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Tom Simonite, online technology editor

The creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has made an odd request: for a kind of rating system to help people distinguish sites that can be trusted to tell the truth, and those that can't.

Berners-Lee was speaking at the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation, which aims to ensure that everyone in the world benefits as the web evolves.

In his speech he referred to the way fears that the LHC could destroy the world spread like wildfire online. As the BBC puts it, he explained that "there needed to be new systems that would give websites a label for trustworthiness once they had been proved reliable sources."

He went on to say that he didn't think "a simple number like an IQ rating" is a good idea: "I'd be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways". Whatever process is used to hand out the labels, it sounds like a bad idea to me.

Berners-Lee himself directed us towards some of the its biggest problems:

"On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable...A sort of conspiracy theory of sorts and which you can imagine spreading to thousands of people and being deeply damaging."

There are plenty of arguments online already about whether Scientology is a cult. I find it unlikely anyone will be keen to step in and label sites on either side as not to be trusted. Others might reasonably argue that all religions - whether established or not - should come with a warning message.

As for wading in to put a stop to conspiracy theories, I can't image anything their proponents could benefit from more.

Berners-Lee also mentioned the system would help people find out the real science behind, for example, the LHC's risks. You might think handing out rating for sites about science would be easier, with publishers of peer-reviewed science, for example, receiving a top rating without problems.

But there will be papers in the archives of any journal that have been entirely superseded. And a whole lot more that present results that are valid, but can be misleading to some readers. Web licences to ensure that people only read sites they can handle are the next logical step.

Fortunately it's much more likely that the whole idea will quietly be forgotten, which will at least prevent Berners-Lee receiving one of the first "potentially misleading" badges for thinking it up in the first place.

Let's hope the World Wide Web Foundation and its laudable goals have a rosier future.

Tom Simonite, online technology editor

Labels: web

Nokia's cellphone anthropologist Jan Chipchase - interviewed in depth here - blogged this week about the etiquette of connectivity. When is it OK to whip out a phone or laptop, and when is it not?

Chipchase gives the example of a UK cafe that discouraged customers from using laptops by targeting them with bustling cleaners. I've certainly been to places that seem to carefully cultivate an atmosphere that makes people feel they must leave their laptops in their bags, and steal outside to make or receive calls.

Here in London, lovers of non-connectivity were worried this week by suggestions that underground trains may soon get cellphone reception. Trains between cities here commonly have "quiet carriages" where the use of phones and music players is banned. But I think that is unlikely on the Tube - the march of connectivity is set to continue until we just don't question it anymore.

Laptops are largely tolerated in lecture halls and mobile phones are hardly ever banned anywhere anymore. We've rolled over, and adjusted.

Chipchase hints at the idea of places that actually jam mobile or Wi-Fi reception. Also unlikely, I think, but before patches without connectivity are completely eradicated, perhaps they'll become more celebrated for a while. They deserve some commemoration of their passing.

Tom Simonite, online technology editor

Labels: cellphones, wireless

You've heard, of course, of digital rights management - used to control how you play, copy or otherwise use media files like music.

Now Apple wants to apply that concept to your sporting wardrobe. In US patent application 2008/0218310, the company details a way to stop us using unauthorised training shoes with the in-sole sensors it sells as part of the Nike + iPod kit. The shoe sensors work as pedometers, sending the data to your iPod as you run.

Apple's patent explains that "some people have taken it upon themselves to remove the sensor from the special pocket of the Nike shoe and place it in inappropriate locations - shoelaces, for example - or place it on non-Nike shoes".

They seem to consider this beyond the pale. The patent details a way of "pairing a sensor and an authorised garment", such as "running shoes, shirts or slacks". Companies like Nike could authorise their garments by burying an RFID chip inside it. That chip is required to activate the sensor. No longer will you be able to use the sensor you paid for with any shoe of your choosing.

Apple's idea sounds mean-minded to me. What do you think?

The company has previous form, though. Last year they tried to patent a system that would prevent you from recharging a music player if you ever use it with unauthorised software.

Paul Marks, New Scientist technology correspondent

Labels: gadgets

Last week, DARPA issued researchers with a plea for help: help us make liquid coal economical and environmentally sound.

It's easy to see the logic here - the US Department of Defense guzzles its way through 300,000 barrels of liquid fuel a day, relying on foreign oil to meet that need. The US has an estimated 275 billion tons of coal reserves. Convert that coal to liquid fuel and - hey presto - you could sever the dependency on foreign oil .

The technology even exists - the Nazis were producing liquid coal using indirect synthesis via the Fischer-Tropsch process in the 1940s. But that in itself is revealing - this isn't a very economical process, and was perhaps only viable in Nazi Germany as a last resort when oil resources dried up.

A Google search for 'liquid coal' offers little comfort. Coming in at number 3 is "Liquid Coal is a Bad Deal for Global Warming", while at number 6 is "Why Liquid Coal Is Not a Viable Option to Move America Beyond Oil".

The US Air Force itself would tend to agree: on 5 August they appear to be on the verge of abandoning their own attempts at converting liquid to coal. Time will tell if DARPA succeeds where the US Air Force has failed.

Colin Barras, online technology reporter

Labels: Air Force, coal, DARPA, liquid coal, oil

There's always been a bit of confusion between the UK and the US over who contributed most to the invention of the electronic programmable computer. It is heart-warming, however, to see some leading lights in US computing recognise the achievements of Alan Turing and his fellow WWII code breakers that were long kept classified.

Data encryption company PGP Corporation and PC-inventor IBM donated $100,000 to help maintain Bletchley Park, where Turing and colleagues worked. To what should be the UK government's shame, the place risks falling into ruin. I visited today as PGP and IBM tried to encourage others to add to their donation. If you want to do so, visit this website.

Bletchley Park says it needs some £10 million for the upkeep of the crumbling huts - where Alan Turing and others kickstarted computing as they tried to crack Nazi codes - and the manor house nearby. A further £7 million is needed for a museum to house Europe's largest collection of fully functional computers.

The most famous computers from Bletchley Park are Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, which was used to decode Nazi teleprinter traffic on the fly, while the Bombes - giant electromechanical calculators - revealed the rotor settings from various types of Enigma machines.

But because this top secret work stayed classified for so long after the war, a US computer, EDVAC stole some of Bletchley Park's deserved thunder, PGP's chief technical officer Jon Callas and president Phil Dunkelberger told me. Only in the late 70s did the achievements of the British machines begin to be recognised, by which time the early history of computing was already written.

It wasn't until the 1970s and early 1980s that computer scientists began to hear whispers of the existence of a super fast machine in England that predated post-war American computers," says Callas. "When the details eventually came out about Colossus we couldn’t quite believe how fast it had been at its one task: breaking ciphers.”

"As the acknowledged birthplace of modern computing, Bletchley Park is responsible for laying the foundation for many of today's technology innovations," said Dunkelberger.

"We have had a great response to the campaign so far, but more is definitely needed to preserve this British – and international – icon," says Bletchley spokesman Jon Fell. He told me that he hopes the UK National Lottery and the US Sidney E Frank Foundation will soon pledge money too.

Paul Marks, technology correspondent

Labels: computing, history

Fans of US TV series The West Wing, which until 2006 portrayed the inner workings of a fictional White House, might have experienced deja vu on reading my colleague's article last week on how scientists at NASA are working on identifying people from satellite images of their shadows. Their trick is to spot signs of a person's gait - their characteristic pattern of walking.

The series slipped up badly on this very subject in one 2003 episode, in which someone from a thinly disguised Slashdot says he has a tipoff about military research on mind control.

Horrified press spokesperson C J Cregg looks into it and is visited by a scientist from US defence research agency DARPA - one of the most hilariously portrayed nerds TV has ever screened.

Things soon turn nasty for viewers, though. The dialogue proceeds to jumble together the MK-Ultra project of the 1960s, in which the CIA really did use drugs for mind control, with more current research, by DARPA and others. This ranged from tiny cameras to adhesives based on gecko feet to mind-computer interfaces to, yes, gait analysis. Except this gait analysis was supposed to tell if a person is a potential criminal. Nonsense.

A colleague tells Cregg to leak the story to the press, so this horror will be shut down. Sadly that is where the show veered back towards the real world. True, horrific research such as MK-Ultra has been done in the name of security. But some research by the military, especially blue-sky types like DARPA, is merely banal, and even beneficial - like this internet thing you are currently using.

Much fear of science is engendered by the sloppy, arm-waving, button-pushing alarmism that results when commentators garble all research with horrors like MK-Ultra. And sometimes good research is threatened by this fear.

In this case, the otherwise brilliant writers of West Wing engaged in just such sloppiness. Disappointing, but cautionary - an occasion, in this US election year, to remind ourselves to beware such dishonest portrayals of science, even by writers we can otherwise trust.

Debbie MacKenzie, Brussels correspondent

Image courtesy Fotografar

Labels: DARPA, security, tv