Rupert's DiarySlightly sanitised for the squeamish

Without debate, without public consulation, without any form of mandate, Lord Mandelson - an unelected politician - is preparing to place the rights of powerful industrial concerns above those of Parliament and above ours.

The powers that he wants to create - by means of a statutory instrument, which bypasses Parliamentary debate and decision - will criminalise downloading of content without permission. They will give him or anyone he chooses the power to enforce by law any action he or his successor thinks fit, in the service of protecting copyright.

And they will give industry bodies, such as the BPI, FAST and so on, powers of investigation tantamount to those of the police force. The risk of copyright infringment would be enough to force any company to patrol its actions and offerings, closing down anything that might land them in the dock. The freedom of the Internet would be gone. It is placing the future of the Net, with the force of law, in the hands of those who depend on artificial scarcity. It is antithetical to everything that matters in the digital world.

By any measure, these are extraordinarily dangerous moves. That he is attempting them by an undemocratic process turns them into a profoundly mendacious power grab by forces who have never been reluctant to place their own interests above all else - often in the name of the law and of freedom.

Should these moves succeed, the Internet in the UK will be thrust back thirty years, when a state monopoly with commercial interests was the gatekeeper to all online information - and where that information was only held by other large organisations.

But Internet users would be thrown into another dimension, one where every action must be monitored, every access cleared, every file transfer a potential criminal act. A dimension policed and enforced, moreover, by those with a direct financial interest in preventing new models of distribution, of enforcing the idea that they and they alone can set the rules for information-driven commerce.

Nothing would be untouched. Everything on the Internet is a transfer of information, and all information may be copyright. Thus, every action on the Internet would be a potential criminal act, and everyone connected would have a duty to make sure it wasn't. Be sure that that duty will be imposed with eagerness.

It would be easy to use the metaphors of the police state, of corporate monopoly, of any society where the state turns on its own citizens. Easy, but wrong: what is being proposed is new, one where the very machinery that runs our lives is handed over to a special interest group with a history of saying and doing the maximum it can get away with for its own survival and prosperity.

No wonder he dare not go through Parliament. No wonder he has not published his proposals.

What Mandleson is trying to do is not far short of a coup, a power grab from Parliament and from us. It should be treated as such, and shut down with speed and permanence.

Rupert Murdoch has said that he'll probably take his content out of Google, and hinted very strongly he and other newspaper groups are in discussion over paywalls.

Leaving aside the question of anti-trust - and whether, given Murdoch's extremely close and effective ties to governments, any regulator would be able to function at all or act fast enough to make any difference - this would seem to presage the death of the Internet and its replacement with what old media and old telecoms wanted all along, a segregated, partitioned network where access always comes at a price.

We had that before. It didn't work. Or, rather, it worked fine for established interests with the money to build their own systems or who, by accident of history, controlled the routes of access, where 'fine' meant maintaining that control and preventing open standards, open access and open innovation.

Let's say that Murdoch carries through with his threat and pulls all his content from Google, and sets up paywalls for all his properties. What will happen under the following scenarios?

1. Nobody follows him
2. Some content providers follow him
3. All content providers follow him

and a wildcard:

4. He allows Bing (for example) to crawl his sites, but excludes Google. Or Apple springs its tablet-based news-stand app store on the world with all major publishers involved: you want news, you go through Apple, Rupert's new best friend.

Here's how I see those panning out:

1. Huge competitive advantage to everyone else in attracting readers. His pitch, that readers who pay are worth far more to advertisers than readers who don't, relies on having readers who pay. The standard conversion rate for freemium services (ie, you get people in with the free stuff and sell them up) is 1 percent. And that's 1 percent of people who haven't got there via Google? Does that make sense?

2. Chaos reigns. Suddenly, the news outlets with no paywalls and plenty Google will find it very advantageous to run with stories that they read behind the paywall, even a day after - unless the paywalled sites decide they do want Google and just publish a day late online. The opportunity here for a new face (again, think Apple) to step in with a free service tuned to the new landscape is high, and dangerous to the incumbents.

3. Google loses all its news. Everyone has to decide what to pay for - you can't afford the Times and the Telegraph, let alone Salon and the NYT and Boing Boing - and you can bet the paywalls are set to get a year's sub out of you. The news and information landscape takes a 25 year trip back in time... where, you may remember, a new technology called the Internet was waiting in the wings. The Internet has not actually gone away.

There would be no better market for a new operation to start from a clean slate - a billion plus people ready and able to consume content that they've come to expect, and peeved that they've lost it.

4. Stand by for the biggest lawsuit you've ever seen. Unless Murdoch, Apple and co get into bed with Comcast, Verizon and other major internet providers around the world to break net neutrality, in which case stand by for the biggest lawsuit you'll ever see.

2010 will be very interesting. Anything Murdoch does is going to be a huge gamble, beyond anything he's done before - and he'll do anything to appear confident that it'll work.

We'll see.

A programmer was talking in a tech support forum about some GMail problem he had that was linked to YouTube. "I haven't tried it in Chrome", he said. "That's a little too much Google for me."

That comment has a certain force. I was reminded of it when I watched Eric Schmidt give a bravura performance at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

It started well, with some subtle but cutting digs at his Gartner interlocutor: when asked his prediction of non-advertising Google revenue three years time to compare with Gartner's projected nine percent, he said "We don't do that calculation. It's what finance people do, and it's not very interesting." Laughter.

But there wasn't much laughter during the next 45 minutes, as he elucidated a frighteningly coherent view of how the future was going to go Google's way - and not just bits of the future, the whole lot. From enterprise to consumer, from cloud to mobile, everything was included.

We might, if we're good, be left some vertical market stuff - Google only likes dealing with things that a few hundred million people can use - but that's because the big G can't be bothered. Everything was in the mix; Wave, ChromeOS, Chrome, Google Apps, HTML 5, GMail - oh, was GMail high on the list - Android, even YouTube. Cross-enterprise searching, anyone, where you find out what's going on inside your circle of trust? Employee monitoring? Seamless cloud apps on all platforms? Security that works without firewalls?

One of his predictions was that by next year, there will be netbooks running cloud services within the enterprise that will be good enough to replace the run-of-the-mill enterprise PC "but at a fifth the cost", because cheap hardware was that good. It all joined up. It all made sense.

I digested that prediction while reflecting on the fact that I was watching Schmidt in high resolution via YouTube within Chrome under Linux, on a machine that was simultaneously running all my social networking, chat and other clients, all my home entertainment requirements, all my editing and content creation faffery... and the only part of it that was Microsoft was the copy of XP I run under VirtualBox in order to get to my corporate email. That's only because Microsoft chose to cripple Outlook Web Access when it's not running under IE. Guess how that makes me feel.

(Ah yes, Outlook. Exchange. Schmidt talked on stage about the revelation he'd had about calendaring being at the heart of enterprise: when I use Exchange's calendaring, the revelation I get is that I hope to the highest powers in the cosmos that someone fixes it soon.)

I had a Google Doc open for a project I'm sharing with five pals. I had Google Maps open. I had an Android phone snoozing by the side of the keyboard. In short, I had too much Google in my life. And when ChromeOS comes along and makes my netbook work better (and it will), the amount of non-Googleage will shrink still further, because Google works and is nice to use and I am weak in the face of working code that's nice to use. The fact that everything Schmidt was saying was patently coming true in front of my eyes didn't help.

Now, imagine Ballmer trying to put on an equivalent 45 minute performance where he seamlessly merges the Microsoft vision for mobile (can you even tell me what that is?), cloud (ditto), netbooks (ditto), security (ditto). And how much? Those MS calculations that running free services and software cost more than proprietary solutions - well, they're hard to swallow when you're paying for everything yourself.

Just to put the seal on it, Schmidt mentioned how many Google salesmen were going into the enterprise pushing GMail - priced not for free, because they found that enterprise was happy to pay for service, when they got it. And when the sales pitch didn't work because things were missing, they went back to the Googleplex and fixed them, or worked around them, or found reasons why those missing things didn't need to be there at all. Then they went back, and tried again.

So when I read that Los Angeles City Council is moving from Groupwise to GMail and Google Apps - at a cost of $7.25 million, paid for partially by a legal settlement Microsoft had to make for overcharging - and think that this is the sort of deal Microsoft should be winning, I wonder what Ballmer makes of Schmidt's grand plan, and whether I will hear any cogent response this year, or next year when the ChromeOS netbooks are in the fray, or the year after that when the migration from Exchange becomes too big to ignore.

When, in short, will Microsoft get scared enough to do something that might make a difference? Because after 45 minutes of Schmidt's world domination plan, I was plenty scared myself.

And I like Google.

Last night, just 48 hours after I'd installed it, I had my very first Windows 7 Blue Screen Of Death.

It may not have been the complete BSOD package, but the machine was thoroughly dead and the screen was blue: there was what may have been intended to be the traditional mystic hexadecimal runes of disaster on the screen, but they'd been scrambled into a cryptographic stew of white pixels. And it was making a most peculiar noise.

Just before this, I had been watching Carry On Spying on DVD - reaching the point where Kenneth Williams (in a fez) and Charles Hawtrey (as Beau Geste) were about to rush in on Barbara Windsor and Bernard Cribbins (both in belly-dancing outfits, both at imminent risk of violation from Eric Pohlmann, aka The Fat Man) in an Algerian bordello. A classic moment in British film, and Kenneth Williams was giving it his flared-nose hyper-camp all.

The exact point of silicon disaster hit as he was issuing a nasal vowel so elongated and swooping it fell from the sky like a roll of toilet paper thrown from the Kop. The screen blinked and went blue: the sound system locked into a death spasm, repeating 200 milliseconds of the audio ad infinitum. The death knell of Windows 7, I can report, sounds like this:

"OooOooOooOooOooOooOooOooOoo..."

I enjoyed the moment, then reset the computer. The laptop, a by now rather venerable Sony Vaio, recovered at length: I replayed the scene, but all was well.

I think it's safe to blame Windows 7. The laptop had previously been running Vista for a couple of years - I try and use whatever MS' latest OS is daily, even though I hadn't warmed to Vista after all that time - and I'd performed an in-place upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. (That took around four hours, but as I had the luck or foresight to kick that off on a Saturday morning before retiring back to bed for a long lie, I was as refreshed as the computer once it had completed.)

I was using the same application for DVD playback as I had for many DVDs before; there were no hardware changes or configuration fiddling beyond what had come in on the Windows 7 installation. I'd certainly never experienced a failure like that under Vista; although I had had a couple of catastrophic crashes, they happened when I was running beta software or messing around with peculiar hardware.

And so, pace Talbot Rothwell and the Pinewood posse, I fear we have to conclude that the longest running farce on the small screen has got some acts left to go before conclusion.

This is a pure rumour, sourced from random tweets. But it comes from Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome and Mono, so it has a certain investment of radiance.

His first tweet:

"VMware is creating a new Linux distro, according to the recruiting spam they are sending on Linked In."

and a little later:

"Leaky VMware-istas confirm that VMware is creating a Linux distro. Investigative Journalist De Icaza signing off."

Nice work, chap. In subsequent discussions with other hacks, we agreed that it had a lot of sense behind it, although the thought of getting Linux support from VMware did rather unsettle some correspondents. The prevailing opinion, though, was "If they don't do that, where do they go?" - which has a certain logic to it.

More on this as it happens...

The news that Nokia is suing Apple over ten wireless patents marks the start of what may be a fascinating and prolonged canter through the worlds of mobile phone standards and intellectual property. (Alternatively, it could end up, as the Nokia-Qualcomm war did, in silence)

It's not generally realised that a lot of industry standardisation work is legal, rather than technical: a company that owns a useful patent which would work well in an international standard wants paying for it, but the standards body won't want barriers to adoption.

The mechanics of how this works vary from case to case - most commonly, an agency is set up which manages the pools of IP and offers an efficient way to license them. But whatever the details - and GSM is more gruesomely complex than many - there are fairly standard way to get the IP you need to make the goods that follow the rules.

Which means that cases like this, where an IP owner goes after a handset maker, are rare. We don't know the details of the case, but it's a fair assumption that it's going to have a number of unique aspects. Nokia isn't a patent troll, it's been in discussion with Apple for a year, and the manner of the action tends to support the view that whatever the outcome, Nokia genuinely believes it has a case and is proceeding as a responsible litigant would. Around $25 of the cost of a mid-range phone goes on GSM licensing, which means Nokia's claim of between $6 and $12 owed per iPhone is no small percentage of the total amount you'd expect. It all looks and sounds like a case with substantial grounds.

You wouldn't know that from the reaction online, though. Half the world has assumed that Nokia is doing it because it can't make phones as good as the iPhone, because it wants to cripple a competitor, because it's a cheap path to publicity, because its losing money and Apple has loads... well, pick any combination of greed, stupidity, ill-will, jealousy and desperation and you'll find someone confidently proclaiming that this is what's going on. Poor Apple, eh?

All of the above could be true, although I doubt it. Yet neither I nor you nor any of the shouty Apple fanboys know what's actually going on. So from whence comes their great confidence?

It could be that they hate patents in general, although it's hard to despise a framework that's helped create a global mobile phone standard with four billion users. It could be that Apple is always right, a shining example of wholesome propriety and not the aggressive, arrogant, secretive organisation some mistake it for. Or it could be that those darn Finns have no right taking a pop at America - World War III? Is there nothing the iPhone can't do? There's an app for that..

Or it could be prejudice informing an instant and gratifying group opinion.

Whatever the answer, the evidence is out there right now. Have a look and decide for yourself.

It's nearly Wednesday, and the question of what happened to the Sidekick service remains unanswered.

At one level, it's obvious. T-Mobile US's Sidekick service, run by Danger and thus Danger's owners Microsoft, went down and stayed down. As the Sidekick mobile phones rely completely on the service to maintain their data – they're thin clients with only battery-backed local storage – this has left the users with nothing.

At another level, it's remarkably unclear. How can a company with the resources, experience and reputation of Microsoft allow a mission critical system to die beyond resurrection? The reaction of the punditsphere has been rapid, predictable and not unreasonable: this is the failure of the Cloud idea, this is a vindication of keeping it local, this proves Windows is useless, this is absolute proof of Microsoft's incompetence.

Not unreasonable, just not very right. If local backups never failed, then yes, that would be a killer shot against remote services. Cloud means many things, but it doesn't normally mean having a single copy of data running on a single system: Google's downtimes have been bona-fide cloud failures, but data has not been lost. And as for Windows being somehow at fault: please. Danger is an Oracle, Unix and Java outfit: unless the problem happened because the service was being moved to a new Windows-based system, then keep yer trap shut (and even if it was, the old system would have been there for fallback. So, no).

Which leaves Microsoft's incompetence. Of all the diagnoses, this is the most unanswerable. And while Microsoft has many very competent people, the loss of all data goes beyond personal incompetence. This has to be, at a very deep level, a systemic management failure.

And that is a truly dangerous perception for Microsoft. Forget about the loss of consumer confidence in Sidekick – that's gone, and won't come back. It's not as if the customers really knew or cared that Microsoft was behind their service. Management failure speaks most eloquently to enterprises, who know more than they know anything else that bad management is a corporeal disease that will ruin all else that is good and reliable in a company. It makes a partnership unconscionable: it doesn't matter if a business partner is evil, greedy, power-crazed or working to hidden agendas, you can work with all of that if it comes up with the goods. If it is incompetent, though, it is poison and can kill you. Run away.

There is only one course of action that will save the day for Microsoft, and that's a detailed, frank and complete explanation of what happened. That's very difficult for any company to do, let alone one so addicted to public protestations of God-like perfection in the face of what the faithless consider evidence to the contrary. Yet in this case, there is no other path to redemption.

Microsoft even has a template to work to. Earlier this year, the Apache Foundation had a very embarrassing and very public security failure. Hackers gained access to many of its public servers and installed scripts that compromised various Apache developer services. It took some time and a loss of service for Apache to recover from this: not what you want if you're responsible for the code that runs the majority of the Web.

Apache reacted well. After diagnosis and restoration, and having fixed the chain of vulnerabilities that exposed them, the Foundation published a very detailed account of what happened, how they recovered and why it won't be happening again. That account was sufficiently complete to act as a valuable and apt lesson for others who also run web services. Not only did it restore confidence in Apache, it took a bad event and turned it into a public good.

We still don't know what happened with Sidekick. There are plenty of rumours, including sabotage, Machiavellian actions by Microsoft to destroy confidence in the cloud, internal revolt and quite possibly alien action. Best guess? It was probably a failed upgrade that required data restoration from a backup that subsequently proved unusable – this happens. The golden rule, that a backup isn't a backup until it's restored, was ignored.

Microsoft needs to come clean. It needs to publish what it found in the wreckage, it needs to say how that happened and it needs to say what steps its taken to ensure that it doesn't happen again anywhere in the organisation. And it needs to do so in terms that the rest of us can use, to check our own systems and guard against our own tendencies to incompetence.

It needs to do this now. Otherwise, all we know is that the company is incompetent in delivering the core services it's trying to sell us, and it may not be able to cure that.

Enterprise poison.

Welcome back my friends to the magnetic machine story that never ends, courtesy of Dublin-based perpetual motion mongers Steorn.

One of my two favourite miraculous organisations — in the company, however unfairly, of xG and its magic morphing wireless broadband — is making noises again and promising great things. In this case, it's "a public display of various Orbo systems" by the end of 2009, with a video stream so that all of us out here in Webland can watch, wonder and then buy a very reasonably priced licence to use the technology.

Ah yes, the technology. You won't be surprised to hear that there's been no further disclosure about what it is and how it works, except that it now includes a "passive magnetic bearing technology, ZeroF". In an interview in Free Energy Times, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy said that this was necessary because ordinary bearings act as speed bumps due to the "very strong radial forces that change direction in very small angular displacements". I think that means powerful magnets wobbling around a bit, but we'll have to wait and see.

Apparently, every bit of the Orbo perpetual motion over-unity energy-from-nowhere device is explicable by standard physics "except the net result". So far, though, the 'net result' in terms of the failed demo in 2007 and the disbanding of the independent review panel this year — their conclusion: nothing doing — has been thoroughly explicable by standard physics.

Steon has also filed two patents this year, but don't get too excited. One is for measuring energy transfer from an electromagnet to a permanent magnet, and the other is for measuring the torque of a rotating device. In both cases, they're in the class of patent best described as "stark raving obvious" — the latter incredibly so, as Sean appears to have reinvented the optical encoder.

Which leaves yet another intriguing question: if that's their IP, what on earth would they license?

At last, the Amazon Kindle is to launch in the UK - and around a hundred other countries. This ebook reader has attracted a lot of attention in the US, as much for its business model as for its hardware and software (which are on a par with a rather brain-dead smartphone).

That business model has dictated a lot of limitations. Not all content sources can be accessed over the wireless network of the Kindle, which uses a protocol called Whispernet over the Sprint network in the US to support nominally free mobile access. It's only nominally free - in fact, around thirty percent of the revenue from paid content goes to the network - and so what you can do wirelessly is restricted compared to what you can get it when you plug the Kindle in via USB (there's no wi-fi) to another networked PC.

There's no equivalent to the Sprint wireless network outside the US, so the UK Kindle (actually a Kindle 2, which has to be bought from the US) and other international models will use 3G data.

Now, the commerical side of 3G data is fascinating. Which network are they using, we wonder, and how are they going to duplicate the no-subscription model? "It'll use the AT&T Global Network", the PRs assured journalists. "But AT&T doesn't have a network, global or not, in the UK", the journalists replied. "Ah... we'll get back to you on that", said the PRs. Likewise with Amazon execs, who say "You'll have to ask AT&T about that".

So how come Amazon is ready to talk about the launch of the Kindle, but unable to say which essential partners it'll be working with? Not as weird as it sounds: my bet is that it's a matter of press releases. When you're a big company doing something with another big company, you have to make a joint release - or say nothing. That's not just politeness, that's big company rules.

But all releases from big companies have to be written by marketing and approved by upper management. Upper management tend not to approve things until they've fiddled with them, because they have to prove that they're managing upperly. Then the changes go back down to marketing, who have to turn those changes back into some form of language that the rest of the world will understand, and submit the new version back upstairs for the OK. This can take a few iterations before marketing or management get bored, and you can normally tell who surrended by whether the press release makes any sense or not.

That's bad enough when you're doing it by yourself. When the process has to be synchronised between two big companies, it can turn into a rich carnival of madness. When you've got a hundred countries and goodness knows how many mobile operators (AT&T's Global Network, whatever that may be, notwithstanding), you've got a better chance of organising a bank holiday on Mars with Prince Philip and Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo.

Unless you hold a gun to everyone's head, in the nature of a unilaterally declared public deadline. Which, I think, Amazon has just done - quite possibly taking lessons from Apple in the process.

So, we'll have answers to our questions about how you can have a subscriptionless connection to 3G soon enough. And at that point, we can ask the next question. Given that Amazon has promised no roaming charges if you take your Kindle abroad, when will us paying stiffs get the same kindness?

There is one outcome that seems particularly exciting. What if all Kindles worldwide are on American AT&T sims, and the 'no roaming charges' are because all of them are roaming, all the time? There's absolutely no technical reason for that - once you get the other networks to agree to it. If that's the case, then what happens if you extract the sim from the Kindle and shove it in your own phone? A global, free, 3G data sim?

If that's the case, then there's going to be a very lively market indeed in Kindles. Or, as we will get to see them, a rather useful sim in an elaborate, disposable package.

The first international Kindles are due to ship by October 19. Can't wait.

So, there I was in San Francisco, listening to Intel tell me all about the bright, spangley future of mobile. The keynotes were full of standard issue happy videos of happy young people doing happy young things with mobile devices, socially networking with video and the great taste of Internet.

Wouldn't disbelieve a word of it, guv, except for one thing. I was sitting at the very epicentre of networked wireless technology, and I couldn't even send an instant message from my phone.

Technically, there was no problem. My phone, the constantly pleasing Android-based G1, has no difficulty in speaking American airwaves, and it is stuffed to the gills with software that tweets, chatters, displays moving pictures, geolocates and so on and so forth. The problem was me: for some reason, I dislike being held to ransom and having my money extorted. And with T-Mobile wanting to charge me £7.50 a megabyte for data, there is no other way to describe data roaming charges.

Seven pounds fifty. A megabyte. My iGoogle home page? 300Kbytes? That'll be two pounds fifty. Just to see my own home page. A fiver to check ZDNet UK's home page (naughty of us to have pictures, I know).

It gets worse, of course, when you consider what the extra costs to T-Mobile are for data roaming. Using the Internet, of course, the local operator just has to hook me up to its local connection point, which it can economically do for its own customers for the usual amounts. In my case, that local operator was T-Mobile – who will also sell me hotspot access via Wi-Fi in San Francisco for eight dollars a day, no particular data limit mentioned.

Extortion isn't too strong a word, especially when you consider how competition has been so carefully excluded from the equation. I tried to do the smart thing and buy an American pay-as-you-go data-only SIM, but my handset is locked to TMob and the local TMob shop assured me that such a thing was "impossible".

I know that many, if not most, companies now forbid data roaming for their employees, because the charges can easily run into thousands of pounds for even moderate use. I know that none of the UK people I talked to at IDF were using data roaming – although some had unlocked handsets that allowed the "impossible" task of using local SIMs for data. And these are the people who are directly involved in creating the exciting new world of mobile which, we are assured, will push technology for the people into ever greater heights of electrowonder.

It doesn't matter how good and cheap the technology is, if you can't afford to use it because of extortion. And it is doubly painful when you're abroad, which is exactly when you most need all those wonderful online information tools.

I have been at parties with mobile phone executives who openly laugh about the rip-off of data roaming charges. That left a very bad taste. What baffles me is whether they've ever made the calculation of how much money they don't make – or are there so many thousand-pound bills floating around that they don't want to bother to collect a hundred ten-pound bills instead?

But the current state of affairs is wrong – criminally, caustically, catastrophically wrong. It is poisoning the hopes of the mobile Internet, it is showing up the lack of international regulation (three cheers here for the EU, which is slowly enforcing sanity on the robber cartels), it is massively stupid in a way only telcos can be massively stupid. It is an enormous insult to customers, developers and manufacturers. It spits in the face of the future. If anyone can suggest a way to break this conspiracy down, I'm more than ready to hear it.

And if anyone from T-Mobile would like to explain to me why it is right to charge me five pounds to look at a single web page, I would love to hear that too. Bring it on.