Now does that really comes as a surprise to anyone? The monitoring system was uncovered by a group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers. Basically, the surveillance involves the tracking of internet text communications that feature banned words and phrases.

The primary target of this surveillance is the users of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay , owners of Skype.

The human rights activists discovered the system about a month ago. Apparently, they found message logging server in China which contained more than a million censored messages. By analysing the messages they were able to put together a list of banned words that had triggered the system.  If you’re wondering how human rights activists managed to ‘just access’ servers in China it’s because the machine were, apparently, misconfigured. This allowed the team to simply download the logs.

Of slightly more concern is the report that the Chinese authorities also monitored conversations between Tom-Skype users and Skype users around the world (including user id’s).

Don’t forget that China isn’t the only nation watching its citizens. Intelligence networks around the world routinely collect internet based communications, albeit for reasons other than censorship i.e. counter terrorism.

Two final points for you - banned words found on the list included;  Falun Gong, Taiwan independence and the Chinese Communist Party, democracy, earthquake and milk powder. (Chinese officials are being slammed over their handling of earthquake relief and chemical laced milk powder.)

During the recent Olympic Games, China had an estimated that 30,000 or more “Internet police” monitoring online traffic, Web sites and blogs for political and other offending content!

Popularity: 48% [?]

But only for the US

That’s right, just like Hulu. The MySpace Music launch, which was announced yesterday by MySpace owners News Corp, allows all users to view the new layout and functionality. Unfortunately, music content will only be available to users in the US. According to News Corp, this isn’t a snub to users outside the US but is the result of complex licensing deals in different country which need to be negotiated prior to music being available. MySpace are expecting to have deals in place soon, on a country by country basis (Note: Hulu is now a year old and most video content is still only watchable in the U.S!)

It will be in the interest of MySpace to resolve this licensing issue as soon as possible. There are already millions of non-U.S. users who won’t be able to listen to any new music added by the major labels. This also means they can’t access access, create or share new playlists. It’s not likely that another music site of this size will spring up overnight and snatch MySpace users away but, should we see another similar service rise over time, users could be slowly leeched away with a high quality, open to all service.

Popularity: 26% [?]

It would be fair to say that most social networks are making hard work of generating revenue from ad networks. The likes of FaceBook and MySpace have been trying hard to pull in some serious cash from advertising - to no avail.  Considering these two social media monsters are having a hard time you’d think that other companies wouldn’t even bother going down the advertising path until a fix had been found. Think again…

LinkedIn thinks they’ve cracked it. Most social networks are hard pressed to sell ads for more $1 CPM (hint; now might be a good time to advertise on FaceBook etc) but LinkedIn have pitched in with ads starting at $30 CPM rising to $76 CPM (text ads from $12 to $20 CPM).

How do they do it? They’ve entered into a deal with Collective Media whereby select sites can target LinkedIn users when they visit a partner site. When a user visits LinkedIn a cookie is placed in the users browser. This will be used to identify them as a LinkedIn member when they visit a partner site. Personal information will be removed, but members will be grouped into different, targetable categories - laser focused advertising delivered to users. The system does allow users to opt out of the program.

Nothing new, you might think until you consider the membership of LinkedIn. Typically, most users of LinkedIn are there to use the business networking aspects of the site, with many being in senior, decision making positions.

Is this really the future of socia networks?

Popularity: 24% [?]

Dubbed a “burglars charter”.

Some of you may already know this, but Google has sent cars around the UK to take close-up pictures of houses, road, hospitals and everything inbetween. This mammoth task is being carried out to allow Googles Streetview website to show a 360 degree picture of every UK address of postcode.

There’s one small problem - data protection. People can still be easily identified leaving, say, a sex shop! The Information Commissioners office is so concerneed that they have written a letter to Google  demanding privacy guarantees. Hmm, I wonder if that’s like the strongly worded government letters we hear so much about? I can just see Mr. Horrendous Despot wiping his arse on the letter as we speak (I am in no way suggesting that Google is despotic!)

In addition, checking out access points and weak spots becomes far easier for Mr B. Urglar - I wonder, could you sue Google if it was proven that a burglar used the Streetview service to break into your home? Now there’s something for the Goog to think about.

Popularity: 21% [?]

A snip at £20 million!

It would appear that BT is keen to expand its BT Directories business. Ufindus  currently has a huge number of customers - 20,000+ small and medium-sized business customers and around 1.9 millionlistings in its online directory. In addition, Ufindus offers its services through three directories: SmileLocal, MoreUK and Ufindus. On top of thie, it also runs more than 100 niche directories and provides website design services.

Lancaster based Ufindus had reported revenues of £14m in the year to 31 March, 2007 - that actually looks like a real bargain for BT.

Ufindus is expected to play a key role in the development of BT Directories’s online service offering.

“Through Ufindus’s considerable expertise and experience in online classified advertising, we access further local classified product offerings, significant search traffic and new customers for this fast-growing part of our business.” said David Benjamin, the chief executive of BT Directories.

Interesting news, I’m off to play a game of ‘Monopoly’!

Popularity: 21% [?]

Now, as you may or may not know Hans Reiser, the founder of ReiserFS (Linux file system) was found guilty of his of his wifes murder. Reiser and his wife, Nina, had been going through a bitter divorce battle when she disappeared in 2006.

According to the San Francisco Chronical, police believe that Reiser has lead them to her remains in the hills of Oklahoma, California. As yet the remains have not been formally identified.

Reiser is currently being held, without bail, pending his sentencing on Wednesday.

Popularity: 20% [?]

8,002,530 is the number to beat.

That’s right, FF 3 was downloaded over 8 million times in the first 24 hours of availability following a campaign to mobilise the Open Source community.

“As the arbiter and recorder of the world’s amazing facts, Guinness World Records is pleased to add Mozilla’s achievement to our archives,” Gareth Deaves, records manager at Guinness Worlds Records, said in a statement.

On the day the record was FireFox also notched up 6% of market share; its highest figure so far. Now that’s pretty impressive regardless of how you look at it. Well done, keep up the good work

Popularity: 20% [?]

…hardware market to defy the economy.

I said it yesterday and now Gartner have confirmed it (I feel really good when things like this happen).

The predictions came out of the Gartner IT Hardware Insights forum, which was held at the company’s UK headquarters in Egham, Surrey.

Senior research analyst Errol Rasit said the period from 2008 to 2009 will be marked by a split in the market for hardware. “At the high end and the very low end, we have two very large groups who are spending,” he said. Linux-based systems are a beneficiary of this trend, thanks to the move away from high-end Unix systems to x86-based systems.

It looks like IBM are going to benefit as well. There is renewed interest in the zSeries mainframe as companies seek to achieve economies of scale through the purchase of larger systems. That said, the server market is still dominated by Sun which is good news. I’m a huge Open Source fan and Sun are the number one contributors which makes me very happy.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Trailing the US by a long chalk!

Same old story; the US leads the way in yet another area. The business world is being driven by an information explosion which would have easily swamped traditional methods of computing. The virtualised world provided companies with the ability to side step issues associated with power requirements, physical space and virtualised storage. But the uptake in Europe is slow.

Recent independent surveys conducted in both the United States and Europe indicate that the majority of businesses surveyed in bothregions believe that their existing storage solutions will only be able to scale for the next one to two years.

It is widely recognised that storage virtualisation is the best way to provide a alleviate many current but only 27% of European  respondents are actually implementing
storage virtualisation today as compared with 35% in the US.

73% of US respondents reported that they currently operate a virtualised server environment, and 67% answered that they are considering deploying virtualised storage in their data centres.

In the US, 45% of businesses surveyed stated that they would realise
operational cost savings between 20-40%, which is the main driver of
storage adoption. In Europe that figure was near identical on 48%.

Other significant results from the survey include:

• 59% of respondents believe that at the current growth rate, their existing storage solution will be able to scale for only one totwo years; way ahead of the European market, which was on 40%

• Half of US respondents believe that simplifying management is the most important consideration when choosing a storage virtualisationsolution. In Europe the figure was far higher on 60% of the sample.

• 45% of US respondents consider 20-40% operational cost savings to be the number one motivation to switch from their current file storage solution to virtualised storage. In Europe the figure was comparable at 48%.

I guess it’s time for European countries to get their act in order; we wouldn’t to fall behind the US, would we?

Popularity: 24% [?]

All together now, ‘ENCRYPTION’!

Yes, you’ve already guessed what I’m going to say but what the hell; an NHS trust hospistal has 21,000 patients details. The data was stored on unencrypted laptop lost by the Colchester Hospital University NHS Foundation Trust.

Details of patient names, dates of birth, postcodes and treatment details, were on the laptop which was stolen from the car of a Colchester trust manager. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) will investigate whether the organisation breached the Data Protection Act by failing to encrypt patient data.

Trust chief executive Peter Murphy stated that there is “very small chance that patient details can be accessed” and that the trust believes “the data will almost certainly by wiped by the thief” - or so they hope!

So, another case of your data being lost by those entrusted to keep it safe. Another day, another cock up!

Popularity: 20% [?]