Wayne Williams

Google has spent millions of dollars funding channels offering high quality content in a bid to compete with television, and more importantly, offer brand-safe shows for major companies to attach their adverts to. Some of the channels have been wildly successful, while others -- it’s fair to say -- haven’t reached anywhere near their full potential.

Still, YouTube remains committed to funding high-quality programming and in the next fortnight or so will start showing content from five of its flagship channels on Virgin America flights across the U.S. and Mexico.

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Passwords exist to keep our personal data secure. They prevent snoopers accessing our computers, and stop hackers from getting into our Facebook or email accounts. Passwords can be a pain at times -- thinking up something secure, and remembering it whenever prompted isn't always easy -- but they’re a necessary evil.

And yet, time and again we hear stories of people being hacked because they used simple-to-guess passwords, and/or the same passwords everywhere. Signing up to multiple websites with the same login you use for your email account is just asking for trouble, but people do it. The reason I bring this up is cybersecurity company ESET has just released new data from a Harris Interactive study that once again shows how lackadaisical we are when it comes to password protection.

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I know what you’re thinking. There just aren’t enough social networks. Sure, there’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and MySpace, but what the world really needs is one that bills itself as an experiment in social search, right? Fortunately Microsoft’s Fuse Labs has been working on such a project, and has finally opened its endeavour to the world.

Socl (pronounced "social") was launched quietly back in May, as an invite-only offering for students. It was described then as an "experiment in learning" (which is hardly the sexiest of taglines) but from today the site is open to all, and if you’re the sort of person who appreciates seeing slightly raunchy animated GIFs of Katy Perry, or still enjoys all things Gangnam Style, you’re going to love it.

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Although there was an odd blip where Google’s new Gmail app appeared in the App Store, and then vanished mysteriously (a "rollout issue" according to Google), it’s back again and is available to actually download this time. And the good news is: it’s worth grabbing.

As a Gmail user, and an owner of an iPad and a few iPod touches, I’ve never really rated the old, official app, preferring to just to stick with the mobile web version. After ten minutes use I can say that while the update is not perfect, it is a huge step in the right direction and a massive improvement over its predecessor.

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The Apple co-founder passed away a little over a year ago, but such is the continuing interest in Steve Jobs’ life, there’s not one, but two Hollywood biopics in development. Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of Walter Isaacson’s biography (which will apparently be set behind the scenes of three of Jobs’ biggest product launches -- the Mac, NeXT and the iPod), is due to start shooting next year, while jOBS, Joshua Michael Stern's more typically-structured take on events, is already in post-production and has been booked to close next year's Sundance Film Festival.

jOBS has attracted a lot of interest, partly for its choice of leading man. Ashton Kutcher’s movie career hasn’t exactly set Hollywood alight, and it’s fair to say the news that he was to play Jobs didn’t exactly go down well with the Apple faithful. Still, the actor seems to be taking the role seriously, and certainly looks the part in the promo photo released today.

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Pope Benedict XVI sent his first tweet last year via the Vatican's official Twitter account but now he's got his own personal account and plans to start telling followers what he had for dinner, posting communion wafer recipes, and retweeting comments from the likes of Ricky Gervais and Kayne West.

Well, maybe not. His account @pontifex (meaning both pontiff and "builder of bridges") will actually be used to send spiritual messages translated into eight languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Arabic), and he'll likely be agreeing with the message rather than composing it himself.

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It’s no secret that a lot of the world’s governments want the internet to be regulated. Two months ago, I wrote an article on how the Saudi government, fired up by The Innocence of Muslims video that YouTube was refusing to pull, had made a submission to the World Telecommunications Policy Forum, calling for the creation of a new overseer designed to censor offensive content on the Internet.

That particular event is scheduled for May, but starting today, at a closed-door meeting of The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Dubai, world governments will be discussing, among other things, internet regulation and will be looking to revise a decades old treaty that could allow more oppressive countries to justify the censorship of free speech, and even cut off internet access if they so choose. You can see some leaked proposals on the WICITLeaks website.

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Every time Microsoft launches a new operating system there’s one phrase you’re guaranteed to hear: "This version of Windows is outselling its predecessor". Microsoft claimed Windows Vista got off to a fast start, shifting more than 20 million copies in two months -- some three million more than XP sold in the same time frame. Windows 7 of course comfortably outsold Vista, and recently Tami Reller, finance and marketing head of the Windows business, announced that Microsoft sold 40 million licenses for Windows 8 to date, adding, "Windows 8 upgrade momentum is outpacing that of Windows 7". Of course, of course. The message here is clear: every version of Windows is a success. But how successful is Windows 8, really?

We don’t know. That’s the bottom line. When Apple says it’s sold X billion apps we know that’s true because sales go through the App Store and are counted. When Microsoft says it’s sold 4 million copies of Windows 8 in the first few days, or 40 million licenses to date, we have no idea what that means in terms of actual sales. Consumers activate Windows when installing it, so Microsoft will know how many activations it's had, and yet that figure, the one we know to be trustworthy, has yet to be revealed. There’s a lot of talk about how poorly Windows 8 is doing. An activations figure, if decent, would silence the critics. But there’s no sign of it.

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Apple has released the long-awaited iTunes 11 and boy does it look different. The brand new, easier to navigate interface provides a simplified view of your media. The default view shows a grid of albums and you can expand each one to see the songs it contains. There’s a pop-up menu on the left to browse your libraries (Music, Films, TV Programs and Apps) and a button on the right to open the iTunes Store. The Playlists button is located in the bar at the top of the screen. The familiar sidebar on the left is no more.

When you connect an iPhone, iPod or iPad to your computer, a button for it will appear and you can add content to the device by dragging and dropping.

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Newzbin2, a site offering links to pirated content, hit the headlines back in November 2011 when a successful court case brought by the Motion Picture Association led to it being blocked by a number of major ISPs in the UK, including BT, Virgin Media, Sky, and TalkTalk.

The website responded in bullish fashion by rolling out an encrypted software client to circumvent the ban and switching to a Spanish domain to avoid the threat of domain seizure, but the adverse publicity meant that payment providers were unwilling to work with the site, leaving the owners unable to pay the hosting costs. Despite this, Newzbin2 struggled on, offering an increasingly unreliable service, until today when it finally closed for good.

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According to Microsoft, one-third of new Outlook.com sign-ups are from active Gmail users. While a good portion of those are likely just signing up to get an account to use with Windows 8 (I’m a Gmail devotee but use my Outlook.com address to log into the OS as it offers clear benefits), Microsoft presumes that these new users must dislike Google’s service and want to switch. To this end, the company hired a research firm to say what it wanted to hear.

"Hundreds" of Gmail users were recruited and asked to give Outlook.com a try. These test subjects moved their emails over and used the service for a brief while before being grilled on their experience. The researchers found that the group largely preferred Outlook.com’s clean design (it's possible), and the fact that the service makes sharing photos and Office documents easy (fair enough). But here’s the claim that I can’t quite believe: Apparently the users found Outlook.com "does a better job of blocking spam" than Gmail. Sorry? The only reason you could possibly think that is if you never get any spam in the first place (which would be the case with brand new Outlook.com sign ups).

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I have two cats, Charlie and Chloe. Charlie is very talkative, especially when he’s hungry (which is most of the time), and indeed you can often have lengthy conversations with him. So when, in 2009, YouTube user Andrew Grantham (klaatu42) put out a call for clips of talking animals to appear in a new Christmas video, I filmed Charlie requesting more food and uploaded the 30-second snippet. I was very fortunate, because not only was my submission accepted but my cat was used to sing the opening lines to Deck the Halls.

It was a fun video, and clearly found an audience -- as to date over nine million people have watched it. But Charlie’s fleeting fame wasn’t to stop there. A few weeks ago, out of the blue, I received a slew of increasingly frantic messages in my YouTube inbox from the Leo Burnett advertising agency.

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A port of the incredibly popular indie sandbox survival game Minecraft will soon be available for the Raspberry Pi, and if that news isn’t enough to get you excited, the price might -- it will be entirely free.

Minecraft: Pi Edition (a port of Minecraft: Pocket Edition) was officially unveiled at Minecon in Paris, and offers a revised feature set and support for several programming languages, so users can code directly into the game. According to Minecraft publisher Mojang, users will be able to "start by building structures in the traditional Minecraft way, but once you’ve got to grips with the in-game features, there’s opportunity to break open the code and use programming language to manipulate things in the game world. You’ll be learning new skills through Minecraft".

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A new report from Ofcom reveals that one in six Internet users in the United Kingdom access films, TV shows, music, or eBooks through illegal means. Published this week, the first results from an ongoing study of Internet users aged 12 and above also reveals that 47 percent are unsure whether the online content they download, stream or share is legal or not.

During the three-month period from May to July 2012, Ofcom found that the levels of infringement varied considerably depending on content type. For example, while 8 percent of users accessed music illegally and 6 percent consumed films that way, just 2 percent downloaded games and software. That said, of all the computer software obtained online, 47 percent of it was acquired illegally.

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I write this on my new least-favorite operating system: Windows 8. I knew when installing that I would have to use it as my sole OS. Spending equal amounts of time in Windows 7 and 8 (occasionally dipping into Ubuntu) just wouldn’t have worked. Windows 8 is a very different beast and takes time to master properly, and I knew I couldn’t do that if running its predecessor, too. This was the problem I had with the early releases of Windows 8 -- I just wasn’t committed enough.

This total immersion has worked well for me. Using Windows 8 is now a breeze. I zip around using keyboard shortcuts where possible, and I jump between the desktop and Modern UI without thinking about it. But here’s the thing: I still don’t like Windows 8.

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