Chinese province bans adults looking at youngsters’ mobiles
Adults banned from searching children's computers or phones under a new law passed in Chongqing, southwest China It is a ruling that teenagers around the world will regard with a certain amount of envy. Parents in one Chinese city are to be prevented from snooping on their children's online activity and text messages. Adults, including family members, are banned from searching through children's computers or phones under a new regional law passed in Chongqing, southwest China, state media reported today. The regulation outlaws snooping into their emails, text messages, web chats, and browser history. The regulation is designed to protect the rights of children, but is surprising given widespread concern in China about excessive internet use among young people and their access to unsuitable material. Psychologists have sought to have internet addiction listed as a clinical disorder and treatment camps have sprung up across the country. The Chongqing Evening Post described the new regulation, adopted on Friday by officials in Chongqing, as the first of its kind in the country. Other Chinese media said it expanded an existing national rule. But both experts and children doubted whether it would have an impact in practice. Lu Yulin, a professor at the China Youth University of Political Science, told China Daily that children were unlikely to take their parents to court
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Chinese province bans adults looking at youngsters' mobiles
Glastonbury festival: The full lineup as a spreadsheet
Glastonbury festival kicks off today, with Gorillaz replacing U2 as the Friday headliners. Check out the bands that will be playing and plan your weekend here • Get the data Glastonbury opened its doors to festivalgoers this morning. Revellers at Worthy Farm can look forward to a weekend packed with bands, including Damon Albarn's side-project Gorillaz, who hastily took a headlining spot after U2 were forced to pull out last month when Bono suffered a spinal injury. But Glastonbury is about so much more than the headline acts. Who else will be rocking Worthy Farm over the weekend of 23-27 June? Now the official Glastonbury site has put up the full timetable of acts - we've excised them for you and put them into a spreadsheet. Check out the embedded table, or download the spreadsheet, for the full line-up across all the main stages and venues. Last year, @RichardAblewhite created a magnificent visual mash-up by combining the Datablog's Glastonbury dataset with content from several other sites. He's created another excellent mash-up for this year's Glastonbury festival , which together with this dataset from Clashfinder General and the Orange GlastoNav app will enable data-savvy festivalgoers to plan their weekend with military precision.
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Glastonbury festival: The full lineup as a spreadsheet
HP’s Palm purchase: the analysis
HP seems to be buying a route into the mobile phone market with its purchase of Palm, but it could also plan to emulate Apple's strategy with tablets and other media devices Was it a good idea for Hewlett-Packard, the world's biggest computer company, to buy Palm – which now specialises in mobile phones – for $1.2bn? The initial response from analysts has been as mixed as you'd expect – see the comments from Forrester, Gartner, IDC, Informa, and Ovum below – but almost everything depends on what HP intends to do with its new company. At one extreme, the takeover could just involve a change from a Palm that's struggling in the smartphone business to a Palm with the cash (and the resulting market confidence) to create a successful smartphone business. That's IDC's basic view
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iPad to be available in the UK through Vodafone, O2 and Orange
Prices will be announced on 10 May, after high demand delayed launch dates outside the US Vodafone, O2 and Orange have all signed up to supply the iPad to customers in the UK from next month. Earlier today Apple admitted that high demand for the tablet computer means that its launch outside the US has been delayed until May . The Californian company will announce prices and open pre-orders on 10 May. Apple is producing two versions of the device – one that only has short-range Wi-Fi technology and one that can access both Wi-Fi and 3G mobile phone networks
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iPad to be available in the UK through Vodafone, O2 and Orange
Apple v Google: the gloves are starting to come off
When Apple decided to sue Taiwanese phone manufacturer HTC , it was hard to see it as anything other than a broadside at Google. After all, HTC makes Nexus One handset, and Steve Jobs has previously told staff that he's angry because "We did not enter the search business... they entered the phone business" . The ever-growing conflict between the two is something I mentioned on Monday , and plenty of people have weighed in on the subject, including former Sun Microsystems boss Jonathan Schwartz , who said that any company launching a software patent lawsuit was basically undertaking an "act of desperation". But most of the action so far has been from Apple's side - the accusations about its rivals (including Nokia, which has in turn accused the iPhone maker of "legal alchemy" ); the offended and aggrieved statements by Jobs and so on. So where's Google in this fight? Is it just staying quiet? Step forward Tim Bray , the Canadian technologist best known for his work on XML. Bray - who has written eloquently on software patents before and who left Sun himself last month - announced over the weekend that he was joining Google's Android team.
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Apple v Google: the gloves are starting to come off
Google executive: ‘Desktops will be irrelevant in three years’
Google's prediction jumps on an obvious trend - but the implications betray the company's growing hubris It's likely that you don't know a lot about John Herlihy, the head of global advertising operations for Google. He's not a publicly-recognised figure in the same way as Eric Schmidt, Larry Page or Sergey Brin, and - like many vice-presidents at big corporations - he doesn't get a great deal of time in the limelight. But he is certainly basking in it today, after a series of comments - reported by Silicon Republic - caused a stir around the web. "In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant," he told an audience at University College Dublin. "In Japan, most research is done today on smartphones, not PCs." "Mobile makes the world's information universally accessible. Because there's information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that's why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models - ubiquity first, revenue later." Various camps reacted in a mixture of ways.
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Google executive: 'Desktops will be irrelevant in three years'
In praise of… Tetris
Since it was first invented 25 years ago, the video game Tetris has undertaken an epic journey. Developed deep inside the Soviet Academy of Sciences by a 29-year-old artificial intelligence researcher, Alexey Pajitnov, who was playing around with mathematical puzzles, it has become, more than a quarter of a century later, the king of casual games . Tetris has travelled from the computing equivalent of the stone age – a Soviet copy of an American minicomputer – to the Nintendo Game Boy and now to the phone – recently celebrating its 100 millionth download to a mobile. The concept is so simple – a series of differently shaped blocks fall from the top of the screen, which the player has to arrange in a line without gaps – that its durability has taken everyone by surprise, not least its inventor, Mr Pajitnov . There was no scoring or levels in the original version, but once you start playing you can not stop. Operating on the basic commercial principle that if he was addicted, others would be too, Mr Pajitnov began what became a mammoth quest to get the game marketed internationally. Initially the rights were owned by the Soviet state, and without a deal with Nintendo – and the help of Henk Rogers, a Dutch game designer – the game could have faded into obscurity, as many other games of the 1980s did. Mr Pajitnov remains surprised to this day about the success of his computer doodling. But no one in 25 years has come up with anything better. Tetris Games Computing Mobile phones PC guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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In praise of… Tetris
Hard times turn us to gaming, but not everyone will be a winner | Victor Keegan
Companies may look to cash in on the upcoming mobile market rather than invest millions in video games. Will it work though? Monopoly – the game – has had a long and complicated pedigree.
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Hard times turn us to gaming, but not everyone will be a winner | Victor Keegan
Apple looks for iSlate mobile partner
iPhone creator believed to be in talks with UK phone networks over subsidies for the much-anticipated tablet computer Apple is understood to have approached several UK mobile phone networks, including Orange, about selling its forthcoming tablet computer to British customers. The device, rumoured to be called the iSlate, has created a buzz among mobile phone operators not seen since Apple pitted several networks against each other in the race for the exclusive British rights to sell the iPhone in 2007. That deal was clinched by O2 at the last minute when it barged aside Orange and Vodafone. The Californian technology company is expected to unveil the iSlate at an event in San Francisco on 27 January and it is likely to be on sale in the US in March. British gadget fans will have to wait until much later in the spring, according to UK sources, but the price of the device could be reduced if Apple can persuade a mobile phone company to subsidise it. Rumours abound about the iSlate but it is expected to have a 10-inch touchscreen, no keyboard and allow users to surf the web, watch TV shows and read digitised magazines and newspapers. While it is expected to have short-range wi-fi access to connect to the web, it will also have the ability to connect to mobile phone networks, meaning users will have to sign up to a mobile broadband package to get the most out of the iSlate. Already several UK mobile phone companies subsidise the cost of laptops to persuade customers to sign up for long-term mobile broadband contracts. Anyone signing up to a two-year mobile broadband deal with T-Mobile at £40 a month, for instance, gets a free Sony Vaio laptop worth £499. Apple is looking for mobile partners willing to bundle a mobile broadband contract with the iSlate. The UK's mobile phone networks, meanwhile, also have deals that allow their mobile broadband customers easy access to thousands of public wi-fi hotspots across the country. Any such tie-up with an operator, however, is unlikely to make the iSlate free because the basic price of the device in the UK is expected to be only slightly less than Apple's cheapest MacBook laptop, which costs £816
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Apple looks for iSlate mobile partner
CES 2010: Ford plans to let drivers tweet from the road
A century after it first revolutionised the car industry, Ford plans to make its vehicles more hi-tech - by letting drivers listen to internet radio, conduct web searches and even send Twitter messages straight from the dashboard. Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Ford chief executive Alan Mulally unveiled the next generation of Ford's in-car Sync entertainment system and said that it would be able to do everything they expected from a computer or mobile phone. "We are actually now bringing the internet to the car," he said. "We're going to bring all the applications you can get on mobile phones today, we'll bring in the car - absolutely hands-free, voice activated, and focused on the road – but you can get access to all your cool stuff." The system, called Sync MyTouch, is based around a pair of dashboard touchscreen computers that allow drivers and passengers to carry out a number of activities while they drive thanks to a wireless internet or 3G connection. The touch or voice activated systems can be synchronised with mobile handsets like the iPhone – they can use any one of hundreds of applications specifically designed for Sync, such as built-in satellite navigation and local search. The technology, which was developed in conjunction with Microsoft and was first unveiled in 2007, is currently only available in 12 of the company's north American models – but Mulally said new Sync modules would be integrated into 80% of the company's US cars within five years. Last year it said there were plans to launch the system in European models later in 2010, Despite concerns over safety, the company says that using Sync should be no more – as long as drivers to the same rules about using other in-car devices, such as satellite navigation systems and mobile phones. "The whole process of interface design is also more critical in a vehicle, because the driver is dealing with so many more inputs," said Ford vice president Derrick Kuzak. "We have to keep interfaces simple and intuitive. And they have to minimize driver distraction." The world's fourth-largest car maker says it hopes that providing extras like internet connectivity can help boost its fortunes as the American auto industry struggles to cope with the effects of the recession. Although Ford suffered substantially during the depths of the financial crisis – posting record losses of $14.6bn (£9.1bn) in 2008 – the company appears to be on the up. Unlike its Detroit rivals, General Motors and Chrysler, the company did not file for bankruptcy and $2.3bn (£1.4bn) in profit for the second quarter of 2009. Mulally said that improving the technology inside its cars was an important part of turning around the company and making it a leader once again. "We believe these features have a place in every Ford vehicle, not just our luxury models," he said. Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Motoring Gadgets Ford Mobile phones Telecoms Bobbie Johnson guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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CES 2010: Ford plans to let drivers tweet from the road