Be your own personal privacy czar

Regular columnist Bill Thompson wonders if it is time to create web services that can be trusted.

I rarely encrypt e-mail messages, leaving them to be read by anyone in the electronic chain between me and the intended recipient.

And I use public chat services like MSN Messenger and iChat, even though they send messages as plain text across the network.

Partly this is because the tools needed to make communications secure can be cumbersome and complicated, even for someone with a technical background.

But partly it is because I have not often been involved in researching stories that are going to bring me to the attention of those with the capabilities needed to tap even insecure online communications.

But you never know.

Each year I tell my students on the online journalism course at City University that they should take care to protect their files and e-mail.

And I point out that once someone e-mails them from a work address then that person can never be guaranteed anonymity in future, simply because it is so easy for employers or the police to get access to e-mail traffic records.

They may not know what was said, as reading the contents of e-mail requires permission under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, but they can find out that messages were exchanged.

But using commercial services for campaigning or organising raises the same sorts of issues as we see with Hushmail, because the interests of the owners are not the same as those of the users.

But after revelations that Hushmail has passed on details of supposedly secure e-mails to the Canadian police I think I'll stop.

I like Hushmail because it works in your web browser. When you sign in it downloads an application written in the Java programming language, and this encrypts and decrypts your message using your secret keys.

Hushmail never sees your e-mail, and so it can't hand it over to the authorities even if they come with a warrant.

But the company also offers an easier to use service which does the hard work on its server rather than your computer. And when it does that it has to have access to your original message, at least briefly.

So when the Canadian police asked it for copies of e-mail sent and received by someone suspected of the illegal manufacture and distribution of anabolic steroids it could not deny that it could read them.

The company has been open about what happened, although it does not seem to have got around to mentioning it on its website yet.

But being open isn't good enough, as the issue has highlighted a fundamental flaw in its security model, one that it will be all but impossible to get around.

Even its more secure service could be undermined if the company agreed to add a 'backdoor' to its code at the authorities' request.

The problem is that Hushmail, like other companies that store and process personal information, is bound by the laws of the country in which it is based and sometimes those laws will require it to betray the confidence of its customers.

A newspaper editor in the UK has to decide whether to go to court or hand over leaked documents; a manager at an net service firm has to decide whether to allow the police to access e-mail logs; and someone running a secure e-mail company has to decide whether the privacy of a suspected drug dealer is worth a jail sentence.

Usually they do what is asked, and often they are not even allowed to tell users what they have done because of gagging orders.

It can be hard to keep your messages secret, warns Bill

The National Union of Journalists is currently having an occasionally fractious internal discussion about the impact of new media on the profession, and the use of social network sites has been raised several times.

Some of the participants are simply opposed to these new-fangled technologies, a position that I have little sympathy with.

I remember meeting Tony Benn, former MP and lifelong campaigner for socialism, and being pleasantly surprised at his enthusiasm for YouTube and the ways it could be used to amplify a political message.

But using commercial services for campaigning or organising raises the same sorts of issues as we see with Hushmail, because the interests of the owners are not the same as those of the users.

Trade union activist and online campaigner Eric Lee put it succinctly in a recent blog post when he noted that 'Facebook is a poor replacement for a real online campaigning strategy for unions. And it makes us vulnerable to the whims of those who own the company'.

Hushmail seems to offer a good service, but its 'simple' service offers little real security when it matters. Far better to install your own encryption software, like the freely available GnuPG, and take responsibility for your own security.

And Facebook may make it easy to set up a group, but it will never be as good as having your own server, your own code and your own security mechanisms in place. Organise a group on Facebook and it belongs to them; organise it on your own server and it belongs to you.

Of course doing this takes time, costs money and requires expertise that many campaigners simply do not possess. Perhaps the time is right for a co-operative social network site, one owned by its members and run in their interests.

It might never be worth $15 billion, but it could make the world a better place.

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Sony Reader targets book lovers

Sony is trying to do for e-books what Apple has done for downloadable digital music.

It has launched a handheld device designed for electronic books- dubbed the Sony Reader - at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

It has a screen made from electronic paper that makes text look almost as sharp as it is on a printed page.

Sony hopes the gadget will tempt more people to download and read books in digital, rather than paper, format.

Electronic ink

E-books have not made much of an impact as the experience of reading on-screen has failed to live up to expectations. As a result although sales of e-books are growing they still account for only a tiny fraction of the overall book market.

The electronics giant aims to address this with the electronic paper used for the display in the Sony Reader. It says the six-inch black and white screen will be as easy to read as the printed page.

The technology used means the screen is not backlit, avoiding screen flicker, which can put a strain on the eyes.

The device's display uses technology developed by US-based firm E-Ink which works by electronically arranging thousands of tiny black and white capsules to form characters.

"In recent years millions of people have become comfortable downloading and enjoying digital media, including e-books," said Ron Hawkins of Sony Electronics.

"But until now, there has not been a good device on which to read."

Publishers onboard

The Reader is about the size of a paperback, is 14mm thick at its widest and weighs little more than 250g.

Sony has realised the importance of making sure there is good content for a gadget like this.

It has done deals with major publishers, including Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins, to sell digital e-books via its Connect online store.

This is similar to what Apple has done with its iTunes music store, which effectively created the market for digital music downloads.

But Sony faces a number of challenges.

This is the second time the Japanese electronics giant has tested the waters with an e-book reader.

In 2004 it launched a similar device called the Librie in Japan, which failed to take off due to its high price and the restrictions it imposed on readers.

Additionally other companies are also working on devices using the same E Ink technology. And some are working on flexible electronic paper displays that can be rolled up.

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Amazon to show e-book device

The book reader is already listed on the Amazon site

Amazon is expected to unveil its own-brand electronic book reader at a New York press conference on Monday.

The paperback-sized Kindle is expected to cost $399 (195) and be able to store up to 200 books in its memory.

Although details are scant, Kindle is also believed to use a wireless service so owners can buy e-books from Amazon while out and about.

Amazon is thought to have signed deals with publishers to prepare a long list of books ready for the Kindle launch.

New edition

Prior to the launch at New York's W Hotel in Union Square, information about Kindle has appeared in American magazine Newsweek.

The magazine interview with Amazon boss Jeff Bezos revealed that Kindle has a digital ink screen; gives about 30 hours of reading time on a full battery charge and uses wireless for restricted web browsing and buying books.

The device will also be able to give people access to magazines, newspapers and blogs.

Anyone buying a Kindle gets an associated e-mail address so if that person is sent Word documents or PDF files, these are converted for reading on the device.

There is no information yet about when the device will go on sale or which territories will get it first.

Information about Kindle first emerged in 2004 and the device's debut is thought to have been delayed to iron out teething troubles with the prototypes.

Amazon is not the first company to produce an e-book reader. Many other companies have tried and failed with similar devices.

In early November, Sony released the second version of its Reader that also sports a digital ink screen. The first version of the Reader was criticised because of the restrictive digital rights management system it used.

Also this month, Epson Seiko showed off a prototype e-reader that is only three millimetres thick. There are no announcements about when, or if, the gadget will go on sale.Population crisis Jerusalem diary The week ahead

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Digital Planet

How much more can be packed into a silicon chip?

Welcome to Digital Planet, the weekly BBC World Service programme that reports on technology stories from around the globe.

On this week's Digital Planet Gareth Mitchell looks at downloading emails to your mobile phone without having to go online.

And other than selling virtual accessories in a virtual world - can money really be made in this online environment?

LEMONADE FOR LE MONDE

Lemonade - license to enhanced mobile orientated and diverse endpoints - is an open standard for mobile phones which allows the user to download emails without having to log onto an online account.

Not only does this mean that simple feature phones can be used more like smart phones, it also reduces bandwidth usage and therefore costs.

Gareth Mitchell talks to Carsten Brinkschulte from Synchronica - a company developing email gateways for Lemonade.

VIRTUAL MONEY

Buying new clothes for your avatar and trading weapons is common practice in virtual worlds, but can money be made in other ways?

Jonathan Kent looks at how some companies are now advertising virtual artworks and selling them online and in the real world.

DIAL UP GAMING

Can you imagine playing a massively multiplayer online game via a dial-up connection?

Runescape is one such game that can be played without the need for broadband.

The game currently has around six million players - most of whom use a PC.

Digital Planet met Geoff Iddison and Niall O'Malley from the company Jagex, the firm which designed the game.

TRANSISTOR

It was in 1965 that he predicted how transistors would change our lives; he spoke of the creation of mobile phones and home computers.

We hear how he devised what's become known as Moore's Law; the number of transistor's on an integrated circuit doubling every two years.

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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When work becomes a game

A generation is growing up playing immersive online games

Video games are big business and soon they could be big in business too.

A whole generation is growing up for whom video games are a key part of how they relax, whether it be fragging friends in a first person shooter or backing up the main tank in a Warcraft raid.

And it is not just youngsters. There are plenty of older folks who shake off the dust of the working day in many different virtual worlds.

Statistics from the the US Entertainment Software Association (ESA) back this up. It claims that the average player is 33 and has more than a decade of gaming under their belt.

All of a sudden, say academics and researchers, companies have realised that all the time employees spend gaming in virtual worlds is changing them.

Ian Hughes, IBM's metaverse evangelist, said many organisations were considering ways of harnessing the skills and familiarity their employees have with virtual environments.

This familiarity has driven many organisations to consider virtual worlds as places where employees can meet, mix and get on with the job.

"A lot of people are more accepting of that way of working just because of games," he said.

"It's about harnessing that ability to play to get work done."

The formidable organisational skills needed to run a game team or guild, organise raids involving perhaps 40 people and co-ordinate their different abilities to defeat a game's strongest foes are all relevant to work, said Mr Hughes.Game gear

But it is not just the skills that gamers hone in futuristic or fantasy worlds that businesses want to co-opt. Some are taking their inspiration directly from the way that online games are structured.

Skills learned on raids in games could apply to work too

"The problems associated with distributed teams, collaboration and information overload right now are so severe, and the opportunities so good, that they are willing to look at anything," he said.

Dr Reeves has founded a company called Seriosity that applies game elements to workplaces.

It was working with five or six unnamed Fortune 500 companies to harness the efficiencies of those game mechanics, said Dr Reeve.

One of the programs developed by Seriosity adds a virtual currency element to e-mail in a bid to help people cope with information overload.

Anyone sending a message adds some of their limited supply of virtual coins, called Serios, to show how important they consider that e-mail to be.

It was a more finely grained grading system than the low, medium or high importance flags found in most e-mail programs, said Dr Reeves.

It had other benefits too, he said. It revealed not just the flow of messages but also started to show who people pay attention to and who did a good job of getting responses.

Some companies were starting to adopt even more of the elements familiar from games.

"There are people right now trying to map it one-to-one," said Dr Reeves. Level playing field

Convinced that games can help them thrive some companies have turned work groups into guilds, rewarded staff with experience points when they complete tasks, giving out titles and badges when a guild finished a project and portraying objectives as quests.

Virtual worlds could become key to future business life

None, so far, he said, were tying wages to how people performed in the quests and against other guilds.

"Mapping levels and points on to wages is the most extreme application," he said.

Companies were adopting game mechanics for several reasons, said Dr Reeves.

Partly because workers were so familiar with this structure, he said, and because people become powerfully motivated when they know how they compare to their contemporaries.

The main reason was for the transparency it gave to the way workplaces were organised and for revealing who got things done.

"It exposes those that do and do not play well," said Dr Reeves. "There is a leader board and you know the rules."

It had the potential to turn workplaces into meritocracies where the most accomplished are easy to spot because they have racked up all rewards, achievements and levels required for a particular post.

While it may not sweep away systems of privilege or end nepotism it had the potential to make workplaces fairer and take some of the grind out of the day job, he said.

"The whole idea here is to get the objectives of the individual players aligned with the objectives of the organisation," said Dr Reeves. "Do that and you have something good."

Angela Barron, an advisor at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said games had long been used in training to expose personal preferences and prejudices.

Many organisations also used courses that revolve around games to help make teams work together better or expose power structures among workers.

She said this was the first time she had heard of elements of online games being used in a similar way.

"I would not have thought enough people play games for it to be a great motivator," she said.

But, she said, anything that helped staff develop a better working relationship and promote team work was likely to be a good thing.Deadly gems Climate dilemma All eyes on Koroma

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Driving the boundaries of realism

Driving through the rain-drenched streets of Shanghai in an Aston Martin DB4 at breakneck speeds, with the neon signs of shops blurring as you pass by, is one of the great thrills in life - even if it is only virtual.

Video game development has made tremendous graphical strides in the last four decades and nowhere is this more pronounced than in driving simulations.

In the 1970s a driving game was a simple mix of black and white pixels that were manoeuvred between two moving lines to represent the road's edge.

One of the first such games, Night Driver, had a plastic representation of the car that was laid under the screen of the arcade machine.

Games like Pole Position in 1982 and Outrun in 1986 pushed the genre on with 3D graphics and a growing emphasis on realism.

But today's games offer an experience that is unrecognisable from the blocky and crudely drawn efforts of the past.

Games such as Project Gotham Racing 4, Ferrari Challenge and Gran Turismo 5 offer photo-real cars with simulated handling physics, being thrown about in high-definition worlds, which often recreate real cities in astonishing detail.

"We're not trying to simulate reality," says Alan Mealor, lead environment artist at Bizarre Creations, developers of Project Gotham Racing 4 (PGR4).

"There's no point in creating a richly detailed world if it can't run in the game," he adds.

Bizarre have to trade off hyper-realism with the hardware's ability to handle the complexity and detail of a world and have cars run smoothly inside the game.

PGR4 takes drives on a tour of eight cities - Macau, Las Vegas, London, St Petersburg, Tokyo, New York City, Shanghai, Quebec - and each location took one of four teams of five artists 18 to 20 months to build.

"We start with research; books, magazines, the internet - anything to get a feel for a place," says Mr Mealor.

'Hands on'

After short listing the cities Bizarre sent out a team to each of the locations to look for any potential problems first hand.

Race some of the world's best cars - virtually

Mr Mealor says: "Cities have a nasty habit of changing. Macau looked perfect for us first of all.

"But in the space of two years they had built two casinos, the road layout had changed dramatically and they had reclaimed lots of land."

The work to recreate a city then moves to digital photography. The artists used a bank of digital SLRs to take photos of every aspect of a location.

"In Macau we took 240,000 photos. Everything from pavements to litter bins and every sign on a building.

"We have a two-week trip just taking photos."

In all, in excess of two million photographs of various locations around the world were taken - and then the hard work began.

Each of the cities in PGR4 is drawn by hand. The team does not use GPS data because it is not accurate enough and software that converts digital photos into real world geometry is eschewed in favour of an artist's talent at capturing the "feel" of a location.

Three dimensions

The artists use software application Photoshop to draw the worlds and Maya to build the cities in three dimensions. At the end of the process each city is more than 6.3GB in size, across 10,487 different files.

That data is crunched down by a render farm into a size manageable by the Xbox 360. The team even uses pre-production 360s to help export the data.

At the end of the crunch a city is only 593MB in size, held in just three different files.

The hardest part of the process, says Mr Mealor, is lighting.

The mission statement for us was to recreate the feeling of a Ferrari experience

"The importance of lighting is always overlooked. It's unbelievably important.

"You take it for granted when walking around a city: The light on concrete, tarmac, and cars."

The attention to detail and growing realism is one of the reasons racing titles remain such a popular gaming genre.

Mark South, a producer at Eutechnyx, working on multiplatform title Ferrari Challenge, says authenticity was the guiding principle.

"The mission statement for us was to recreate the feeling of a Ferrari experience. Getting all the real world data into the game requires a lot of reference."

His team travelled to far flung corners of the world to track down rare Ferraris, taking between five and 7,000 digital photos of each vehicle.

In all, the company gathered more than 3.3 terabytes (3,417GB) in data for its cars and tracks.

"The time taken between taking photos of a car to putting it in the game is about 2.5 months, with two people working on it day in, day out," says Mr South.

'Real thing'

The company also hired the services of Grand Prix 2 driver Bruno Senna to test the accuracy of virtual handling.

"If you're going to create a simulation you need to know that it drives like the real thing," says Mr Mealor.

"We took a virtual Ferrari 430, took it on a virtual track and recorded the telemetry. Then we took a real 430 and took it to a real track and again recorded telemetry to make sure it matches up."

At Bizarre, the firm also used CAD data for some of the cars and for certain others used miniature models, photos, manuals and first-hand experience of the vehicles.

"It takes four to six weeks to build every car - from nothing to being in the game," explains car artist Jason Bowers.

"We wanted the cars to look super realistic."Deadly gems Climate dilemma All eyes on Koroma

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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State of Play: The game of love

People play games for many reasons, but increasing numbers are finding that they are a great way to size up potential partners.

The wave that started in chatrooms has swept across internet dating sites and crashed against the shores of Azeroth, Vana'diel and Norrath.

Hundreds, probably thousands, of players can attest that they met their partners or spouses in the worlds of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI and EverQuest. A few more have darker tales to tell of romances that led to obsession or that were founded in deceit or infidelity.

For a while, it was a taboo. Couples steeled themselves against the inevitable silence that followed the announcement "we met online".

Now, it's commonplace: any silence following that kind of declaration will be based on boredom, not embarrassment.

The speed of that acceptance has meant that a fundamental question doesn't often get asked: just what is it about online games that makes them a good place to hook up?

They do, of course, share some of the aspects that make online dating in general successful: it's a quick, efficient way to encounter a large number of potential suitors, all without having to expose yourself too acutely.

it's hard to beat a game for how much it will show you of someone's character, and how quickly

But surely, that's where the advantages end. You don't see anything real of someone in a game, not so much as a photo. You don't get a real name, or even a real gender, as often as not. Conversation can be cumbersome and stilted, and your range of action can be severely limited.

But while information may be sparse in online relationships, insight abounds.

There's an intimacy available in games that the real world takes time to match. Warcraft is a world where you can right-click on someone you've just met and inspect their underwear.

Imagine how that ability would change how you responded to someone who offered to buy you a drink in a bar. What conclusions would you draw about a mighty, armour-laden warrior who is secretly wearing a pink silk shirt under his plate-mail carapace? How would you judge a seemingly level-headed priestess when you notice she's stuck with a low-level robe that offers little protection but matches her hair?

So far, so shallow. But can a game clue you in to more important character traits?

A good stint in an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) can give you a very accurate reading on, say, how someone handles their money. It's easy to assess the difference between a carefree impulse buyer and a number-crunching investor who knows how to play the auction house - much more revealing that whether or not someone offers to "go Dutch" on a first date.

Or how about tricky social situations? Games are full of awkwardness: persistent beggars hassling you for money or inept but enthusiastic players who need to be jettisoned from a squad if you're to have any hope of success.

Games do not need much help to get players connecting

And all this is before you get to the actual game; there are few more revealing processes than watching someone play.

You can easily gauge some of the slipperiest aspects of human nature by observing someone's tactics. Are they a risk-taker? Do they panic under pressure? Do they respond to failure with frustration or creativity? Are they a gracious winner or a griping loser? A loner or a team-player? Perfectionist or bodger? Is winning all that matters, or will they risk death to pull a prank or tell a joke?

Dinner and a movie may well give you a chance to check out the basics - minor details like physical appearance, age, sex, gender and race - but it's hard to beat a game for how much it will show you of someone's character, and how quickly.

Dating in the real world is all too often reminiscent of the way French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery describes in his book The Little Prince meeting adults who only care about jobs and houses and money, golf and politics and neckties.

They never ask about essential matters, he laments, and so he never discusses them with such people; no talk of boa constrictors or primeval forests or stars, of butterflies and games and rose-brick houses.

It's taken more than 50 years for games to catch up with him, but it's hard not feel that he would approve of the exploration, friendship and whimsy that they now offer. Deadly gems Climate dilemma All eyes on Koroma

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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State of Play: A wide world of games

The Witcher draws on the work of Andrzej Sapkowski

The gaming industry may span the globe but attempts to homogenise what it produces may end up killing creativity.

The rest of us would probably struggle to put it on the map.

But the city, home to this month's Austin Game Developer's Conference, has an odd status in the videogame world.

In an industry dominated by its twin poles of Tokyo and Los Angeles, Austin has long been a cluster of development excellence.

From the days of Looking Glass and Ion Storm, to the current trend for major outfits like BioWare, Midway, NCSoft and Sony Online Entertainment to base studios there, Austin has a long history of attracting, and retaining, game developers.

Handy info, if you're a game-fan-quiz-aficionado. And no doubt good news for Austin's local board of commerce. But does it have any wider significance? Does where a game gets made have any impact on what it's like to play?

The most obvious divide is between western and Japanese developed games.

Think of the extraordinary range of subjects, styles and structures you find in the "world cinema" section of a decent video store, and imagine what would happen if we could apply the same diversity to gaming.

And, as the appeal of games took hold in the late '70s in the US, and the early '80s in Japan, that gulf was amplified, as 30 years' worth of games established a new set of traditions to serve the local markets.

But while it's easy to look at game history as the US versus Japan, Atari versus Nintendo, the truth was always more multi-cultural.

Britain had a flourishing and distinctive game development scene, initially serving Clive Sinclair's homegrown computers the ZX81 and the Spectrum.

France soon established itself, with titles like Another World and Rayman still resonant today. Currently, it's areas such as Scandinavia and Korea which are pushing to the forefront of development.

So can you pick up a game and guess where it's from?

Sometimes it's easy: there's a trend for humour and oddness in British games which still survives today, in the output of Rare or the presentation of Little Big Planet.

The French insistence that games can have a wider emotional and stylistic range can still be found in forthcoming games such as Heavy Rain and The Crossing.

A Scandinavian tradition for understanding that "mature" can mean more than mere lashings of gore can be seen in Dreamfall, Kane & Lynch and The Darkness.

Korea's emphasis on highly customisable, multiplayer PC games is producing recognisable aesthetic trends, in both its casual and high-end games.

Bioshock was part-written by Austin resident Susan O'Conner

Yet, while some local flavour remains, the prevailing trend is for the opposite: games face almost total globalisation.

Overwhelmingly, publishers hope to be able to market what they make worldwide, which leads to them to limit the culturally distinct elements in a title.

Developers themselves are well used to relocating, often skipping continents to find the work they want. Even individual game projects are global affairs - it's no longer unusual to find projects that are being worked on simultaneously in three different countries, scattered across time zones.

Other older art forms had longer to incubate local traditions before becoming global commodities, meaning that national literary and musical identities have stayed strong.

Some newer media, like comics, have failed to generate the kind of commercial pressure that the games industry now generates, ensuring local traits continued to flourish.

Gaming may be facing a uniquely acute risk of losing its various identities.

Which takes us back to that original question. Does it matter? Isn't gaming's global appeal part of the proof that it's a truly modern medium for a truly modern age?

Gaming is capable of hitting all the current buzzwords, as it crosses borders, and encourages collaboration and user-created content. What sense does it make to cater to a domestic audience when you could be making games for the entire world?

The answer is another buzzword: diversity.

There's little importance, from a gamer's perspective, in whether or not Spain has a thriving development scene.

But if there weren't studios in Warsaw and Kiev, we almost certainly wouldn't have game projects inspired by film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky (S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) or writer Andrzej Sapkowski (The Witcher).

The games industry is used to having arguments about whether bringing more female, gay or ethnically diverse staff into the development process will make it more able to serve those markets.

What doesn't so often get discussed is the benefit that cultivating regional identities could bring. Think of the extraordinary range of subjects, styles and structures you find in the "world cinema" section of a decent video store, and imagine what would happen if we could apply the same diversity to gaming.

Isn't that the kind of globalisation games should be fighting for?

Deadly gems Climate dilemma All eyes on Koroma

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Kicking off the debate about free speech

The legal system is starting to get to grips with chat on the internet, says regular columnist Bill Thompson

A row about comments left on the site has ended in the courts

The football club has obtained an order from the High Court requiring the site's administrators to hand over the e-mail addresses of the three fans.

Although the posters used pseudonyms and may have thought that they were safe from any legal action, they may now be tracked down after deputy Judge Richard Parkes agreed that their posts "may reasonably be understood to allege greed, selfishness, untrustworthiness and dishonest behaviour on the part of the claimants".

This leaves them open to proceedings for libel, so the judge has told site owner Neil Hargreaves to reveal their e-mail addresses despite the site's privacy policy.

Of course nobody should assume that user names offer any real anonymity or protection against legal action against a site's host, whether here or in China, so if the three people involved didn't go to the trouble of registering non-UK addresses just to use on Owlstalk their real names will soon be known to the lawyers acting for the directors.

The consequences could be severe, as we now have a reasonable body of case law establishing that something you say online is just as likely to get you sued as something you print.

And while service providers and hosting companies may be able to claim immunity from prosecution under the EU directive on e-commerce those who write and publish the material are increasingly likely to find themselves hearing from the lawyers.

Three years ago the Sunday Herald paid damages to former defence secretary George Robertson in an out of court settlement after Mr Robertson said he had been libelled on the paper's message boards.

Most of us, most of the time, know the difference between abuse and moaning, so we should not see this case as the end of online anonymity.

Since then there have been many other cases, including the dispute between childcare writer Gina Ford and the Mumsnet site which ended with the site paying Ms Ford compensation. Another recent case involved a threatening letter from the law firm Schillings on behalf of Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov which resulted in the suspension of several blogs.

Back in September I chaired a two-day conference with the rather unpromising title "User Generated Content and the Law in the Modern Legal Environment".

It was a conference for lawyers, who clearly don't need to be enticed by snappy headlines, and featured a range of speakers who understood how the law was being applied online.

I can remember when commentators routinely described the internet as "lawless", a new frontier where existing legal principles simply could not be applied.

Some of the more hopelessly romantic, like John Perry Barlow, even declared that "cyberspace" was a new realm, independent of the physical world.

They were wrong at the time, but it was true that lawyers and judges were struggling to fit this new medium into the framework of existing law.

Now, it is clear, they have pretty much completed the task and there is no justification for believing that our online activities are in any sense outside the frameworks of regulation and control that govern the rest of our lives.

The stereotype of the uninformed, out-of-date judge issuing incomprehensible pronouncements from the bench is no longer sustainable.

The net is now judged by laws that apply offline too

While the e-mail addresses of the three fans have to be handed over, he refused an application to disclose the e-mail addresses of a further eight posters because their comments were "plainly intended as jokes and unlikely to be taken seriously".

He reckons they were "no more than saloon-bar moanings about the way in which the club is managed".

Most of us, most of the time, know the difference between abuse and moaning, so we should not see this case as the end of online anonymity. It is not going to force every website, bulletin board or mailing list to insist on proof of identity, a blood sample and a letter from two grandparents before you can sign up.

It won't have a chilling effect on the sort of raucous debate many of us enjoy on our favourite discussion sites, and it does not diminish the protection someone might expect if they are posting deeply personal or sensitive material under a pseudonym.

Of course, it isn't perfect. The judgment doesn't rule out the possibility of a thin-skinned person taking offence and dragging a small community site into the courts over postings which they really should just ignore.

And it doesn't change the law that encourages hosting companies simply to pull any content after they receive a complaint, as Fasthosts did when Mr Usmanov complained about blog postings about his past.

But it should help anyone who posts online decide whether what they are about to say crosses the line, and ensure that anyone who decides to go for the jugular realises that their carefully-selected username will not really help them when it comes to court.

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Net vigilantes 'should listen more'

Regular columnist Bill Thompson wants "net vigilantes" to focus more on customer service.

Sometime in October a malicious program exploited a security flaw in the Wordpress software I use to host my weblog and injected some extra commands into one of the widgets I use to add features to the site.

They opened up a connection between the blog and a site that tried to download a malicious piece of software to any site visitor unfortunate enough to be using Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Anyone who visited my site would have been prompted to install a clearly unwanted piece of software, although as far as I know nobody was affected. However I can't be sure and hope that I didn't unwittingly cause damage to anyone else's computer.

I upgrade my installation regularly, and apply new security patches as they come out, but this happened in the few days before the release of a new version and I was caught.

Yet I only found out about the problem when a kind reader e-mailed me to tell me that Google was warning prospective visitors that my blog might "harm" their computer.

Malware on websites isn't the only area where private organisations are taking on this sort of police action

I hadn't noticed the warning because, strange as it may seem, I don't Google my own name that often (searching blogs is a different matter, of course).

And I hadn't found out from Google, either because they didn't send any emails or because the company that acts as technical contact for my site didn't bother passing them on.

Once I knew what had happened I searched for and found the offending code, but it has taken three weeks to get the Google warning removed, and the experience has been a salutary one.

I started off at StopBadware, the organisation Google works with to flag sites hosting malicious code.

Fighting Badware

I searched for information about what they had found on my site and discovered that although Google had flagged my blog it hadn't passed any information on to StopBadware.

So I requested a review using the form provided, hoping to get some information to help me find out what had happened and which pages were affected.

I had to e-mail them three times before I got a reply, and had to wait 10 days for that, and even then there was no information on exactly what Google had found on my site, so I had to search myself.

Eventually I discovered that I could find a lot more information and request a review more effectively by signing up for Google's Webmaster Tools.

This is a great service, but it isn't something my small blog really needs and of course signing up gives Google access to a lot of information about what I'm up to, information I'd rather they didn't have.

But when the alternative is a blood-red sign saying "All hope abandon, ye who enter here" splashed over Google's search results there really is no choice.

And now my site is clean and Google likes me again.

Malware on websites isn't the only area where private organisations are taking on this sort of police action. There is a similar debate going on over e-mail and spam, with groups like Spamhaus creating lists of servers that they believe are sending out spam.

Other organisations subscribe to the Spamhaus Block List and will block emails from those servers.

Their approach is pretty effective at closing spam relays, but of course sometimes the listing is wrong and sometimes there is collateral damage, when a server used by an ISP is listed and all of its customers are affected.

Part of me would like to see this sort of listing done by the appropriate authorities, perhaps even the police, with some degree of judicial overview and a formal appeals process.

Of course this is not going to happen, at least not on the global basis that would be needed to make it effective.

And the only real option for anyone who runs their own website is to sign up Webmaster Tools to keep an eye on what the rainbow monster thinks of them.

But if we're going to live in a world where Google, StopBadware, Spamhaus and all the other private organisations offering to make the net safe have so much power then we have to push them to do a better job, especially when it comes to communication.

The point is not that this is online vigilantism, although it surely is. The point is about accountability, openness, responsiveness and the other things that we require from state actors but too often leave up to the market to enforce for private companies.

For many of us our websites, email addresses, personal profiles and the other aspects of our online lives are vital parts of who we are.

The organisations and companies seeking to fill the gaps left by law enforcement need to tread carefully and must treat those affected with respect and care, or they cannot expect us to support them, however noble their intentions.

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Social networkers warned of risk

Users are being warned not to post personal details on their profiles

A quarter of the 11 million Britons who use social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook may be leaving themselves open to identity fraud.

Get Safe Online, a government-backed campaign group, is warning against posting personal details online.

Its research also showed eight million people leave home wireless networks unprotected against intruders.

And more than half of the over-65s polled use a single password for every website they visit, the group said.

The group is advising older internet users to change their passwords more often.

'Rich pickings'

Tony Neate, managing director of GetSafeOnline.org, said a date of birth and address details were enough for someone to set up a credit card in another name.

"Although some of these details may seem harmless, they actually provide rich pickings for criminals," he said.

People need to take care when using public wi-fi

Cabinet Office minister Gillian Merron said the risks can be easily fixed and did not mean people should stop using social networking sites, and wireless networks.

The poll of 2,000 adults also showed that nearly 30% admitted searching for former girlfriends and boyfriends on the sites, and almost one in three used them to find out about their boss, colleagues or a job candidate.

The survey also found 13% of social networkers had posted information about or photos of other people without their consent.

While 80% of people now have firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spyware products installed on their PCs, the usage of wireless networks is far more lax.

At part of the campaign, Get Safe Online and the Serious Organised Crime Agency demonstrated how easy it was to break into an unsecured wireless network.

High profile cases

It showed that not only was it easy to freeload on an unsecured network but also to hack into it and 'steal' potentially valuable information.

A SOCA officer, taking part in the mocked-up demonstration for the BBC, took just a quarter of an hour to access and "steal" passwords and other personal information from a nearby laptop.

According to a survey conducted by the government and SOCA-backed Get Safe Online campaign, over 7.8 million people in the UK have left their internet access open for anyone to use.

"It took just 15 minutes to break into the network but it would take less than that to make the machine safe," said Tony Neate, managing director of the Get Safe Online campaign.

There have been several high profile cases this year of individuals piggybacking on other people's unsecured wireless connections.

Such freeloading is generally harmless and invisible to the user, unless the person stealing it is using large amounts of bandwidth which will noticeably slow the network down.

Stealing passwords

The mocked up SOCA demonstration showed that anyone with a wireless-enabled laptop could scan for unsecured networks and, if one was found, use it to surf the internet and send emails at someone else's expense.

The demonstration also showed that it only takes a limited amount of technical know-how to take the free usage of someone else's network to a different level.

"I am running a tool which is freely available from the internet which will scan the computer to see if it is vulnerable to any exploitation," explained the SOCA officer, who was only known as Stuart.

"A red X on the screen shows that a Microsoft patch for a known vulnerability [in this case, the Sasser worm] hasn't been applied so now I just need to use this information with another program - also freely available - which will allow me to input commands and gain control of the machine," he said.

In this particular demonstration, Stuart was able to access the victim's My Documents' folder which contained a document listing passwords for banking, e-mail accounts and social networking sites.

A Get Safe Online campaign earlier in the year found that 12% of the UK's net users had experienced online fraud during 2006 with an average loss of 875.

As part of this week's campaign the Get Safe Online team will be travelling around the country offering advice on how to stay safe and secure when using the internet.Deadly gems Climate dilemma All eyes on Koroma

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Brazil hosts web policy forum

The meeting in Rio de Janeiro is the second of five

More than 2,000 people who oversee the workings of the net around the world are gathering in Brazil.

Policy makers, activists and officials are gathering in Rio de Janeiro for the second Internet Governance Forum.

The UN-backed body aims to give those developing policies for the net a place to air problems and hear about others who have succeeded.

Sessions at the four-day forum will debate security, international domains and control of core net functions.

Debating chamber

The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) grew out of the World Summit on the Information Society meetings which were held in 2003 and 2005.

The forum is intended to be a debating chamber that, among other things, helps to keep the UN Secretary General up to date with pressing net issues.

The IGF was also created to be a "neutral space" in which policy makers, concerned citizens, lobby groups, educators and companies can debate and swap ideas without the need to produce recommendations or decisions.

But this lack of measurable success has led some critics to decry it as little more than a talking shop.

"Using 'talking shop' as a negative suggests communication is a bad thing," said Emily Taylor, director of legal and policy at UK domain name overseer Nominet, who will be attending the meeting.

She said it was one of the few times that those involved with overseeing the net get a chance to gather.

"I know from working in the industry for a few years that an awful lot can be learned from your peers," she said.

Theresa Swinehart, general manager of global and strategic partnerships at net overseer Icann, said one of the most positive aspects of the IGF was that lack of pressure to produce decisions and policies.

"One of the big issues at the WSIS was the importance of sharing information and addressing issues that may not be under the jurisdiction of one particular organisation," she said.

In some senses, she said, the IGF could already be judged a success because it had put in touch people around the world working on the same thorny net problems.

"It's already demonstrated benefits because people are aware of the issues and have information about how to solve them," she said.

Ad hoc working groups have emerged from the first IGF in Athens and many are expected to report what they had been doing at the 2007 event.

Sessions at the IGF will debate how to improve net security and ways that governments have tackled rising cybercrime. Other sessions will look at linguistic diversity online, the move to IP version 6, the number system for all online devices, and how to protect free speech.

Ms Taylor said the debates typically involved the sharing of success stories, recounting of the mistakes some made and policies that did and did not work.

She said: "Often you learn as much from what went wrong as from what went right."Deadly gems Climate dilemma All eyes on Koroma

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Meeting the man behind Moore's Law

Dr Moore has now helped found several companies

In April 1965 a 36-year old electronics buff jotted down his thoughts on the future of the juvenile silicon chip industry.

Writing in a "throw-away" journal, Gordon Moore accurately imagined a future filled with mobile phones, home computers, and even intelligent cars.

But it was a much more prosaic prediction that has come to dominate his life and the industry that he helped found.

"I could see a change coming that the electronics were going to get significantly cheaper," says the co-founder of Intel, the largest maker of computer chips.

In the article in Electronics Magazine, he predicted that the number of transistors on a silicon chip would double every year for ten years.

He later revised the forecast to doubling every two years or so, as the initial breakneck speed of development and shrinkage waned. It was a prediction that became known as Moore's Law and it has helped drive the computer revolution over the last four decades.

Modest growth

At first glance it is not the kind of observation that would catapult a person to fame.

But the day I meet him, a now silver haired Dr Moore has just given a talk to a packed auditorium of people and he is surrounded by crowds of autograph hunters who were not even born when he made his off the cuff observations.

Moore's Law has become shorthand for the pace of technological change. It set a standard for the chip industry's phenomenal growth and has in turn underpinned the world's digital awakening.

"It was an exciting technology in the beginning. It had so much potential, we just had no idea how much potential," he says.

"When Intel was formed [in 1968] the total semiconductor industry was only a couple of billion dollars worldwide - today it is 300 billion."

And as the industry has delivered each successive generation of faster, smaller, cheaper chips, it has opened up rafts of new possibilities for silicon that have ultimately delivered the technologies he predicted more than 40 years ago.

Reflecting on his prophesies today, a retired and quietly-spoken Dr Moore is characteristically modest.

"When I went back and read that I was amazed that I predicted all of those things," he says.

But, as a young engineer, he was at least uniquely placed to make his key observation, having co-founded Fairchild Semiconductors, maker of the first commercial integrated circuit, or chip.

"I was directing a lab where we were trying to advance the technology and from my perspective I could see some of these things coming that weren't generally visible to the rest of the population," he says.

Force for change

At the time, computers were mainly used by the military and PCs were unheard of, he says.

"Computers were in glass rooms tended to by a core of monks that knew how to do the proper incantations."

But as the silicon chip industry took hold and computer makers learnt how to exploit the technology everything changed.

"Shortly after that the commercial market just completely dwarfed anything in the military," he says.

And what had originally been just a prediction by Dr Moore became a self-fulfilling prophesy.

"It has become a driving force for the industry," he says. "Competitors have realised that if they don't move at least that rate they are going to fall behind."

So far silicon producers have managed to keep on or ahead of the curve for more than four decades by continually shrinking the technology and packing more and more components inside a chip.

"It's a peculiar feature of this technology that by making things smaller everything gets better," says Dr Moore. "The transistors get faster, you can put more of a system on a chip."

But more importantly, and perhaps more curiously, the chips also become cheaper.

And this is the key point of his 1965 paper, he says. Moore's Law is an economic law and would probably have driven the industry regardless of whether or not he had made his prediction.

"I am not sure that having Moore's Law held up there as a yardstick increases the pressure [on chip manufacturers] because the need to remain competitive is so strong."

Chip future

As a result, the industry has grown "far beyond" what he could have imagined in 1965, he says.

Moore interview

"It is surprising that any of the things we predicted are still valid."

He is most impressed with the industry's inventiveness, he says, allowing it to overcome a series of seemingly insurmountable technical hurdles as it grew.

"The industry has succeeded in getting around all of the ones that have been thrown in front of it," he says. "It has been much more successful than I probably would have predicted."

But, Dr Moore says, the industry can only go on shrinking transistors for so long.

Eventually, the features will become so small that the atomic structure of the materials will be a limitation, possibly spelling the end of Moore's Law

So what does he think will happen in the next 40 years?

"I'm through with making predictions," he chuckles. "Get it right once and quit."

Deadly gems Climate dilemma All eyes on Koroma

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China satellite orbits Earth's moon

BEIJING, China (AP) -- A Chinese satellite successfully entered lunar orbit Monday, a month after rival Japan put its own probe into orbit around the moon, but Chinese officials denied there was any competition between the two nations.

China's first lunar probe Chang'e 1 launched on October 24.

Chinese space officials said the Chang'e 1 satellite, part of the country's ambitious space exploration plans, entered lunar orbit after completing a planned braking operation.

China plans to keep the Chang'e 1 -- named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon -- there for one year, about the same length of time as Japan's probe. China launched its satellite late last month, while Japan put its satellite into space in September.

The timing of the launches raises the prospect of a space rivalry between the two Asian nations, with India possibly joining in if it carries through on a plan to send its own lunar probe into space in April.

But Long Jiang, deputy commander of spacecraft systems of China's lunar exploration program, said Beijing wanted to use its space program to work with other countries.

"We are willing to cooperate with the rest of the world to the benefit of humankind, but as to what kind of cooperation, it depends on specific circumstances," Long told a news conference.

The Chang'e 1 blasted off on top of a Long March 3A rocket on October 24 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province in southwestern China.

"All of the subsystems of the Chang'e 1 are in normal operation so far," said Pei Zhaoyu, spokesman for the China National Space Administration.

The Chang'e 1 has survived the most critical part of its journey, Pei said. It had to enter the moon's orbit at the right time and speed, otherwise it could have hit the moon or flown by it.

He said the satellite's success was a sign of China's advanced engineering. "The project is a comprehensive demonstration of China's economic, scientific and technological power."

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is on a two-day visit to China, commended China's Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan over the lunar mission.

"I congratulate him and the people of China on this achievement. It's clearly a credit to Chinese industry and innovation," Gates said.

The lunar mission adds depth to a Chinese space program that has sent astronauts orbiting the Earth twice in the past four years.

Chang'e 1 is the first step of a three-stage moon mission. In about 2012 China plans an unmanned lunar landing with a rover. In the third phase, about five years later, another rover is to land on the moon and be returned to Earth with lunar soil and stone samples.

China plans a new generation of more powerful Long March 5 rockets able to lift more weight to the moon -- and possibly a manned mission -- but Pei told the news conference these wouldn't be used until after 2012, missing the second phase.

According to Japanese news reports last week, Japan plans to send an unmanned probe to land on the moon by 2015.

It would cost about $437 million and consist of an unmanned lander, a rover to study the lunar surface and a small satellite to transfer data, according to the Asahi and Mainichi newspapers.

Chang'e 1's goal is to analyze the chemical and mineral composition of the lunar surface. It will use stereo cameras and X-ray spectrometers to map three-dimensional images of the surface and study the moon's dust.

The 5,070-pound satellite is expected to transmit its first photo back to China late this month.

China sent its first satellite into Earth orbit in the 1970s but the space program only seriously took off in the 1980s, growing apace with the country's booming economy.

In 2003, China became only the third country in the world after the United States and Russia to put its own astronauts into space.

But China also alarmed the international community in January when it destroyed an old satellite with a land-based anti-satellite missile.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Asteroid could be NASA's new target

(PopSci.com) -- Here we are, nearly eight years into the 21st century, and the most spectacular manned mission NASA can pull off is a trip to the International Space Station, a mere 210 miles above the Earth.

Lack of gravity could make exploring an asteroid tricky.

Even the most ambitious part of NASA's current plans for human spaceflight involves visiting a celestial body we've already been to: the moon.

Astronauts, space buffs and an unimpressed public hunger for space exploration that's more dramatic, more heroic, more new. Something like, say, landing astronauts on a distant rock hurtling through space at 15 miles per second.

That's exactly the kind of trip NASA has been studying. In fact, scientists at the space agency recently determined that a manned mission to a near-Earth asteroid would be possible using technology being developed today.

The mission wouldn't be easy. A crew of two or three would spend months riding in a cramped spacecraft before reaching their barren, nearly gravity-free target.

That such a mission is even being considered, though, says a lot about the versatility of NASA's next fleet of spacecraft and the ambitions the agency has for them. If nothing else, it's a signal that space exploration could soon get much more exciting.

This wouldn't be our first trip to an asteroid. We've been visiting them by proxy for years now, using unmanned space probes.

In 2000 NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft arrived at 433 Eros, which a century earlier became the first near-Earth asteroid known to man; five years later, the Japanese Hayabusa probe touched down on asteroid 25143 Itokawa.

Yet unmanned probes have their limitations. NEAR Shoemaker and Hayabusa gathered a good deal of data, but we still don't know the exact composition and internal structure of the asteroids they visited. And although Hayabusa was designed to collect two small samples from Itokawa, it's doubtful the probe will actually have anything onboard when it returns in 2010.

Humans, however, could be much more effective. Unlike robots, we adapt to our environment in real time.

"We spend weeks at a rock with a Mars rover, trying to determine what it is," says Rob Landis, an engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center and one of the co-leaders of the mission feasibility study. "An astronaut could make that determination in a matter of seconds."

A human crew could travel across an asteroid more intelligently than a robot, making it easier to deploy scientific instruments, collect samples, and zero in on the areas of greatest interest.

"No doubt, on a human mission we would characterize an asteroid better than we ever have," says Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society.

Plenty of characterization needs to be done. While most asteroids are a safe distance from Earth (in an approximately 190-million-mile-wide expanse between Mars and Jupiter), Jupiter's gravitational tug and, less often, collisions between asteroids can kick these objects into orbits that pass uncomfortably close to Earth.

The 270-meter-wide asteroid 99942 Apophis, for example, will pass within roughly 24,000 miles of Earth in 2029, and could come back for a direct hit in 2036.

And if we're to have any hope of deflecting asteroids, we need to know a lot more about them than we do now. First off: What, exactly, are they made of? Measurements taken by Hayabusa indicate that 40 percent of Itokawa's volume is empty space. If some asteroids are truly this porous, that's helpful information for any plan to destroy or deflect an Earth-bound object.

Averting the apocalypse isn't the only reason to study near-Earth asteroids, though. They could be floating gold mines for future deep-space expeditions. Preliminary observations suggest that some asteroids are rich in useful minerals and, better yet, frozen water -- the most valuable resource a space traveler could hope to find.

If water could be extracted from asteroids, it could not only be used for drinking, but also broken down into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for rocket fuel. "It might be an ultimate way to get to Mars," Landis says.

Forty-one years ago, a scientist at Northrop (now Northrop Grumman) proposed using moon rockets to go to an asteroid.

In some ways, NASA's latest plan is similar; it too relies on spacecraft designed for lunar travel -- the vehicles belonging to the Constellation program, which NASA is building to replace the shuttle and then go to the moon and beyond.

But although the hardware is similar, an asteroid mission couldn't be more different from a trip to the moon. Actually, an asteroid mission has one clear advantage: The virtually negligible gravity at the crew's destination means they need less fuel to get home.

That lack of gravity, however, means that the first person to reach an asteroid will not take one giant leap for mankind, and he will not drive a dune buggy.

"You're going to be wearing a backpack and flying around," says Rusty Schweickart, an Apollo 9 astronaut who is now chairman of the B612 Foundation, whose goal is "to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid, in a controlled manner, by 2015."

Astronauts might explore the asteroid from inside their spacecraft using remotely controlled instruments, or they might anchor their spacecraft to the surface of the asteroid by firing hooks into the object and reeling themselves in.

The biggest logistical hurdle is the sheer distance involved. It takes a few days to travel the 238,855 miles to the moon, but it will take more than a month to cover the distance of up to 4.5 million miles separating us from just about any asteroid of interest. The crew of two or three will live in their small quarters for several months.

Psychological experiments and historical precedent show that isolation and boredom can mentally break an otherwise sane person; NASA will have to find a way to keep an asteroid-bound crew from losing their minds. It will also have to engineer a means to shelter the astronauts from the intense cosmic radiation found outside the protection of Earth's magnetic field.

Most ominously, though, there's this little wrinkle: If anything goes wrong out there for an asteroid-bound space traveler, there's almost no chance of rescue.

Which asteroids would we visit?

"You need an asteroid that's in an orbit very similar to the orbit of the Earth," says David Morrison, a senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute. "There aren't many, so we would be quite dependent on carrying out a new survey."

The ideal target asteroid will also be at least a couple hundred meters in diameter, will have a very slow rotation of 10 hours or more, and will have the potential to come too close to Earth for comfort. Scientists suspect approximately 1,000 asteroids meet these criteria -- but we have yet to find them.

In 2005, Congress ordered NASA to develop a program to detect, track, catalog, and characterize, by the end of 2020, 90 percent of all near-Earth objects (an expanded category that includes comets as well as asteroids) 140 meters in diameter and larger.

The hitch: Right now, NASA doesn't have the budget to get it done by that deadline.

The interplay between Congress and NASA brings up the more terrestrial matter of politics. The stated goal of President George Bush's administration is to launch an "extended" moon mission by 2020 and, later, to build a permanent moon base that could function as a springboard for a manned mission to Mars.

That could all change after next year's election, however. A new administration could divert money from human space exploration to any number of other projects -- say, satellite-based climate science.

"I don't think that the Vision" --the Bush administration's plan for a new era of human space exploration --"as written today is likely to survive the election, even if a Republican is elected," says Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society.

Then again, some experts believe the Constellation program will move forward no matter who wins in '08; if it doesn't, NASA won't have any spacecraft after the shuttle retires. And although the feasibility study doesn't mean we're headed to an asteroid soon, it does tell us that if we decide to go, we can get there.

So if, say, we find one day that we need to visit 99942 Apophis to find the best way to knock it off a collision course with Earth, or if we need a refueling station for astronauts headed for Mars, we might be in luck.

Copyright © 2007 Popular Science

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Destination of 'recycled' electronics may surprise you

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Most Americans think they're helping the earth when they recycle their old computers, televisions and cell phones. But chances are they're contributing to a global trade in electronic trash that endangers workers and pollutes the environment overseas.

Discarded electronics pile up at a recycling event Thursday in Bloomington, Minnesota.

While there are no precise figures, activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 to 400,000 tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year ends up overseas. Workers in countries such as China, India and Nigeria then use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and the environment to a cocktail of toxic chemicals.

"It is being recycled, but it's being recycled in the most horrific way you can imagine," said Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, the Seattle-based environmental group that tipped off Hong Kong authorities. "We're preserving our own environment, but contaminating the rest of the world."

The gear most likely to be shipped abroad is collected at free recycling drives, often held each April around Earth Day, recycling industry officials say. The sponsors -- chiefly companies, schools, cities and counties -- often hire the cheapest firms and do not ask enough questions about what becomes of the discarded equipment, the officials say.

Many so-called recyclers simply sell the working units and components, then give or sell the remaining scrap to export brokers.

"There are a lot of people getting away with exporting e-waste," said John Bekiaris, chief executive of San Francisco-based HMR USA Inc., which collects and disposes of unwanted IT equipment from Bay Area businesses. "Anyone who's disposing of their computer equipment really needs to do a thorough inspection of the vendors they use."

The problem could get worse. Most of the 2 million tons of old electronics discarded annually by Americans goes to U.S. landfills, according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data. But a growing number of states are banning such waste from landfills, which could drive more waste into the recycling stream and fuel exports, activists say.

Many brokers claim they are simply exporting used equipment for reuse in poor countries. That's what happened in September, when customs officials in Hong Kong were tipped off by environmentalists and intercepted two freight containers. They cracked the containers open and found hundreds of old computer monitors and televisions discarded by Americans thousands of miles away.

China bans the import of electronic waste, so the containers were sent back to the U.S.

The company that shipped out the containers was Fortune Sky USA, a Cordova, Tennessee-based subsidiary of a Chinese company. General manager Vincent Yu said his company thought it was buying and shipping used computers, not old monitors and televisions, and is trying to get its money back.

Fortune Sky exports used computers and components to China, Malaysia, Vietnam and other Asian countries.

"There's a huge market over there for secondhand computers that we don't use anymore," Yu said. "I don't think it's going to cause any pollution. If the equipment can still be used, then that's good for everybody."

Yu refused to say where he bought the material, but Basel Action Network tracked it to a San Antonio, Texas, company that collects computers, printers and other electronics from schools and businesses.

Activists complain that most exporters don't test units to make sure they work before sending them overseas.

"Reuse is the new excuse. It's the new passport to export," said Puckett of Basel Action Network. "Other countries are facing this glut of exported used equipment under the pretext that it's all going to be reused."

At the other end at customs, the goods don't always get checked either.

"It is impossible to stop and check every single container imported into Hong Kong," said Kenneth Chan of Hong Kong's Environmental Protection Department. "Smugglers may also deliberately declare their ... waste as goods."

In the first nine months of this year, Hong Kong authorities returned 85 containers of electronic junk, including 20 from the U.S.

Exporting most electronic waste isn't illegal in the United States. The U.S. does bar the export of monitors and televisions with cathode-ray tubes without permission from the importing country, but federal authorities don't have the resources to check most containers.

The EPA recognizes the problem but doesn't believe that stopping exports is the solution, said Matt Hale, who heads the agency's office of solid waste. Since most electronics are manufactured abroad, it makes sense to recycle them abroad, Hale said.

"What we need to do is work internationally to upgrade the standards (for recycling) wherever it takes place," he said.

The EPA is working with environmental groups, recyclers and electronics manufacturers to develop a system to certify companies that recycle electronics responsibly. But so far the various players have not agreed on standards and enforcement.

Many activists believe the answer lies in requiring electronics makers to take back and recycle their own products. Such laws would encourage manufacturers to make products that are easier to recycle and contain fewer dangerous chemicals, they say.

Eight states, including five this year, have passed such laws, and companies such as Apple, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Sony now take back their products at no charge. Some require consumers to mail in their old gear, while others have drop-off centers. HP says it also now designs its equipment with fewer toxic materials and has made it easier to recycle.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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