Zen Internet Newsletters

Our planet's population has more than doubled since 1960 and more than tripled since the 1940s. Try this BBC gizmo to find out how much it's increased since you were born - and what number you have been given in the 7 billion-long queue of human beans counted as current inhabitants of the third rock from the Sun.

January's weather was relatively mild this year, but it may be back with a vengeance in 2013. If you will be looking for an escape route when the big chill returns, it's worth remembering that the annual International Consumer Electronics Show opens in Las Vegas in January when the temperature there hovers comfortably in the sunny 60s Fahrenheit and mid-teens Celsius. This year, the show treated visitors to the launch of thousands of new devices from 3,100 exhibitors occupying almost two million square feet of floor space.

The European Union could make a decision as early as March on whether or not it will file a formal antitrust complaint against Google, according to Reuters. The trouble started in November 2010 when the European Commission launched its investigation. The organisation said then that it was acting on complaints from rival search providers including two UK-based price comparison sites: Foundem and Microsoft's Ciao. The European Commission said it was checking claims that Google artificially lowered its competitors' rankings while boosting its own services.

At Westminster Magistrates' Court last month, Sheffield Hallam University student Richard O'Dwyer, 23, who set up a Web site with links to sources of pirated copyrighted films and television programmes, lost his case against extradition to the US where he faces up to 10 years in jail. The site - TVShack.net - which Mr O'Dwyer claimed was similar to Google, earned more than £150,000 from advertising before US authorities were able to close it and seize the domain name.

It seems that Google was taking notes during the years that Myspace was missing its chances to remake the way independent music artists promote and distribute their work. The search giant has launched its free Google Music service, giving users the ability to upload their music library (up to 20,000 tracks) that can be accessed anywhere with an Internet connection. The company also announced the addition of music sales to its Android Market - a move that might give Apple's iTunes a run for its money and make independent music artists take notice. Perhaps the biggest piece of news revealed by Google about the new service is its intention to give virtually unknown music artists a direct route to distribute their music to fans. The new music service includes an Artist Hub feature, which lets up-and-coming musicians set up a profile that allows them to upload songs, set prices, link directly to music clips or videos and more. Google will take a 30 per cent cut from sales.

After his table-clunking evidence before the House of Commons Select Committee investigating phone hacking, it may be hard to imagine Rupert Murdoch tapping selectively at anything so fragile as a keyboard, but apparently he can employ a lighter touch - and often does - as a newly enrolled member of the twitterati. The media mogul has joined Twitter, and used it to respond to ongoing jibes about News Corp's wrong-footed acquisition of MySpace, which may have lost the company more than a billion dollars. "We screwed up in every way possible", he tweeted recently.

If you've ever struggled with your PC's BIOS - or been hit by a rootkit that assailed the BIOS - you might have wondered how this archaic set of gears at the heart of our machines could have survived for so long without being replaced by a more resilient alternative. It seems Windows 8 has a solution. It will introduce UEFI - the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface - for most users. BIOS - the Basic Input/Output System - spans the entire 30+ year history of the personal computer. The very first IBM PC had a BIOS. And despite extraordinary advances in hardware and software, the BIOS we may still puzzle over today is not much different from the one in the original PC. The new system will offer malware protection and replace text-based start-up screens with graphics-based control of the boot-up process. Unlike the BIOS, it can exist on a disk, like any other software - or in nonvolatile memory on the motherboard or even on a network share. The first to see the benefits of swapping old-fashioned BIOS for UEFI will be system administrators who have to oversee hundreds or thousands of PCs in company offices and data centres.

This year, Britain will reach the end of an era as analogue television begins its final countdown to closure. The old five-channel television system will be switched off permanently on the 24th of October, bringing to an end eighty years of analogue TV, which began - following experimental broadcasts - in November 1936 with the world's first regular high definition service, transmitted to an audience numbered in the hundreds. As the frequencies used for analogue TV transmission are vacated, new possibilities will be created for broadband expansion and the provision of better service in rural areas.

In an effort to recruit more members for its 'Plus' network Facebook alternative, Google hopes to make it more relevant to other users by giving Google+ content added influence in search results. Google search users who are logged into their Google profile can now turn on a feature called 'Search plus Your World'. The new functionality will skew search results in favour of Google+ content, giving added priority to photos, posts, pages and profiles from the social networking service. "Search is pretty amazing at finding that one needle in a haystack of Web pages, images, videos, news and much more. But clearly, that isn't enough", claimed Google fellow Amit Singhal, who heads the company's ranking algorithm team, in a blog post (third link below). For one despairing Washington Post writer however, making the haystack bigger wasn't the right answer: "I never thought I'd say this, but thank God for Bing".

Proliphiq describes itself as "The New Search Engine for Sources of Real-Time News", but it's much more than that. This recent start-up is not only a real-time search engine but a kind of crowdsourced analysis system. It works by allowing social media users to add and tag accounts under various categories to grow the index (especially when searches don't turn up the best results) and these additions can include, for example, your own Twitter output or Facebook page.