Communication Breakdown

A CIA-sponsored investment company called In-Q-Tel has bought into Visible Technologies, a company that provides a social media monitoring technology called truCast.

TruCast powers services that let companies monitor how often subjects are being discussed on Twitter and in other forms of online social conversation. In a statement on Friday, In-Q-Tel's head of architecture and engineering, Troy Pearsall, said truCast would help his company keep an eye on online conversation trends.

"Visible Technologies' platform is key to understanding the breadth and depth of the online social landscape," Pearsall said. "Its platform delivers a clear and comprehensive view of complex information, integrating real-time data into a navigable and easy-to-use application that understands the context and tone of online dialogue."

The truCast platform is already used by companies such as Microsoft and Xerox.

In-Q-Tel was founded by the CIA in 1999 as an independent not-for-profit organisation, to help the US intelligence community find and work with emerging commercial technology companies. The company aims to accelerate the development of technologies that the intelligence community wants to use.

Skype has signed a deal with Lenovo that will see the PC manufacturer pre-install the communications service on all its enterprise laptops and desktop computers.

Beginning immediately, all ThinkPad laptops and ThinkCentre desktop PCs that are sold around the world include the internet telephony (VoIP) and video-calling client, Skype blogger Peter Parkes wrote on Monday.

As part of the deal, Lenovo's new machines have a Skype icon in the start menu, from first power-up.

However, an enterprise communications analyst told ZDNet UK on Monday that the deal was unlikely to help Skype much in the business market.

"In the business market, most organisations reimage their PCs anyway," Forrester research vice president Steve Blood said. "I'm not sure it's going to give either Skype or Lenovo a major boost. Skype needs to continue with its viral marketing, where it's very successful."

Blood said a better plan for Skype would be for the VoIP firm to "go to the enterprise and say, 'Why don't you include Skype in your image?'"

The analyst also pointed to Skype for SIP as a serious move by Skype into the enterprise. He said that, although there were still "a couple of security issues there because they're not encrypting anything", leaving the service "totally open to man-in-the-middle attacks", Skype have promised to fix these flaws.

"It's that kind of action that will help them in the enterprise market," blood said. "When it's secure, that will be of some benefit."

Confusion has broken out within government circles over the 2Mbps universal broadband coverage that was called for by Stephen Carter's Digital Britain report.

At a Parliament and Internet conference held in London on Thursday, the head of broadband policy for Lord Mandelson's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) said the government had "never said there will be 2Mbps [provided to UK citizens] at any given time".

Andy Carter (no relation to Stephen, Lord Carter) said in a discussion session that Digital Britain had called for broadband speeds of up-to-2Mbps to be instituted across the country, and that 2Mbps was not a minimum requirement of the strategy.

"This is not an obligation," Andy Carter said. "This is the government recognising that services are not available [in certain areas of the country] and it is an attempt to correct that."

However, communications minister Stephen Timms — Lord Carter's successor — then arrived to address all the delegates at the conference. Asked to clarify the significance of Digital Britain's 2Mbps references, Timms said 2Mbps was "a minimum basic level of service, a safety net".

"It will be the universal service obligation and I feel confident that we will be able to ensure that 2Mbps is available everywhere," Timms said.

Later in the conference, Derek Wyatt MP — the head of the All-Party Communications Group (apComm) — praised Timms for saying the universal service obligation would ensure minimum speeds of 2Mbps across the country.

"I was encouraged that he was brave enough to say that," Wyatt said. "That's what we want."

When Digital Britain came out in July, the government said the universal service obligation would be funded at least in part by money that had been set aside for the digital switchover, but not yet spent.

The government has maintained a stance of technology neutrality on the rollout, saying it could be met by a combination of fixed-line, wireless and/or satellite services.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the HyperText Transfer Protocol, regrets specifying the characters "//" in the protocol.

Berners-Lee told The New York Times last week that the characters, used in web addresses after the "http:", were a programming convention at the time (the tail-end of the 1980s) but proved to be unnecessary in the case of the World Wide Web.

The physicist went on to (somewhat less than seriously) lament the many trees that died to serve people typing and printing out "//" unnecessarily, and the many hours that people have spent doing so in the lifetime of the web.

French authorities have arrested a man connected with Cern over suspected links to al-Qaeda.

The 32-year-old man was arrested in the French town of Vienne on Thursday.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), near Geneva, is the organisation behind the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) scientific facility, a giant experiment that Cern hopes will help it discover more information than is currently known about the nature of matter.

According to a report by the BBC, the arrested man is believed by French police to have "been in contact over the internet with people linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and had been planning attacks in France".

"We can confirm that a person was arrested by French police in Vienne yesterday who was a user of Cern facilities," Cern spokesman James Gillies told ZDNet UK on Friday. "It was a member of the LHCb [the 'Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment', which aims to recreate conditions that immediately followed the Big Bang] experimental collaboration."

"Any data he had access to was public data," Gillies said. "He wouldn't have had access to secret information or data of any use to terrorists."

Tom Espiner contributed to this report.