Wayne Williams

Google’s standing in the Muslim world isn’t great right now. The company’s refusal to pull the offensive The Innocence of Muslims video from YouTube has led to lots of criticism around the world. The Saudi Arabian government even led calls for a new international body to censor the internet purely as a result of Google’s stance.

However, perhaps in an effort to appease angry Muslims, Google has announced that from today it will stream the ritual of Hajj (the world’s largest pilgrimage) live from Mecca, on the Saudi Ministry of Culture and Information's YouTube channel.

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The music industry has tried various things to combat piracy over the years, ranging from actually selling music online, to suing alleged file sharers/customers. In the United Kingdom, the British Phonographic Industry is trying to force internet service providers to block access to infringing sites.

The Motion Picture Association started the trend last year by going to the courts and asking them to block access to Newzbin 2, a members-only site sharing music and video. The BPI followed its approach, successfully getting the High Court to order ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, and now it’s got three more major torrent sites in its crosshairs.

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Google News is one of the search giant’s more contentious services (Brazil's National Association of Newspapers recently blocked it from using its members' content because the service allegedly drives traffic away from their websites), but there’s no question it’s an incredibly useful resource, pulling content from a wide variety of sources.

Last year Google made it easier to scan for stories, and this year it’s implementing some useful changes to the News search results pages.

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Despite making huge sums of money in the United Kingdom, many of the major tech companies based there pay surprisingly little tax. Exactly how little has only just started to come to light, thanks to investigations by several national newspapers.

The latest company to be exposed for paying a pittance in UK tax is eBay which, according to the Sunday Times newspaper, paid just £1.2m in 2010, despite its UK subsidiaries generating sales of close to £800m, and making an estimated profit of £181m.

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According to the results of a worldwide, multi-year study conducted by industry body GSMA, the total number of global mobile connections will reach 6.8 billion by Q4 2012.

However, the number of actual unique mobile subscribers is much less. By stripping out machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and inactive SIM cards, and factoring in that consumers apparently use an average of 1.85 SIM cards each, GSMA was able to arrive at a figure of 3.2 billion mobile subscribers, or around 45.7 percent of the world’s population.

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When I opened Apple Maps in iOS 6 for the first time, I was struck by how basic the actual maps are. Zooming in shows the roads, and road names, but it’s all very simple. By contrast, when you zoom into Google Maps you often get to see the buildings on either side of the roads, which can help to get orientated and locate important landmarks.

Google today boosted this subtle but incredibly handy navigation feature by adding a further 25 million new algorithmically-created building footprints to the desktop and mobile versions of Maps.

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Changing your email address can be a major pain. You’ve got to tell everyone about it, move your emails from the old account to the new one and so on. I know people who’ve been using Hotmail for the better part of a decade, despite loathing it, just because they don’t want the perceived hassle of switching to another service (or even upgrading to Outlook.com).

AOL’s new cloud-based email tool, Alto, is designed to avoid this problem by working alongside, or rather on top of, the main webmail services, rather than replacing them. You don’t need to sign up for a new email address, you just log in with your existing AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, or iCloud details. Once you’re in, Alto will help manage your inbox and cut back on clutter.

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Apple today lost an appeal against the UK ruling that found rival Samsung's Galaxy Tab did not infringe its design rights. The original case, in which Judge Colin Birss declared Samsung’s tablets were not cool enough to be confused with the iPad, found in favor of the South Korean company and ordered Apple to publish a notice on its website and in various print titles (for a minimum of six months), informing visitors and readers that Samsung did not copy the design of Apple’s tablet.

The Court of Appeal’s review of the case upheld this ruling, meaning that Apple must comply with the original order. And just for a little additional salt/wound rubbing, one of the three appeals judges, Lord Justice Kitchin, stated that the typeface used in the notices must be no smaller than 14 point Ariel.

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Larry Page, Google’s CEO, was forced to cancel all of his public speaking engagements back in June when a mystery ailment caused him to lose his voice. It wasn’t known when (or indeed if) Page would make appearances again, but the question was answered yesterday when he took to the stage at the company's annual Zeitgeist conference in Paradise Valley, Arizona.

Still, clearly suffering with a hoarse voice, and taking sips of water in between questions, he discussed various topics, beginning with how he gets really excited about the things that Google can do to seriously change the world, citing Search and Books as prime examples. Page also mentioned Maps: "We said it would be really nice to have a virtual representation of the real world that was accurate. Seven years later we’re kind of almost there, and we’re excited that other people have started to notice that we’ve worked hard on that for seven years". His subtle dig at Apple’s mapping catastrophe raised an appreciative laugh from the audience. When asked if Google was working on an iOS app, he gave an evasive answer and moved on.

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Ever wondered what the inside of Google’s high-tech data centers look like? Or fancied taking a stroll around the server floor -- a place where only a select group of the company’s employees are allowed to tread? Well, the good news is now you can, virtually at least.

No, Google hasn’t fully unleashed its Street View trikes inside the data centers (more on that in a second), but it has given photographer Connie Zhou unrestricted access to them. The result is a website filled with striking, and surprisingly colorful high-res images of some of the most advanced server networks on the planet.

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Search engine DuckDuckGo released a video a few days ago that shows how Google personalizes results for all signed in and signed out users. It asked 131 people to search for the same Election related topics ("abortion", "gun control", and "Obama") on Google at the same time, and most of them received slightly different results.

That Google personalizes results in this way is hardly new information. The company has been doing it since 2009 and Eli Pariser covered the topic in depth in his 2011 book, The Filter Bubble (a great read). He also gave an enlightening Ted Talk on the subject in which he observes that "the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see."

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Raspberry Pi, the massively popular credit-card-sized computer, has had a surprising update -- the Model B version will now come with 512MB of RAM as standard, but will remain priced at $35.

If you’re not familiar with the device, it’s essentially a bare, single-board uncased ARM GNU/Linux computer that you connect to your TV and a keyboard. It’s designed to encourage programming and while aimed at children and students has proved a hit with all age groups, and has been put to some great uses, including sending back photos from the edge of space.

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Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner broke a number of records with his breathtaking edge-of-space skydive yesterday -- and not just the highest jump from a platform (128,100 feet), the longest distance free-fall, (119,846 feet) and becoming the first skydiver to break the sound barrier (with a maximum vertical velocity of 833.9 mph or Mach 1.24). He was also responsible for notching up the most simultaneous live views on YouTube to date.

According to Google, over eight million people (myself included) visited the live stream to watch Baumgartner jump from a capsule attached to a giant helium balloon some 24 miles (39km) above the Earth and land safely around nine minutes later, nonchalantly touching down almost -- as a friend described it -- as if stepping off a bus.

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Whether you think Microsoft wants to be Apple, or not, the company continues to roll out products designed to compete with its major rival. Today’s announcement is for Xbox Music, a digital music service for the Xbox games console, which will also appear as the default music player in Windows 8.

The service, which goes live tomorrow and will be available in 22 countries from launch, is a cross between Spotify and iTunes. Users will be able to listen to songs or full albums for free, create artist-based streaming radio stations, and put together music mixes and playlists. The iTunes element comes in the form of a music store, which will allow users to purchase and download tracks. The store will reportedly offer over 30 million songs, some four million more than Apple's store. There will also be over 70,000 music videos on offer.

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You’ll no doubt be familiar with The Innocence of Muslims, the controversial film that has angered Muslims across the Middle East, sparking riots and leading to several deaths.

It’s unlikely you’ll have actually watched it, although the more curious among you may have caught some of it on YouTube, where the film is still freely available -- provided, of course, you’re not reading this in one of the countries where Google has blocked it, specifically Libya, Egypt, India, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Russia recently banned the film, too, which unsurprisingly also is not available to watch in Iran, Pakistan, or Afghanistan, where they’ve chosen to go a step further and block YouTube entirely.

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