Robert Hampton

Interesting news emerged over the past few days that many smartphones collect data on the user’s location and store it in a hidden file, with the data being used to improve geographic targeting of adverts. The first revelations involved the iPhone, but Google’s Android software also does something similar.

The Register explained why such tracking could be harmful. Outside of technology circles, however, there has been a distinct lack of outrage. In a world where everyone (except me, apparently) is checking in on Foursquare or Facebook Places every two minutes, I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me.

Judging by the number of Tweets in my feed from mobile phones, which display completely inaccurate locations, the technology is far from perfect in any case.

If they ever do a new version of Catchphrase, Mr Chips could actually be a contestant:-

IBM’s supercomputer Watson has trounced its two competitors in a televised show pitting human brains against computer bytes.

After a three night marathon on the quiz show Jeopardy, Watson emerged victorious to win a $1million (£622,000) prize.

The really worrying thing here is that Jeopardy usually uses a “returning champion” format where the winner comes back the next day to play again. That computer could conceivably play indefinitely, winning thousands of dollars every day. After a few years, it would own most of the world’s wealth. And then you have all sorts of problems – can a computer open a bank account, for example?

I, for one welcome this development, and plan to enjoy the few years I have left before the inevitable day when robots overthrow human civilisation.

July brought big changes to the newspaper industry, as The Times started charging for access to its web site. This was supposed to ensure a steady income stream for the newspaper, putting it on a secure financial footing for the future. However, it also resulted in the Times being completely removed from the online chatter of the blogosphere, as its news coverage and columnists were no longer accessible to the internet hoi-polloi. Still, I’m sure this decision made sense to someone somewhere.

The Supreme Court ruled that gay people facing persecution are entitled to claim asylum in the UK. I welcomed the decision, although my blog post is curiously vague about precisely why I welcomed it. Hmm…

In other gay-related news, I reviewed, with sadness, a booklet from the US Military discussing its anti-gay don’t ask, don’t tell policy.

Elsewhere, health and safety went mad as one person suggested banning rugby scrums. I felt uncomfortable on a train full of Orange Lodge marchers and I defended the traditional sitcom from an onslaught of criticism from trendy TV reviewers.

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What a year 2010 was! It had twelve months, each consisting of at least 28 days. On some of those days I made blog entries. Here are the highlights.

I began the year in January fretting about an alleged Crystal Maze remake starring Amanda Holden. This story fortunately turned out to be utter bollocks. Ginger people again proved that (yours truly excepted) they have no sense of humour or perspective. Britain experienced a deluge of snow, and Merseyrail impressed everyone by soldiering on throughout, a feat which they would surely repeat next time we experienced awful weather… right?

I finally joined the Wii owners’ club, just as the console stopped being cool. My rekindled love for video games did not result in me getting rickets. I also celebrated my first Twitterversary and cautiously welcomed the iPad.

I also took time to blog at length about a US comedian no-one has heard of over here, illustrating my post with YouTube clips which have now been removed for copyright infringement.

In more serious matters, the Haiti earthquake occupied people’s thoughts as a humanitarian catastrophe unfolded in the devastated country.

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Nintendo has earned a reputation for rehashing its classic titles in an attempt to extract the maximum revenue from its back catalogue.

It’s not an entirely unfair comment: the Game Boy Advance was launched with an enhanced remake of Super Mario Bros. 2, and by the end of the handheld’s life, all the classic Mario titles had appeared in one form or another. The Classic NES series, also for the GBA, presented pixel-perfect emulations of Nintendo’s best 8-bit games to a new audience.

It’s hard to blame Nintendo for milking its old games for all they’re worth. The games are absolute classics — immensely playable even two decades later — and it’s not a bad idea to introduce them to new games players. Retro-gaming is a massive business these days – can you blame Nintendo for cashing in? Is 500 Wii points really too high a price to play for games on the Wii Virtual Console?

That said, check out this upcoming release for the Wii: Super Mario All-Stars 25th Anniversary Edition.

It’s a straightforward emulation of the old SNES game. It comes with a commemorative booklet and soundtrack CD, but the game itself is unaltered from the original 1993 release.

So Nintendo are expecting us to part with money for an unchanged 2010 port of a 17-year-old remake of games originally released between 1985 and 1990?

Oh, who am I kidding? I’m still going to buy it.

Followers of my Twitter feed (those who aren’t spambots selling diet pills, anyway) will probably be aware that I have been clearing out junk from my loft. This is not due to some sudden financial crisis, nor am I desperately trying to feed an addiction (unless you count my weakness for Haribo Tangfastics). It’s simply because we’re getting a loft conversion done, and an empty loft facilitates that. Therefore selling some old crap is a good idea.

Amongst the stuff up there is a veritable museum of computer history: twenty years of accumulated electronics, including my Commodore 64 (top right), Acorn RiscPC (top left) and Acorn A3010 (bottom). Also up there but not pictured: my Super NES.

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Rupert Murdoch’s nefarious plans have come to fruition and The Times web site is now behind a paywall. As of July 2nd, anyone wanting to click past the newspaper’s (admittedly quite nice-looking) front page will now need to flash their credit card in News International’s direction.

Will this drive away punters? Almost certainly, and the Guardian wasted no time publishing a (slightly smug) “welcome” message to disaffected Times readers.

I’m guessing from the tone of that piece that the Guardian are sticking with the “free” model for the foreseeable future, but how long can that situation continue? Most newspapers are losing money and online advertising does not bring in enough revenue to compensate. New revenue sources will have to be found somewhere. Good journalism is not cheap, and it does seem a bit commercially suicidal of newspapers to give away their content for free.

On the other hand, hiding articles behind a paywall means that same quality product is at risk of being ignored by the wider internet. There will be no Google News alerts pointing to Times articles; bloggers will no longer have the option of linking to a Times article to back up their views; on Twitter, there will be few bit.ly short URLs going to The Times. Overall, there will be a big drop in traffic: will there be enough people paying money to the Times to justify taking their web site out of the global conversation?

In fact, with so many other free news sources online (for now, at least) will anyone be prepared to pay? The Financial Times has charged for some time, but that’s a specialist publication for a niche market, offering in-depth coverage not provided elsewhere. The Times, on the other hand, is a mainstream newspaper — who will pay to access the Times when the same news can be found on the BBC, Telegraph, Guardian, New York Times and a thousand other sources on Google News? Is Jeremy Clarkson’s column a sufficient draw to tempt people to pay £1?

In summary, I’m sceptical. But if it stops overseas bloggers referring to “The Times of London” in their links (that’s NOT what the paper is called!) I’ll be happy.

It’s probably not escaped your attention that I am something of a computer geek. What you may not know is where it all began. For that we need to go back to 1989 or thereabouts, when my seven-year-old self was thrilled to see that my dad had been able to source a computer second-hand for me.

Enter the Commodore VIC-20:-

This picture released under Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence. Original by Pixel8/Cbmeeks.

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I’ve posted before about the dangers of trusting Google to deliver you to the right place, and the “Facebook login” fiasco shows why it’s a problem.

Details are in the link above, but in a nutshell: the web site ReadWriteWeb posted an article with the title “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login”. That page quickly rose to the top of Google’s search results for Facebook login. Soon RWW were inundated with confused facebook users who believed that they had landed on Facebook’s login page and thought that they had fallen victim to one of the frequent redesigns that people love to complain about so much. The comment thread to that post is a sight to behold.

The question is: why didn’t they just type facebook.com into their browser’s address bar directly? The answer, I suspect, is that a lot of people simply don’t know how to do this. For many people “Google = Internet”, the same way “Microsoft = Computer” is commonplace (or certainly was until recently).

They never bother to bookmark sites, preferring to use Google to find everything. This fiasco has demonstrated, in the most hilarious way possible, why that it is a bad thing, especially when the same users seemingly believe Google even when it throws up an obviously bad result.

It’s no wonder phishing and other scams are so commonplace with this level of internet literacy. It would be a good idea for Google and other big players on the Internet to embark on a programme of education in this area.

I look forward to the time when tablet computing truly comes of age. Nothing would please me more than to be able to sit in Starbucks, drinking coffee and tapping away at my Wi-fi enabled tablet, pretending I’m really sitting in Ten Forward on the Enterprise-D drinking Raktajino while preparing a duty roster for Commander Riker on a PADD.

So does the iPad bring us one step closer to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision? Maybe. But I wish we were getting the full blown MacOS rather than the iPhone OS, with its dependence on the locked-down App store which means that Apple, and Apple alone, decide which apps you can and can’t run on it. It also looks a bit underspecced and underpowered for what it is. A netbook or a cheap laptop still might be a better bet for lots of people.

I remain to be convinced that this the quantum leap forward for computing that the pre-launch hype promised us. But it’s Apple, and the brand name and lovely design will surely mean that 100 billion are sold within the first 20 minutes.

Now, speaking of Star Trek technology: when do we get a working Holodeck?