Tech Pol

The government should kill its absurd rail plan and lay an optical fibre network – it's cheaper and be the ultimate economic boost

At Google's developer conference in San Francisco, its chief executive Larry Page took part in an impromptu Q&A session. What, one person asked, was the point of the company's rollout of optical fibre networking in places such as Kansas City, where it is offering connections that run at 1,000 megabits per second (100 times faster than the best in the UK) for about $20 per month?

Page's reply: "It's sad that all these computers are connected by such a tiny pipe … things will have to change. Gigabit speeds are just the beginning – connections should go at computer speed."

He's so right. Fast connections just make the entire experience of working online different. You know that yourself: if you were to be taken back now to the world of dial-up, where your connection ran at a maximum of 56 kilobits per second (that's how it was about 10 years ago for most UK internet users, children), you'd feel the pain. Optical fibre means you can have connections that are so quick that you can both download and upload at speeds that let you watch or send HD-quality pictures in real time.

Which is why all the talk of spending billions on the HS2 high-speed rail plan infuriates me. It's such a stupid waste of money, when what we should be doing is building high-speed optical fibre connections across the UK. It would probably cost a little less than HS2, but it would bring far greater benefits both in the short and long term.

Start with the obvious ones. Building HS2 will, it's true, be an economic pump-primer: it'll generate billions in construction. However, so will digging the channels and stringing up the lines needed for optical cable.

But whereas the immediate construction benefit from HS2 will be felt in a very limited corridor (and blight the lives of people who live there), installing optical fibre won't push anyone out of their house, and would produce benefits nationwide.

It would be the ultimate economic boost, but without any of the drawbacks, and with the advantage that most of the economic activity (in terms of people doing physical work) will be in rural areas, which need it more than overserved cities.

What about once it's built? HS2 will good for all those people who live in London and want to visit the provinces before scuttling back at the end of the day. If you think that it will lead to people spending more time in the provinces having travelled "down" from London (because in railway parlance all tracks to London are "up"), here's a reality check: given the choice between staying a night in a regional hotel and getting back on a late high-speed train to the capital, corporate people will choose the latter. Result: more empty hotel rooms in the provinces, not fewer.

Compare that to optical fibre: once everyone has it, or has reasonable access to it, we can all participate in some sort of economic activity all the time. The most surprising thing about optical is the effect that it has once you can upload as fast as you download (so-called "symmetric" connections). It means that your local cricket match can attract thousands of spectators from all over the world. And that's just the start; it also means you don't have to ferry people back and forth on trains or in cars because you can have realistic video conferences on large screens. With energy prices rising, optical fibre uses less energy than copper to get a better result.

But how much will it cost, you ask, and who will pay? In 2008, the cost of wiring up the entire nation with fibre-optic was put at £30bn by the Broadband Stakeholder Group. Since then, BT and Virgin have gone some way to reducing that by rolling out fibre. However, we shouldn't leave it to private enterprise – in part because government rules tax new optical fibre at bizarre rates, while favouring those with an installed base such as BT. That dissuades private industry from laying new optical fibre until it's sure it will have complete take-up. But who's going to sign up for a service that might not be available for a couple of years? More sensible to go with BT's expensive (and perhaps overpriced) offering.

That's why the absurd HS2 project should be killed right away, and any money that the government was going to put into it should be diverted into a national fibre rollout with the aim of giving every household easy access to superfast connectivity, which a range of different providers could vie for. The government can own the network (rather as it does the rail network, through its control of Network Rail) and make it available to commercial players; that would prevent BT getting a tie-up.

Or of course it can ignore this advice. But don't be too surprised if in a few years Google decides that it's going to do the same as it has done in the US, and comes in to build its own network and disrupt the cosy incumbents. That would be the company that government ministers and MPs have been condemning for being "immoral" and "evil". For the government to sit back and let that happen while they splurge money on a retrograde transport scheme that belongs in the Victorian era – well, that would be really evil.

• Broadband
• Internet
• HS2
• Rail transport
• Google
• Network Rail
• Transport
• BT

Self-taught coder who set up Tumblr in his mother's New York apartment could be the newest rich kid on the internet block

David Karp has become the latest high school dropout turned twentysomething multimillionaire after selling his internet creation, Tumblr, to Yahoo for $1.1bn.

The 26-year-old New Yorker founded the microblogging site in 2007 from the back bedroom of his mother's modest Manhattan apartment – and for years rebuffed the solicitations of Silicon Valley's biggest technology giants.

But now Karp could be worth as much as $220m after the all-cash deal, which will see the self-taught computer coder added to another company's payroll for the first time.

Only a year ago Karp told the Guardian he was disinterested in joining the elite group of "rich people in the world", insisting: "There are very few people who have the privilege of getting to invent things that billions of people use."

He added in January 2012: "The joke now is what's the first tech company that we acquire. I hear AOL's going pretty cheap."

Six months following that exchange, ex-Google executive Marissa Mayer took over at Yahoo and the allure of being "gobbled up by a big media company" quickly looked more attractive.

Rail thin with floppy brown hair and invariably wearing a check shirt, Karp looks every bit the web wunderkind. But a combination of smart business moves and internet savvy has seen his blogging platform – famous for its beguiling range of user-created sites like "Accidental Chinese hipsters" and "White men wearing Google Glass" – turn into one of the hottest properties on the web.

Karp's parents, the television composer Michael Karp and teacher Barbara Ackerman, reportedly separated when he was 17. That same year he flew to Japan, determined to become an entrepreneur despite his youth.

"I was so silly – I tried to be very formal and put on a deep voice to clients over the phone so I didn't have to meet them and give away how young I was," he said last year. "I lied about my age. I lied about the size of my team. I lied about my experience. I was so terribly embarassed about it for so long. I should have just owned up."

The experience was to be a rite of passage for Karp, who returned to the US and formed the consultanc company, Davidville, that would later become Tumblr.

Like his fellow twentysomething internet billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, Karp lives a frugal life with few possessions in his refurbished Brooklyn apartment where he lives with his girlfriend, Rachel Eakley, a trained chef.

"I don't have any books. I don't have many clothes," Karp told Forbes in an interview earlier this year. "I'm always so surprised when people fill their homes up with stuff."

• Tumblr
• Yahoo
• Internet
• Digital media
• Media business
• Technology sector

Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Hangouts, Amazon Cloud Drive Photos, Justin's World, Haunting Melissa, Star Trek Rivals, Sago Mini Sound Box and more

It's time for our weekly roundup of brand new and notable apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It covers apps and games, with the prices referring to the initial download: so (Free) may mean (Freemium) in some cases.

Looking for Android apps? Check this week's 30 best Android apps roundup, which was published earlier in the day.

Here's this week's comparable iOS selection:

This excellent classical music app is a partnership between Touch Press and Deutsche Grammophon, building on the former's The Orchestra app from a few months back. The app contains four recordings of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, with synchronised scores, video interviews and the ability to switch between recordings at will. You get two minutes for free, with an in-app purchase unlocking the rest.
iPhone / iPad

Google moved to unify its Android messaging apps last week with Hangouts, offering instant messaging, photo-sharing, emoji and video calls in one package. But it's also available on iOS with the same features, as well as on computers.
iPhone / iPad

Amazon is trying to make its Cloud Drive online storage service more useful for specific tasks – mobile photography in this case. The app saves the snaps you take on your iPhone or iPod touch to the Cloud Drive, and provides access to all the images stored there – with Facebook and Twitter sharing built in.
iPhone

CBeebies star Justin Fletcher – quite possibly the biggest name in children's entertainment in the UK – is getting into apps with his Justin's World brand. This first app tells the Goldilocks fairytale, with Fletcher himself dressing up as all the main characters to host a mixture of video and mini-games for pre-schoolers. Find out more on his plans in this interview.
iPhone / iPad

There is justifiably bags of buzz around this, a beautifully-crafted puzzle game with impressive papercraft visuals. While the production values stand out from the App Store crowd, it's the quality of the puzzles that make it a keeper, offering genuine depth. The storyline also keeps you engrossed as you play through them.
iPhone / iPad

Films as apps? A few production companies are testing the idea, with Haunting Melissa the latest example. Promising "a terrifying tale with twists and frights that you won't soon forget", it's exclusive to iOS for now, and with The Ring and Mulholland Drive on its producer's CV, well worth a look. You can pay for individual chapters or a season's pass via in-app purchase in SD or HD quality.
iPhone / iPad

Created by a team of researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, this app turns real pen-and-paper drawings into music, scanning them in then sending twinkly lights around the image to create sounds. A novelty? The serious aim here is to get children interested in coding: "Using this app you can easily explore the ideas behind computer programming by adding more to the drawing to change the tune," suggests Professor Peter McOwan.
iPhone / iPad

Following in Marvel's footsteps, now Star Trek has its own card-battling app for smartphones and tablets. Featuring characters and ships from both Star Trek and the Star Trek Into Darkness film, this offers more than 100 cards to collect and use to challenge other players in turn-based fights. In-app purchases of its Latinum currency fund the action.
iPhone / iPad

Two apps rather than one, but these can be safely treated as a pair. They're both by book publisher Bloomsbury, with a mixture of virtual stickers, dress-up games and puzzles for children. One features pirates, and the other princesses.
iPad

If you like a real challenge with your iOS games, then Frozen Synapse is a fiver well spent this week. It's a turn-based strategy game originally released for computers, as you guide your squad through a succession of levels. 55 missions to play by yourself plus five multiplayer modes make this a treat.
iPad

In March 2013, popular children's apps maker Toca Boca bought one of its peers, Zinc Roe, and rebranded it as Sago Sago. Now the studio has released its first app since the changes: a marvellous collection of interactive sound-objects for toddlers, "from wind chimes to barking puppies".
iPhone / iPad

And if the inclusion of this enrages you, consider this: Ask Keith Lemon is currently the third Top Paid app in the UK App Store, ahead of Minecraft, Angry Birds Star Wars and countless other big names. The opportunity to "have Keith Lemon as your personal assistant" is clearly popular. An in-app purchase upgrades it to "Ruderer Mode" with salty language.
iPhone / iPad

Excited about the upcoming British Lions tour? Rugby Nations '13 will swell your rugby joy still further. It includes 20 teams to play as, spiffing graphics and commentary from TV's Bill Leslie, with the gameplay doing as good a job as any title at the difficult task of rendering rugby playable in digital form.
iPhone / iPad

This is the latest children's storybook-app from Irish startup StoryToys, which turns the famous tale of Mowgli, Baloo and Bagheera into a virtual pop-up book for iOS devices. Animation, voice narration and a series of accessible mini-games make it a treat for kids.
iPhone / iPad

Steak! Gin! That's all you need to know about this iPad app. Well, if you do want to know more, this is an app from London steakhouse restaurant Gillray's designed to be used by anyone with a penchant for, yes, steak and gin. It'll tell you how to cook steak, tell you the history of gin, and suggest cocktails.
iPad

More history here, although not quite as much gin. Osprey Publishing and Aimer Media's book-app focuses on the battle of Borodino as Napoleon led his forces into battle against Imperial Russia. Expect bird's-eye maps, illustrations and plenty of text explaining what happened and why.
iPhone / iPad

Developer PikPok's latest game is based on the upcoming DreamWorks Animation film Turbo. It's basically Mario Kart with snails. Well, there's a bit more to it than that, but this free-to-play game gets you to customise then race a colourful terrestrial-gastropod.
iPhone / iPad

The latest fresh startup to enter the mobile messaging game is... Wacom! Yes, the graphics tablets people. This social app is designed to work with its Bamboo Stylus Mini stylus, but is also "finger-friendly". It focuses on creating "cards" and customising them with scribbles and other tools, sending them to friends or sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and/or Instagram.
iPhone

Blitz Games Studios' 3D puzzle game has a real originality about it, with papercraft levels and characters. You have to solve 45 levels by moving the characters around by tapping and swiping, figuring out how to use each one's special ability. It looks lovely, and plays well too.
iPhone / iPad

Beatrobo is a social streaming-music service with added robot avatars. The idea being that you listen to music from YouTube and SoundCloud in rooms with your friends – but with an asynchronous model that means you don't have to all be online at once. The robots give it a colourful twist.
iPhone

That's this week's selection, but what do you think? Make your own recommendations, or give your views on the apps above, by posting a comment.

• iPhone
• iPad
• Apps
• Smartphones
• Tablet computers
• Mobile phones
• Mobile
• Apple

Sven Olaf Kamphuis is accused of global cybercrime, but Spanish police found him in a squalid flat with his name on the letterbox

The day Sven Olaf Kamphuis parked his huge orange Mercedes van with its German numberplates outside Bar Javis, in the Catalan town of Granollers, the owner's son snapped a picture with his mobile phone.

"Not a lot happens in this street," Maria Cruz, the bar's owner, explained. "And it was so huge, with all those funny antennas and solar panels poking out of the roof, that it blocked the light to the bar."

Even stranger was the 35-year-old Dutch man who parked it in this narrow street after renting a small attic flat with windows made of glass blocks in the poorer end of this nondescript town 15 miles from Barcelona.

Even on hot early summer days, Kamphuis wore a woollen hat. And he spoke no Spanish, answering "yes, yes" in English to everything people from this friendly neighbourhood said to him.

Kamphuis, 35, is one of the most controversial characters in the murky world of spam and hacking – deemed the internet's public enemy number one by some, though others believe his reputation has been blown out of proportion by the grandstanding of his foes.

Capable of rigging up sophisticated computer systems anywhere, including the back of a van, he allegedly masterminded a flurry of March internet attacks that the security company CloudFlare claimed "almost broke the internet", plunging the world into digital darkness. When Spanish and Dutch police arrested him they found the flat occupied by a tangle of cables and computer gear. A copy of the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver lay on the unmade bed.

Kamphuis displayed a Napoleonic sense of grandeur. "He claimed he had diplomatic status," said the Spanish police officer who led the operation, but asked not to be named. "He said he was the telecommunications minister and foreign minister of a place called the Cyberbunker Republic. He didn't seem to be joking."

"The request to arrest him came from the Netherlands," said the police officer, who heads the cybercrime unit in Barcelona. "But Britain, the United States and Germany were all affected by the massive denial of service attacks that he launched.

"The van was fitted out as a mobile office from which he could launch his attacks. Amongst other things we found the IP addresses of his targets and that is part of the evidence we are sending to the Netherlands."

Kamphuis has yet to be tried, but Spanish police believe they know his modus operandi. "He brought together hackers from around the world to launch the attacks. It is obviously not all over yet, because the Dutch have been under attack again in recent days – presumably as revenge by his friends.

"Some of them have networks of zombie computers, having spread viruses that let them control others people's computers. They all agree to launch the attack and they do millions of requests to the server at the same time."

The result was what the New York Times called an attack of previously "unknown magnitudes", producing a 300bn-bits-per-second data stream that targeted the British and Swiss-based anti-spam operator Spamhaus and its allies. This had reportedly blacklisted his CB3ROB/Cyberbunker company, which claims its servers are housed in an old Nato nuclear bunker near Rotterdam, for hosting hundreds of spam and malware websites. Kamphuis happily claimed to be punishing Spamhaus for "abusing their influence".

"Nobody ever deputised Spamhaus to determine what goes and does not go on the internet," he told the New York Times in an angry message. He later denied involvement. "We want to be absolutely clear that the DDoS [distributed denial of service] attacks are not and have not ever been orchestrated within CB3ROB/CyberBunker, nor are they conducted under the supervision of Sven," he wrote on his Facebook page.

But the huge number of spammers he hosts has led even hacktivists sympathetic to his pro-Pirate party, Anonymous and Julian Assange's stance to question his real activities.

Several other mysteries remain. If this was one of the most successful spammers in history, why was he living in a squalid flat and a camper van?

"If you get paid a few cents for each spammed email and you send out million emails every day, then you can make a lot of money," said the Spanish police chief.

Kamphuis certainly did not behave like a criminal on the run. "He seemed too relaxed to be a crook," said Cruz. "And he certainly didn't hide away. He had even written his name on the letterbox."

"He wasn't really trying to hide," agrees the Spanish police chief. "I think he thought that we wouldn't track the attacks to him or that we would leave him alone because he was not attacking Spanish targets."

His attacks were widely reported to have slowed the entire internet down, but internet speed trackers such as Internet Traffic Report barely registered a blip.

Some point to publicity-seeking grandstanding by CloudFlare, an internet security company called in to protect Spamhaus. It claimed this was "the DDoS [attack] that almost broke the internet".

"The record-breaking attacks were initially directed at Spamhaus infrastructure such as websites, mailservers and nameservers. Then, over the course of the following two weeks, the attacks escalated to targeting Spamhaus's supporting networks and services including various internet exchanges," Spamhaus's British founder Clive Linford said on his blog, describing the attacks that started in the middle of March. "While the DDoS caused disruptions to our organisation and its hosts and partners, the flow of the Spamhaus anti-spam data that protects over 1.7bn mailboxes worldwide was never interrupted."

Kamphuis was last week taken to the Netherlands – a country that recently announced plans to let police hack into computers located abroad, installing spyware, reading emails and deleting files. He is being held in jail while investigators decide what charges to bring.

A spokesman for the Dutch public prosecutor's office said he would appear before a court in Rotterdam again this week to have bail conditions reviewed after the "unprecedented heavy attacks" on Spamhaus and its partners in the US, Netherlands and Great Britain.

• Hacking
• Spain
• Europe
• Cybercrime
• Internet
• Spam
• Email

CEO Marissa Meyer risks blowing the blogging platform's cool – but the deal could rejuvenate the tech giant's ad business

Despite the breadth and diversity of life online, there are relatively few opportunities to make the kind of acquisitions that make the industry stop and take stock. Yahoo's $1.1bn deal to buy Tumblr is one of those moments: a bold acquisition that says chief executive Marissa Meyer means business.

Comparisons to Yahoo's 1999 $3.6bn acquisition of Geocities are too simplistic. In internet years, 1999 is more like two centuries ago and Yahoo is in a completely different place, led by a woman with all the zeal of a convert. Repeatedly passed over for promotion during her previous (another internet lifetime) 13 years at Google, she has an opportunity to do something impressive with Yahoo, which seemed in terminal decline. One venture capital executive told me that during the tenure of Carol Bartz, Mayer's predecessor once removed, the investors were expecting Yahoo to ditch all but essential staff, focus on core revenue-building products and then rinse the company hard for maximum profit until it ran into the ground.

Meyer is already the longest-serving Yahoo CEO after Bartz and co-founder Jerry Yang. In the 300 days since she took over, Yahoo's share price has steady improved, until it's now at a level comparable with January 2008, when Microsoft made its unexpected offer to buy it. Compare that with the floundering, directionless company that horrified many investors then by repeatedly rejecting Microsoft's $50bn offer, which led to the erosion both in share price and the consensus that Yahoo was irreversibly set to decline.

Yahoo was easy to write off in the tech community because it lacks the cool factor and developer kudos of Facebook and Google. But Yahoo's power has always been in its more mainstream (though ageing) user base and its powerful display advertising business. Herein lies the key to its Tumblr acquisition. Though the fit with this hipster lite-blogging, photo-heavy platform could seem a little awkward, it makes sense in the context of Yahoo's ad strategy.

Tumblr founder David Karp has always said its advertising model is based on Twitter's "the tweet is the ad" principle. That is, that being embedded in a customised, personal flow of information, being relevant to an influential and proactive community is the most valuable and meaningful way of presenting display advertising right now. That makes Tumblr, integrated with Yahoo's enormous expertise in display advertising, a diverse and demographically important platform for Yahoo that is mobile-heavy and social-focused.

The timing is interesting too; Tumblr has been trying native ads akin to promoted tweets for the past year, giving its advertising proposition some legs and diffusing the concern about the juxtaposition of ads with edgier content.

The challenge will be for Yahoo – which has pointed to a typical "hands-off" approach – to integrate enough to make a meaningful, complementary ad platform, but allowing Tumblr to keep its edge. Tumblr's market proposition is powerful – young, cool (arguably a little less than a year ago, but still), informed, experimental – just the type of audience who won't hesitate to up sticks when something better comes along. Can Yahoo invest in and encourage the best of that? That's a big challenge for a company so optimised for performance, when actually a little creative chaos is vital.

• Yahoo
• Tumblr
• Internet
• Digital media
• Media business
• Technology sector
• United States

The short and sharp career of Greg 'Idra' Fields, videogaming genius and part-time offensive lout

One day videogames will be an Olympic event. The games that will be played probably don't exist yet, but their predecessors do – and prime among them is Blizzard Entertainment's Starcraft II.

This strategy game is one of the major factors behind the rising global popularity of competitive videogaming, better known as eSports, and is built on the foundations of a bona-fide phenomenon.

The original Starcraft was released in 1998 on PC and became one of the biggest-ever crazes in South Korea, the impetus and focus for a competitive industry. There had been gaming tournaments and the like beforehand, but by the early millennium, Starcraft and its expansion Brood War had professional teams playing in televised leagues and tournaments viewed by millions – at what was perhaps the game's peak, the 2005 Pro League Final filled a 120,000-seater stadium in Busan.

The game's developers Blizzard did not – could not – have predicted this. But Starcraft II was developed from the start to capitalise on it, intended as nothing less than the first global eSport; arguably something it has achieved, with ever-growing audiences given a recent fillip by the expansion Heart of the Swarm. Professional teams competing in a year-round calendar of worldwide tournaments, with livestreaming increasing audiences and advertising revenue like never before.

The Starcraft scene naturally has its own jargon. A foreigner is anyone who's not South Korean.

Cheese is a cheap strategy. The very greatest players are bonjwa. Personalities are referred to by their in-game IDs rather than name. And then there's BM – bad manners, and one of the many things Greg "Idra" Fields is famous for.

Fields is polite, extremely articulate, and until a fortnight ago was one of the highest-profile and highest-paid professional gamers in the world. This is not wholly unrelated to the fact that he's also responsible for some of the most outrageous outbursts in eSports, and not the cool kind of outrageous.

He once opined that a nice chap called David Kim, for being one of Starcraft II's balance designers, should be raped with a tire-iron. In March, he wished cancer on an opponent while livestreaming – which was, of course, seen and spread by everyone watching. Alexander Garfield, the CEO of Fields' team Evil Geniuses, assured fans there would be no repeat.

Shortly afterwards, following a frustrating showing in the early rounds of Blizzard's new Starcraft II World Championship Series, Fields visited the forums at Team Liquid, the biggest community hub for the game, and went for certain fans. "You're all a bunch of fucks," he wrote in a thread concerning team EG. "It just so happens I get paid to treat you as such. It's fucking awesome."

This happened on 7 May, and the remarks rapidly spread online. It was a moment that posed eSports, and particularly Team EG, an uncomfortable question. Sean "Day [9]" Plott is a major Starcraft II personality and caster – as well as a former North American Brood War champion. "Right when Idra left the Polt game and then shortly thereafter made that post, I was having a conversation with a friend, and I said there's a 99% chance he gets kicked for this. No chance he doesn't get kicked for this. But it was still so crazy to me that the next day it did happen."

On 9 May Team EG announced it had fired one of its biggest faces.

"I've known Idra for a long time personally," says Gamespot's Rod "Slasher" Breslau, an eSports reporter. "But this was the right call. He went direct to the fans and badmouthed them as a whole. It's a decision EG had to make." Two days after being fired, Fields announced his retirement in an interview .

The end of his pro-gaming career came where it had began. In sixth grade he'd heard about Starcraft from a friend, and after playing casually for a few years found a new focus.

"I was 15 or 16 and stumbled across websites like Team Liquid, and that's how I realised the competitive side even existed. I figured I wasn't much of a gamer, but the fact I kept coming back to this thing [meant it] might be worth investing more time into and getting serious about."

Fields wasn't an instant success, but one tournament win changed everything. "The Korean team eSTRO announced a North American tournament with prize money, but also part of it was you'd be evaluated to come over and get a spot in the team house in Korea and become a pro-gamer. I won that, and they chose me from all the top-placing players to come over and join the team."

The life of a professional gamer in South Korea, the Starcraft Mecca, is one of grinding practice.

"I've never experienced a boot camp," says Fields. "But I'd imagine it's the same thing except you exchange physical labour for playing Starcraft. It's very, very intense. Especially back in the Brood War team houses, you basically just play for 12 hours a day with one or two days off a month – we had six to seven hours scheduled sleeping time, so not even the recommended eight hours or whatever. An hour for each meal, everyone had chores, and the rest was practice."

"I wouldn't say it was enjoyable, because I don't think doing anything that much could be 'fun' fun. But it felt good to do. I felt like I was working hard towards something I cared about, and that was satisfying."

The improvement in his play meant Fields started winning plenty of foreign tournaments, but the release of Starcraft II and the fresh start it offered was too tempting – he was one of the first Brood War pros to switch. "It was clearly the future."

The change in game came with a host of others. Fields changed his preferred race, abandoning Terran in favour of Zerg, and by the end of 2010 had signed for the US team Evil Geniuses on one of the nascent sport's biggest contracts. Though he stayed in Korea for another six months or so, come 2011 he was back in America.

"I ended up coming back to the US because, as part of the scene, we knew tournaments like the North American Star League and IGN Pro League were about to open up and at the time their plans were to host North American-only competition. And the competition at the time was kind of a joke for me, I could have beaten any of them very comfortably."

Big talk but, in patches at least, he made good on it – over two hotstreaks in this period, Fields won five major tournaments as well as regular top-four finishes. "During the second run, the IEM, MLG, Asus competitions, I think that was me playing at my best."

Fields has always been admired for his 'macro' play, the art of crushing an opponent over time by building a greater economy, and on his stream you can hear the keys being hit hundreds of times every minute – the pressure behind every clack sounds even.

"Idra's the sort of athlete who, if you opened up a playbook, and there was the recommended fundamental playstyle … he does that, but refined to such an incredible degree that it almost feels like he's cheating," says Sean Plott.

"You won't see those big flairy risks taken by him, it's just clean and elegant. Like a master chef with a simple menu. In his kitchen, every single order of food is on time and perfect, never misses one, never messes one up. It's not a creative menu but that doesn't matter."

In 2012, Fields suffered a dip in form. But his profile remained high because, while tournament wins and placements are crucial to pro-gaming careers, just as important is streaming – which means, for the most part, broadcasting live practice sessions with commentary. Every time Fields streams, he instantly attracts an audience of thousands, at times hitting tens of thousands; not just because he's brilliant at the game, but because he's a born analyst.

Watching is an almost irresistible tug on the voyeur inside every viewer, and the chat is an interface with the public that's as up-close and personal as online gets. Meaning that, as well as fans, pro-gamers constantly have to deal with trolls and mendacious yahoos.

"Players now do have to deal with more of that side and it's harder," says Breslau. "But there is a level of professionalism where if these guys want to be paid the big bucks – and Idra says himself he was top two or top three in the world in terms of salary – they have to act in a certain manner."

The world of eSports has at least one root in an amateur culture that prizes abuse, which is why insults that take the breath away are more common than you might expect. Text chat has never been very good at tone, and when what you say is not what you mean, it's easy to cross the line between tasteless and grossly offensive.

"The biggest response is that I'm silly to expect people not to take me literally," says Fields. "But I feel that sarcasm and exaggeration and hyperbole – these are established aspects of language and communication. I think if I say that I want someone to get cancer, it's pretty clear that I don't actually want them to get cancer in real life. But a lot of people seem to disagree with that, so maybe I'm the one who needs to reconsider."

"I did understand EG's decision because I generated a lot of negative attention for them," continues Fields. "The way my persona works, the way I get attention from the public is in a lot of negative ways and that will always be walking a bit of a tightrope. My only problem was there was never any escalation, I'd only ever been fined $500 way back for an unrelated incident, so I didn't realise things were getting worse."

I asked EG's CEO Alex Garfield about that. "We're not the kind of company that likes to force people to do things. I as a person am not like that. We have the right to fine players, and Greg was fined quite a few more times and for more money than he says, but ultimately fines are only one part of motivating players to behave professionally. The bottom line is that you can only tell someone 'this will never happen again' so many times."

Talking to Garfield also suggests other sides to this story; his words carry the careful weight of a man who, after years of supporting a controversial star turn, finally had to cut him loose. The professionalism teams like EG are bringing to eSports is what makes players like Idra high earners and is also what did for him.

It is an ignominious end, nevertheless, to a great pro-gaming career – and a sad one. During our interview, Fields takes great pains to clarify the distinctions between who he was insulting in that forum post.

"Not the fans and genuine supporters of eSports, but the ones who are just there for the drama mongering. And in a way I did, and still do, get paid to treat them like shit because that's what they find entertaining, that's what they tune in to watch and get off on."

There is the young man's conviction – and this is a vein running right through the Starcraft community – that being right is more important than anything else. And that I am right.

In the end, that's why Fields is fascinating. Not just because he's a human angle on a new and little-understood industry, but also because he's a human, angled; somewhat inexplicable, a living contradiction. An exceptional and disciplined intelligence, capable of such childish outbursts it's almost comical. Almost.

Fields is embarking on a career commentating and streaming, and doesn't see a return to competitive action. "There was an aspect of burnout to my decision. I don't see myself redeveloping that longing to play."

Perhaps it is the pro-gamer's fishbowl; an always-on life with live feedback, replayed and dissected daily. "I would almost say he's hardened," finishes Plott. "And in some ways doesn't care as much as he used to."

At several points, Fields talks about his persona; a self-creation. Yet his actions often suggest much less craft. The ultimate goal of a pro-gamer's life is to win in the white heat of tournament competition, and of the many hopefuls few enough make it. Perhaps to be one of them, even for a short time, burns a little piece of you in return. Greg Fields is 23.

• Games competitions
• Games
• PC
• Strategy games
• South Korea
• United States

Diner Dash, Soundhalo, Hangouts, Whisper, Sonic the Hedgehog, DK Quiz, Lego Star Wars: The Yoda Chronicles, Moshcam and more

It's time for our weekly roundup of brand new and notable apps for Android smartphones and tablets.

It covers apps and games, with the prices referring to the initial download: so (Free) may mean (Freemium) in some cases. The equivalent iOS roundup will be published later in the day.

For now, read on for this week's Android selection (and when you've finished, check out previous Best Android apps posts).

Billed as "the world's #1 hit time management game", Diner Dash has been hugely popular on computers and iOS devices alike down the years. Now it's on Android too courtesy of publisher PlayFirst. The game involves seating, serving and saying tara to diners as efficiently as possible to collect tips. It's a freemium game, so in-app purchases are used for boosts and upgrades.

Google moved to unify its Android messaging apps last week with Hangouts, offering instant messaging, photo-sharing, emoji and video calls in one package. It's also available for computers and iOS.

Soundhalo is an app for live music concerts, selling audio and video files of performances by artists, starting with two London gigs earlier in May by Alt-J. It's pitched as a way to buy the gig you've just seen as you walk out of the venue, but the bigger market is likely to be people who didn't attend.

Whisper has been popular on iOS: an "anonymous social network that lets you share confessions, express yourself and meet new people". New anonymous people, obviously. The idea being an app where you can post your genuine, unshareable-with-friends thoughts, for a wider audience.

Sega is certainly cashing in on its fleet-footed blue hedgehog: the original Sonic game follows two episodes of Sonic 4, Sonic CD and Sonic Jump onto Android. The famous Mega Drive game has been accurately ported across, with extra Tails & Knuckles, a remastered soundtrack and a new Time Attack mode.

This is the work of book publisher DK: a trivia app covering music, film, food, sports and numerous other topics. You can play alone or challenge friends Draw Something-style, with virtual coins (earned or bought via IAP) helping you unlock different question packs.

Several friends have practically foamed at the mouth upon being informed of the release of this game. It's the latest offshoot from Lego Star Wars, which sees you battling through eight levels as either Yoda or Count Dooku.

Launched by Scottish Natural Heritage, this tourism app showcases the sights to be seen when travelling by train in Scotland. That means four-minute audio chapters narrated by broadcasters Fiona MacDonald and Mark Stephen, complemented by photographs, interviews and other information.

There are lots of tower defence games on Android, it's fair to say – including a number of top-quality titles. Kingdom Rush should be able to hold its own in the crowd though: it was excellent on iOS. The game has a fantasy setting, all orcs, elves and wizards. You'll be protecting your kingdom against more than 50 enemies, with all manner of upgrades and abilities to fuel your strategy.

This is the latest children's storybook-app from Irish startup StoryToys, which turns the famous tale of Mowgli, Baloo and Bagheera into a virtual pop-up book for Android devices. Animation, voice narration and a series of accessible mini-games make it a treat for kids.

Developer PikPok's latest Android game is based on the upcoming DreamWorks Animation film Turbo. It's basically Mario Kart with snails. Well, there's a bit more to it than that, but this free-to-play game gets you to customise then race a colourful terrestrial-gastropod. In the US, there's the additional incentive of a $1m contest to be the best player.

It's a good week for Android-owning live music fans, with Moshcam joining Soundhalo on the Google Play store. This offers videos of gigs by the likes of Slash, PJ Harvey, Hot Chip, Alabama Shakes and Blondie among others, with interviews in the mix too.

One for retro gamers, this: a 1984 karate game by Jordan Mechner, who went on to create the Prince of Persia games. This is a port of the Apple II version of Karateka, which sees you going head-to-head (well, also foot-to-midriff) with a succession of enemies in a side-scrolling adventure.

Parents! Is your fridge over-festooned with marvellous, clearly-advanced and hinting-at-glory artworks by your kids? Kidpix is one of the apps hoping to help you store these paintings and scribbles. The idea: you take photos of children's artwork, add virtual frames and then save/share it.

This is the latest Dr Seuss book-app for Android, but it's fascinating for parents as well as children thanks to its theme. It's about the Yooks and the Zooks, who've fallen out over which way to eat their bread (butter side up or down?) and are in an arm's race to develop ever-more-silly weapons to use against one another. As allegories for the Cold War (but with rhymes) go, it's one of the best.

This is an inventive take on the racing genre: a "turn-based strategic racing game" with jellies instead of cars. There are tournaments to take on Facebook friends and strangers alike, as well as a fun Party Play mode for several people to play on a single device.

Children's TV character Wubbzy (he's on Nick Jr.) has been the star of a succession of apps in recent months. This new one sees you bashing robot chickens with a mallet, with two modes to suit children of different ages and abilities.

The apps world tends to have long, spiralling tails, so there's definitely space for a multiplayer horseracing strategy game where you manage stables and run horses against those of friends. Breeding and betting is also built in.

Another well-known old gaming brand pops up on Android: Fire & Forget, with racing and shooting in equal measures, a post-apocalyptic theme and 10 levels to drive (and shoot) your way through.

This is unofficial but interesting: a guide to every Star Trek TV episode and movie, offering plot descriptions and images. A good companion when digging into the Star Trek back catalogue around the release of the newest movie.

That's this week's selection, but what do you think? Make your own recommendations, or give your views on the apps above, by posting a comment.

• Android
• Apps
• Smartphones
• Tablet computers
• Mobile
• Mobile phones
• Google

Metro: Last Light nukes the opposition, knocking Dead Island: Riptide off the top spot

UKIE Games Charts © compiled by GfK Chart-Track

• Games
• Xbox
• Wii
• PlayStation

Velocity, not volume is increasingly what determines the hardware and software needs of data-processing organisations
• More from the Guardian's series on big data

Critics of big data are picking holes in its validity as a concept, but there is a problem with their arguments around data volume - it is speed, not size, that defines big data in 2013.

Big data is among the computing neologisms du jour, and a technology conference in 2013 is rarely considered complete without a smattering of uses, typically accompanied by further volume-related qualifiers (tsunamis of big data being by far the worst offender I have encountered - other suggestions welcome).

Despite having been in use for a few years now, settling on just what is meant by big data appears to be a complex task. As is their wont, various computing gurus (that one isn't confined to tech circles) have come up with initialisms to summarise what they see as its key constituent parts.

The 'four Vs' definition is probably the most widely recognised - the letters standing for volume, velocity, variety and variability - and from a technical perspective, this is actually a reasonable effort, but a number of otherwise excellent articles currently making the rounds deal only with the first V.

A healthy dose of scepticism is a must when dealing with emergent terms in the technology sector, but in this particular case, commentators would do well to delve a little deeper before setting out to dismantle big data as a concept.

Last month we re-posted an interesting and well-constructed argument that 'small data' - or data of the volumes most regular analysts, researchers and statisticians are used to dealing with - is actually both more relevant and more useful to the vast majority of organisations than its big cousin.

More recently, I read a well-researched article on just how infrequently the world's data powerhouses - citing Facebook and Yahoo! - actually carry out an individual piece of analysis on data that would not fit onto a laptop or desktop machine you could pick up from your local electronics retailer.

The points made in both of these articles are eloquently put and there no obvious holes to be found in the arguments' logic. The problem is, both authors dismiss big data on the grounds of volume alone, ignoring the fact that it is speed, not size that is increasingly driving desire for software and hardware improvements at data-processing organisations.

The need for genuine real-time results is integral to ever more analytics use cases. There are, of course, industries where gathering, analysing and reacting to data is nothing new - take high frequency trading, for example. But the list is growing, with information security, marketing and telecommunications just three examples of sectors where speed, more than volume, has been identified as a limiting factor.

Last week Paul Maritz, CEO of EMC Pivotal, described a marketing paradise in which customers in a store are tracked and served offers while they shop - insights put into action instantly, rather than retroactively, as we currently see with deals offered at the point of sale.

Leaving aside for now the numerous privacy and intrusion questions that arise from such a scenario, the message here is that data-centric companies seeking to gain a competitive edge have marked out velocity as the new battleground.

In fact it is just as fallacious to consider speed in isolation from volume as it is to do the reverse - the pair form two sides of a speed-data-time triangle. As the values for data and time tend towards infinity and zero respectively, the software and hardware requirements ramp up.

In short, once you really consider the technical challenges facing CTOs, data scientists and others embedded in this field, the idea that big data be dismissed as a term because it's not all that big is - however well presented - verging on straw man territory.

Which side of the big data debate do you sit on? Join the discussion in the comments below, or have your say via Twitter to me directly @jburnmurdoch or to the official @GuardianData account.

• Big data
• Computing
• Yahoo
• Google
• Facebook

Intel shunned ARM processors and played virtually no role in the smartphone revolution, but now Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO reveals Steve Jobs asked Intel to build the iPhone microprocessor

CEO valedictions follow a well-known script: My work is done here, great team, all mistakes are mine, all good deeds are theirs, I leave the company in strong hands, the future has never been brighter … It's an opportunity for a leader to offer a conventional and contrived reminiscence, what the French call la toilette des souvenirs (which Google crudely translates as toilet memories instead of the affectionate and accurate dressing up memories).

For his farewell, Paul Otellini, Intel's departing CEO, chose the interview format with the Atlantic Monthly's senior editor Alexis Madrigal. They give us a long (5,700+ words) but highly readable piece titled Paul Otellini's Intel: can the company that built the future survive it?

Intel's outgoing CEO Paul Otellini. Photograph: Guardian.co.uk

The punctuation mark at the title's end refers to the elephantine question in the middle of Otellini's record: Why did Intel miss out on the smartphone? Why did the company that so grandly dominates the PC market sit by while ARM architecture totally, and perhaps irretrievably, took over the new generation of phones – and most other embedded applications?

According to Otellini, it was the result of Intel's inertia: It took a while to move the machine.

Madrigal backfills this uneasy explanation with equal unease:

"The problem, really, was that Intel's x86 chip architecture could not rival the performance per watt of power that designs licensed from ARM based on RISC architecture could provide. Intel was always the undisputed champion of performance, but its chips sucked up too much power. In fact, it was only this month that Intel revealed chips that seem like they'll be able to beat the ARM licencees on the key metrics."

Note the tiptoeing: Intel's new chips "seem like" they'll be fast enough and cheap enough. Madrigal charitably fails to note how Intel, year after year, kept promising to beat ARM at the mobile game, and failed to do so. (See these 2010, 2011 and 2012 Monday Notes.) Last year, Intel was still at it, dismissively predicting "no future for ARM or any of its competitors". Tell that to ARM Holdings, whose licencees shipped 2.6bn chips in the first quarter of this year.

Elsewhere in the article, Otellini offers a striking revelation: Fresh from anointing Intel as the microprocessor supplier for the Mac, Steve Jobs came back and asked Intel to design and build the CPU for Apple's upcoming iPhone. (To clarify the chronology, the iPhone was announced in early January, 2007; the CPU conversation must have taken place two years prior, likely before the June, 2005 WWDC where Apple announced the switch to x86. See Chapter 36 of Walter Isaacson's Jobs bio for more.)

Intel passed on the opportunity [emphasis mine]:

"We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we'd done it […]

Indeed, the world would have been different. Apple wouldn't be struggling through a risky transition away from Samsung, its frenemy CPU supplier; the heart of the iPhone would be made In America; Intel would have supplied processors for more than 500m iOS devices, sold even more such chips to other handset makers to become as major a player in the smartphone (and tablet) space as it is in the PC world.

Supply your own adjectives …

Indulging briefly in more What If reverie, compare the impact of Intel's wrong turn to a better one: How would the world look like if, at the end of 1996, Gil Amelio hadn't returned Apple back to Steve Jobs? (My recollection of the transaction's official wording could be faulty.)

So, again, what happened?

At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."

A little later, Otellini completes the train of thought with a wistful reverie, a model of la toilette des souvenirs:

"The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut," he said. "My gut told me to say yes."

The frank admission is meant to elicit respect and empathy. Imagine being responsible for missing the opportunity to play a commanding role in the smartphone revolution.

But perhaps things aren't as simple as being a "gut move" short of an epochal $100bn opportunity.

Intel is a prisoner of its x86 profit model and Wall Street's expectations. It's dominant position in the x86 space give Intel the pricing power to command high margins. There's no such thing in the competitive ARM space, prices are lower. Even factoring in the lower inherent cost of the somewhat simpler devices (simpler for the time being; they'll inevitably grow more complex), the profit-per-ARM chip is too thin to sustain Intel's business model.

(Of course, this assumes a substitution, an ARM chip that displaces an x86 device. As it turns out, the smartphone business could have been largely additive, just as we now see with tablets that cannibalise classical PCs.)

Another factor is the cultural change that would have been required were Intel to have gotten involved in making ARM devices. As both the designer and manufacturer of generation after generation of x86 microprocessors, Intel can wait until they're good and ready before they allow PC makers to build the chips into their next products. The ARM world doesn't work that way. Customers design their own chips (often called a System on a Chip, or SoC), and then turn to a semiconductor manufacturer (a foundry) to stamp out the hardware. Taking orders from others isn't in Intel's DNA.

And now?

The answer might lie in another French expression: L'histoire ne repasse pas les plats. Google Translate is a bit more felicitous this time: History does not repeat itself. I prefer the more literal image – history doesn't come around offering seconds – but the point remains: Will there be seconds at the smartphone repast?

Officially, Intel says its next generation of x86 processors will (finally!) topple the ARM regime, that their chips will offer more computing might with no cost or power dissipation penalty. In their parlance "the better transistor" (the basic unit of logic processing) will win.

I doubt it. The newer x86 devices will certainly help Microsoft and its OEMs make Windows 8 devices more competitive, but that won't prevent the spread of ARM in the legion of devices on which Windows is irrelevant. For these, Intel would have to adopt ARM, a decision Otellini has left to the new tandem leadership of Brian Krzanich (CEO) and Renée James (president). Will they stick to the old creed, to the belief Intel's superior silicon design and manufacturing technology will eventually overcome the disadvantages of the more complex x86 architecture? Or will they take the plunge?

They might be helped by a change in the financial picture.

In 2006, that is after throwing Jobs in Samsung's arms (pun unintended), Intel sold its ARM business, the XScale line, to Marvell. The reason was purely financial: for similar capital expenditures (costly fabs), ARM processors achieved much lower per-unit profit, this is because of the much more competitive scene than in the x86 space.

Now, if Intel really wants to get a place at the smartphone table with new and improved x86 devices, the company will have to price those to compete with established ARM players. In other words, Intel will have to accept the lower margins they shunned in 2006. Then, why not do it with the ARM-based custom processors Apple and others require?

– JLG@mondaynote.com

----------------------------

(I'll confess a weakness for the Atlantic and, in particular, for its national correspondent James Fallows, a literate geek and instrument-rated pilot who took iy upon himself to live in Beijing for a while and, as a result, can speak more helpfully about China than most members of the Fourth Estate. Going back to last week's reference to the Gauche Caviar, when my Café de Flore acquaintances fall into their usual rut of criticising my adopted country for its lack of "culture", I hold out that the Atlantic – which sells briskly at the kiosk next door – is one of many examples of American journalistic excellence.

And, if you're interested in more strange turns, see this other string Alexis Madrigal piece in the same Atlantic: The time Exxon went into the semiconductor business (and failed). I was there, briefly running an Exxon Information Systems subsidiary in France and learning the importance of corporate culture.) – JLG

• Intel
• Smartphones
• Steve Jobs
• Apple
• Samsung
• Microsoft
• Computing
• Telecommunications industry
• Telecoms

Internet measurement techniques need a total overhaul – new methods make it hard for incumbent players to stay in the game

The web user is the most watched consumer ever. For tracking purposes, every large site drops literally dozens of cookies in the visitor's browser. In the most comprehensive investigation on the matter, The Wall Street Journal found that each of the 50 largest websites in the United Sates, weighing 40% of the US page views, installed an average of 64 files on a user device. (See the WSJ's What They Know series and a Monday Note about tracking issues.) As for server logs, they record every page sent to the user and they tell with great accuracy which parts of a page collect most of the reader's attention.

But when it comes to measuring a digital viewer's commercial value, sites rely on old-fashioned panels, that is limited user population samples. Why?

Panels are inherited. They go back to the old days of broadcast radio when, in order to better sell advertising, dominant networks wanted to know which station listeners tuned in to during the day. In the late thirties, Nielsen Company made a clever decision: it installed a monitoring box in 1,000 American homes. Twenty years later, Nielsen did the same, on a much larger scale, with broadcast television. The advertising world was happy to be fed with plenty of data — mostly unchallenged as Nielsen dominated the field. (For a detailed history, you can read Rating the Audience, written by two Australian media academics). As Nielsen expanded to other media (music, film, books and all sorts of polls), moving to the internet measurement sounded like a logical step. As of today, Nielsen only faces smaller competitors such as ComScore and others.

I have yet to meet a publisher who is happy with this situation. Fearing retribution, very few people talk openly about it (twisting the dials is so easy, you know…), but they all complain about inaccurate, unreliable data. In addition, the panel system is vulnerable to cheating on a massive scale. Smartypants outfits sell a vast array of measurement boosters, from fake users that will come in just once a month to be counted as "unique" (they are indeed), to more sophisticated tactics such as undetectable "pop under" sites that will rely on encrypted URLs to deceive the vigilance of panel operators. In France for instance, 20% to 30% of some audiences can be bogus — or largely inflated. To its credit, Mediametrie — the French Nielsen affiliate that produces the most watched measurements — is expending vast resources to counter the cheating, and to make the whole model more reliable. It works, but progress is slow. In August 2012, Mediametrie Net Ratings (MNR), launched a Hybrid Measure taking into account site centric analytics (server logs) to rectify panel numbers, but those corrections are still erratic. And it takes more than a month to get the data, which is not acceptable for the real-time-obsessed internet.

Publishers monitor the pulse of their digital properties on a permanent basis. In most newsrooms, Chartbeat (also imperfect, sometimes) displays the performance of every piece of content, and home pages get adjusted accordingly. More broadly, site-centric measures detail all possible metrics: page views, time spent, hourly peaks, engagement levels. This is based on server logs tracking dedicated tags inserted in each served page. But the site-centric measure is also flawed: If you use, say, four different devices — a smartphone, a PC at home, another at work, and a tablet — you will be incorrectly counted as four different users. And if you use several browsers you could be counted even more times. This inherent site-centric flaw is the best argument for panel vendors.

But, in the era of Big Data and user profiling, panels no longer have the upper hand.

The developing field of statistical pairing technology shows great promise. It is now possible to pinpoint a single user browsing the web with different devices in a very reliable manner. Say you use the four devices mentioned earlier: a tablet in the morning and the evening; a smartphone for occasional updates on the move, and two PCs (a desktop at the office and a laptop elsewhere). Now, each time you visit a new site, an audience analytics company drops a cookie that will record every move on every site, from each of your devices. Chances are your browsing patterns will be stable (basically your favorite media diet, plus or minus some services that are better fitted for a mobile device.) Not only your browsing profile is determined from your navigation on a given site, but it is also quite easy to know which sites you have been to before the one that is currently monitored, adding further precision to the measurement.

Over time, your digital fingerprint will become more and more precise. Until then, the set of four cookies is independent from each other. But the analytics firm compiles all the patterns in single place. By data-mining them, analysts will determine the probability that a cookie dropped in a mobile application, a desktop browser or a mobile web site belongs to the same individual. That's how multiple pairing works. (To get more details on the technical and mathematical side of it, you can read this paper by the founder of Drawbridge Inc.) I recently discussed these techniques with several engineers both in France and in the US. All were quite confident that such fingerprinting is do-able and that it could be the best way to accurately measure internet usage across different platforms.

Obviously, Google is best positioned to perform this task on a large scale. First, its Google Analytics tool is deployed on more than 100 million websites. And the Google Ad Planner, even in its public version, already offers a precise view of the performance of many sites in the world. In addition, as one of the engineers pointed out, Google is already performing such pairing simply to avoid showing the same ad twice to a someone using several devices. Google is also most likely doing such ranking in order to feed the obscure "quality index" algorithmically assigned to each site. It even does such pairing on a nominative basis by using its half billion Gmail accounts (425 million in June 2012) and connecting its Chrome users. As for giving up another piece of internet knowledge to Google, it doesn't sounds like a big deal to me. The search giant knows already much more about sites than most publishers do about their own properties. The only thing that could prevent Google from entering the market of public web rankings would be the prospect of another privacy outcry. But I don't see why it won't jump on it — eventually. When this happens, Nielsen will be in big trouble.

– frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

• Google
• Internet
• Digital media

Microsoft is unveiling its new console in Seattle on Tuesday. So what can we expect from the long-awaited Xbox 360 successor?

Sony's cards are on the table, now it's Microsoft's turn to show its hand. After the controversial introduction of the PlayStation 4 in February, Tuesday will see the unveiling of the next Xbox machine, which still doesn't have a name – although Infinity is a frontrunner once again. Taking place at the Microsoft HQ in Redmond, the event will be live-streamed across the globe, and should actually show us the new console – unlike Sony's rather coy non-reveal.

The industry has changed almost beyond recognition since the announcement of the Xbox 360 way back in May 2005. But somehow the console has managed to stay abreast of trends, introducing Achievements and gamer scores, perfecting the online gaming experience, and opening up its online infrastructure for an array of video-on-demand services. It has sold over 76m units worldwide, attracting over 46m users to its Xbox Live service.

So what's the plan for the 720, or Durango, or Infinity, or whatever it's called? Here are the five things we want to know. Feel free to add your own questions and concerns int he comments section.

Well, unless there's a huge upset, we have a pretty good idea of what to expect here. Rumours coming out of the development sector for several months suggest an eight-core X86 CPU operating at 1.6Ghz, a custom GPU (possibly based on the Radeon HD 8770 or HD 7790, depending on your preferred source of speculation), a 500GB HD and a Blu-ray drive. It doesn't take a super geek to work out that this is a very similar set-up to the Playstation 4, so it's all down to the nitty gritty of the architecture – the type of RAM used, the teraflops output, any memory squirreled away for OS use, that sort of thing. Oh, there have been rumours of a second GPU dedicated to multimedia functionality – ie video streaming. That would fit with the emerging idea that Microsoft wants to push this thing as a one-size-fits-all living room entertainment behemoth. Damn, I wish they would call it the Xbox Behemoth. Anyway, what we want to know is: are these specs correct, and if so, what does this AMD-fuelled architecture have that PS4 doesn't?

Ever since the leak of that suspiciously amateurish Xbox 720 document back in May 2012, we've been conditioned to expect the return of Kinect, Microsoft's, let's say divisive, motion control peripheral. Kinect 2.0, we're led to believe, will be built in to the new console, offering much more accurate cameras – thereby allowing for facial recognition and tracking of up to four players at once. There will also be improved voice recognition for when you just can't be bothered to press buttons. Does this excite you? Well, maybe not – Kinect never really got the pulses racing on Xbox 360, despite shifting more than 20m units. The tracking tech never really worked well enough, and you needed masses of space to use the thing. If these problems have been solved, then this could be interesting, although it seems we can rule out a joint implementation with Microsoft's Illumiroom 'augmented viewing' concept, which baths your viewing area in images matching the onscreen action; that's still some way off apparently.

However much of a PlayStation fan you are, you have to concede that Xbox 360 got online just right. Sure, you had to pay a subscription, but Live worked beautifully and left Sony scrabbling to catch up (Trophies, anyone?). Alongside a wonderful online gaming system, the console also offered an array of video-on-demand services, and it's likely these will be a key focus for the follow-up, too. When Xbox blogger Major Nelson announced the next-gen Xbox event back in April he stated, "On Tuesday May 21st, we'll mark the beginning of a new generation of games, TV and entertainment." In short, we can expect content partnership deals with major TV and movie corps, and maybe other entertainment features set to place the console in competition with the likes of Virgin and Sky (for example, the ability to record and store TV programmes). As for Xbox Live itself, will we get a more social lobby system, allowing for easier match-ups between friends? Can we count on cross-platform gaming against smartphone and tablet owners? And will there be a new take on Achievements?

And the biggest question of all: will the next Xbox require a constant internet connection? This would, of course, offer security benefits, but won't be... popular (greatest understatement of the year nominee 2013). Polygon reckons publishers will get to decide if their games require a constant connection, whereas Ars Technica suggests that offline fun will be available to those watching TV, Blu-ray movie discs or indulging in single-player campaigns. Hmm, what could possibly go wrong? That Polygon story also mentions the possibility of a record option, allowing gamers to easily share their game footage. Sort of like the PS4 "share" function. Gawd, are there any original ideas left in the world?

Xbox veterans are in for a thrilling time tomorrow. Rumours suggest Project Gotham Racing 5, Forza Motorports 5, Halo 5 and Fable 4. As for new – ahem – "IP", we're expecting one or maybe even two projects from Rare, and the first-person Roman hack-'em-up Ryse from Crytek, may be headed this way. Elsewhere, there are whispers that Titan the first project from Respawn Entertainment (founded by ex-Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella) could be an Xbox 720 exclusive. Likely to steal the show, though, will be the debut of Activision's Call of Duty Ghosts – the next-generation instalment in its moderately successful shooter series. My question though: what is Microsoft doing about supporting smaller studios? Xbox Live Indie Games was a huge disappointment. Let's try that again, eh?

Microsoft analyst Paul Thurot has guessed at an early November launch, with two price points: $499 for an outright purchase of the console, or a $299 option which gets you the machine but commits you to an Xbox Live subscription, possibly for two years. Microsoft has experimented with this sort of price model before, and it may be a smart way of keeping hardware costs within the budgets of gamers who would probably stump up for the online gaming service anyway. Sony hasn't given a PS4 ETA yet, beyond vaguely mumbling about Winter 2013, so can Microsoft hit the shelves first? And if so, how important will that be? The Sega Saturn just pipped the original PlayStation into Japanese stores, while Dreamcast beat PS2 to sale – neither flourished as a result. But the big gap between the Xbox 360 and PS3 certainly did help Microsoft's machine.

But just imagine if both come out in November. It'll be carnage out there...

• Xbox
• Microsoft
• Games
• United States

There are, the saying goes, two certainties in life – death and taxes – but it would pretty safe bet to add a third: Jeremy Clarkson's comments offending one group or another. The Daily Star reports that this time the motormouth has upset the mothers of small children. "When will British Airways realise that babies belong in the hold?", he tweeted. "Mine didn't fly until they were old enough to behave." Cue the usual outrage, and a little support, across the Twittersphere. "I'd rather share a cabin with 20 colicky babies than 1 Jeremy Clarkson," said one outraged punter, clearly not telling the truth.

• Jeremy Clarkson
• BBC
• Television industry
• Top Gear
• Television
• Factual TV
• Twitter

Plus, how console is still a big deal in the global games market, the rise of 'neuro-gaming' and Nintendo's forthcoming announcements

A selection of links, hand-picked by the Guardian games writers.

Less than two years after vowing to deliver on an "unprecedented partnership" with Nintendo, gaming giant EA is quiet on the Wii U front.

"We have no games in development for the Wii U currently," company spokesperson Jeff Brown told Kotaku yesterday. He did not rule out the chances of EA developing for the Wii U again. EA publishes many of gaming's biggest franchises, including Madden, The Sims, and Battlefield.

This is not a good sign for Nintendo, of course. EA may not be the gigantic force it once was when its lack of patronage effectively killed the Dreamcast, but the denial of regular big-hitters like Fifa and Battlefield is going to hurt.

Activision's market share of the boxed video game sales market climbed from 15.7 per cent in 2011 to 19.5 per cent for 2012.

That's according to data collected by Ubisoft, based on figures from NPD, GfK Chart Track and Nielsen, showing that Activision, Ubisoft, Take 2 and Microsoft were the only publishers to increase their market share.

The data also provides the best selling game brands. Can you guess the top five? It's Call of Duty, Mario, Fifa, Wii Fit and Assassin's Creed.

Major Nelson:

On the latest episode of my weekly podcast, Aaron Greenberg (IEB Chief Of Staff) drops by to share some interesting data around the video game industry. How much time are people spending gaming? How does console gaming compare to PC's and mobile? Find out the answers to that and more!

Microsoft reckons that consoles still make up 42% of the global consumer spend on games. People are forking out around $27bn on console titles, compared to $10bn on smartphone/tablet and $12bn on PC.

Nintendo has confirmed that Mario, Mario Kart and Smash Bros. will appear in a Nintendo Direct before E3. The news comes via Nintendo of America's Twitter account, which wrote "#IwataSays We will discuss new Smash Bros., 3D Mario game, Mario Kart and other Wii U titles in our #NintendoDirectNA before the start of E3."

Surprise!

How far are we from fully controlling games with our mind? VG247′s Dave Cook speaks with neuro-technology expert Zack Lynch to discuss why sensory tools like Oculus and Google Glass are the future of gaming.

This is an interesting round-up of current thinking in 'neuro-gaming' and sensory mechanics. I get virtual reality, but do you really want to touch, feel and smell game worlds? I don't want to smell Call of Duty.

The Banner Saga: Factions | TIGSource

If you like tactical games and free PvP, then you might get as addicted to the Banner Saga: Factions as I have (Factions' Steam page). It's much like playing a timed chess game with a greater depth of variety in terms of strategy, which is provided the fantasy elements of the game and its unique battle mechanics.

This is just a quick heads-up for this truly beautiful looking tactical RPG.

You can follow Press Start at Pinboard.

• Games
• Wii
• Xbox
• PlayStation
• PC

iPhone and iPad to battle for contracts worth millions of dollars, boosting their standing in corporate and government markets

Apple's mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad have been cleared for use on the US Pentagon's networks, joining Samsung and BlackBerry in the potentially huge – and tightly regulated – US military market.

That opens the door to a three-way fight between the companies for contracts worth millions of dollars and whose prestige could have benefits far beyond the defence department's networks.

On 2 May BlackBerry's Z10 smartphone and PlayBook tablet running its new BB10 software passed the Pentagon's requirements. Samsung's "Knox" version of Android, which it says will be available on its new S4 smartphone later this year, has also been approved this month.

Any device that is used will be tightly controlled using "mobile device management" software that restricts what apps can be used and installed, and limited in which networks it can connect to.

With the Pentagon looking to buy as many as 8m devices for a global network, all three companies now have high-profile approval that they can use to push for broader enterprise adoption.

For Apple, which for years before the iPhone had little penetration in corporate markets, preferring instead to focus on consumers, the nod from the most rigorous tester is a dramatic shift in its business standing. "It's a big deal," Brian White, an analyst at New York-based Topeka Capital Markets, told Bloomberg News. "Apple has had a big push into the enterprise and government. This is definitely a positive step in that initiative."

Samsung has developed "Knox", a hardened version of Android, specifically to win defence and enterprise contracts as it aims to cement its dominance of the smartphone market, where it is the largest player by volume. "The department approved the Knox STIG [Security Technical Implementation Guide] before the product is even available commercially, which we see as a positive example of close government/industry partnership delivering the latest technology to meet DoD needs," Pentagon spokesman Lt Col Damien Pickart told the Guardian.

BlackBerry's position as the prime supplier to defence organisations is under threat from its two rivals. Having carved out a niche in which its handsets were the only ones allowed to connect to US military networks, providing a lucrative niche, it is under increasing pressure from Apple and Samsung in this field. Scott Totzke, senior vice-president for BlackBerry security at the Ontario-based company, told Bloomberg: "Technical certifications are an important but only first, 'threshold' step in meeting the needs of truly secure mobile computing for government. Security, reliability and the ability to perform in crisis situations when you depend on mobility are all import hallmarks of the BlackBerry solution."

Presently the Pentagon has more than 600,000 mobile devices being used on its networks, including 470,000 BlackBerry handsets, 41,000 iPhones and iPads, and 8,700 Android-based smartphones. Many of the latter have been used principally for testing, and do not connect to its military networks.

• Apple
• iPad
• iPhone
• Mobile phones
• Smartphones
• Telecoms
• Computing
• Tablet computers
• United States

Reports claim board has approved move to buy blogging platform site that could catapult Yahoo back into top flight web firms

Marissa Mayer, the former Google executive who is now in charge of Yahoo, is poised to create yet another nothing-to-riches tale in the web industry with the $1.1bn (£720m) acquisition of the blogging site Tumblr.

Mayer called Yahoo's board together on Sunday afternoon to discuss the firm's latest attempt to regain its former glamour and reports indicated the board had given its approval. Tumblr was founded in 2007 by David Karp, then 21, in a bedroom in his mother's apartment in New York. Within a fortnight it had 75,000 users; by January 2012, there were 42m blogs on the site; today, there are about 110m, and the investors who have poured $125m into the company include Sir Richard Branson.

With a press conference due on Monday in New York's Times Square, just a couple of miles from Tumblr's headquarters, nobody expects Mayer will turn up empty-handed. According to the Wall Street Journal on Sunday evening, the Yahoo board have agreed to pay $1.1bn for Tumblr and will let it continue to operate as an independent business.

Yahoo declined to comment before the announcement, but pointed out that it would be streamed live. That is something the company has previously only done (in audio) for its quarterly financial results. For Yahoo, capturing the white-hot blogging site could catapult it back into the top flight of contenders in a web world that has become hugely more complicated since it was set up in March 1995 – before Google and nearly a decade before Facebook.

Tumblr's attraction is how easily it allows users to create their own web presence: they can go from zero to blogging in less than a minute, posting pictures and text effortlessly. Unlike Facebook, it is anonymous, yet has a powerful search engine for finding "similar" content, which is often reshared. As the network grows, that internal sharing grows and grows.

The web measurement company Quantcast says Tumblr has had 217m global users in the past month, and was the US's 24th most popular site, with about 75m American users. This gives Tumblr a user base on a par with Yahoo's own.

But for Tumblr, Yahoo could bring the ability to attract advertising it has been sorely missing. It also looks like something of a shotgun marriage. Tumblr has only a few months of cash left, according to industry gossip, and has been shopping itself around for a while. It pulled in $13m of advertising in 2012, but is spending far more than that.

Tumblr hoped to hit a $100m revenue target for 2013 but that now seems unlikely, making the purchase a potential lifesaver for investors.

Unlike Facebook, Tumblr has been slow to pull in advertisers. Speaking to the Guardian in January 2012, Karp expressed disdain for how other sites use ads. Of the Google-owned YouTube, he said: "They take your creative works – your film that you poured hours and hours of energy into – and they put ads on top of it. They make it as gross an experience to watch your film as possible. I'm sure it will contribute to Google's bottom line; I'm not sure it will inspire any creators."

Mayer was appointed 10 months ago as Yahoo's chief executive in a move that looked both audaciously clever, and a last throw of the dice. She was at the time one of the longest-serving staff at Google, having been there 13 years, but had apparently been bypassed for the high-profile jobs. Yahoo, meanwhile, had seen its revenues slump and a revolving-door procession of CEOs.

The big fear for Yahoo is that Tumblr will turn out to be an updated version of Geocities, the third most visited site on the internet when Yahoo bought it in January 1999. Though it became famous for users' garish choice of page colours, Geocities was also a resource many loved. But the company arguably never got back the $3.57bn it paid – entirely in stock, at $36 per share. In 2009, Geocities was shut down, and the entire site simply wiped from the internet. For Mayer and Karp, and millions of Tumblr users, the hope must be that history won't repeat itself.

• Yahoo
• Internet
• Tumblr
• YouTube
• Blogging
• Newspapers & magazines
• Digital media
• Social media
• United States
• Technology sector
• Technology startups
• Marissa Mayer

Plus Nokia Asha's unique selling point, the point of a Google Music service, what Apple needs at WWDC, and more

A burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Stealthy Mac OS X spyware that was digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer ID has been detected on the laptop of an Angolan activist attending a human rights conference, researchers said.

The backdoor, which is programmed to take screenshots and send them to remote servers under the control of the attackers, was spread using a spear phishing email, according to privacy activist Jacob Appelbaum. Spear phishing is a term for highly targeted emails that address the receiver by name and usually appear to come from someone the receiver knows.

Jacob Applebaum (@ioerror on Twitter) is the person who spotted all this; he says the target's life is "likely in danger" - just in case you thought this was some trivial bit of hacking.

Some Marks and Spencer customers have told the BBC of cases where the chain's contactless payment terminals have taken money from cards other than the ones intended for payment.

Card are supposed to be within about 4cm of the front of the contactless terminal to work.

But some customers say payments have been taken from cards while in purses and wallets at much greater distances.

The customers can't be certain that they never brought their wallets within that required 4cm or so. But it does point to a potential business making wallets with fine wire mesh weave to stop the cards being read by accident.

Philip Elmer DeWitt:

It's been years since Samsung reported any unit sales numbers at all for its mobile phones, so the tech press took notice Thursday when the South Korean manufacturing giant decided it had something to brag about.

Samsung Electronics co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun told reporters at an industry forum in Seoul that he is confident shipments of the Galaxy S4 will top 10m next week - four weeks after the device went on sale in 60 countries, including Korea, China, India and the US.

"That would make the mobile device the fastest-selling selling smartphone in Samsung's history," the Korea Times reported - a line echoed in the U.S. press.

That kind of coverage must drive Tim Cook crazy.

Because when Apple (AAPL) reported last September that it sold 5m iPhone 5 units in three days, analysts expressed "disappointment" and Business Insider ran this headline:
IPHONE 5 OPENING WEEKEND SALES COME IN WORSE THAN EXPECTED

And what was its headline Friday?

Samsung's S4 Starts Strong: 10 Million Units In Less Than A Month

Despite advertising 16GB of internal storage, the Samsung Galaxy S4 only offers roughly 9GB of user available storage highlighted by the BBC Watchdog exposé. The Samsung flagship does offer microSD card expansion options, but early purchasers have complained about the memory discrepancy.

"We appreciate this issue being raised and we will improve our communications," said a Samsung spokesperson to CNET UK. "We are reviewing the possibility to secure more memory space through further software optimisation."

The interesting thing about this isn't that there's a difference between the stated storage and what you get, but that buyers are actually complaining about it. One wonders how much Samsung will be able to claw back through that "optimisation". And how much memory Google's "pure" S4 (sold via Google) has. (Thanks @Avro for the link.)

Simon Phipps, president of the Open Source Initiative, on Google's VP8 licensing proposal:

You'll need to provide your personal information to Google to get this license, and section 9 makes clear the company may well use it at some point to contact you and even use your name in its publicity, according to section 15.

That restriction is probably tolerable for a corporation that can execute the agreement once for all products and staff, but for an open source project it's a big problem. Open source communities may not have a legal entity able to sign on behalf of the community, either because there's no actual legal entity or because the community of developers has too loose a relationship with any legal entity to be counted as the equivalent employees. By requiring individual, nontransferrable registration, Google is erecting a barrier that at the very least will provoke suspicion from open source projects.

Open University professor Tony Hirst:

As John Naughton feels obliged to remind folk every now and again, the web is not the internet. Because we all know that for many people, Facebook apparently is. Or Google is.

And as anyone following my tweets over the last year or two will know, I've started finding Google more and more irksome.

It's not just that the one or two people I know who use Google Plus (Google+?) are now all but lost to me as sources of neat ideas because I don't do Gooplus and it doesn't do RSS…

Keep reading. It's quite a list of points with a killer endline.

Ben Thompson:

Asha… has worse specifications than a cheap Android phone, and a much worse app selection. Thus it has been largely ignored by a tech press that considers little more than features and price.

However, finding a market is about finding a new axis of differentiation. In the case of low-end smartphones, are there things that matter beyond price and performance?

Consider again where Asha will be sold: India, Africa, Latin America – all have markets where mobile phones are the primary form of computing, as well as areas without consistent electricity. In such markets, nothing matters more than battery life.

And Asha has that in spades. In fact, the Asha range has sold more phones in the past three quarters than Windows Phone. (Also, bonus point for the title of the post.)

Marcus Taylor:

When I go to Google in search of music, it's fair to say that the results I'm served are exceptionally poor.

In this instance, the results that Google serve me do not match my search intent. I want to download Incubus' album – but instead Google is pointing me in the direction of illegal download sites, music videos, and a streaming platform.

To paraphrase Google's mission statement, they want to offer me the most relevant result in as few clicks as possible – and at the moment there are no legal and relevant results within 3-4 clicks away. Surely Google can do better?

So here is where I think we're heading. Please note that these are photo-shopped images, and not actual screenshots.

His suggestion is that Google Play Music All Access results will be pushed to the top of music search results - as happens with lots of other Google properties. One has to wonder about the antitrust implications.

Incredible colour footage of 1920s London shot by an early British pioneer of film named Claude Friese-Greene, who made a series of travelogues using the colour process his father William - a noted cinematographer - was experimenting with. It's like a beautifully dusty old postcard you'd find in a junk store, but moving.

.

Justin Williams:

With WWDC just a few weeks away, I thought it'd be beneficial to the Internet at large to compile a working list of everything that is expected of Apple during their Keynote and subsequent "State of the Union" addresses in order to appease the Internet.

He left off "$100 mini iPhone in five colours". What sort of appeasement is this?

You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on Pinboard

To suggest a link, either add it below or tag it with @gdntech on the free Delicious service.

• Microsoft
• Apple
• Google

Eight in 10 parents polled by headteachers say issues around pornography should form part of sex education lessons

Many parents believe schools should teach children about the dangers of pornography as soon as they are old enough to use the internet, a survey suggests.

It reveals that the majority of parents do not want it to be left to them alone to educate their youngsters about the issue, and a large proportion think pupils as young as five or six should be given lessons on the subject.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT), which conducted the poll, said many young people were exposed to explicit materials online and on mobile phones, and needed to know how to cope.

The survey, which questioned about 1,000 parents, found that six in 10 are worried, or very worried, about their children seeing violent or sexual material on the web. But the poll also reveals that the majority (80%) of are confident in protecting their children online.

While just over half (51%) say pupils should not be taught about the dangers of pornography until they are teenagers, more than two in five (42%) said they should be educated as soon as they are old enough to access the internet.

More than eight in 10 (83%) say issues around pornography should form part of sex education lessons. The same proportion thought that parents and schools should take joint responsibility for teaching children about the issue, with just 13% of parents saying it is the parents' job alone and 4% saying it should be left to schools.

Hobby said: "There is no place for explicit materials in the classroom or school, even in the course of teaching about their dangers, but many young people are exposed to such materials on the internet and phones. In the face of this young people need to know how to cope with and avoid these distorted views of relationships."

He added that it was reassuring to see that parents believe that schools are part of the support network for their children.

Stephen Watkins, head of Mill Field primary school in Leeds, said schools should speak to children about explicit material in an age-appropriate manner. He said he "would not dream" of talking to young children about pornography.

"We don't talk about pornography, we do say to them if you see images of naked bodies and body parts then tell us. You start at a low level, it is about raising awareness that not everything that comes up on a computer screen should be there."

The NAHT is not the first group to raise concerns about access to explicit images. This month Ofsted called for secondary school pupils to learn more about pornography, relationships, sexuality and staying safe, rather than just the mechanics of reproduction.

It suggested that many schools were failing to give pupils decent sex and relationships lessons, which could leave them open to sexual exploitation or inappropriate behaviour.

The findings came just weeks after a teachers' union called for pupils to be given lessons on the dangers of pornography. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers passed a resolution at its annual conference that warned that schools must ensure pornography does not become seen as so normal that youngsters expect it to be part of everyday life.

• Pornography
• Sex education
• Schools
• Children
• National curriculum
• Sex
• Primary schools
• Secondary schools
• Teaching
• Curriculums
• Internet
• Opinion polls
• Sexuality
• Sexual health
• Ofsted

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PM urges havens to 'get our own houses in order' before G8 summit in June, where he claims tax avoidance will be a priority

David Cameron has written to the leaders of Britain's offshore tax havens stressing the need to "get our own houses in order" as he pushes for international action to tackle avoidance schemes.

In a message to 10 crown dependencies and British overseas territories Cameron said he backed their right to be low tax jurisdictions but insisted that rules needed to be set and enforced fairly.

The move comes ahead of next month's G8 summit in Northern Ireland, where Cameron will push for an agreement aimed at clamping down on tax evasion and avoidance.

He said he wanted the G8 to "knock down the walls of company secrecy" to reveal who really owns and controls firms.

Cameron's initiative came as he prepared to raise the issue of corporate tax dodging with Google's boss, Eric Schmidt at a meeting in Downing Street.

The internet fim's executive chairman is a member of Cameron's business advisory group, which has its regular quarterly meeting on Monday, just days after Google was given a mauling by a House of Commons committee over its tax affairs.

The group holds its meetings behind closed doors and Downing Street does not reveal the content of its deliberations but a source inside No 10 confirmed that tax will be up for discussion, insisting that "nothing is off the table" when Cameron meets the group of 16 business leaders.

The PM's letter calling for more transparency about tax information and the ownership of companies was sent to leaders in Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Anguilla, Montserrat, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.

Cameron wrote: "As you know, I have made fighting the scourge of tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance a priority for the G8 summit which the UK is hosting next month.

"With one month to go, this is the critical moment to get our own houses in order. I am looking to all the overseas territories and crown dependencies to continue to work in partnership with the UK in taking the lead on two critical issues: tax information exchange and beneficial ownership."

He told the leaders: "I respect your right to be lower tax jurisdictions. I believe passionately in lower taxes as a vital driver of growth and prosperity for all.

"But lower taxes are only sustainable if what is owed is actually paid – and if the rules to achieve this are set and enforced fairly to create a level playing field right across the world. There is no point in dealing with tax evasion in one country if the problem is simply displaced to another."

He welcomed commitments made by the territories to exchange tax information but said there was also a need to improve its quality and accuracy.

"Put simply, that means we need to know who really owns and controls each and every company," he said.

"This goes right to the heart of the ambition of Britain's G8 to knock down the walls of company secrecy.

"Some of you have already led the way with public commitments to produce action plans on beneficial ownership – and I hope those who have yet to can do so as quickly as possible.

"Getting the right content in these plans will now be critical. These will need to provide for fully resourced and properly managed centralised registries, that are freely available to law enforcement and tax collectors, and contain full and accurate details on the true ownership and control of every company."

Ed Miliband has pledged to write new rules to tackle corporate tax dodgers if he wins the next election, even if there is no international consensus for action.

In an interview with the Observer, he said Cameron's government was "dragging its feet" on the issue.

• David Cameron
• Tax avoidance
• Corporate governance
• Bermuda
• Americas
• G8
• British Virgin Islands
• Google
• Eric Schmidt
• Cayman Islands
• Ed Miliband
• Gibraltar
• Europe
• Turks and Caicos Islands
• Jersey
• Channel Islands
• Isle of Man