News Blog

The Digital Economy Bill that the government wants to push through Parliament in the coming year seems to be a pretty messy piece of legislation.

Bearing in mind that we could very well have a different government in place by May next year anyway, the bill - especially the part that deals with illegal file-sharing - could very well not be worth the paper it is written on.

It talks of technical measures being used to stop persistent pirates, including disconnection. It says that this forms part of a two-stage process - neither stage of which includes giving the accused a fair trial.

If this bill is passed, it will be at complete odds with legislation recently passed in the European Parliament that enshrine "due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy".

So if someone is cut off under UK law, they will simply fight the ruling under European law. What a mess.

There has to be a presumption of innocence in these cases as people with unsecured Wi-Fi networks may be at risk of being branded criminals and having their connection cut off, all without any chance to plead their innocence.

It could be argued that people with unsecured Wi-Fi networks should be held accountable as they haven't taken adequate precautions - but what should these precautions be? One might, quite reasonably, assume that password protection and encryption would be enough.

However, if you use WEP encryption, it isn't enough. WEP can easily be hacked and more recently vulnerabilities in the newer WPA encryption standard have been found. So do we insist that everyone who has a wireless network uses WPA2? What if they have older hardware that doesn't support it - do we insist they upgrade? And what happens if WPA2 can be cracked?

Those people who want to download music or films illegally will always find a way - what is the point of passing legislation that could easily see innocent people accused of and punished for crimes they did not commit?

The Open Rights Group has called on people concerned about this nonsensical legislation to write to their MP, and I would encourage you to do so too.

England football fans can breathe easy – after the fiasco of the online-only coverage of the team's World Cup qualifier in Ukraine, the government has moved to protect such games so they can be seen on free-to-air TV.

The match, back in October, may have been a dead rubber but millions of fans were robbed of the chance to see their team in a competitive international.

The farcical situation arose because the FA did not actually own the rights to away World Cup qualification games. Setanta originally bought the rights to provide UK coverage from the Ukrainian FA, but when Setanta collapsed, no other UK broadcaster was prepared to pay the asking price.

So the 500,000 or so England fans who watched the game got to see a low-quality video feed featuring half an hour of Sven Goran-Eriksson's tedious analysis followed by a poor performance on the pitch. Talk about a slap in the face.

The good news is that a government review, headed by former FA chief David Davies, has recommended that all qualification games for World Cup and European Football Championship be reserved for free-to-air TV channels.

Additionally, home Ashes tests are covered in the report, though other home test matches are not. Wales is the only UK territory that has its Six Nations rugby games protected.

Online-only broadcasting of these 'crown jewels' was ruled out for the foreseeable future.

"The Panel remained convinced that, at least for the foreseeable future, despite the enormous changes in the media landscape, most people's first choice of how to view the bigger sporting events would be via what is still identifiably a television set," the review states.

Microsoft has cut off thousands of Xbox owners from the Xbox Live service, an online platform that lets gamers compete with their peers the world over.

The reason these gamers have been cut off is for breaking their licence agreement with Microsoft by 'modding' the consoles to play pirated or unauthorised games.

But how does Microsoft know these people are guilty? Presumably, when gamers connect to Xbox Live and play a game, Microsoft can tell whether or not the copy of the game is an official one. Or, perhaps, it can examine the hardware configuration to see whether or not a console has been 'chipped'.

However, this brings up a number of questions - firstly, if Microsoft can tell when someone is playing a dodgy game, why not just stop them there and then? They could have been playing a copied or unauthorised game for months and got away with it, only to be cut off now.

Secondly, and more importantly, where has the right to a fair trial gone? It seems that Microsoft has decided that these people are guilty of a criminal offence - piracy - and imposed its own punishment without giving the customers a chance to defend themselves.

The European Parliament recently passed legislation that, albeit very ambiguously, enshrined in law the right to reply of anyone accused of illegal file-sharing of movies or music. Yet Microsoft seemingly has the right to cut off those who it reckons are playing pirated copies of its games without any outside regulation.

It could very well be that this is allowed for by the terms of use (below) - but while Microsoft might be acting perfectly legally, it doesn't seem very fair. Microsoft sees the issue as being black and white, but there surely are grey areas here, such as: what if someone had bought an Xbox second-hand and not realised that it had been chipped? Could they be cut off without warning or offered a chance to plead innocence?

Here is the relevant section of the terms of use:

"You agree that you are using only authorised software and hardware to access the Service, that your software and hardware have not been modified in any unauthorised way, and that we have the right to send data, applications or other content to any software or hardware that you are using to access the Service for the express purpose of detecting an unauthorised modification.

I spoke to Kim Walker, a partner in the Intellectual Property division of legal firm Pinsent Masons, who told me: "The terms of the contract seem to allow Microsoft to do virtually whatever they want. However, if someone was accused [of modding their Xbox] and cut off and they actually hadn't, then Microsoft would be in breach of contract."

According to Walker, the burden of proof would be on the customer to prove that they hadn't modified the console, assuming that Microsoft could produce documents saying that they had.


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The first-round FA Cup clash between Oldham Athletic and Leeds United was streamed live for free on the FA's website on Saturday evening.

As a Leeds fan, I logged on at 17:15 with a feeling of trepidation. Was I going to spend the next 90 minutes staring at a 17-inch laptop screen wondering if that round blurry shape was the ball or a player's head?

My only previous experience of online football was in a bar in Greece last year, trying to watch England's World Cup qualifier against Croatia. As everyone in England enjoyed Theo Walcott's hat-trick, we endured jolty, pixelated screens with large spells of downtime.

But I have no complaints about the FA's online coverage tonight. When you've got Sky HD on a 37-inch TV, coverage on anything less is always going to be inferior but as the web goes, this was pretty impressive. It also managed to surpass ITV's woeful TV coverage of the Histon v Leeds FA Cup tie last season (not difficult).

Only on the 29th minute did it threaten to misbehave. The screen flickered to black nothingness... yet within two seconds it was back. Panic over.

The sound quality was fantastic, with the microphone seemingly nestled among the Leeds fans on some occasions (not so good for those with sensitive ears).

But a major highlight of the online broadcast for me (other than the 2-0 Leeds victory courtesy of Jonny Howson and Mike Grella) was the half-time entertainment. No ex-footballers sitting in a studio dissecting whether the grass was too long - just a quick replay of the first-half highlights, a few FA adverts and then 10 minutes of quality crowd action.

Far more entertaining than Messrs Redknapp and Gray were shots of fans eating pies, fireworks in the sky and Leeds fans with large bellies waving their shirts above their heads. That's proper football!

If future Leeds FA Cup games are broadcast online, I'll be looking forward to it... as long as we win, of course!

Discover all FA Cup matches live on the web this weekend. 

Now, I consider myself to be a reasonably intelligent person. I read a lot. I understand the economic principles behind quantitative easing. I watch University Challenge every week. Sometimes I even answer a few questions, too.

But recently I've begun to doubt my intelligence, and it's all Google's fault.

When Seattle-based interview coach Lewis Lin revealed 10 questions that Google fires at applicants during job interviews, my brain started to throb.

They aren't typically tricky queries like, "What's your main weakness?"

No, these questions are brain-twistingly hard. Some of them take several hours just to read.

But, undaunted, I've decided to tackle them, one by one - and thereby discover whether I'm smart enough to work at Google (not that I want to leave Web User Towers, you understand).

So here we go. . .

1 Why are manhole covers round?
This one I know, but only because I had read it in one of the social psychology books that are so in vogue right now, possibly Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.

The answer is that if they were square, they could slip down the hole if lifted up. Round ones can't. So I'd be off to a flyer in my fictional job interview.

2 You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

Er, could you repeat the question?

I guess this riddle tests your ability to think "outside the box" (or outside the blender in this case).

Unfortunately, I can't think of anything sensible except maybe headbutt the blender to break it, thus ensuring my escape.

3 How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

Surely this depends on what other people already charge, and then decide whether you could afford to undercut them. Would that be the economically literate answer?

4 Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

As it happens, in about six months I will have an eight-year-old nephew, so I have a while to prepare an answer for his birthday.

I would probably think of things that he likes, such as Ben 10 toys.

Then explain to him that, instead of leaving all his toys thrown around the bedroom in a heap, he could find them easily if he kept them in a specific order, such as when they were bought, or which are his favourite.

Problem is, he'd get bored in seconds and seek less complex gratification blasting the heads off aliens on his Nintendo Wii.

5 In a country in which people only want boys, every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

Right. Now this requires some serious mental flexing.

The situation must lead to more boys than girls, surely, because there's a 50 per cent chance of either being born, and every time a boy is born, the family stops reproducing - but I guess that's just me repeating the question, and buying myself some more thinking time.

So, 50 per cent of families would stop after the first birth, because they would have a boy.

The remaining 50 per cent of families have a 50 per cent chance of having a boy with every subsequent birth.

Ah, but wait. Having just scribbled down some numbers, I think the answer is that the proportion would be 50/50. The number of families having children would diminish - indeed, halve each birth - but the boy-girl ratio would stay the same.

Wouldn't it?

Am I clever enough to work at Google? Questions 6 to 10