Zen Monthly Newsletter

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Police uncovered a terrorist plot to blow up Britain's Internet hub at Telehouse in London, according to reports from the Sunday Times. The paper claims that, if successful, the Al-Qaeda plot "to bring down UK Internet" could have knocked out most of Britain's online services. The report says police raids uncovered computer files indicating that terrorist suspects had been planning to infiltrate Telehouse in London's Docklands with the aim of blowing it up from the inside. However, although the Sunday Times warning that most of the UK's Internet traffic passes through the Docklands facility may be valid enough, its crime reporter, David Leppard, failed to note that critical infrastructure is distributed at many colocation sites and terrorists would need to mount attacks at numerous buildings around the country to cause any major disruption.

Businesses in the UK and Europe are leaving themselves vulnerable to IT security breaches by failing to incorporate suitable training in employee inductions, according to a survey of small and medium-sized companies.

British companies are more concerned about cost and quality of service than security when it comes to making the switch to VoIP. And for most the technology was meeting expectations: 60 per cent of businesses said they were seeing the majority of the benefits they hoped for from the IP telephony system they selected.

New colour printing technology known as Memjet looks set to change the industry with disruptively low-price running costs. Unveiled last month at the Global Ink Jet Printing Conference in Prague, it is the first to combine high speed and quality colour at reasonable cost. The new technology prints full-colour images at 60 pages per minute, many times the inkjet industry standard. Machines at a fraction of the price of high-speed colour laser devices will be available soon for the home/office, photo-kiosk and label markets. Printing costs for the basic desktop printer are expected to be around 3p per A4 for a colour page. There's more to come: the technology is scalable from 20mm to over 2 metres, and could be incorporated into mobile phones and digital cameras at one end of the scale and large-format commercial printing with the ability to print a personalised newspaper at the other.

BBC Magazines is adding video clips and full listings of TV programmes that are available online to the Radio Times Web site as part of a revamp to reflect the growing options for watching broadcast content via the Internet. The site, radiotimes.com, will include listings for online channels such as five.tv, livingtv.co.uk and Channel 4's video-on-demand service, 4oD, and will recommend the best of the latest user-generated clips on sites such as youtube.com, youare.tv and gofish.com.

London taxis are being fitted with 'on the move broadband' wireless access and digital radio station broadcasts direct to the passenger compartment, providing anyone with a laptop access to the Web as they travel. There will be some advertising: businesses will be able to buy space on the landing page that comes up when users connect for the first time.

The Tube is to trial mobile phone use. Starting this month, London Underground plans to test the commercial and technical viability of mobile coverage on the below-ground sections of the city's rail transport system.

In February, a group of 16 cyclists from the UK took part in a fund-raising bike ride across Kenya to help provide technology for developing countries, raising £17,000 for the IT charity along the way.

Oodle, the online classifieds company, has oodles of competition, but venture capitalists have invested over $10 million recently to push it to the fore. On the face of it, Oodle is not very different from Craigslist and other classifieds startups, such as Edgeio, LiveDeal and Vflyer. But Oodle is using the extra cash to offer better tools. Take its car classifieds, for example. If you’re searching for a particular make and model, Oodle gives you market price data, and availability - data that you can’t get at the other sites. Oodle’s model is not to take listings itself, but to aggregate classifieds from other sites, such as newspapers - giving it a much greater reach. In the US, it has 20 million listings culled from over 75,000 sources, and there's a UK version - something lacking at Edgeio, LiveDeal and Vflyer, but well established and busy at the still-minimalist Craigslist site.

Facebook, the social networking site for twenty-somethings, is turning out a generation of navel-gazing pseudo-celebs, says Spiked columnist Amol Rajan. But In the UK, over 30 universities have signed up for membership, and at least 60 per cent of Oxford and Cambridge students are said to be registered users. More photos (around 2.3 million) are uploaded onto Facebook.com each day than any other Web site in the world and it has at least 18 million users - second only to MySpace.com, which Rupert Murdoch bought for $580 million in 2005. Google reportedly offered $2.3 billion for Facebook shortly after acquiring YouTube for $1.65 billion last year.

Grouptivity is the latest start-up that wants to let you share your views on Web content with friends or work colleagues. Specifically, Grouptivity gives you a toolbar that lets you easily strip the content from any Web page, including text, images and video. It puts that content onto a clipboard, which you can send to your friends with notations. You can add in your contacts on Skype, Yahoo IM or Microsoft messenger and see if they are online. Copyright is honoured. If text is stripped from the Web, Grouptivity copies the first 300 words and then provides a link to the rest. With photos and video, a thumbnail is provided, and recipients view the original media by clicking back to the original site. Grouptivity is similar to Clipmarks, another site that lets you cut and paste pieces of a Web page. However, Clipmarks forces you to go back to your e-mail client to send the content. Grouptivity is more helpful; stripped content is automatically loaded into a form that's ready to send. All you do is enter the e-mail addresses.

According to Wikipedia, a weblog, or simply a blog, is a Web site that contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common Web page. Blogging has always been personal. Now - at least if you believe VNU and its Nielsen Media Research division, BuzzMetrics - it's business too. Nielsen people think that companies need to keep an eye on blogs, the tip of the CGM (Consumer Generated Media) iceberg, and the increasing commercial marketing opportunities they offer. The BuzzMetrics BlogPulse site provides a set of online tools that apply "machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs" so that businesses can search the blogosphere for the latest trends in consumer-generated media.

Apparently not content to rest on the laurels of his Canterbury Tales authorship, Geoffrey Chaucer is back - with a blog. "Thou kanst fynde myn feede for liveiournale at the username chaucerhathblog. Sum swete soule hath sette yt vp for me", says Geoff, who also comments on current affairs (such as "Britney Spearses" and "MynSpace") and many other matters.

Could the vast commercial landscape of the Internet be dominated by a single company one day? Will we just Google everything? It's unlikely, thinks Geoffrey Moore, author of Picking Winners in High Technology. "Ecosystems always organise to curtail entities that get too powerful", he says. But Googlezon - a combination of Google and Amazon - might prove an irresistible force, according to Business Week.

When this writer last noticed the size of the Internet Archive - which takes ‘snapshots’ of the Web at least once every 60 days - its repository had reached 500 terabytes. That’s more data warehousing than most people can visualise without their head hurting. This year, the archive is seeing growth of almost 1 terabyte per day, and currently stores over 2 petabytes in total. A petabyte is roughly a thousand terabytes and a terabyte is roughly a thousand gigabytes. Geeky stats aside, this means there is a fantastic array of ‘old’ versions of the Web, freely available for serious research or casual enquiry, or even as a possible last-chance backup when an individual site becomes unavailable.

The way people found various Web sites in the early days of the Internet, before Microsoft's still-not-really-named search engine, or Yahoo! or Google came along, was by navigating from link to link, or by typing in a URL after being tipped off by a friend - or seeing it in 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web'. Wonder what happened to that?

Registered domain names came under the auctioneer's hammer in Las Vegas earlier this year. Families.com went for $650,000, Greeting.com for $350,000 and Blogster.com made $275,000. Skinnydipping.com sold for $10,000, and many of the highest prices were paid for unmentionablehere.coms of the variety much sought after by members of the adult Web site community. Over $1.7 million changed hands in less than four hours during the event, run by Moniker.com, who will hold another auction in New York this summer.

Find a dead link - or one that redirects to another address - on the pages of the online BusinessSeek directory and the company will provide you with a Sponsored Listing for a six month period free of charge. Not a bad idea for any business with a whopping Web site to keep tabs on.

A man in Scotland has won a damages award of £750 plus expenses against Transcom Internet Services after suing the ISP for sending him a single e-mail.

Need spam-avoidance anonymity? Emailias allows you to add a button to your Web browser toolbar that will automatically generate a temporary @emailias.com address and then have anything that's sent to the disposable address forwarded until you tell it to stop. There's a free trial. For one-off, always-free, shorter term solutions, there's Ten Minute Mail, which works in a similar way, but 'self destructs' addresses after ten minutes. When the disposable e-mail address becomes invalid, spammers can no longer reach you and they get bounced messages instead.

TimeSearch is a very different search engine that delves into history to deliver its results. It's the brainchild of Bamber Gascoigne - of University Challenge fame and sometime presenter of historical documentaries. The engine requires a choice of year (BC or AD) and selection of geographic areas or themes (art, politics, science, etc), and there's the further option of limiting results from specific sources such as the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and so on. Typical responses come in the form of a timeline or list of events for the year selected and a little beyond. TimeSearch takes some getting used to, and the need to choose a year is limiting (you can't search by naming events, for example) but development continues.