Death to the mouse: Apple’s trackpad hits the shops
The first whiff of an Apple trackpad was as far back as 2008, with a fresh bout of enthusiasm when the patent application was unearthed earlier this summer . Now the rumour has become a reality with the first Magic Trackpads released for sale through the Apple Store. Why yet more fuss for yet another Apple product? Because it symbolises the end of an era - the end of the mouse. As ever, Apple's brilliance is in refining consumer electronics to a form factor usable by the mainstream; the trackpad indicates the much needed death of the RSI-inducing mouse, another piece of hardware that Apple didn't invent, but did popularise . Magic trackpads are £59, wireless, 80% bigger than the trackpads on a MacBook Pro and work from 10 metres away. Eventually, a touchpad could replace both keyboard and mouse through a touchscreen interface
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Death to the mouse: Apple's trackpad hits the shops
Crime software may help police predict violent offences
Minority Report-style technology being trialled by two British forces following success in the US Two British police forces have begun trials of a sophisticated computer software package which aims to boost their efficiency by predicting where and when future crimes will take place. The system, known as Crush (Criminal Reduction Utilising Statistical History) evaluates patterns of past and present incidents, then combines the information with a range of data including crime reports, intelligence briefings, offender behaviour profiles and even weather forecasts. This is used to identify potential hot spots and flashpoints, so police forces can allocate resources to areas where particular crimes are most likely to occur
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Crime software may help police predict violent offences
Go go gadget plaything | Saptarshi Ray
Once we found fun things to do with computers sold as serious machines. Now gadgets are marketed as nothing but toys As a boy I managed, after much persistence, to persuade my parents to buy me a Sinclair Spectrum 48K+ (the one with the black, concave keys). To do this I had to convince them it was not merely a machine on which to play games but an important tool that would teach me computer programming and aid my schoolwork.
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Go go gadget plaything | Saptarshi Ray
Jimmy Doherty: ‘Mac owners all seem a bit smug’ | Celebrity squares
Jimmy Doherty tells us all about his life as a luddite who looks like a nerd What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? That's an easy one for me – it's my iPhone. It allowes me to email and receive email wherever I am. You suddenly realise: how did I ever live without it? You can also listen to music with it and play games. When was the last time you used it, and what for? This morning to have a look at these questions. What additional features would you add if you could? A lie detector would be quite good – that would be awesome. Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time? Only if people stop lying
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Jimmy Doherty: 'Mac owners all seem a bit smug' | Celebrity squares
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
Quality control will save capitalism | Ben Van Vliet
Instead of blaming computer trading systems for market crashes, we should look to these unemotional machines for the answer We now know that automated (or high-frequency) trading systems did not cause the stock market's "flash crash" of 6 May . At best we can figure, an institution executed a large sell order, which drove the market down. The downward pressure triggered lots of stop-loss orders that other market participants already had in the market. For a brief moment, buyers evaporated, and … crash. But, before there was time to panic, automated trading systems recognised the situation for what it was – a tremendous buying opportunity. The market bounced back as quickly as it had fallen. Automated trading systems do not create crashes, or even volatility for that matter.
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Quality control will save capitalism | Ben Van Vliet
Labour candidates must address the liberty deficit | Henry Porter
The failures of the database state have been laid bare, but most of the leadership candidates don't see where Labour went wrong The liberty deficit left by the last government – the gap between the freedom enjoyed by UK citizens in 1997 and what was left in 2010 – is not something that Labour has got its head round yet. The candidates in the leadership election talk about reconnecting with the public, but Balls, Burnham and the Milibands simply don't grasp that they have effectively excluded themselves from the only liberal-progressive act in town. Diane Abbott gets it , but the standard male products of the New Labour curia have got a long way to go. One reason they wrote themselves out of the picture appears in a study from the Centre for Technology Policy Research at the LSE, which is summarised by Ian Grant in Computer Weekly this week. The LSE thinktank concludes : "Despite a spend of as much as £21bn (a year) on public sector IT, it is difficult to find any compelling examples of direct productivity gains and improved public services." Much of the money was spent on intrusive databases – last year, I estimated a total of well over £33bn. We were told it was necessary to give up our personal information to allow the joined-up delivery of services. Prospect magazine praised the programme and declared that personal data was like a tax that we owed to the state; that privacy was luxury we could no longer afford in the modern era. Transformational Government , as the programme was known, was driven by a simple faith in operational savings that were entirely theoretical – "an anachronistic and ultimately ineffective approach from which the UK has only recently begun to distance itself". The following are the crucial lines from Ian Grant's report: "Transformational Government [used an] outdated, 20th-century approach of imposed command and control enabled by large central databases. It distracted government from its own policy aspirations and ignored where the technology of the internet age was heading – towards more localised, autonomous, distributed and consumer-responsive services built around common technical standards." In other words, the statism that demanded we give up personal data and submit to the surveillance society not only had few tangible benefits and was a vast waste of money, but was based on decidedly old thinking that was entirely unsuitable to the internet age
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Labour candidates must address the liberty deficit | Henry Porter
Nvidia shows new iPad-topping Tegra 2 tablet prototype
Tablet computers based on Google's Android operating system are starting to look more viable in the run up to the Computex trade show, and Nvidia's new prototype shows the sort of thing we can expect Nvidia has been showing off a new Android touch-screen tablet powered by its Tegra 2 processor, albeit only running an American football game (BackBreaker by Natural Motion), rather than showing the full user interface. It's a generation ahead of Apple's iPad in using a dual-core ARM Cortex 9 processor, with a lot more memory (1GB), a front-facing webcam and microphone, and a selection of ports. These include a MicroSD card slot and two USB ports, which are sadly lacking on the iPad.
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Nvidia shows new iPad-topping Tegra 2 tablet prototype
Facebook ’sexiest video’ malware spreading virally, warn experts
Fake video installs adware – while Microsoft compares its Internet Explorer 6 to 'nine-year-old milk' and urges upgrade If you get a posting on your Facebook wall telling you "this is without doubt the sexiest video ever! 
:P :P" which seems to be accompanied by a video titled "Candid Camera Prank [HQ]" then don't click on the video: it's a lead-in to malware. Clicking the link will take you to what seems like a Facebook application which then tells you that your video player is out of date – and encourages you to download a file. If you do, then the same "video" plus link gets posted using your avatar to al your friends on Facebook -– meaning it is spreading virally. It's not clear at present whether Facebook has acted to halt it. You should, however, expect that it will mutate in the coming hours/days (depending on how determined the virus writer is), so it might not be exactly that message or video frame. The key element in the attack is that it tells you to download a file. At Sophos, Graham Cluley notes that: "Judging by the number of messages posted on Facebook, thousands of people received this attack. If you were one of them, you should scan your computer with an up-to-date anti-virus, change your passwords, review your Facebook application settings, and learn not to be so quick as to fall for a simple social engineering trick like this in future." The file seems to install a piece of adware called Hotbar , which thus generates revenue for the malware writer. (About Hotbar: "displays a dynamic toolbar and targeted pop-up ads based on its monitoring of Web-browsing activity. The toolbar appears in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. The toolbar contains buttons that can change depending on the current Web page and keywords on the page. Clicking a button on the toolbar may open an advertiser Web site or paid search site. Hotbar also installs graphical skins for Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express
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Facebook 'sexiest video' malware spreading virally, warn experts
A fond farewell to the floppy disk | Wendy Grossman
The 3.5in disk was revolutionary in its day, but it's becoming harder and harder to keep up with the flow of obsolete formats When I was a child I was very fond of my vinyl record set of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf.
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A fond farewell to the floppy disk | Wendy Grossman