Zen Monthly Newsletter

New venture fund capital totalling £20 million - £6.5m from taxpayers and £13.5m in private money - is being made available for investment in early-stage technology businesses across the country. Enterprise capital funds that invest up to £2 of public money for every £1 in private contributions have been designed by the Treasury to tackle what is seen as a scarcity of equity capital in the £500,000 to £2m range. Department of Trade and Industry small business minister Margaret Hodge said: "These new funds will help many small businesses that might otherwise have been unable to develop their potential because there was no equity finance available."

The Government will pay businesses the full wages of employees working in small firms if they are allowed time off to participate in its £400m 'Train to Gain' skills programme, designed to ensure that more of the nation's workforce can read, write and use a computer.

Music fans who bought CDs with Sony BMG Music Entertainment's controversial XCP copy control software are going to get refunds. Last week saw the successful conclusion of a class action lawsuit that was brought against the company after it included invasive and potentially dangerous 'root kit' copy-protection software on an estimated 15 million music CDs. Anyone who purchased one of the XCP-protected discs can apply for either a cash payment of about £4.00, plus one free album download, or for three album downloads, whichever they prefer, and the application page link is here:

The 'Pentagon Hacker', Gary McKinnon, says he was looking for photographic evidence of UFOs and advanced power technology when he was arrested in 2002 by the UK's national high-tech crime unit after hacking into NASA and US military computer networks. He was spotted using a NASA computer to examine what he believes was a photograph of a UFO that had been erased from a satellite image - something he claims is done routinely at NASA's Johnson Space Centre in Texas. Currently banned from using the Internet, and wanted for trial in America where he could face 70 years behind bars, Gary is fighting to have his case heard in the UK and protesting imminent extradition to the US.

This isn't something readers will want to condone, much less try themselves at home, but there may be a grain of satisfaction in learning that spammers are getting scammed by fraudsters. Criminals who deal in stolen credit card data have devised a means to extract money from sponsors of junk mail campaigns. Spammers pay out big commissions to affiliates (people who aid spammers by propagating spam). So carders (people who steal credit card numbers) sign up as affiliates, then buy a ton of goods (mostly phoney cosmetic treatments) from the spammer's online stores using stolen credit card details. They get commission on the sales, but when the fraudulent purchases are identified, the orders fail and the spammers are hit with a mountain of charge backs.

Corporations are inventing people to rubbish their opponents on the Internet, writes The Guardian's George Monbiot. After failing to push GM foods in 1997, when 'genuine' viral marketing - real people passing on real concerns - worked against the company, Monsanto employed blackhat marketeers to badmouth research published in Nature that found native maize in Mexico had been contaminated across vast distances by GM pollen. Less subtle methods were tried before publication. One of the researchers was offered a dream job in return for withholding his paper and his children were threatened when he turned it down. The Internet lobbying specialists chosen by Monsanto, Bivings Group, in an article on their Web site: "Viral Marketing: How to Infect the World", warn that "There are some campaigns where it would be undesirable or even disastrous to let the audience know that your organisation is directly involved. Once you are plugged into this [Internet] world, it is possible to make postings to outlets that present your position as an uninvolved third party". A senior executive from Monsanto is quoted on the Bivings site, thanking the PR firm for its "outstanding work".

A CNET News.com report published recently shows that the US Internet industry and related companies including AT&T, AOL, Comcast and Verizon are pouring millions into political coffers in the US in an effort to have 'unfavourable' legislation halted or reversed. Cash paid to lobbyists and politicians by large IT firms more than doubled between 1998 and 2004, the period for which complete records are available, when the total amount of influence purchasing by 37 prominent computer and Internet firms topped $430 million.

The National Archives of England, Wales and the United Kingdom has one of the largest archival collections in the world, spanning 1,000 years of British history, from the Domesday Book of 1086 to government papers recently released to the public. Now it has a search engine online that for the first time allows users to easily access its eleven catalogues and databases with a single query. Previously, users had to search each catalogue and database individually. The National Archives Global Search brings up results from The National Archives Web site pages, the Catalogue, DocumentsOnline and Access to Archives (A2A). It also searches the Moving Here and Family Records Web sites, the National Register of Archives (NRA), the ARCHON Directory and online research guides.

If you find Google Maps (http://www.google.com/maps) a little cumbersome when it comes to searching the country - or the world - for a particular town or place, try the excellent Earth Tools instead. Click on its "find places" text link to pop up a search box that displays worldwide occurrences of the place name you want to find. Earth Tools offers extra information too, including the elevation/height above sea level of pinpoint locations as you drag any UK map around, plus an alternative version that shows Ordnance Survey style contours at the same time.

Google's staff doctor, Taraneh Razavi, likes to weigh in with blog posts that will help to keep her fellow workers healthy. Her latest concern is to stop Googleplex employees adding to the 34% of lost working days illness in the US that's caused by RSI - repetitive stress injury. Her number one tip: Computer workers should take breaks every 30-45 minutes for at least 5 minutes.

Thanks to regular reminders chiming on their body clocks during the working day, smokers are better at taking regular breaks away from their computers than the rest of us, but risk ill health in many other ways. If they stayed at their desks a little longer, they might find that computers have the answer to quitting smoking for good. A team at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, and the Dutch anti-smoking organisation Stivoro, are developing a female chatbot to provide free, round-the-clock advice and exercises for people trying to give up.

The placement and layout of your desk is critical to the energy flow of your office. A few simple but crucial rules can help you to function more effectively and less stressfully at work, says author George Birdsall, in his book The Feng Shui Companion.

Spiked, the online journal for "free thinkers" that says it would be endorsed by Karl Marx but condemned by Stalin, and which was a lonely voice questioning the government's evidence before the passive smoking debate, reports that EC officials in Brussels are plotting to make drinking as socially unacceptable as smoking. Could British pubs - soon to be smoke free zones - become alcohol free zones too?

You can create an instant online journal or Web page with its own URL, without turning into a blogger or knowing anything about HTML. It's completely free and extremely easy to do - you simply type into an empty text box at ShortText.com and click once. If you have some text-based information that you want to share with the world, or just a few of your friends, you can copy it onto the page and click to create a dedicated Web address that you can send to whoever you like. Pages can be accessible to anyone, and searched for, or you can choose to make them available to a selected audience. You can also decide whether or not your visitors should be able to add their own comments.

Microsoft's first Web site wasn't a pretty sight. Its graphics theme was based on something inspired by the logo on a morning TV news programme and looked like a half eaten breakfast egg. But the broken shell silhouette had a rainbow topping that hinted at more ambitious designs to come and the site was a match for most others around at the time. It was developed more than a decade ago, and although there very few destinations on offer, the front page was already asking "Where do you want to go today?".

Apple Computer's latest cube-shaped creation - a stunning three-storey glass structure marking the entrance to its new 5th Avenue store in New York - reflects how far the Macintosh maker has come since launching its first hexahedron six years ago. Apple's Power Mac G4 Cube computer was released in 2000, but didn't sell well and was discontinued 18 months later. It still has its devotees, however, and its good looks earned the computer some permanent display space at New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Apple's 5th Avenue store, the company's 147th, opens on the back of thriving sales of iPod players and Macs ($14 billion revenue in 2005) that have made Apple one of the fastest-growing retailers in the world.

If iPods could talk, what would they have to say for themselves? SmartMoney.com lists the top ten items not up for discussion.

Last month, AOL launched AIM Phoneline, offering free phone numbers to the 41 million users of its instant messaging service in the US, allowing them to receive unlimited free phone calls from landline phones using VoIP - Voice over Internet Protocol technology. Users need to upgrade to a flat-fee, $14.90 per month add-on service before they can make any outgoing calls from their new numbers, but get an unlimited provision of domestic and international calls for their money, including calls to mobile phones.

MySpace's still-growing popularity comes at the expense of traffic to older Web portals like Yahoo! and AOL, but its popularity may be short lived. A CNET report shows that the teenage surfers who make up most of the MySpace audience are a fickle bunch, with the list of top teen sites changing almost as fast as the top ten album charts. This year, a fresh crop of newcomer sites like Memegen.net, Tagged.com, Bebo.com and MyYearbook.com have shot up like weeds, attracting between 500,000 and 1 million teenagers per month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which puts them in the top 20 teen Web destinations.

Two members of the MySpace teenage audience were arrested in Los Angeles last month for allegedly trying to extort $150,000 from the company. The pair, 18 and 19, were said to have hacked into the social network Web site, exploiting a vulnerability that enabled them to steal users' personal information. The teenagers threatened to release their exploit code on the Web unless MySpace came up with the money. Company executives invited the two New York residents out to Los Angeles, telling them they would meet to discuss the deal - but they were met instead by undercover agents from the US Secret Service. A court hearing is set for next week, when the travellers will face at least four years in a California prison.

A company in Ohio called CityWatcher has implanted radio transmitters into the arms of some of its workers. The implants allow them to enter secure areas. Costing only $100 and smaller than a grain of rice, the transmitters require no maintenance and can identify someone for many years. The company that makes them says they "combine access control with the location and protection of individuals". The chips can also be implanted in hospital patients, especially children and people who are mentally incapacitated. When doctors want to know who they are and what their medical history is, they simply point a scanner in their direction. This, apparently, is "an empowering option to affected individuals". At least one school in the US (Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, California) has already proposed that all its pupils should be tagged. Although the majority of the population, especially in the UK, may never suffer the indignity of implanted chip surveillance, another use of the same technology might well extend to the rest of us. In January, a letter leaked to the Daily Telegraph from Andy Burnham, the Home Office minister, revealed that the identity cards that we will soon be volunteering to carry will contain radio frequency identification chips. These would allow the authorities to read the cards with a scanner and, as the technology improves, to scan any crowd of people - from shoppers in the high street to groups of political protestors - and produce a list of everyone present.

Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly isn't heard from often these days, but his recent article about Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's goal to make every book ever written digital and searchable put the various book scanning projects underway around the world back into the headlines. Almost since the beginning of recorded history, man has dreamed about collecting all the world's knowledge in one place. The closest anyone came to reaching the goal was at the Library of Alexandria, which assembled over half a million scrolls 2000 years ago. Today, Google is scanning about 1,000,000 books a year, which amounts to a mere 5% of all the books in print. But it is inevitable that it will come together eventually, says Kelly, so that "on this screen, now visible to one billion people on earth, the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge".

(Press Release). "Trumalia New Enigmatic Search Engine Is Sure To Be A Hit With Da Vinci Code Fans. The phenomenon of intricate puzzles made famous by The Da Vinci Code, has left enigma lovers wanting more", it says here. Trumalia is a search engine with a considerable bonus feature. Hidden within the riddles and embedded code are the solutions to four enigmas. Three of these will lead the solver to three buried artifacts. In addition to the value of the artifact, each enigma carries a $1,000 cash prize. If a user solves all four enigmas, he/she will have the opportunity to win the Grand Prize, a sizeable pot of cash that increases with each day the mysteries go unsolved.