest media companies and already owner of MySpace, said today: "We are definitely not going to make a bid for Yahoo." Join the club, Rupert.

But in Murdoch's case, his denial generated pages and pages of web and print copy around the globe leaving observers with a lingering memory that News Corporation was involved in the Yahoo deal somewhere, so it must be a major player in the internet world.  No doubt the likes of Disney and perhaps AT&T will similarly enter the fray in a very non-committal sort of way at some point too.

So will any media giants step in as a white knight for the beleaguered Yahoo? Well, if they need any sort of debt to finance it, and have to approach Wall Street for advice, try avoiding the mention of AOL Time Warner, the last great internet/media deal and perhaps one of the least successful corporate mergers of all time.

Then there is the credit crunch. There is little appetite for a heavily debt-financed acquisition in the financial markets, and although Microsoft has now said it may use a portion of debt to finance its bid, the software giant is so phenomenally cash rich that few companies are able to match the price offered for Yahoo.

Don't rule out Yahoo looking for minority investors - a determined 20 per cent shareholder could be enough to complicate Microsoft's plans - and the search firm will certainly be looking to shore up its future with alliances and partnerships with anybody who has a vested interest in stopping Microsoft - primarily Google of course.

But Microsoft has achieved phase one of its plan. Everyone wants to be linked to buying Yahoo - thus furthering the expectation of a deal - but few can compete with Redmond's cash pile.