An Italian national newspaper has reported that Google plans to launch a service allowing publishers to hide content behind a paywall before the end of the year.

The report in La Repubblica newspaper suggests the system will be linked directly to Google’s search results and will allow consumers to buy paid content directly via Google Checkout with one click. Observes say it could provide a valuable revenue boost for cash-strapped newspapers.

Google is said to be approaching publishers to gauge their interest in its own version of a micropayment system it linked directly to Google’s search results, which would let consumers buy paid content directly via Google Checkout with one click.

According to UK marketing industry magazine Brand Republic, the launch of Newspass would certainly head off some of criticism that has been levelled at Google by the likes of Rupert Murdoch who dispute Google’s claim to send valuable traffic to newspapers.

Murdoch said last year: “We’d rather have fewer people coming to our websites but paying.” And his latest manifestation of this vision is the paid for TheTimes.co.uk website, launched in early June 2010.

La Repubblica has quoted Google’s Vice-President of global media, Henrique de Castro, as saying that his company wanted to forge partnerships with other media organisations, rather than rival them.

According to Brand Republic, it is unclear whether the system is being developed locally in Italy by Google where it already faces an investigation by the country’s Competition Authority. The investigation has been running since last year, after the Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers complained about the lack of transparency in how Google News calculates its rankings.

The Italian Federation of Newspaper Publishers complained that Google was using its dominant position to stop publishers from earning their fair share of online ad revenues.

It seems likely, however, that the plan is one Google hopes to launch globally in that it sounds similar to an idea that it proposed to the Newspaper Association of America last year, which looked at how a successful micropayments model might work.

Adobe has said it is working to fix a “critical” security flaw in its Reader, Acrobat and Flash Player software.

It warned that the vulnerability potentially enables hackers to take control of affected computer systems, and that users running Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating systems might all be vulnerable.

The company released details of the glitch in its online security bulletin, in which it said: “This vulnerability could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

It added: “There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild against both Adobe Flash Player, and Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security software manufacturer Sophos, told the BBC: “It doesn’t really get any worse than a ‘zero-day’ vulnerability like this.”

He said that hackers might try to gain access to a person’s computer through a booby-trapped PDF document or Flash animation, possibly with the intention of gathering personal information or using the machine to send spam messages.

In recent years, PDFs have become a popular means of sharing documents whose contents are considered largely secure and unalterable.

While it worked to fix the problem, the company suggested upgrading to a pre-release version of the Adobe Flash Player, version 10.1, which it said “does not appear to be vulnerable”.

Mr Cluley said that keeping anti-virus software up to date would also help to avoid problems.

“There has been a long history of vulnerabilities being found in Adobe’s products,” he said.

“This is probably because they are everywhere and omnipresent.”

Adobe estimates that more than 95 per cent of computers worldwide have Flash Player installed.

Google’s Chrome browser continued to make inroads into its rivals’ share of worldwide browser usage in May, new statistics show.

Chrome rose 0.3 percentage points to take seven per cent of the market, said Net Applications, which monitors browser usage on a network of Web sites.

The statistics reflect activity, not the number of people using a browser, as people load up about 160 million pages each month on sites Net Applications monitors. Because Web usage is increasing, the absolute number of people using a browser can increase even as its fractional share of usage drops.

Drops in market share were recorded by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which dropped 0.3 per cent to 59.75 per cent, and Mozilla’s Firefox, which slipped 0.2 percentage points to 24.3 per cent. Fourth-place Safari from Apple rose 0.1 percentage points to 4.8 per cent, and Opera rose by the same margin to 2.4 per cent.
 
The browser market has become highly competitive as new features are built in to support new Web standards. Even Microsoft, long considered a technology laggard despite the dominant market position enjoyed by its browser, is fighting back, with extensive development work taking place on IE9.

Microsoft has been trying to rid the world of Internet Explorer 6, introduced in 2001 and now considered outmoded, slow, and insecure. Another analytics firm, StatCounter, reported IE6 use had dropped below 5 percent in the United States and Europe and to 9.8 percent worldwide.

“At these levels, Web developers now have valid justification not to support IE6 in the future,” StatCounter Chief Executive Aodhan Cullen said in a statement. The company collected its data from 15 billion page views of web pages in May.

Net Applications also released statistics for iPad use, showing the Apple tablet’ making gradual progress. With the iPad now for sale internationally, usage peaked May 29 with 0.17 per cent.
Net Applications’ data shows the iPad is relatively popular at weekends, when browsing using it roughly doubles.

The company also tracked mobile phone browsing usage. Java ME, a mobile phone version of the technology from Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle, took the top spot with 40 per cent of usage share.

Next in line was iPhone OS with 32.8 per cent, Symbian at 14 per cent, Android at 6.2 per cent, and BlackBerry at 3.6 per cent.

One commenter on the story, when it appeared on technology news website CNet, said the appeal of Chrome was simple: “I like Chrome for one reason: speed. It’s so much faster than Firefox when it comes to loading web pages,” he said.

A dispute in Australia between members of the public and photographers gathering data for Google’s Street View service has been referred to the country’s police, the country’s Attorney General (senior law officer) has said.

Robert McLelland told journalists ahead of a conference on internet security in the Australian city of Melbourne, that the Federal Police were looking into complaints from members of the public that concern a possible breach of the country’s telecommunications laws.

Google said it would co-operate with the Australian police investigation, and a spokeswoman told Reuters that the company had made an error: “This was a mistake. We are talking to the appropriate authorities to answer any questions they have,” she said.

The ‘Street View’ service has recently been criticised in several countries. The company has said it inadvertently picked up personal data from some unencrypted wi-fi services over several years.

Mobile phone users bought nearly £123million of goods in the UK in 2009 using their smartphones, according to a new report, and this figure looks set to more than double in the next three years.

As total online retail spending in 2009 was £21.2bn – or a market share of 0.6 per cent – this means that by 2013, mobile internet sales could reach £275million, or the four per cent of the overall market, claim analysts Verdict and Ovum, who have released a joint study.

They claim that, in the last year, only 2.1 per cent of the UK adult population shopped using internet access on their mobile. This is less than a tenth of the 28 per cent of the population who have mobile internet access.

“Consumers are not spending significant amounts via mobiles and, for now, we believe the true potential for m-commerce is to provide consumers with a valuable tool for research, comparison shopping and retailer interaction,” said Malcolm Pinkerton, senior analyst with Verdict Research.

“However, with internet-savvy consumers now accustomed to the multichannel environment, they are beginning to embrace m-commerce,” he told Brand Republic magazine.

Christine Bardwell, senior retail technology analyst at Ovum, added: “The opportunities are there for the most proficient multichannel retailers to claim a share of the growing cross-channel expenditure by exploiting the possibilities provided by mobiles to seamlessly link the online and in-store environments.”

Apple top man Steve Jobs fears that the internet will be reduced “into a nation of bloggers” unless a sustainable way of persuading people to pay for online content is devised.

Speaking at the Wall Street Journal-organised D8 conference near Los Angeles, Jobs said that newspapers’ and magazines’ futures, along with that of quality journalism, depended on media outlets finding a way of making it worthwhile for readers to pay to look at website content.

“One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free healthy press, some of these newspapers, the news gathering and editorial organisations are really important,” he said.

“I don’t want to see us descend to a nation of bloggers. I think we need editorial more than ever right now.

“Anything that we can do to help news gathering organisations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid so they can keep their news gathering and editorial operations intact, I’m all for it.”

He was keen, of course, to stress the possible role which his company’s latest big thing, the iPad tablet computer, could play in facilitating this shift in attitudes.

“What we have to do is figure out a way to get people to start paying for this hard earned content. And so this (the iPad) provides us with a potential opportunity to provide more value than a web page and start charging for that,” Jobs said.

However, Jobs appeared to hint that his attempts to take a hard line over charging for iPad apps had made media owners reluctant to develop their own apps, reported Gordon McMillan on MediaWeek magazine’s The Wall blog.
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“I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they charge traditionally for print because they don’t have the expenses of printing, they don’t have the expenses of delivery, and to charge a reasonable price and go for volume. I think people are willing to pay for content,” Jobs concluded.

His assertion seems to have been borne out by early sales of The Times newspaper’s iPad edition, which was reported to have sold 5,000 six-day subscriptions, at GBP9.99 each (about US$16), in its first three days of availability.

Plans by workers at BT (British Telecom) to strike in protest at massive bonuses awarded to the company’s managers and over a two per cent pay rise offer could affect broadband maintenance and troubleshooting services, according to industry observers.

Thousands of BT staff who are members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) are to be asked to support walk-outs in protest at the bonus awards and a two per cent pay increase offer to its members. If the staff vote in favour of a strike, maintenance of millions of broadband lines could be hit.

“There are definitely going to be potential issues with maintenance. It’s (the strike) definitely going to affect day-to-day maintenance and problem resolution, Edd Dawson, editor of broadband information and comparison website broadband.co.uk, said.

“If it turns into a prolonged strike then it could very well affect the roll out of the next-generation broadband.”

The CWU represents nearly 60,000 BT staff.

A union official said: “This is about fairness. We don’t mind senior executives getting bonuses, but we want all staff to share in the success of the company. Striking is a last resort and not something to be taken lightly.”

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has defended changes to the service which have led to privacy concerns, and said that he has no date in mind for a public floatation of the company.

Zuckerberg used an address to the All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California on Wednesday to reiterate his defiant stance on Facebook’s intention to push the boundaries of its offering to users.

“Certainly on a day-to-day basis if we didn’t disrupt things that would be the easiest way to proceed,” Zuckerberg told the conference.

“But we don’t believe that if we did that we’d be doing the best thing for us long-term or for the industry.”

Just a week before the Wall Street Journal-organised get-together of some of the world’s biggest names in online enterprise, Facebook had simplified its privacy controls, so that users could more easily keep information private.

The steps for doing so are now contained on a single page on the site.

At the same time, the site also made it easier for users to conceal their details from third parties, in an effort to counter some critics who had said the privacy settings were too cumbersome.

But Zuckerberg was unrepentant about his company’s right to pursue a radical and innovative approach to its offering, Reuters reported. It would continue to make what it believed were the right changes, even if some of them were controversial, he said.

The company does have a fine line to tread between encouraging its users to share information socially with others, and their individual privacy, yet it is increasingly being seen as infringing onto territory occupied by the likes of Google and Yahoo as a general resource for information of all kinds.

Zuckerberg revealed to the All Things Digital audience that more than 200,000 websites now use the company’s social ‘plug-ins’, which allows Facebook users to click on buttons across the Web to show that they “liked” a particular online article or video.

Facebook is backed by a range of technology companies and investors including Digital Sky Technologies, Microsoft Corp, Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka Shing, as well as venture capital firms Accel Partners, Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners.

But it is under constant scrutiny from investors who hope one day to be able to buy shares in the fast-growing company.

Zuckerberg confirmed recent media reports that the company now had four times as many advertisers than a year ago. He also said that the company’s social ‘plug-ins’, which allow Facebook users to click on buttons across the web to show that they “liked” a particular online article or video, were now being used by more than 200,000 websites.

“I don’t know if we always get it right,” Zuckerberg said about some of the service’s controversial new features. “But my prediction will be that a few years from now, we’ll look back and wonder why there was ever this time when all these websites and applications … weren’t personalised in some way.”

The Sun newspaper in the UK was the target of a torrent of anger from Twitter users when it asked its readers to vote on whether gay people should be ministers in the cabinet of the UK Government.

The paper, the UK’s highest-circulation national daily newspaper, posed the question after the resignation of former Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws, following revelations in one of The Sun’s rival publications that Mr Laws had wrongly claimed expenses for accommodation where his secret partner lived.

On Twitter @duckorange reminded people: “Shocked at Sun’s “gay cabinet minister” poll? Don’t be – this is same paper that ran “Ten ways to spot if your vicar is a pulpit pooftah”.

And a comment from @neilmonnery’s saying: “The Sun really ran a poll asking ‘Should gay people be cabinet ministers? – Even I never thought they could sink that low”, was heavily retweeted.

Of those polled 13 per cent said it was a good thing that gay people were in the cabinet and more than three-quarters said they did not mind. Only five per cent said they were against.

On the afternoon the poll appeared, campaigners from gay campaign group Stonewall said they were not surprised that 90 per cent of the paper’s readers who took part in the poll said that an MP’s sexuality should have no bearing on whether they can be a Cabinet member.

The result of The Sun poll, according to Stonewall Chief Executive Ben Summerskill, “must have been a disappointment to the Sun journalists who were silly enough to ask the question.

“This suggests it is more out of touch with its readers than it likes to think.”

Google is expected to release details of its plans for a compromise with EU data protection bodies this week.

The American company has admitted it made a software coding mistake in 2006 and this led to its Street View photography cars collecting payload data from private, but unsecure WiFi networks.

The company has been facing pressure from various European Union bodies including authorities in France, Spain and Germany, to hand over the data it collected, but Google has so far resisted.

According to the Financial Times, Google’s lawyers have advised the company against this course of action.

Google is set to offer a compromise solution this week, although details have not been released.

A Google spokesperson said: “We are working through it and will have some answers for the data protection authorities during the course of the week.”

By Richard Morris

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