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Sting's wife Trudie Styler and Janis Sharp have presented a petition to Number 10 calling for Nasa hacker Gary McKinnon not to be extradited to the US.

Styler, and Sharp, who is McKinnon's mother, presented the petition to Sarah Brown, the Prime Minister's wife, on Friday. The petition was signed by 4,338 people, and called on the government to provide protection against extradition for people with autism. McKinnon has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a condition on the autism spectrum.



"As a mother myself, I am 100 percent behind Janis's tireless fight to protect her son," said Styler in a statement. "Gary's actions were clearly misguided. However extraditing him seven years after the event and subjecting him to lengthy prison sentence thousands of miles away from his family is an unnecessarily cruel and undignified way to treat anyone, let alone someone with his condition."

Styler and Sting have supported McKinnon for approximately six months. In March they contacted Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer, calling for Gary to be tried in this country. They also sent a hamper to McKinnon and his family, with a note, later in March.

McKinnon enjoys support from a wide range of people, including Jane Asher, Terry Waite, Boris Johnson, The Proclaimers, Dave Gilmour, and Julie Christie. Politicians including Conservative shadow minister for justice David Burrowes also support McKinnon's cause.

McKinnon stands accused of the "biggest military hack of all time" by US prosecutors. McKinnon's legal team maintain that should McKinnon be found guilty by a US court, he runs the risk of being imprisoned for up to sixty years. However, the Law Lords rejected that possibility, and found that he would be likely to be improsoned for 8 to 10 years.

The next stage in McKinnon's seven year legal battle is a high court hearing on 14 July. The appeal judges will consider McKinnon's application for a judicial review to decide whether he could be tried in the UK.

Three patent applications made by Apple were published on Thursday, covering technologies including haptics, fingerprint recognition and RFID.

The haptic feedback patent, if approved, would bring the iPhone (and possibly other Apple devices) in line with rival handsets, which already provide localised tactile feedback in, for example, an on-screen soft keyboard.

The fingerprint recognition patent is not really to do with authentication and security, but rather for identifying which fingers are in use, so as to associate different functions with different digits.

The RFID reader patent would see RFID-communicating circuitry integrated with the circuitry behind the touchscreen itself.

All the above are just applications, though, so it could be a long while before we see any of this functionality built into iPhones or other Apple devices.

Over in San Francisco yesterday, the brand-new NoSQL movement held its first public meeting. 150 bitwranglers from outfits large and small absorbed ten presentations about how to handle data in the new online world. (Disclosure: the meeting was hosted by CBSi, ZDNet UK's own mothership, and organised by Johan Oskarsson from our sister company last.fm.)

The NoSQL movement – if it's ready to be promoted from notion – is one of those regular reactions to the status quo that make life worth living. Very smart people with big ideas are keen to find ways to store and manipulate data that don't rely on the old relational database ideas, or challenge those ideas in ways that aren't appropriate to the standard methods.

There are many overt motivations behind this. Lots of important database applications have arrived with the Web revolution, and many of those have particular size, scaling, performance and reliability needs that might have optimal solutions outside the mainstream. To take the most extreme case – could Google have prospered, or even worked, had it been designed to run on top of Oracle? But that's just Google, right? The NASA of online commerce? You don't get much insight by noting that you can't get to the Moon on a Boeing 737: it doesn't make much difference to the plane you catch to Alicante.

The difference here is that everyone wants to go to the Moon. To be more precise, they want to be NASA – able to pull off the biggest projects at the same time as doing fantastic things with cheap little robots sent all over the place. If your big idea doesn't work on a tiny phone as well as scaling to the point where everyone on the planet can use it, then you're missing out. And "work" isn't just a question of technicalities, it's as much about economic engineering.

That's particularly interesting, because the mountain of maximum economic pain is nowhere near the canyon of maximum technical difficulty – and it's the technical stuff that tends to attract the attention of the young punks of NoSQL. If you're a very small outfit with big ideas, you evolve something very clever because you've got no choice. If you're a big enterprise, you can use your chequebook to beat your suppliers into compliance. It's the guys in the middle who get shafted. You've got mainstream needs but are too small to make waves: the suppliers are much bigger than you, so you take what they give.

Which is why SME problems with database tech – and technology in general – are centred around getting a fair deal. About not being forced to pay too much on very bad terms. About not ceding control over the company DNA to people whose business objectives are not your business objectives. It's a classic balance of power problem, one illustrated by comparing the balance sheets and profit margins of those very large software companies who supply corporate IT with those of the SMEs who consume it.

For NoSQL to properly change the world, it has to be fit to climb that particular mountain of pain. Like the open source movement from which it comes, it will find this the very hardest task. This particular Everest is frustratingly immune to the weaponry of innovation, lateral thinking, energy and idealism unless harnessed to a focussed, patient, strategic assault. And focus, patience and strategy are not attributes commonly found among bright young punks.

Movements do throw up monsters, though, and its the monsters who devastate. So enjoy NoSQL for the thinking, the arguments, the technology, but watch it closely for its very own Gates, Jobs or Ellison. Sometimes, only a monster will do.

Researchers from the University of Surrey, the London Centre for Nanotechnology and Peking University's Institute of MIcroelectronics have been awarded a £430,000 grant to get busy devloping silicon structures for use in spintronic devices. It's a three year project funded jointly by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the National Science Foundation of China.

The UK is bringing its chops in watching and fixing the way electrons spin, while the Chinese are particularly good at building silicon nanotech. The aim is to investigate and build a silicon device where the electron spins are controlled by laser beams, which sounds as cool a 21st century job as exists on the planet.

Not that I wish to express any doubts about the Chinese nano-fabrication skills, but they'll have to go some to beat the London Centre's latest news announcement - a sculpture of a trumpeter only 100 nanometres tall.

The world of European mobile communications was not rocked to its very foundations this week, as 3 announced a £1.25/MB data roaming deal followed by Vodafone offering up £5 per diem/25MB max.

Moble data roaming charges are fantastic. Truly. They're like a pub that changes the cost of the beer depending on where you live. And not by a crafty fifty pence neither.

That £5/day/25MB limit? If you're a Voda customer at home, you get a month for £5 and a 500MB limit - which is at least twenty times the value. Imagine trying to buy a three euro beer in Paris, only to have your passport checked and told that it was going to cost you sixty euro. Then, if you complain, being told that this is a brand new and very competitive rate, and in any case the pubs in London charged fifty quid per pint to any visiting Parisian.

That's exactly what the mobile phone companies are doing to us, every time we use data abroad. A sixty euro beer. The same rapacious markup applies across Europe and across mobile phone companies. Yay for free markets, and thank goodness the companies aren't operating an illegal cartel. We can have all the sixty euro beer we can drink.

Only, of course, we don't drink sixty euro beer, and we don't use data roaming. Because we can't afford to. Even though mobile data is at its most useful when we're travelling.

So why does mobile data from the mast in the corner of a foreign field cost so much? Because the networks are operating in collusion to keep the price sky-high, and there's a chance you'll desperately need it. There is no technical reason.

The network you're using abroad will be making a profit selling its local internet access on something along the lines of your domestic deal: it costs no more to serve you beer - or data -- than to serve Helga. I don't know how much it costs the mobile phone companies to reconcile roaming charges: I do know that it can't be very much.

I particularly like the excuses given when regulators rattle their sabres. If we didn't charge our users twenty times as much as we need to, the argument goes, we'd have to charge them more for other stuff. Try applying that to the sixty euro beer, and see how much sense it makes.

So: thanks for nothing, guys. Come back to us when you've worked out that caring for your customers means not ripping them off in a fashion unseen since the days of Vikings and papal indulgences. Come back to us when you've joined the modern world.

A Californian law firm is looking for potential plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit over laptop makers' battery life claims.

Girard Gibbs has put up a webpage referring to AMD's claims that "many laptop battery manufacturers calculate battery life based on a misleading test that is conducted by running computers at low energy levels, resulting in seemingly larger life span numbers".

"If you believe that your laptop battery has a shorter life span than what was advertised or represented to you, or if you would like to learn more about our investigation, please fill out the form on the right for a free consultation," the law firm urges.

Girard Gibbs says it has, in the past, achieved "significant recoveries" from companies including Apple, Sony BMG, MCI, AT&T, Mitsubishi, BMW, Whirlpool, America Online, and Paypal.

Apple has almost tripled its stake in the Hertfordshire-based company Imagination Technologies, which provides graphics technology for the iPhone.

On Friday, Imagination sold 2.2m shares to Apple. Added to another 11.5m shares bought on the open market around the same time, Apple now has a stake of around 9 percent in Imagination — it first bought shares in the company last December, when it paid £3.2m for a 3.6 percent stake.

Apple's investment in Imagination is, however, much less than that of Intel — earlier this month, Intel increased its own stake to around 16 percent.

In both Apple and Intel's cases, many of the acquired shares are believed to have come from Imagination's major backer, the currently debt-ridden Saudi investment firm Saad.

Last week, Intel announced it was teaming up with Nokia in a major push into the handheld computing market, taking it up against rivals including Apple.

EBay's intended spin-off of Skype as a new public company could be threatened by a dispute between Skype's founders and the internet telephony firm's parent.

The online auction giant intends to launch an IPO for Skype in 2010. However, according to a report in Bloomberg, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (through their new company Joltid) have accused eBay of breaking terms of a licensing deal.

The Skype founders apparently still own key technology that the platform needs to function, and they are threatening to withdraw that technology — which would disable Skype.

EBay has sued Friis and Zennstrom to stop this happening, according to Bloomberg. The argument could either sink the IPO or cause it to raise much less money than hoped for, lawyers quoted in the piece say.

It is not yet clear precisely what integral technology eBay failed to buy when it picked up Skype for $2.6bn four years ago.

Sending letters to internet users suspected of filesharing is a successful way of cutting down on such activity, the head of Ofcom said on Thursday.

Ed Richards, the chief executive of the telecoms regulator, told ZDNet UK in Brussels that "letter-writing itself, if done properly, seems to have had a positive effect", for example by alerting parents to their children's activities.

Over the last year or so, some ISPs have sent letters to suspected filesharers, warning them that their activity has been noted and telling them to stop. This is similar to the first stage of Sarkozy's 'three-strikes' approach, which culminated in the user being disconnected (Sarkozy's Hadopi law was, however, recently deemed unenforceable by the French constitutional court).

It is also the same initial stage that was recommended by the government in its Digital Britain report last week. In this case, the first letter could be followed by the release of the user's identity to the rights holder, then – potentially – technical measures such as protocol blocking or bandwidth throttling.

The ISP must, of course, first be told by the rights holder that the user is suspected of filesharing. The rights holders – record companies and so on – find this information out by monitoring filesharing sites and logging IP addresses and times, then passing that information on to the ISP. By then identifying the user to the rights holder, the ISP would be opening that user up to a civil suit, as copyright infringement is not a criminal offence.

Ofcom is currently starting to consider the issues around IP address privacy, as proposed by the government.

The new legislation that is needed to put the Digital Britain recommendations into practice will go before parliament immediately after the summer recess, ZDNet UK understands.

Europe's telecommunications commissioner, Viviane Reding, has told ZDNet UK that the Telecoms Package, a collection of new laws that many fear will be sunk by a contentious net-neutrality clause, will not all have to go to a conciliation process.

"Only [Amendment] 138 will go to conciliation," Reding said at a Brussels conference on Thursday. "That is the instruction that ministers have given to the new presidency."

Amendment 138 states that internet access is a fundamental right. The clause is widely seen as pro-net-neutrality, because it would make it impossible to throw users off the internet for doing things like filesharing copyrighted content.

The Commission has already stated that it does not see the need for the amendment, as national laws already prohibit extrajudicial disconnections.

The European Parliament's passage of Amendment 138 has caused a great deal of anger in the European diplomatic community, as the rest of the Telecoms Package had previously been agreed between parliamentarians and the Council of Telecoms Ministers, who always said they would not accept such a clause.

According to a source close to the negotiations that have been going on between parliamentarians and ministers, Reding's assertion that Amendment 138 will be the only part of the Telecoms Package to go to conciliation is correct, thanks to some form of "gentleman's agreement between the institutions".

It is not technically possible to confine the conciliation process to just Amendment 138 - at the very least, a large chunk of the Telecoms Package needs to go with it - but, according to the source, the key players from the first round of negotiations (particularly MEPs Trautmann and Harbour) have been reelected and will retain their roles, and "the optimistic scenario is, with goodwill on both sides, they can agree a gentleman's agreement. That's where most people want to take this."

On the issue of why the European Parliament voted through an amendment they knew would risk sinking the whole package, the source suggested that this came about as a result of two factors.

The first factor was a small group of MEPs who wanted the net-neutrality clause, and the second was the order of voting being switched, leading some MEPs to accidentally vote for the wrong version of the Telecoms Package text. This was, in the words of the source, a "cock-up".