Ofcom under requirements better service for disabled customers

Communication providers must give text Relay services for phone users hearing and/or speech impairment photograph: Graham Turner for the guardian

People with disabilities rely on communication services to make phone calls is set to take advantage of the new measures proposed by the communications regulatory authority Ofcom under.

By law, communication service providers (ISPs) give text Relay services for phone users consulting and/or speech impairment. The service allows users to write messages in a text telephone which is provided by a relay-Assistant to the recipient. The Assistant then converts your reply back to the text for the user.

Ofcom under research has shown that users are current communication services slow, with conversations sometimes lack flow naturally. Under the current service, users have to say "go ahead" after each part of a conversation.

The new features of the text Relay service will include permits users to interject during a conversation, rather than to wait until the end of a message. They will also give the service access to mainstream consumer electronics devices such as PCs and netbooks, as well as existing Relay equipment, such as textphones.

By Ofcom concerning consumer group Director, Claudio Pollack, said: "people with disabilities may face barriers when you use the communication services. Although the wide availability and use of broadband and mobile text services have given greater opportunities for people with disabilities to communicate, still people with hearing and/or speech impairment meet barriers when using voice telephony.

"The proposed measures aim to reduce these barriers by allowing conversations to flow naturally in real time."

Ofcom under also proposes the introduction of the video relay on a limited basis for registered users, British sign language. Under the Communications Act 2003, Ofcom under the obligation to meet the needs of the disabled and the elderly.

In May introduced regulatory authorities an emergency SMS system for 14,500 users with hearing and speech barriers to text details about events to emergency services, instead of calling 999.

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Team 17 Software Ltd Chief: ' EA was a good fit for us '

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PopCap chief executive Dave Roberts says the past six months have been 'pretty damn crazy' for the company. Photograph: Lincoln Potter/Samaya LLC/Lincoln Potter

One of the biggest game industry stories this year has centred around the acquisition of one of casual gaming's leading lights, PopCap, by Electronic Arts for the hefty sum of $750m (£457m).

While the benefits of the sale from EA's perspective are easy to work out – it extends the company's reach on both social network and smartphone gaming platforms, and increases its talent-base significantly – PopCap's motives for the sale have been difficult to pin down.

We spoke to PopCap chief executive Dave Roberts to find out what motivated the deal and what effects it will have on the company.

How were the past six months?
It was certainly crazy. I don't know if it was the craziest six months of my life, but it was pretty damn crazy.

Can you talk me through the decision process that led to PopCap being acquired by Electronic Arts?
Well, we were working with some bankers on the deal. They were taking us through the whole thing – which wasn't a traditional banking process. At the same time we were spending a lot of energy and time looking at going the IPO route on this and doing a lot of work on that. So, on the one hand I was involved in that, and on the other, I was meeting with a lot of companies who could potentially acquire us, so, yeah, there was a lot on my plate during that time.

It was kind of like speed dating – although I've never done speed dating. For us, there were a lot of quick 'Hi, how are you' meetings. EA was a good fit for us, though. I think both companies remembered each other from a couple of years ago when we first took a good look at each other's inner workings – it was easy to think that everything was static, when in fact, the truth was both companies had changed a lot over that time.

A lot of it was about rediscovering, for us, that EA actually cared about games. That was an eye-opener for me; I mean I know John Riccitiello's been saying it for a long time, but I've heard that sort of thing before. Just because a CEO is saying it doesn't make it so. But then you walk through the halls of EA and see people who are genuinely excited about games.

Number 1 hit: Bejeweled, PopCap's first runaway success

They also like us from a product-personal perspective. They genuinely have affection our games; their interest in us wasn't because they saw as filling a market niche. With Riccitiello's vision for EA, games do come first and this multi-platform future for all games is kind of where we at PopCap were heading anyway. We share a common vision with them.

There's now a lot more we can do with our games – and I think we've just scratched the surface of what we're capable of.

What will the deal change at PopCap?
Well, PopCap's been changing every single year for the last 10 years, but hopefully, we'll keep the essence of what we do here. One of the things I like about EA – and I don't think this was true of them a few years ago – is that they care about games very passionately. I think they lost that for a while. The EA of four years ago was the EA that was arrogant and didn't really give a shit about games. At some point though, and I personally didn't even notice this about EA until around last year, but things had changed. EA was different; people were actually excited about their jobs again, and I don't think that had happened in a while.

Every indication is, that EA like us as we are. They've not really proven to be very good at making casual content, so there's no reason why they'd want to mess with what we have here.

We certainly look at it as an opportunity to take some of the things that we've tried to do better on a bigger scale – like massive porting efforts, for example – that we've never been quite as good as EA at doing. We could only do that sort of stuff on a PopCap scale. Teaming up with EA to do that stuff is going to make our lives so much easier; a lot of our game guys will have space and time to work on games and they won't have to spend vast amounts of time on porting efforts, say.

Peggle opened the door to PopCap's hardcore success through Steam

So was the main objective in the deal to allow PopCap to refocus its creative talent?
Well, that's one objective, sure. We're a relatively small company after all. I mean, for example, we've got a team in Dublin right now that's working on a social media game, but that's also the team we have that does ports to Android. Also, if we get a Sony Ericsson deal, we have to go off and buy 60 handsets to work on.

Look, no individual task is that hard, but you'd have a situation where we'd have designers, artists and engineers that could be working on a social game, and they're doing other things instead of that. Now, we can move that sort of work off to other parts of the EA organisation that do that stuff very well. The good news is that EA have set it all up so we get to choose which parts of our organisation and workload that we want to integrate. There's no big EA mandate that dictates that we have to do things their way.

Their attitude is more: 'Look, here's the stuff our organisation can do. Let us know what you want and we'll figure it all out.'

Well, that's how it's been so far. We haven't closed the deal yet, so ask me in six months! But we're pretty excited about it. We really see this as an opportunity to be a bigger company, hopefully without losing what's special about what we do here.

So was the other major objective to grow PopCap as a company?
Well, we've always been about creating this enduring legacy for our brands. We want our games to rank up there with games like Monopoly and Scrabble, regardless of the fact that they're video games. People have favourite games but a many of them aren't video games and we really want to change that. Now, with the consumer reach that EA's got, we're better positioned for that. We knew we could have probably done it on our own, but it would have taken a lot a longer. With EA, we can accelerate that process by quite a large number of years, because a relationship with them gives us access to a lot more resources.

Some of its things, like Playfish's publishing platform, which can accelerate our social media games development, or Origin, which is this huge client database which will help us reach more gamers.

So we've got more available. We don't have all the answers yet on what we're going to do with all of it, but we're excited that we have the opportunity to use it.

You sound like you're still figuring it out as you go…
Yeah, well, that's just it; the biggest challenge for a company our size is that there are so many things that we could do. The danger is that we don't make sure we know what the first things we should go after are. We're going to have to be a little bit careful; it's easy to try a thousand things at once and do none of them. We've got to be a bit judicious about things and take deliberation on it.

Look, there are a lot of questions we still have – we haven't closed the deal yet – and there's the potential for a lot of angst that people have when there's this much change, so we know we have a lot still to work through.

You've said that there's a lot that will change at PopCap – as has been happening over the last 10 years – but surely there are fundamentals here that won't be changed?
Well they shouldn't be. Unless, of course, we decided we wanted to change them. Look, five years ago we were a download gaming company. Now we're a social media games company and a smartphone games company. That's what we're know for now, and that's a pretty big change, right? It's the biggest change that I think we've had at PopCap – certainly in the time I've been here.

We've had to really think about games differently. With social games, I really have to credit Jason [Kapalka, founder and chief creative officer] and some of the other guys at the studio for dragging some of the old timers we've had here, kicking and screaming sometimes, towards that genre. Once they got it, though, they really realised that all social games were not evil and they were actually a really cool way to engage users in ways we never thought of before. Once that happened, the whole landscape here changed.

I think we're on this dawn of new social games. We haven't seen the best of what that platform has to offer yet – not just from PopCap but from anyone. We want to change the way people look at social gaming and I'm sure other folks are working on the same thing. Take the new Sims social stuff – I haven't seen it myself yet, but I've heard it's supposed to be amazing. I don't think you're going to be seeing much more, cloney, spam-your-friends games that we've seen on Facebook in the past. I think you're going to see a lot of innovation there and that's only a good thing.

Plants vs Zombie proved a massive crossover hit for both casual and core audiences

So do you think that we're going to see fewer games on social platforms that put a premium on monetisation?
Well, it depends on what you care about. You can go overboard with monetisation on any platform. You can take any of the free-to-play models too far and I think doing that too much can put a blemish on the industry. I think that this actually hurt social games very early on, even some of the ones like FarmVille, which I think was very spammy at first. But they've gotten huge; ask FarmVille players now if they like FarmVille, and they do. It's easy for us in the core gaming crowd to say that it's not even a game, but the truth is, FarmVille has tens of millions of people who play it and love it and you can't argue with that!

Do you think that the core market developers resist making social media games because they see how much money they make and they start getting worried that this is the sort of game that publishers and developers will start to focus more on making, because that's where the money is?
I think that's a part of it, sure. But then there's another part of it that it's because it's the unknown. Game designers are a fickle breed and they kind of like things to stay the way they are. It's hard for things to change sometimes – look, we've struggled with it. It's hard to make a game with the right balance; which is fun, and that you can monetise while having it still be engaging. Making a game which is a one-time fee is a much easier challenge than making any freemium game model work.

I've seen a lot of bad freemium models out there where they give you two levels and then expect you to pay for it – and the two levels aren't very good. There may be an interesting game in there, but you'll never know, because the makers tried to make you pay for it too fast!

So, I guess developers have always had game balance issues, and now we've got a new dimension for game balancing and I think that's daunting. It's a whole new skill set and evidenced by some of the stuff I've seen out there, a lot of people aren't very good at it.

I think we'll come around, though. People are learning how to make better social games. We take an approach here where we try to lead with the fun part and then dial up the monetization part. We've probably left money on the table somewhere, but ultimately we've kept our customers happy and we've preserved our reputation and, frankly, that's the most important thing for us. We're in for the long run. It's Facebook today, but it might Google+ in a year and it could be something completely different in three years.

Do you have any developers looking at making games for Google+?
I don't know if I'd be allowed to say so if we did!

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Mac OS X Lion: in-depth review with pictures

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Apple CEO Steve Jobs announces Lion at the 2011 Apple World Wide Developers Conference in June. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The release of Apple's next revision of Mac OSX, version 10.7 – called "Lion" – brings a number of big and small changes, from the direction of scrolling to the colour of buttons to ad-hoc Wi-Fi sharing. Here to guide you through them and tell you what's good, what's less so, and what to avoid, is Matt Gemmell.

Into the Lion's mouth
First impressions
Finder
Launchpad
Full-Screen apps
Mission Control
Gestures
Mail
iCal and Address Book
Safari
System Preferences
Auto Save, Resume and Versions
Odds and ends
Upgrading to Lion
What's left behind
Whoa, horsey
Conclusion

When Apple held its "Back to the Mac" event in October 2010, many OS X users breathed a sigh of relief. There had been a perception that Apple's focus had been solely on iOS, the operating system for the iPhone and iPad, for quite some time – accurate enough, and understandable given the meteoric rise in the number of people using an iOS device in recent years. The announcement of Mac OS X "Lion" (version 10.7) served as reassurance that Apple hadn't forgotten about its existing customers.

But there was another meaning to "Back to the Mac": it indicated that many of the new features in Lion had been inspired by iOS, or born of lessons learned during the development of iOS. The good parts of iOS had been fed back into OS X. Which makes sense, since millions more people have used iOS devices than Mac OS X ones; but the Mac OS X market is gaining new users every quarter (Mac sales have been growing faster than the PC market for five years).

With the previous release of OS X, Snow Leopard (reviewed here) being seen as more of an overall improvement and refinement (with plenty of new developer APIs) rather than adding lots of new visible features, OS X was due to give some more love to the average user. Thankfully, Lion delivers.

As soon as you reach the login screen, it becomes plain that Lion serves up a raft of cosmetic tweaks, as every OS X release does; this time, making nods towards iOS. Most are subtle, but the new appearance for choosing a user account to log into doesn't fall into that category. The textured background behind many iOS interfaces when you scroll past a boundary is shown in its full and somewhat sombre glory.

Mac OS X Lion's login screen: the appearance has changed dramatically – to something more like an appliance

User account photos are now rendered in bubbles, not just here but throughout the OS, including in the Fast User Switching menu and in AirDrop. There's something kiosk-like about the new visual cues; it feels just a little bit less like a computer and more like an appliance.

When you reach the desktop, you'll find not much has obviously changed – until you're presented with a large window informing you that the default scrolling behaviour has changed: by default, Lion now moves content in the direction your fingers move on the trackpad or Magic Mouse, such that you move your fingers upwards to move web pages upwards (thus "scrolling down", as we'd call it). In other words, it's just like iOS. You can change back to the old behaviour if you wish.

It takes some mental adjustment, but after a few days it does make more sense, particularly when paired with the other multi-touch gestures which permeate the new OS. This is the scrolling direction to bet on from now on, and it's not by accident that Apple enables it by default, and calls it "Natural".

As far back as 2003, Steve Jobs was grumbling about interfaces where it's up to you to keep the files neatly ordered – where "you're the janitor". Despite Apple's apparent dislike of users having to explicitly manage a file system (to which Spotlight and Smart Folders on OS X are testament, along with several new Lion features; iOS doesn't even give the user access to the file system in any direct way), a new release of OS X always includes a host of tweaks to the Finder's appearance and behaviour.

Lion is no exception. The Sidebar in Finder windows has undergone an iTunes-like cosmetic transformation: its various icons now all shown in grey. As with iTunes, it's a questionable decision, making specific folders more difficult to find at a glance. On the plus side, we have a new view of documents entitled All My Files. It's a series of CoverFlow-like browsers, sorted by file type, of all your own documents regardless of location, and definitely useful when, say, you want to find a certain presentation, say, but don't recall the name. Spotlight can provide that functionality too, but a visual browser is more consumer-friendly than a search field. Once again, it's yet another alternative way to find and access your files.

Browse your files by type in All My Files

Searching for files is also improved with the new Search Tokens (also available in Mail), which are a middle ground between an unadorned Spotlight search (type some text into the search field) and a Smart Folder (a saved, continuous search). As you type a query into a Finder window's search field, Lion suggests the actual search criteria you want: you type "Guardian" and it suggests what you're after is "Filename contains 'Guardian'". If you confirm these criteria they're inserted into the search field as blue tokens, which you can interact with to broaden or narrow their scope. It's a remarkably intuitive way to make very precise searches without having to know the arcana of Spotlight's more complex query syntax (which remains available to those in the know, of course).

Advanced searches are easier with automatic Search Tokens

As soon as you look at the Dock in Lion, you'll notice a new icon for one of the tentpole features of the new OS: Launchpad (also available via a gesture, as you'd expect: swipe upwards on a trackpad with three fingers). Launchpad is the iOS Home screen interface, but on your Mac: rows of icons, freely re-orderable and which can be grouped into folders, spanning as many horizontally tiled screens as necessary.

Launchpad makes your Mac into a very big iPhone indeed

Launchpad stays in sync with applications you add or remove, either manually or via the Mac App Store, and functions just as you're used to if you've ever used as iOS device. One sticking point is that apps can't be selected by typing their name on the keyboard – a pointing device is compulsory, which feels a little mean. Otherwise, the interface works very well, and its privileged position in the Dock will surely help beginners find applications without knowing about Spotlight or the Applications folder. It's unlikely to get much use from more advanced users, but it's by no means forced upon you.

Many applications, including several from Apple, have had full-screen modes for years now, but each was different in its appearance and behaviour. With Lion, Apple introduces not only a standards means for apps to support a full-screen mode, but also native integration with Spaces (its multi-workspace implementation) for those that do.

Apps supporting the new Full-Screen API gain a subtle icon on the extreme right of their title bars (the by now standard diagonally-opposed arrows). Clicking the icon causes the app to enter Full-Screen mode, which promotes it to occupy a new Space of its own. Each app in Full-Screen mode occupies a unique Space, and these Spaces are implicitly tiled horizontally (accessible via four-finger horizontal swipe gestures).

The menu bar disappears in Full-Screen mode, though it rolls down into view if the pointer is hovered near the top of the screen – which gains a new button at its right side so you can exit Full-Screen mode and return to the normal Space for that application. It's an interesting approach, and in practice turns out to be one of Lion's most compelling features. It makes the most of smaller screens such the MacBook Air's, and being able to swipe between each such app makes it very straightforward to get to the Desktop or to another app temporarily, without feeling that you're constantly shuffling windows or having to hide other apps.

Developers whose apps could even remotely plausibly benefit from a Full-Screen mode would be well advised to adopt this new API as soon as possible.

For several versions, OS X has had a somewhat confusing conglomeration of app, window and widget-managing environments and utilities: Spaces for virtual desktops, Exposé for window management, and the Dashboard for "widgets" – small, utility applications mainly for status displays and suchlike. Each one has their proponents, but integration between them was loose at best. Lion attempts to gather the majority of their functionality, and that of Full-Screen Apps, under a unified interface called Mission Control. Essentially, it's where you can see everything that's happening across all the windows and Spaces.

At first bewildered glance, Mission Control seems aptly named

There's no kind way to say this: initially, Mission Control is confusing. There are a lot of things going on, and its aims are lofty indeed. The good news is, it does work, and with some perseverance you come to realise that it provides a sensible subset of app, window and Space management in a relatively concise (if not especially inviting, at first) interface.

Mission Control is split conceptually into two sections: Spaces along the top (including those you've created yourself, Full-Screen apps, and optionally the Dashboard too), and apps on the current Space in the middle (with their windows grouped together). You can move between Spaces using the same horizontal four-fingered gesture whilst in Mission Control, and the focus will change to the relevant Space. You can switch apps, Spaces and even choose specific windows from here, which will bring the relevant app to the front as normal.

It's Space management, however, where Mission Control gets clever. (Did the Apple engineers love the implied joke of "Spaces" and "Mission Control"?) You can create new Spaces manually by hovering over the top-right (as a nice touch, if you have random desktop pictures enabled, each new Space gets a new picture), and you can delete any Spaces you've created by hovering over it in the top row to get an delete icon. The row of Spaces resizes to fit, as icons in the Dock do.

App windows and even entire apps can be dragged between Spaces from within Mission Control. (For apps, drag the icon of the app which is shown centred below its collected windows.) Quick Look works for the window you're pointing at, temporarily zooming it to full size, and windows continue to update live at all times.

Once you've grasped the idea that all Spaces (which might have your running Full-Screen apps) are listed along the top, and the main central display is that of the current Space, Mission Control becomes extremely useful. It's trivial to shuffle windows or entire apps between Spaces, or create new ones on the fly for a given task. The disparate functionality of Spaces and Exposé have been convincingly integrated here. It may intimidate at first, but it repays time spent becoming familiar with it.

Like it or not, multi-touch gestures are the lingua franca of Lion. If you've somehow been holding out on moving to a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad full time, you may want to reconsider your position. Swipes, pinches and flicks are supported far more widely than before, including for history navigation in Safari, triggering Launchpad and Mission Control, and much more.

With Lion, OS X gets serious about gestures

What were previously somewhat gimmicky conveniences have now become first-class interaction techniques, and there's every indication Apple will expand gesture support in future. The new System Preferences panes for your preferred multi-touch input devices have many additional gesture options, complete with the expected slick demonstration videos. You're relatively free to pick the type of gestures you prefer (three- or four-finger swiping particularly), but the message is clear: while you don't absolutely have to use them, your life on Lion will be much easier if you do.

One of the most dramatic app-revamps in Lion is that of Mail, the venerable email client which has been kicking around in one form or another since NeXT Computer's NeXTSTEP in the mid-80s. Gone (by default, but once again restorable via a preference, if you wish) is the traditional layout with the message list along the top and message preview below; in Lion, Mail has a three-column view which immediately brings to mind its iPad cousin.

Another borrowing from iOS is the preview of the first few lines of a message in the list itself, and a minimalist display (with on-hover action buttons) when viewing the full content.

Mail gets sleek, and more iPad-like

It's visually much cleaner, and has a number of improvements (such as – at last! – multiple colours for "flags" on messages, and a threaded and quote-stripped conversation view like Gmail). This version of Mail feels lighter and more like a new application than an upgraded version. Naturally, it supports Full-Screen mode, and even the mailboxes list can be collapsed for a truly iPad-like experience.

Also new are Exchange 2010 support (shared with Address Book and iCal), Search Tokens (as in the Finder search), and a number of tweaks to toolbars and formatting controls. If Mail is your email client of choice, there's only good news here.

While Mail has gone sleek and efficient, the other two main productivity apps included with OS X have instead leaned in the direction of whimsy. Address Book is now, well, an address book – almost identical to its iPad incarnation. The wisdom of this decision is questionable, though there's no doubt it's attractive to look at (if oddly small, sitting on a vast iMac screen).

Address Book takes its name literally in Lion

Address Book has always had a gimmicky, somewhat awkward and frictional interface, and this new version doesn't improve matters. It has a few useful new features – more comprehensive integrated IM buddy status – but its new appearance will have more detractors than supporters. It's continues to be a capable and functional oddity whose eccentricities now include its aesthetics.

iCal also adopts its iPad version's look, complete with oh-so-irritating pieces of torn paper along the top, but makes up for it with a useful new Year view, and a revamped Day view to match the iPad version, with a summary and full day planner side by side. Full-Screen mode is also present and correct, making for a welcome if not terribly exciting upgrade.

Try as you might, you can't pick off those paper shreds

Mac OS X's web browser has a modest list of user-visible additions, and a long list of improvements behind the scenes. Full-Screen mode makes a much-appreciated appearance, as does iOS-like tap-to-zoom (automatically finding the nearest boundaries of an image, or a column or text, as you'd desire). Swipe gestures move you back and forward through your history, accompanied by an initially jarring but eventually pleasing animation. The Downloads window is no more, replaced by an unobtrusive popup available from the extreme right of the main toolbar, showing a handy progress indicator.

Safari's Downloads now live in a popup, with embedded progress indicator

Among the things you won't notice, but are there: performance, privacy, stability, compatibility and security improvements, improved HTML5 support, the ability to view (or remove) all data a site has stored on your computer, sandboxing of sites, and improved CSS3 support. Last, but certainly not least, Safari in Lion now competes with Instapaper and other "read it later" services with its new Reading List; a way to bookmark articles or pages you want to read at a later time. It's synced to your iOS devices too, naturally, via the to-be-released iCloud.

Catch up on your reading whenever you like with Reading List

It's not much more than an extra (and temporary) location for bookmarks, but coupled with Safari's existing (and confusingly similarly-named) Reader feature, you can have a comfortable reading experience for lengthy articles without cluttering up your main bookmarks or using an external service.

The aggregated control panel for global settings gets the usual smattering of adjustments and reorganisations. Most immediately noticeable is that the "Exposé & Spaces" pane from Snow Leopard has been replaced with one for "Mission Control", containing a consolidated set of options including keyboard and mouse shortcuts for those features. Just as with Snow Leopard, third-party preference panes which are 32-bit will force the whole Systems Preferences app to restart in 32-bit mode. (Any written using PowerPC code won't work at all, though.)

There's a brand new pane – though it will be familiar to iOS users – called Mail, Contacts and Calendars, giving a central location to set up email, CardDAV, CalDAV, LDAP, and instant messaging accounts, for Apple's applications and any others that wish to use them. There's quick setup for Exchange, MobileMe (soon to be the free iCloud), Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Mac OS X Server accounts. Previously, setting up accounts was done inside the relevant Apple applications (even if you preferred to use a third-party app instead), so the consolidation is logical and much appreciated. Score another one for iOS's approach as the better way – and one to Apple for getting rid of the way it had done it for years in favour of a better one.

System Preferences lets you set up all your email, calendar and chat accounts in one place, at last

Most of us probably haven't looked at the "General" preference pane in years, but you may want to revisit it now – it has a new setting which controls how scrollbars behave in Lion. By default, Lion has iOS-like scrollbars – thin, plain, translucent scroll-thumbs which appear only momentarily during scrolling. Some older apps will continue to always use full Aqua scrollbars, but Lion itself almost exclusively uses the new style. If you prefer always-visible scrollbars, this is where you can set it up.

Want your scrollbars back? Here's where to find them: System Preferences -> General

The "Users & Groups" (née Accounts) pane holds an interesting new option, born of the fact that it lets you enter your Apple ID for the use of iTunes and the Mac App Store: you can now allow a user to reset their local account password using their Apple ID, if they've entered it. In case of emergency, it could be a handy escape route – but just make sure your Apple ID password itself is suitably secure. (That means not just alphanumeric, people; add those punctuation marks.)

Reset your account password using your Apple ID

A small but handy new option has been added to the Energy Saver settings too: automatically restart the computer if it freezes. Potentially useful for machines running server processes or for remote file sharing.

Automatic restart on freeze ... though when's the last time your Mac froze?

Lion now has an extra tab in the Security (now aptly called Security & Privacy) pane, showing a list of all apps which have recently requested your location (as iOS does), and the option to opt out of sending diagnostic and usage data for your Mac to Apple.

Check up on location-tracking apps, just as with iOS

Finally, at long last, English-speaking text-to-speech users need no longer suffer under the at times gratingly soulless voice of Alex, the default speaking voice in Snow Leopard. Lion includes the ability to choose (automatically downloading as necessary) a host of new voices in a multitude of languages, including several British English voices, complete with Scottish and Irish variants.

Make alerts a little easier on the ears with new voices – even Scottish ones

Lion has three new features which are related to one another, and all equally welcome. Resume does exactly what it says: when you log back in, or even restart your machine, your session will resume exactly as it was before – right down to the apps and windows that were open, as if you'd never left. We've become somewhat used to this on iOS, but it really is a novelty on a desktop OS. Even current selections are preserved within documents. Extremely useful, and a feature quickly missed if you use another operating system or even an older version of OS X. Just be sure there was nothing compromising on your screen last time (but yes, you can choose not to resume if you wish).

Auto Save is similarly self-explanatory: for apps which have opted into the behaviour, documents will be automatically saved at set intervals. Such documents gain a new control in their title bar when the pointer hovers over there: an arrow which spawns a menu.

Auto Save lets you manage saved versions of a document from its title bar

You can quickly revert to the last explicitly-saved version of a document (a necessary option, given the nature of auto-saving) and can even lock a document such that no further auto-saves will occur. Time Machine in Lion also gives you the option of automatically locking documents of a certain vintage, to prevent accidental edits if you happen to open them later. If you wish to lock the current version of a document but make further independent edits, you can duplicate the document here too.

The real fun, however, comes when you choose the last command in the menu, and browse all saved versions of the file. This is Versions.

Versions: it's Time Machine for each set of changes to a file

If you've used Time Machine, the Versions browser will be immediately familiar. It uses the same visual metaphor of versions drifting back into cosmic history, and any version can be restored with a click. The really clever part, though, is that all of the older versions aren't just static renderings – they're live documents. You can click into them, copy some content, and then paste it into the latest version. Incredibly useful for grabbing some bits of a previous version without clobbering all your other recent changes.

Resume is a feature that everyone will immediately understand and enjoy, whereas Auto Save's more complex functionality (and Versions as a whole) are somewhat hidden, and perhaps more suited to advanced users - but for those users, they're indispensable. Auto Save and Versions, particularly, finally fulfil the other half of Time Machine's promise, and are very welcome indeed.

Lion boasts a new zero-configuration file sharing feature called AirDrop, complete with parachuting parcel icon. It lives in the Finder's sidebar, and when active, other Lion users can simply drop files onto your user account photo to share them with you. File sharing has always required some fiddling around (enabling sharing in System Preferences, then finding the relevant machine in the Sidebar, then navigating to the shared folder), and AirDrop takes all the effort away. No doubt very useful for lab or school situations, or even just for a multiple-machine setup.

AirDrop lets you share files between computers as easily as dragging them to a folder (don't worry, it's secure)

Security implications? There aren't really any. It's write-only (you only see another person's user account photo as a drop-target; you're not browsing a list of their files). You're asked to confirm any file you drop onto a person's photo in the AirDrop section of a Finder window, and then the recipient is asked to confirm that they want to receive the file. If they accept, it's placed into their own Downloads folder. The sender sees nothing at all on the recipient's machine, nor vice versa. And yes, the files are encrypted as they're sent.

AirDrop requires that both parties be on the same Wi-Fi network, and only works when both parties have a Finder window open and are viewing the AirDrop section; if you aren't viewing the AirDrop area, you're not visible to others via AirDrop at all.

Quick Look has had a few enhancements, including (at long, long last) the ability to automatically resize its preview window as you switch between multiple files. The preview window itself is now grey in appearance, and includes an "Open with Preview" button that causes the window to smoothly transition into an open Preview document, which is a nice touch.

The new-look Quick Look window in Lion

Preview itself sensibly supports Full-Screen mode, and includes a loupe to magnify areas of any document. Intelligently, it provides a circular loupe for images, and a large rectangular magnifier for areas of text.

Aperture's magnifying loupe makes it into Preview

Windows across the OS can now be resized from any corner or edge, losing their lower-right resize indicator, and have rounded corners as panels do on iOS. All the standard widgets have had a polish up, and have an overall more silver-grey and rounded-rectangle appearance. The ubiquitous blue highlight has been brightened, in Apple's seemingly endless search of the ideal shade.

It wouldn't be a new version of OS X if the buttons hadn't changed. And they have ...

Note that standard widgets now look rather soft compared to those on Snow Leopard, and in some cases it can be difficult to tell whether a control is enabled or not. The visual contrast of some controls just isn't as high as it was before. They'll no doubt change again next time.

... but the new grey style of buttons can make it difficult to see what's disabled

System Profiler is now called System Information, and when accessed from the "About This Mac" panel in the Apple menu, has a new streamlined appearance giving a useful summary of relevant hardware and software info. You can still access the old verbose display too, as you'd expect.

The new, easier-to-read System Information display

Lion is the first version of OS X to be distributed exclusively online, and indeed exclusively via the Mac App Store. What this means in practice is that you need to have the Mac App Store app (available free from Apple) installed on your Mac before you can upgrade to Lion, and what that means is that you need the latest version of Snow Leopard.

Other requirements are at least 2GB of RAM, and either an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5 or Xeon processor (or better). Generally, Macs from late 2006 onwards (excluding Mac mini models which don't meet the aforementioned spec) should be ready to go.

Lion will cost £20.99, and when installed creates a small restore partition on your boot drive, from which you can repair or reinstall OS X if things ever go wrong, without needing any optical media or external drives.

If you're running any code from the PowerPC days, this is the time to wave it goodbye. The Rosetta software that came with Leopard, and was an optional install with Snow Leopard, won't be installed or supported. Lion is the end of the road for PowerPC apps. Attempting to run one results in a dialog saying: "You can't open the application [Whatever] because PowerPC applications are no longer supported." There is no offer nor option to do anything about it.

It's been five years since Apple changed to Intel, and PowerPC has run out of road.

The same is true of "incompatible" software: during installation of the OS, Lion will move any apps known to be incompatible apps into a new "Incompatible Software" folder at the top level (root) of the boot drive, including a "Read Me" file telling you what was moved. Lion also informs you that it has done so. This doesn't seem to be limited to just PowerPC apps; Apple maintains a list of known-incompatible versions of specific apps, and Lion checks for them.

You may have noticed that there isn't an installation disk for Lion: it's just installed directly onto your machine from download. This obviously leads to the question of what happens if you have a disk crash and have to rebuild your disk directory using Disk Utility or a third-party utility: how do you reboot to rebuild the disk if the disk you're trying to reboot from is the one that's broken?

The Lion installer contains a disk image hidden within it, and OS X Daily has got a suggestion on how to create a bootable Lion volume that you can put on a USB stick. (It may be that installation is tied to your Apple ID used to install the disk.) Apple hasn't said anything about a recommended course of action if even the restore partition is damaged, but there will probably be some technical notes once Lion is release. (MacBook Airs, which don't have optical drives, already have USB boot disks.)

I recall that Steve Jobs has said that you can boot from Snow Leopard though, in one of his recent replies to a customer's email. Perhaps when booting from the restore partition, you'll be offered the choice to create a bootable external volume/disc of Lion? We don't know the answer yet.

But that is why it's really important to remember the mantra: back up before you install. And make sure that you can boot from the backup. It's only a few extra minutes, and it's worth the effort.

Lion has a vast array of new features (here's the full list) and perhaps unlike Snow Leopard, the majority of them will be useful to the average user right from the start. Despite initial concerns about an "iOS-ifying" of OS X meaning a reduction in functionality or flexibility, the opposite is actually true – the new version of OS X fulfils the promise of "Back to the Mac" without compromising the focussed elegance of the user experience we've come to rely on.

While it's true that there are a few rough edges (mostly related to changed-for-the-sake-of-it cosmetic tweaks, and a lack of obviousness of some of the new functionality like Auto Save), overall Lion is an exceptionally solid and exciting release. There are many new features to be enjoyed by those with any level of experience with OS X, and existing apps and features have been polished and thoughtfully refined.

Lion is a substantial improvement across the board, and at only £21, it's a steal.

• Matt Gemmell is an iPad, iPhone and Mac OS X developer specialising in user experience. He runs his own business, Instinctive Code, and is an invited speaker at industry conferences. He has written hundreds of articles on development and interface design at mattgemmell.com, and his clients include Apple and other Fortune 500 companies.

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Cory Doctorow: Galaxy tab a real disappointment

Samsung's Galaxy tab 10.1 was launched in the company's headquarters in Seoul. Photo: Jo Yong-Hak/Reuters

IPad ever since delivered, I have been waiting impatiently for a comparable Android device showing up – something of the like kind, size and capacity, but from a more open ecosystem Apple than one offers.

Like Apple, Google operates an Android App Store, it controls – If your app is not please Google, don't go in the store. But unlike Apple, Google allows you to apps install from unofficial sources, which means that you can download apps directly from their authors or buy them from stores that compete with (or complement) the Google store.

This is the kind of thing is important for me. A tablet software without is just a lyskasse with a volume of fragile and ill-reflecting mirror, so what I want to make sure of when I buy a unit is that I don't have to implicitly trust one Corporation judgment about what software I should and should not be using.

The introduction of the iPad launched a series of Android tablet launches, and none of them had sufficiently impressive specifications or-form-factor to conquer my desire until Samsung announced its Galaxy tab 10.1. Despite having one of the names stupidest and most awkward product in recent memory, boasted Galaxy tab 10.1 specifications met or beat iPad 2 on each axis, and came with the latest Android tablet OS 3.1, preloaded.

So I asked a friend who comes from Chicago to buy one for me and bring it with him (not the device is available in the United Kingdom until 4 August), and greedily unwrapped it, charged it up and got into the business with it I have used it on my own in the home and Office, given it to my three-year-old to test, and taken it in a quick overseas trip, and at this stage, I am prepared to make a judgment: the series.

It is true that the Galaxy is all tab 10.1 the fundamental things you like from an Android tablet, has a long life battery, weighs a little, and have a good, sharp screen and two very good cameras – a face you and one facing away. The camera is a joy – there is something really fun and right about using a large, 10.1 in screen as a viewfinder, especially when shooting video, and pictures are beautiful. Large, the operating system is easy and intuitive, and software offerings from Google's Android store and its competitors are fine as they go.

But there are a couple of irritation and a few awful mistakes in doing Galaxy to a tab 10.1 disappointment. First, and worst of all, there is the USB connector. Apple's iOS devices use famous a long, flat, proprietary connector that provides some easy cash for the company in the form of specialised cable sale and locks the competing units out of using the speaker-docks, and other accessories. This is one of my stay with Apple devices, and using standard, inexpensive, widely available mini-USB cables in Android phones (including the excellent Samsung Galaxy S, which I am pleased to own) is a major selling point for me.

But Samsung had tablets – without appreciable reason-uses a custom tip, there is no standard mini-or micro-USB ends. Instead, it is a broad, flat, like the one Apple applications, but of course it is not compatible with Apple's cables, either. I have already lost my, run down the battery, and now I cannot use the tablet again until I find another. I passed through three airports recently, and none of them had a store that stocked them.

I have phone charger cables in my Office, My Briefcase, my backpack and beside the bed. The last thing in the whole world that I need right now is the need to add a different kind of USB cable to any of these sites. The decision to use a proprietary connector on a device whose major selling point is that it is non-proprietary is the stupidest, on Galaxy tab 10.1 – even stupider than calling it the "Galaxy tab 10.1."

Also disappointing was the decision to omit the microSD card slot on the Wi-Fi-only version of the tablet. 3 G-equipped models come with a built-in microSD reader (handy to have, especially if you need to load some data on your device and you have mislaid dum proprietary cable). This is integrated into SIM Assembly used by 3 G devices, and rather than leaving it empty SIM Assembly in place and leave the IFD intact, Samsung removed it all.

Continuing on the theme of the transfer of data, the new versions of Android made fundamental changes to the system, which speaks volumes for personal computers. Android devices displayed on the desktop as a standard USB storage until now, and you can move files from or onto them by dragging them around in your file browser. This was a straightfoward, quick and easy, but it had some minor annoyance: When your Android storage was installed on your PC, it was not available for Android device, which means that you won't be able to work with the files on your Android at the same time as using storage in order to play the movie or sound.

You can resolve this by borrowed Android MTP, Microsoft technology designed for Zune, which in theory you can use your tablet files as you use your PC to transfer files from or to store in-built. It is a nice idea, and would represent a slight improvement of the experience of Android if it worked.

But it is not. When you connect your Galaxy tab 10.1 for your PC, automatically a Samsung launches Android file transfer app to fill the entire screen. This communicates with a desktop app for that, you can transfer files — very, very slowly. And if you try to start another Android app, while file transfer takes place, it disconnects the communication with your PC, cause file transfers fail. The system is supposed to let you use your Android while you transfer files requires, in other words, that you are not using your Android while you transfer files.

What's more, it means the adoption of the MTP, Android now requires a proprietary desktop app to effect simple file transfers – an app that, if it is possible, even worse than iTunes, and do not represent selling-point for those of us who want non-proprietary, "just works" mobile devices.

Samsung really does not seem to have the head around the concept of Androids strengthen its non-proprietary, open nature. They have preloaded device with multiple Samsung apps, provocative, cannot be deleted without "rooting" device, a process which voids your warranty.

32 GB, WiFi-only tab 10.1 will ship, Galaxy in the UK in August, to an unrevealed Prize, even though the online facility contains the pre-order on a crazy £ 899 (the comparable iPad 2 costing £ 479.00 and paid in United States $ 699 for the my Galaxy tab 10.1).

I am not giving up on my search for a great Android tablet – I underemployed up upcoming Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet. I love the Lenovo's ThinkPad Laptops and ThinkPad Tablet comes with a standard USB connector, video out and an SD card slot (it also has an optional stylus and carrying case with an integrated ThinkPad keyboard – my favorite keyboards in the world).

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How the Internet has created an age of rage

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Websites are increasingly encouraging readers to leave comments, but with users able to hide behind aliases, often such attempts at discussion end in hate-filled bile and a mob mentality. Photograph: Sami Sarkis/Getty

For a while after his first TV series was broadcast in 2009, comedian Stewart Lee was in the habit of collecting and filing some of the comments that people made about him on web pages and social media sites. He did a 10-minute Google trawl most days for about six months and the resultant collected observations soon ran to dozens of pages. If you read those comments now as a cumulative narrative, you begin to fear for Stewart Lee. A good third of the posts fantasised about violence being done to the comic, most of the rest could barely contain the extent of their loathing.

This is a small, representative selection:

"I hate Stewart Lee with a passion. He's like Ian Huntley to me." Wharto15, Twitter
"I saw him at a gig once, and even offstage he was exuding an aura of creepy molesty smugness." Yukio Mishima, dontstartmeoff.com
"One man I would love to beat with a shit-covered cricket bat." Joycey, readytogo.net
"He's got one of those faces I just want to burn." Coxy, dontstartmeoff.com
"I hope stewart lee dies." Idrie, Youtube
"WHAT THE HELL! If i ever find you, lee, i promise i will, I WILL, kick the crap out of you." Carcrazychica, YouTube
"Stewart Lee is a cynical man, who has been able to build an entire carrer [sic] out of his own smugness. I hope the fucking chrones disease [sic] kills him." Maninabananasuit, Guardian.co.uk
"I spent the entire time thinking of how much I want to punch Stewart Lee in the face instead of laughing. He does have an incredibly punchable face, doesn't he? (I could just close my eyes, but fantasizing about punching Stewart Lee is still more fun than sitting in complete, stony silence.)" Pudabaya, beexcellenttoeachother.com

Lee, a standup comedian who does not shy away from the more grotesque aspects of human behaviour, or always resist dishing out some bile of his own, does not think of himself as naive. But the sheer volume of the vitriol, its apparent absence of irony, set him back. For a few months, knowing the worst that people thought of him became a kind of weird compulsion, though he distanced himself from it slightly with the belief that he was doing his obsessive collating "in character". "Collecting all these up isn't something I would do," he suggests to me. "It is something the made-up comedian Stewart Lee would do, but I have to do it for him, because he is me…"

Distanced or not, Lee couldn't help but be somewhat unsettled by the rage he seemed to provoke by telling stories and jokes: "When I first realised the extent of this stuff I was shocked," he says. "Then it appeared to me that a lot of the things I was hated for were things I was actually trying to do; a lot of what people considered failings were to me successes. I sort of wrote a lot of series two of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle with these comments in mind, trying to do more of the things people hadn't liked."

The "40,000 words of hate" have now become "anthropologically amusing" to him, he insists. "You can see a lot of them seem to be the same people posting the same stuff under different names in different places, and it is strange to see people you have known personally, whom you thought you had got on fine with at the time, abusing you under barely effective pseudonyms."

He's stopped looking these days, and never really tried to identify or confront any of his detractors. "I am slightly worried that some of them might be a bit insane and hope I haven't made myself or my family a target."

Lee is, of course, not alone in having this anonymous violent hatred directed toward him. On parts of the internet it has become pretty much common parlance. Do a quick trawl on the blog sites and comment sections about most celebrities and entertainers – not to mention politicians – and you will quickly discover comparable virtual rage and fantasised violence. Comedians seem to come in for more than most, as if taboo-breaking was taken as read, or the mood of the harshest baying club audience had become a kind of universal rhetoric. It's not quite heckling this, though, is it? A heckle requires a bit of courage and risk; the audience can see who is doing the shouting. Lee's detractors were all anonymous. How should we understand it then: harmless banter? Robust criticism? Vicious bullying?

The psychologists call it "deindividuation". It's what happens when social norms are withdrawn because identities are concealed. The classic deindividuation experiment concerned American children at Halloween. Trick-or-treaters were invited to take sweets left in the hall of a house on a table on which there was also a sum of money. When children arrived singly, and not wearing masks, only 8% of them stole any of the money. When they were in larger groups, with their identities concealed by fancy dress, that number rose to 80%. The combination of a faceless crowd and personal anonymity provoked individuals into breaking rules that under "normal" circumstances they would not have considered.

Deindividuation is what happens when we get behind the wheel of a car and feel moved to scream abuse at the woman in front who is slow in turning right. It is what motivates a responsible father in a football crowd to yell crude sexual hatred at the opposition or the referee. And it's why under the cover of an alias or an avatar on a website or a blog – surrounded by virtual strangers – conventionally restrained individuals might be moved to suggest a comedian should suffer all manner of violent torture because they don't like his jokes, or his face. Digital media allow almost unlimited opportunity for wilful deindividuation. They almost require it. The implications of those liberties, of the ubiquity of anonymity and the language of the crowd, are only beginning to be felt.

You can trace those implications right back to the genesis of social media, to pioneering Californian utopias, and their fall. The earliest network-groups had a sort of Edenic cast. One representative group was CommuniTree, which was set up as an open-access forum on a series of modem-linked computers in the 1970s when computers were just humming into life. For a while the group of like-minded enthusiasts ran on perfectly harmonious lines, respecting others, having positive and informed discussions about matters of shared relevance. At some point, however, some high school teenagers armed with modems accessed the open-access space and used it to trash and abuse the CommuniTree, taking free speech to uninhibited extremes that the pioneers had never wanted. The pioneers were suitably horrified. And eventually, after deciding that they could neither control the students through censorship, nor tolerate the space with them in it, they shut CommuniTree down.

This story has become almost folkloric among new media prophets, a sort of founding myth. It was one of the first moments when the possibilities of the new collective potential was tainted by anonymous lowest-common-denominator humanity, a pattern that has subsequently been repeated in pretty much all virtual communication. Barbarians, or "trolls" as they became known, had entered the community, ignoring the rules, shouting loudly, encouraging violence, spoiling it for everybody. Thereafter, anyone who has established a website or forum with high, or medium-high ideals, has had to decide how to deal with such anonymous destructive posters, those who got in the way of constructive debate.

Tom Postmes, a professor of social and organisational psychology at the universities of Exeter and Groningen in his native Netherlands, and author of Individuality and the Group, has been researching these issues for 20 years. "In the early years," he says, "this online behaviour was called flaming. And then that became institutionalised. Among friends, the people who engaged in this activity were actually quite jocular in intent but they were accountable to standards and norms that are radically different to those of most of their audience. Trolls aspire to violence, to the level of trouble they can cause in an environment. They want it to kick off. They want to promote antipathetic emotions of disgust and outrage, which morbidly gives them a sense of pleasure."

Postmes compares online aliases to the tags of graffiti artists: "Trolls want people to identify their style, to recognise them, or at least their online identity. But they will only be successful in this if an authority doesn't clamp down on them. So anonymity helps that. It's essentially risk-free."

There is no particular type of person drawn to this kind of covert bullying, he suggests: "Like football hooligans, they have family and live at home but when they go to a match the enjoyment comes from finding a context in which you can let go, or to use the familiar phrase 'take a moral vacation'. Doing this online has a similar characteristic. You would expect it is just normal people, the bloke you know at the corner shop or a woman from the office. They are the people typically doing this…"

Some trolls have become nearly as famous as the blogs to which they attach themselves, in a curious, parasitical kind of relationship. Jeffrey Wells, author of Hollywood Elsewhere, is a former columnist on the LA Times who has been blogging inside stories about movies for 15 years. For the last couple of years his gossip and commentary has been dogged by the invective of a character called LexG, whose 200-odd self-loathing and wildly negative posts recently moved Wells to address him directly: "The coarseness, the self-pity and the occasional eye-pokes and cruel dismissiveness have to be turned down. Way down. Arguments and genuine disdain for certain debaters can be entertaining, mind. I'm not trying to be Ms Manners. But there finally has to be an emphasis on perception and love and passion and the glories of good writing. There has to be an emphasis on letting in the light rather than damning the darkness of the trolls and vomiting on the floor and kicking this or that Hollywood Elsewhere contributor in the balls…"

When I spoke to Wells about LexG, he was philosophical. "Everybody on the site writes anonymously, except me," he says. "If they didn't I think it would cause them to dry up. This place is like a bubble in which you can explode, let the inner lava out. And, boy, is there a lot of lava."

He has resisted insisting that people write under their own name because that would kill the comments instantly. "Why would you take that one in 100 chance that your mother or a future employer will read what you were thinking late one night a dozen years ago if you didn't have to?" For haters, Wells believes, anonymity makes for livelier writing. "It's a trick, really – the less you feel you will be identified, the more uninhibited you can be. At his best LexG really knows how to write well and hold a thought and keep it going. He is relatively sane but certainly not a happy guy. He's been doing this a couple of years now and he really has become a presence; he does it on all the Hollywood sites."

Have they ever met?

"Just once," Wells says. "I asked him to write a column of his own, give him a corner of the site, bring him out in the open." LexG didn't want to do it, he seemed horrified at the prospect. "He just wanted to comment on my stuff," Wells suggests. "He is a counter-puncher, I guess. The rules on my site remain simple, though. No ugly rancid personal comments directed against me. And no Tea Party bullshit."

The big problem he finds running the blog is that his anonymous commenters get a kind of pack mentality. And the comments quickly become a one-note invective. As a writer Wells feels he needs a range of emotion: "I also do personal confession or I can be really enthusiastic about something. But the comments tend to be one colour, and that becomes drab. It's tougher, I guess, to be enthusiastic, to really set out honestly why something means something to you. It takes maybe twice as long. I can run with disdain and nastiness for a while but you don't want to always be the guy banging a shoe on the table. Like LexG. I mean it's not healthy, for a start…"

Wells does his own marshalling of the debate, somewhat like the bartender of a western saloon. Other sites – including our own Comment is Free – employ moderators to try to keep trolls in line, and move the debate on. A young journalist called Sarah Bee was for three years the moderator on seminal techie news and chat forum the Register. She started as a sub-editor but increasingly devoted her time to looking after the "very boisterous" chat on the site. She has no doubt that "anonymity makes people bolder and more arsey, of course it does. And it was quite a politically libertarian crowd, so you get people expressing things extremely stridently, people would disagree and there would often be a lot of real nastiness." She was very liberal as far as moderating went, she thinks, with no real hard and fast rules, except, perhaps, for "a ban on prison-rape jokes, which came up extremely often".

Every once in a while, however, the mood would get "very ugly" and she would try to calm things down and remonstrate with people. "I would occasionally email them – they had to give their email addresses when registering for the site – to say, 'Even though you are not writing under your real name, people can hear you.'" In those instances, strangely, she suggests, most people were incredibly contrite when contacted. It was like they had forgotten who they were. "They would send messages back saying, 'Oh, I'm so sorry', not even using the excuse of having a bad day or anything like that. It is so much to do with anonymity…"

Bee became known as the Moderatrix – "all moderators have an implicit sub-dom relationship with their site" – though she was just about the only person in the comment section who used her own name. "There was a lot of misogyny and casual sexism, some pretty off-colour stuff. I would get a few horrible emails calling me a cunt or whatever," she says, "but that didn't bother me as much as the day-to-day stuff, really."

The day-to-day stuff was, though, "like being in another world. It got really wearying. I would go home sometimes and just sigh and wonder about it all."

She is keen to say that the Register itself she thought a great thing, and loved the idea of working there, but being Moderatrix eventually got her down. "A hive mind sets in," she suggests. "Just occasionally good sense would prevail but then there is that fact that arguments on the internet are literally never over. You moderate a few hundred comments a day, and then you come in the next morning and there are a few hundred more waiting for you. It's Sisyphean."

In the end she needed a change. She's in another "community management" job now, dealing through Facebook, which is a relief because "it removes anonymity so people are a lot more polite". When she retired Moderatrix she did a goodbye and got 250 comments wishing her well. She doesn't miss it, though. "Just occasionally I would let a stream of the most offensive things through, just to let people know how those things looked in the world… People would realise for a bit. But then the old behaviours would immediately set in. The thing any moderator will tell you is that every day is a new day and everything repeats itself every day. It is not about progress or continuity…"

There are many places, of course, on the internet where a utopian ideal of "here comes everybody" prevails, where the anonymous hive mind is fantastically curious and productive. A while ago I talked to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, about some of this, and asked him who his perfect contributor was. "The ideal Wikipedian, in my mind, is someone who is really smart and really kind," he said, without irony. "Those are the people who are drawn into the centre of the group. When people get power in these communities, it is not through shouting loudest, it is through diplomacy and conflict resolution."

Within this "wikitopia" there were, too, though, plenty of Lord of the Flies moments. The benevolent Wiki community is plagued by "Wikitrolls" – vandals who set out to insert slander and nonsense into pages. A policing system has grown up to root out troll elements; there are well over 1,000 official volunteer "admins", working round the clock; they are supported in this work by the eyes and ears of the moral majority of "virtuous" Wikipedians.

"When we think about difficult users there are two kinds," Wales said, with the same kind of weariness as Moderatrix. "The easy kind is someone who comes in, calls everyone Nazis, starts wrecking articles. That is easy to deal with: you block them, and everyone moves on. The hard ones are people who are doing good work in some respects but are also really difficult characters and they annoy other people, so we end up with these long intractable situations where a community can't come to a decision. But I think that is probably true of any human community."

Wales, who has conducted perhaps the most hopeful experiment in human collective knowledge of all time, appears to have no doubt that the libertarian goals of the internet would benefit from some similar voluntary restraining authority. It was the case of the blogger Kathy Sierra that caused Wales and others to propose in 2007 an unofficial code of conduct on blog sites, part of which would outlaw anonymity. Kathy Sierra is a programming instructor based in California; after an online spat on a tech-site she was apparently randomly targeted by an anonymous mob that posted images of her as a sexually mutilated corpse on various websites and issued death threats. She wrote on her own blog: "I'm at home, with the doors locked, terrified. I am afraid to leave my yard, I will never feel the same. I will never be the same."

Among Wales's suggestions in response to this and other comparable horror stories of virtual bullying was that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments altogether, and that they be able to delete comments deemed abusive without facing accusations of censorship. Wales's proposals were quickly shot down by the libertarians, and the traffic-hungry, as unworkable and against the prevailing spirit of free-speech.

Other pioneering idealists of virtual reality have lately come to question some of those norms, though. Jaron Lanier is credited with being the inventor of virtual worlds. His was the first company to sell virtual reality gloves and goggles. He was a key adviser in the creation of avatar universe Second Life. His recent book, You Are Not a Gadget, is, in this sense, something of a mea culpa, an argument for the sanctity of the breathing human individual against the increasingly anonymous virtual crowd. "Trolling is not a string of isolated incidents," Lanier argued, "but the status quo in the online world." He suggested "drive-by anonymity", in which posters create a pseudonym in order to promote a particularly violent point of view, threatened to undermine human communication in general. "To have substantial exchange, you need to be fully present. That is why facing one's accuser is a fundamental right of the accused."

We rightly hear a great deal about the potential of social media and websites to spread individual freedom, as evidenced during the Arab spring and elsewhere. Less is written about their capacity to reinforce pack identities and mob rule, though clearly that is also part of that potential.

Social psychologist Tom Postmes has been disturbed by the coarsening of debate around issues such as racial integration in his native Netherlands, a polarisation that he suggests has grown directly from the fashionable political incorrectness of particular websites where anonymity is guaranteed. "There is some evidence to suggest that the mainstream conservative media even cuts politically correct or moderate posts from websites in favour of the extremes," he says. "The tone of the public debate around immigration has diminished enormously in these forums."

One effect of "deindividuation" is a polarisation within groups in which like-minded people typically end up in more extreme positions because they gain credibility by exaggerating loosely held prejudices. You can see that in the bloggers trying to outdo one another with pejoratives about Stewart Lee. This has the effect of shifting norms: extremism becomes acceptable. As Lanier argues: "I worry about the next generation of young people around the world growing up with internet-based technology that emphasises crowd aggregation… will they be more likely to succumb to pack dynamics when they come of age?" The utopian tendency is to believe that social media pluralises and diversifies opinion; most of the evidence suggests that it is just as likely, when combined with anonymity, to reinforce groupthink and extremism.

A lot of this comes down to the politics of anonymity, a subject likely to greatly exercise the minds of legislators as our media becomes increasingly digitised, and we rely more and more on mostly unaccountable and easily manipulated sources – from TripAdvisor to Twitter feeds to blog gossip – for our information.

One simple antidote to this seems to rest in the very old-fashioned idea of standing by your good name. Adopt a pseudonym and you are not putting much of yourself on the line. Put your name to something and your words are freighted with responsibility. Arthur Schoepenhauer wrote well on the subject 160 years ago: "Anonymity is the refuge for all literary and journalistic rascality," he suggested. "It is a practice which must be completely stopped. Every article, even in a newspaper, should be accompanied by the name of its author; and the editor should be made strictly responsible for the accuracy of the signature. The freedom of the press should be thus far restricted; so that when a man publicly proclaims through the far-sounding trumpet of the newspaper, he should be answerable for it, at any rate with his honour, if he has any; and if he has none, let his name neutralise the effect of his words. And since even the most insignificant person is known in his own circle, the result of such a measure would be to put an end to two-thirds of the newspaper lies, and to restrain the audacity of many a poisonous tongue."

The internet amplifies Schopenhauer's trumpet many times over. Though there are repressive regimes when anonymity is a prerequisite of freedom, and occasions in democracies when anonymity must be preserved, it is clear when those reservations might apply. Generally, though, who should be afraid to stand up and put their name to their words? And why should anyone listen if they don't?

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Newzbin2 judgment: industry reactions

Newzbin website. A landmark High Court ruling forcing BT to block access to the site illegal file sharing

Internet -providers, right holders and lobbying groups reacted Thursday's landmark High Court ruling forces BT block access to file sharing illegal website Newzbin2.

"This is a useful judgment which provides clarity on this complex issue. It demonstrates clearly that rights holders must prove their claims and persuade a judge to make a court order. BT has consistently said that rights holders must take this route. We return to the Court after the summer to explain what kind of order we believe to be appropriate. "

"This ruling by Justice Arnold is a victory for millions of people who work in the UK creative industries and demonstrates that legislation in the country must apply online. This trial was never an attack on internet service providers, but we need their cooperation to manage your site Newzbin, which constantly tries to circumvent the law and judicial sanction. Newzbin is a notorious pirate website that makes hundreds of thousands of copyrighted products available without permission and without regard to the law. "

"This ruling sends a clear signal that ISPs have a role to play in protecting their customers from rogue Web sites that take advantage of and benefit from creative work without permission, ignore notices not hesitate and Find themselves beyond the reach of law enforcement."

"The decision is crucial to the sector of content as it continues in its efforts to create a sustainable and secure environment for the distribution of legal content online. After this ruling, can other sites that are focused on violating copyright now be susceptible to blocking actions. UK content owners have just established a powerful weapons to help them to protect their copyrights online. "

"This is a terrible day for regular UK internet users. The verdict set a worrying precedent for internet censorship. This is the thin end of a very large wedge. It also leaves the Coalition [Government] internet policy in disarray. Our digital rights is obviously determined by Hollywood, not Parliament. "

"Website blocking is pointless and dangerous. These judgments will not do to stop the violation, or increase the creative industries. And there is a serious risk of legitimate content will be blocked and service slowdown. If the goal is strengthening the creators ability to earn money from their work, so we must give up these technological naive measures focus on genuine market reforms, and satisfy unmet consumer demand.

"Intermediaries like BT are forced to accept that policing the Internet for IP rights infringements is as much your responsibility as holders. The sentence suggests not, there may be a flood of similar claims launched. This misses the point. Now that this test case establishes that an injunction may be granted, the intermediaries is likely to adopt a notice and takedown approach which has worked for many years in relation to defamation claims. When notified claimed IP infringements of rights-holders, probably intermediaries to test attitude in animal trials. "

"Although the law as film studios trust to block access to Newzbin has been in force for some time, this is the first time that a court has upheld it in relation to an internet service provider. This is a welcome victory for rights owners who have been deprived of income due to Newzbins illegal activities. However, it as a test case create a precedent which has the potential to result in a hectic less dignified Court programs to block offensive content. Countless websites any user-uploaded content, and could now be the subject of a request for ISP block. YouTube is just one example. "

"ISPA has long maintained that this is an issue of rights holders should seek to address in court, rather than through voluntary funds, and today's decision should go some way to offer clarity on what is a complicated issue. However, concern over-blocking, facilitate circumvention and enhanced encryption is widely recognised, which means blocking is not a silver bullet to stop online infringement of copyright. Rather, as the Government-commissioned review recently Hargreaves found, there should be more focus on offering innovative, fully licensed content services that provide consumers with the demanding clear. "

"The Court's ruling has no direct or immediate impact on the TalkTalk. If the MPA is seeking a court order against us to block the site NewzBin then we will consider it. "

"The Web site blocks only treats the symptoms, not the reason why consumers to infringe the copyright. Blocking access to Newzbin2 is short-sighted and will not reduce demand for Hollywood movies. Consumers will seek out other sources, and the only long-term solution is more and better legal alternatives. We are on the way to a blocking injunction-arms race-what we really need are members of the Motion Picture Association to be innovative and focus on meeting the UK consumer demand legally. "

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Windows phone ' Mango ' released production.

Mango, cut into slices. If Microsoft can get people to buy five a day ... Photo: Helen Rimell

Microsoft have logged off the code for the "Mango" version of its Windows phone operating system-officially, the code has had the RTM (release to manufacturing)- according to Windows Team Blog.

There, explains Terry Myerson, Corporate Vice-President at the Windows phone team (basically the daily manager) that "This marks the point in the development process where we hand-code to our handset and mobile operator partners to optimize the Mango to your phone and network configurations."

(See our previous coverage on Windows phone Mango for an idea of what this includes.)

The good news: this is a bit ahead of where it had been expected to be (and probably miles better than the original release of Windows phone, which got caught up in internal struggles within the entertainment and device division of Kin-project Pink, from $ 500 m acquisition of danger-and rewrite of the Windows Mobile).

The bad news: it will be called "Windows phone 7.5". We wanted Mango. We will stick with that for now.

So it is the end-July, and the code is going out now, so that they have misunderstood the entire August ... so that should mean release in September, right? Unfortunately, not. Involved in getting the phone code quite complicated dance includes an extra layer, as you did with the release of Windows OS to OEM PC makers: air carriers.

So to get the Mango in people's hands (or retailers ' stores) processes to navigate are:

• handset makers have to test the Mango against their new design to ensure that the code runs really well on their systems

• handset makers have to test the Mango against their old design to make sure the code does not cause devastating thing to happen and that in fact only good things will happen-not even indifferent this worked perfectly with the first update to Windows phone ("pre-NoDo" update), which created some LG phones when it rolled out in April.

• handset makers (like Nokiawill include) must take their phones to carriers and allow them to test them against their networks. All airlines insist on this as a condition for phones will on your network-especially new phones it is the same for Apple. (New iPhones sent to airlines in sealed boxes software so can be tested.)

• If everything is hunky dory, so the airlines who will leave the handset makers. This will depend on the course of the slowest airline to respond in General.

This year there is a greater problem but: lots of Android phones and of course the new iPhones-expected in September-which is in the queue in front of Windows phone Mango phones. It is potentially a traffic jam that will hold things up.

This means generally that you should not expect Mango update to be rolled out, or the new Windows phones (including Nokia's Sea Ray-no doubt you can find a more interesting name, such as N9487) appears before October.

Which is what I have tell you since February, at least with regard to Nokia.

You can also consider fully how Mango would fare in the new OS to the world that it would be articulated. Many said that Windows phone wasn't competitive when first released (no cut + Paste and various other things). Mango is a great improvement. Windows Team blog notes that it will have threading to bring conversations with an individual across multiple connections (IM, email, text) in a single view; multitasking; and Internet Explorer 9. No words on Flash.

The question is whether it will be sufficient, when Apple's iOS 5 is released, and whether there will be the next version of Android code name Ice Cream Sandwiches-available by then. There are expected to have componnents such as face detection, a new app launcher, USB host (for a game controller), and simpler updates. Because Androids messages system is just about perfect, but (in my opinion) its Gingerbread keyboard system is grim perhaps UI improvements will be there.

Inapplicable, Mango is not going to have a soft landing.

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White House rickrolls Twitter user

There was a break from high seriousness on the White House Twitter feed Wednesday when a supporter was rickolled. Photo: Ron Edmonds/AP

Twitter and the White House may seem like a dry combination, but even with the debt ceiling coming World Conference on women close to crushing all downstairs, the leader of the free world — or at least people responsible for the White House Twitter feed – found the time to have a little fun on Wednesday.

How? By rick rolling, one of the 2.3 million Twitter users follow its feed and complain that it was not very interesting.

"Sorry to hear. Fiscal policy is important, but can be dry times. Here is something more fun, "the White House tweeted. And then it submitted a link ... Rick Astley singing never Gonna Give You Up.

David Wiggs, a self described "energy tech enthusiast and mediocre golfer Tweet " If — "this WH [White House] correspondence briefing isn't nearly so entertaining as yesterday 's" – triggered the outbreak of fun from Pennsylvania Avenue, liked it: "Hilarious", he tweeted and , "love it!"

"Rick rolling" is a prank, which began in the 4chan message board (originally called duckrolling, which link would lead to a picture of a duck on wheels); the first use should be linked the video Astley came under the guise of being a secret trailer for the game video never released then Grand Theft Auto IV.

Then spread from 4chan and took off with Twitter in 2008 as a huge number of people joined the service: the need to use shortened links to service 140 characters meant you could blur their destination – and so hold out a tantalising treats it instead turned out to be Rick Astley singing.

In 2010, it was briefly doused when the video was removed from YouTube – but the White House found the time to dig up another.

In the meantime, the deadline for the debt ceiling inched closer on Wednesday night, leading to a dramatic intervention.

(Updated to clarify the history of rickrolling.)

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Why not intellectual Ventures to answer questions about his relations with Lodsys?

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Does Intellectual Ventures transfer its patents to separate companies – or shells? Photograph: Colin Campbell for the Guardian

When it comes to software patents, one company has recently become more and more noticeable for its position defending them: Intellectual Ventures, a company run by Nathan Myhrvold, who founded it in 2000 after leaving Microsoft, where he was chief technology officer.

It's a company which has received $300m of funding from venture capitalists Charles River since 2006: "Nathan helped open my eyes to the notion that IP [intellectual property] is a very important market – it's actually a very big market in tech," Izhar Armony, a partner at Charles River Ventures, says in the linked interview from April. He thinks there's a $6bn litigation market based on legal fees, and a $50bn market in IP rights and licensing.

Here's the odd thing: Intellectual Ventures doesn't seem to be very good at exploiting patents it owns. In two cases it appears to have bought software patents that have value in the courts and then transferred them to little one-man bands who have abruptly realised their value and begun suing people for infringing them.

The two companies: Oasis Research and Lodsys. You may have heard of the latter: it is suing a number of app developers on the Android and Apple iOS platforms, claiming that they infringe patents that it owns, particularly covering in-app purchases. Despite attempts by Apple to intervene – because it says that it has licensed those patents – the cases seem to be going ahead. And its determination to prevail has, as we've written, led to some European app developers deciding that the US game isn't worth the candle.

In other words, software patents are doing the same to the US's standing as a centre for innovation and competition as the debt ceiling issue is doing to its financial standing: destroying it hour by hour. (The NPR program This American Life had an hour-long episode about "invention peddlers" which looks at this in detail.)

You don't have to look far to find venture capitalists who decry what Myhrvold represents. Paul Kedrosky wrote on 19 July that Myhrvold's arguments "veer from hysterical, to unsupportable, and back again", pointing to a Myhrvold column at Bloomberg.

One key sentence from Kedrosky's denunciation: "There is no inconsistency in promoting innovation while attacking the software patent system. Most software companies, large and small, think the patent system is an obstacle to innovation given the prevalence of nonsensical blocking patents and patent trolls. I would hope that they attack it ... This is far, far from a disinterested observer of a fundamentally broken US software patent system. Let's end the deference."

Fred Wilson, principal of Union Square Ventures, who has backed a number of companies, including Twitter, said as long ago as 2009 that patent trolls are a tax on innovation, after one of his funded companies spent $500,000 defending itself against baseless patent claims.

But Intellectual Ventures stands – apparently – aloof from all this. It isn't, as far as I know, involved in any lawsuits where it is asserting any of the patents that it owns. For a company that has $300m of venture capital funding, that seems odd – as does the seeming lack of nous about the value of the patents that it held but then transferred (it's not clear whether "sold" is the right phrase here) to those companies.

There's more, though. A research firm last year released a report claiming that Intellectual Ventures has as many as 1,100 shell companies which it uses to carry out patent "shakedowns": the front companies do the suing, and the parent reaps the benefits.

I contacted Intellectual Ventures on Tuesday evening, and spoke to a person to put a number of detail questions about its relationship with Oasis Research and Lodsys.

Here are the questions that I subsequently put via email (in time for them to be answered during the Seattle business day):

• Does Intellectual Ventures have any royalty or licensing agreement with Lodsys over the patents that it transferred to it? And when did it sell/transfer them?

• What form did the transfer of patents to Lodsys take: simple sale and complete title, or some other arrangement?

• Does Intellectual Ventures have any royalty or licensing agreement with Oasis Research over the patents that Intellectual Ventures transferred to it? And when did it sell/transfer them?

• What form did the transfer of patents to Oasis Research take?

• Has Intellectual Ventures made any investment in Lodsys?

• Are any of the staff or owners of Lodsys present or former staff or owners of Intellectual Ventures?

• Why would Intellectual Ventures, a considerably funded company with large resources, sell patents with clear value to apparently low-funded companies – Lodsys and Oasis Research?

• Is Intellectual Ventures providing any funding or legal assistance for the legal actions being pursued by Lodsys and/or Oasis Research?

These seem fairly narrow questions – that is, they aren't asking for a long thoughtful post on the nature of patents. They're factual.

On Wednesday morning, five hours after I sent those questions, I received a response from Intellectual Ventures. It pointed to a blog post that the company had put up overnight – which is dealt with below – and had this response to my questions:

"Specific to your questions on divesting patents, as has been reported, when it makes sense for our business we sell patents – either to companies who can use them for defensive purposes or to buyers who monetise them. Sometimes based on the structure of the sale we have a financial interest in the outcome of those efforts, but we never have control over, or are involved in, the path to monetisation that these companies pursue once we sell the patent."

Note that this doesn't answer a single one of the specific questions about IV's involvement with Oasis Research or Lodsys (particularly about staff, investment, legal fees or form of transfer). It doesn't say whether it was a sale or other form of transfer – though it does talk about "structure" which could mean payback. It doesn't mention involvement. Simply, it's a non-answer. I've emailed back reiterating the specifics of the questions and asking for detailed responses.

Meanwhile, there is the blogpost which appeared on IV's site. This says, in part:

"By definition, a disruptive innovation is a product or technology that, when introduced, either radically changes existing markets or creates wholly new ones, thereby disrupting companies and networks reliant on the status quo. In simpler terms, it signifies rapid and unexpected progress … a change in context. Intellectual Ventures is a disruptive organisation, and like any other product or service which disrupts established markets, we've invited our share of controversy... We appreciate that patents are an emotionally charged issue that generates a lot of conversation and varying points of view, but we want to take a moment to provide our perspective on a recent characterisation.

"IV believes that inventors who invest all the time, money, and emotional resources that are required to protect their ideas with patents earn a right to recognise a return on their investments.

"IV is challenging the status quo by focusing its business solely on invention and investment in patents. But we think this disruption is an important and necessary step in the development of a fully functioning marketplace for ideas. Our ultimate value proposition is simple: we provide an efficient way for patent holders to get paid for the inventions they own, and in turn, for technology companies to gain easy access to the invention rights they need now or may need as they enter new markets."

None of this however answers the wider question: is the exercise of these patents actually stimulating innovation? Is it to the benefit of real inventors, if the patents are traded on? (The original inventor who was awarded the patents now owned by Lodsys is bemused by the attention paid to them. He has also had to suffer a fair deal of unwarranted abuse, since he's nothing to do with IV or Lodsys.)

We've seen nothing from Myhrvold indicating how it might. There is his quote in an interview with Forbes that "we want to build a portfolio just like those companies have, with licensing approaches broadly like they have ... I want to achieve what IBM has achieved [getting $1bn per year from licensing patents]. That's my financial model. This is a play where I take portfolio theory and apply it to something illiquid to deliver a return for my investors. I don't see that as evil. I don't see that as particularly threatening."

The unanswered question remains, though: do software patents really spur innovation, or hold it back?

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