Rupert's DiarySlightly sanitised for the squeamish

The Monday before the launch of the iPad, I had a rather fractious phone call from a TV station.

Broadcaster: "Would you come on the telly on Wednesday morning and talk about the Apple Tablet or whatever it is they're going to be launching on Wednesday evening?"

Me: "I don't even know what it's called, and neither does anyone else. Apple hasn't said what it'll be announcing. I can't really talk about something I know nothing about. I know lots of people are, but I'm not really comfortable..."

Broadcaster: "Well, can you say nobody knows what it is but then talk about what it might be?"

Me:"What? You want me to come on and say I know nothing about the subject I'm discussing? Not sure that's an improvement..."

The conversation went downhill from there. (We made up on Tuesday, and all is well.)

Of course, it is useless hoping people will stop speculating about Apple (it only encourages them...). But I did hope that once the darn thing was out of its closet, things would settle down.

If only. Since Wednesday, I have read more bad-tempered incendiary pseudo-punditry on whether the iPad is (a) The Greatest Thing Ever or (b) Meh than I have on abortion, guns, drugs and Scientology this year.

It's not just that there are two different camps, it's that they have instantly polarised with an almost cultic level of mutual loathing and lack of respect. I've not seen this much raw contempt shored up with catcalls from the gallery since I last looked into Scottish church history: not for nothing did The Economist lead with an image of Jobs as a berobed, behalo'd saint.

And the whole business remains on the level of holy writ: much is written, but you need the eye of faith to read it - and the heart of a crazed crusader to go to war on the strength of the contents. But crazed crusaders are what we find. Not helping.

Can we wind things back a bit until the Second Coming/Dismal Corrupter of consumer electronics actually makes it into the market? Please? It's not as if there aren't other things - yea, even other Apple things - which may be somewhat more important. Here are two: the upcoming war with Google (which may see some surprising alliances), and Steve Jobs' successor. There are others. Any or all of these will have lots of ramifications for the world outside Apple fandom. Go nuclear on those, if you like.

The iPad? Until it's out there: not so much.

Google's decision to pull out of China is the first genuinely new international power play of the 21st century. And that decision has been made: although the company talks of discussing its future with the authorities, Google has practically accused the Chinese government at best of incompetence, at worst of espionage and theft.

There will be no discussions.

Google has publicly declared that doing business in China is incompatible with Western standards of human rights, and that it's commercially well-nigh impossible. This declaration, and the willingness to accept the consequences, stands in fascinating contrast with the approach made by Western political leaders. It's also a rare example of a company acting - at least partially - in a moral plane, without being pushed to do so by prolonged and public pressure. Google's earlier willingness to work to Chinese rules was criticised, to be sure, but the company didn't attract much more opproprium than any other and was generally given the same dispensation of necessity given to other companies working in China (including, for the record, CBSi, which publishes ZDNet UK).

The real reasoning - and how ethical concerns were balanced with practical and commercial ones - will be much discussed. A company as dependent as Google is on the Internet may well not be able to work in a country where the information infrastructure is owned by an actively hostile agency. It would be exceptional if Google was to publish the board minutes of the decision, an act that would defuse -- or confirm -- much of the speculation to come, and that would focus attention back on the act itself.

For now, however, it's fair to take Google's statements at face value. It could have shut up shop with less fanfare and far less confrontation. But the statement is one of a company with patience ended, one that no longer wishes to play the game and wants make it perfectly clear why.

And so over to the Chinese, who have received a very public dressing-down in an international environment where every attempt is made to avoid slight or condemnation. That reaction will be interesting. There are good odds on it being a variation of Stalin's infamous "How many divisions has the Pope?", when dismissing the power of religion to counter his dictatorship. One American company gone away, even Google, is one less to worry about. But the pressure on other companies - and the politicians - to abjure China just got a lot stronger, and the voice of the critics of China just got a lot more force.

And that, no matter how you view Google's real motives, is a rare and rather wonderful event.

Perpetual motion - a technology so outside the laws of physics that even the patent office refuses to touch it - is back.

Or it will be when Steorn, the Emerald Isle's leading proponents of the art, shows off working machines and opens the tech up to anyone who wants a licence. This exciting event is due to happen sometime in the next week at the Waterways Building in Dublin, where Steorn is reported to be setting up something along the lines of their 2007 demonstration at Kinetica in London - only, one trusts, without the fail.

To back this up, the company has produced a brash new video advert consisting mostly of quotes from Steorn denialists; the only positive quote is Steorn's own from that original Economist advert in 2006 which kicked off the whole business.

But then, there hasn't been much call for positive quotes in the intervening three and a half years. Aside from the Kinetic kalamity, Steorn assembled a 'jury' of engineers and scientists who were made privy to the secrets - only for the panel to announce that nope, there was nothing there. Steorn's battle-hardened CEO, Sean McCarthy, has toured universities and the Middle East giving a talk (but no demos) that majored on 'magnetic viscosity' as the underlying phenomenon, but didn't manage to convince many of his magnetic veracity. And the company's own online forum degenerated into a strange place of ritual chanting, before being shut down abruptly last month - presumably in anticipation of Steorn's rebirth.

Yet the company did promise to show things off and open things up by the end of 2009 - and as that particular deadline comes thundering over the festive horizon, it appears that it is going to do just that.

If I can get over to Dublin to participate in the great unveiling, I shall - I'm supposed to be on holiday, but who could resist?

This is completely unchecked, pure rumour and no doubt made up. But it's too good to keep to myself.

Contacts within the Civil Service tell me that whenever the name of the Right Honourable Lord Mandelson, First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation & Skills, Lord President of the Council, comes up during a meeting, everyone present mimes stroking a white Persian cat.

Whatever can this mean?

The BBC has a nice story for anyone who hopes that IT can bring economic benefits to disparate communities. Which it should, given that you can do anything online from anywhere on the planet - forcing people to huddle together is a relic of the industrial revolution.

The story, that Dumfries and Galloway council has given permission for "one of the biggest data centres in the world" to be built in south-west Scotland, is on the face of it all good news. There's not very much there at the moment - it's one of the UK's least populated areas - and if you're going to gobble electricity then you might as well do so in Scotland where the potential for non-carbon generation from hydroelectric, wind and wave power is top notich. And with sympathetic design and careful production, a data centre can be made to fit in wonderfully with landscape and environment.

But there are things you can't escape - extra infrastructure such as roads, car parks, shops and all the bits to keep humans mobile, warm, fed and happy. These need to be lit at night - and there's a lot of night in Scotland.

And that has implications. For Galloway has just become home to a Dark Sky Park, one of the very few in the world - places where light pollution is so low, the sky at night is displayed in its unblemished splendour. (I must admit to a personal bias here - I spent a few nights earlier this year at the Galloway Astronomy Centre, home of the biggest publicly accessible telescope in Scotland, and saw things you people would not believe. Seriously. How about a constellation of spy satellites, wider than the full moon, moving in perfect formation from horizon to horizon in a couple of minutes? Or a globular cluster of thousands of stars, filling the field of view like so much spilled salt?)

It's not as bad as it might be - the Dark Sky Park is quite far from the site of the new data centre, and a plan to build 750 houses was junked. But light pollution is visible over a very wide area: it's not just that the park is dark, it's that the areas around are dark, too.

So, one hopes very much that the approval for the new centre includes provision for proper assessment of the light pollution and, if necessary, a requirement to minimise it. For it is perfectly possible to design low-impact public lighting without imposing Blitz-level blackouts: it's just that, until recently, nobody ever thought they should. Lighting can be effective and economic and not spill half its photons into the sky where they do no good and lots of harm.

Without debate, without public consulation, without any form of mandate, Lord Mandelson - an unelected politician - is preparing to place the rights of powerful industrial concerns above those of Parliament and above ours.

The powers that he wants to create - by means of a statutory instrument, which bypasses Parliamentary debate and decision - will criminalise downloading of content without permission. They will give him or anyone he chooses the power to enforce by law any action he or his successor thinks fit, in the service of protecting copyright.

And they will give industry bodies, such as the BPI, FAST and so on, powers of investigation tantamount to those of the police force. The risk of copyright infringment would be enough to force any company to patrol its actions and offerings, closing down anything that might land them in the dock. The freedom of the Internet would be gone. It is placing the future of the Net, with the force of law, in the hands of those who depend on artificial scarcity. It is antithetical to everything that matters in the digital world.

By any measure, these are extraordinarily dangerous moves. That he is attempting them by an undemocratic process turns them into a profoundly mendacious power grab by forces who have never been reluctant to place their own interests above all else - often in the name of the law and of freedom.

Should these moves succeed, the Internet in the UK will be thrust back thirty years, when a state monopoly with commercial interests was the gatekeeper to all online information - and where that information was only held by other large organisations.

But Internet users would be thrown into another dimension, one where every action must be monitored, every access cleared, every file transfer a potential criminal act. A dimension policed and enforced, moreover, by those with a direct financial interest in preventing new models of distribution, of enforcing the idea that they and they alone can set the rules for information-driven commerce.

Nothing would be untouched. Everything on the Internet is a transfer of information, and all information may be copyright. Thus, every action on the Internet would be a potential criminal act, and everyone connected would have a duty to make sure it wasn't. Be sure that that duty will be imposed with eagerness.

It would be easy to use the metaphors of the police state, of corporate monopoly, of any society where the state turns on its own citizens. Easy, but wrong: what is being proposed is new, one where the very machinery that runs our lives is handed over to a special interest group with a history of saying and doing the maximum it can get away with for its own survival and prosperity.

No wonder he dare not go through Parliament. No wonder he has not published his proposals.

What Mandleson is trying to do is not far short of a coup, a power grab from Parliament and from us. It should be treated as such, and shut down with speed and permanence.

Rupert Murdoch has said that he'll probably take his content out of Google, and hinted very strongly he and other newspaper groups are in discussion over paywalls.

Leaving aside the question of anti-trust - and whether, given Murdoch's extremely close and effective ties to governments, any regulator would be able to function at all or act fast enough to make any difference - this would seem to presage the death of the Internet and its replacement with what old media and old telecoms wanted all along, a segregated, partitioned network where access always comes at a price.

We had that before. It didn't work. Or, rather, it worked fine for established interests with the money to build their own systems or who, by accident of history, controlled the routes of access, where 'fine' meant maintaining that control and preventing open standards, open access and open innovation.

Let's say that Murdoch carries through with his threat and pulls all his content from Google, and sets up paywalls for all his properties. What will happen under the following scenarios?

1. Nobody follows him
2. Some content providers follow him
3. All content providers follow him

and a wildcard:

4. He allows Bing (for example) to crawl his sites, but excludes Google. Or Apple springs its tablet-based news-stand app store on the world with all major publishers involved: you want news, you go through Apple, Rupert's new best friend.

Here's how I see those panning out:

1. Huge competitive advantage to everyone else in attracting readers. His pitch, that readers who pay are worth far more to advertisers than readers who don't, relies on having readers who pay. The standard conversion rate for freemium services (ie, you get people in with the free stuff and sell them up) is 1 percent. And that's 1 percent of people who haven't got there via Google? Does that make sense?

2. Chaos reigns. Suddenly, the news outlets with no paywalls and plenty Google will find it very advantageous to run with stories that they read behind the paywall, even a day after - unless the paywalled sites decide they do want Google and just publish a day late online. The opportunity here for a new face (again, think Apple) to step in with a free service tuned to the new landscape is high, and dangerous to the incumbents.

3. Google loses all its news. Everyone has to decide what to pay for - you can't afford the Times and the Telegraph, let alone Salon and the NYT and Boing Boing - and you can bet the paywalls are set to get a year's sub out of you. The news and information landscape takes a 25 year trip back in time... where, you may remember, a new technology called the Internet was waiting in the wings. The Internet has not actually gone away.

There would be no better market for a new operation to start from a clean slate - a billion plus people ready and able to consume content that they've come to expect, and peeved that they've lost it.

4. Stand by for the biggest lawsuit you've ever seen. Unless Murdoch, Apple and co get into bed with Comcast, Verizon and other major internet providers around the world to break net neutrality, in which case stand by for the biggest lawsuit you'll ever see.

2010 will be very interesting. Anything Murdoch does is going to be a huge gamble, beyond anything he's done before - and he'll do anything to appear confident that it'll work.

We'll see.

A programmer was talking in a tech support forum about some GMail problem he had that was linked to YouTube. "I haven't tried it in Chrome", he said. "That's a little too much Google for me."

That comment has a certain force. I was reminded of it when I watched Eric Schmidt give a bravura performance at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

It started well, with some subtle but cutting digs at his Gartner interlocutor: when asked his prediction of non-advertising Google revenue three years time to compare with Gartner's projected nine percent, he said "We don't do that calculation. It's what finance people do, and it's not very interesting." Laughter.

But there wasn't much laughter during the next 45 minutes, as he elucidated a frighteningly coherent view of how the future was going to go Google's way - and not just bits of the future, the whole lot. From enterprise to consumer, from cloud to mobile, everything was included.

We might, if we're good, be left some vertical market stuff - Google only likes dealing with things that a few hundred million people can use - but that's because the big G can't be bothered. Everything was in the mix; Wave, ChromeOS, Chrome, Google Apps, HTML 5, GMail - oh, was GMail high on the list - Android, even YouTube. Cross-enterprise searching, anyone, where you find out what's going on inside your circle of trust? Employee monitoring? Seamless cloud apps on all platforms? Security that works without firewalls?

One of his predictions was that by next year, there will be netbooks running cloud services within the enterprise that will be good enough to replace the run-of-the-mill enterprise PC "but at a fifth the cost", because cheap hardware was that good. It all joined up. It all made sense.

I digested that prediction while reflecting on the fact that I was watching Schmidt in high resolution via YouTube within Chrome under Linux, on a machine that was simultaneously running all my social networking, chat and other clients, all my home entertainment requirements, all my editing and content creation faffery... and the only part of it that was Microsoft was the copy of XP I run under VirtualBox in order to get to my corporate email. That's only because Microsoft chose to cripple Outlook Web Access when it's not running under IE. Guess how that makes me feel.

(Ah yes, Outlook. Exchange. Schmidt talked on stage about the revelation he'd had about calendaring being at the heart of enterprise: when I use Exchange's calendaring, the revelation I get is that I hope to the highest powers in the cosmos that someone fixes it soon.)

I had a Google Doc open for a project I'm sharing with five pals. I had Google Maps open. I had an Android phone snoozing by the side of the keyboard. In short, I had too much Google in my life. And when ChromeOS comes along and makes my netbook work better (and it will), the amount of non-Googleage will shrink still further, because Google works and is nice to use and I am weak in the face of working code that's nice to use. The fact that everything Schmidt was saying was patently coming true in front of my eyes didn't help.

Now, imagine Ballmer trying to put on an equivalent 45 minute performance where he seamlessly merges the Microsoft vision for mobile (can you even tell me what that is?), cloud (ditto), netbooks (ditto), security (ditto). And how much? Those MS calculations that running free services and software cost more than proprietary solutions - well, they're hard to swallow when you're paying for everything yourself.

Just to put the seal on it, Schmidt mentioned how many Google salesmen were going into the enterprise pushing GMail - priced not for free, because they found that enterprise was happy to pay for service, when they got it. And when the sales pitch didn't work because things were missing, they went back to the Googleplex and fixed them, or worked around them, or found reasons why those missing things didn't need to be there at all. Then they went back, and tried again.

So when I read that Los Angeles City Council is moving from Groupwise to GMail and Google Apps - at a cost of $7.25 million, paid for partially by a legal settlement Microsoft had to make for overcharging - and think that this is the sort of deal Microsoft should be winning, I wonder what Ballmer makes of Schmidt's grand plan, and whether I will hear any cogent response this year, or next year when the ChromeOS netbooks are in the fray, or the year after that when the migration from Exchange becomes too big to ignore.

When, in short, will Microsoft get scared enough to do something that might make a difference? Because after 45 minutes of Schmidt's world domination plan, I was plenty scared myself.

And I like Google.

Last night, just 48 hours after I'd installed it, I had my very first Windows 7 Blue Screen Of Death.

It may not have been the complete BSOD package, but the machine was thoroughly dead and the screen was blue: there was what may have been intended to be the traditional mystic hexadecimal runes of disaster on the screen, but they'd been scrambled into a cryptographic stew of white pixels. And it was making a most peculiar noise.

Just before this, I had been watching Carry On Spying on DVD - reaching the point where Kenneth Williams (in a fez) and Charles Hawtrey (as Beau Geste) were about to rush in on Barbara Windsor and Bernard Cribbins (both in belly-dancing outfits, both at imminent risk of violation from Eric Pohlmann, aka The Fat Man) in an Algerian bordello. A classic moment in British film, and Kenneth Williams was giving it his flared-nose hyper-camp all.

The exact point of silicon disaster hit as he was issuing a nasal vowel so elongated and swooping it fell from the sky like a roll of toilet paper thrown from the Kop. The screen blinked and went blue: the sound system locked into a death spasm, repeating 200 milliseconds of the audio ad infinitum. The death knell of Windows 7, I can report, sounds like this:

"OooOooOooOooOooOooOooOooOoo..."

I enjoyed the moment, then reset the computer. The laptop, a by now rather venerable Sony Vaio, recovered at length: I replayed the scene, but all was well.

I think it's safe to blame Windows 7. The laptop had previously been running Vista for a couple of years - I try and use whatever MS' latest OS is daily, even though I hadn't warmed to Vista after all that time - and I'd performed an in-place upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. (That took around four hours, but as I had the luck or foresight to kick that off on a Saturday morning before retiring back to bed for a long lie, I was as refreshed as the computer once it had completed.)

I was using the same application for DVD playback as I had for many DVDs before; there were no hardware changes or configuration fiddling beyond what had come in on the Windows 7 installation. I'd certainly never experienced a failure like that under Vista; although I had had a couple of catastrophic crashes, they happened when I was running beta software or messing around with peculiar hardware.

And so, pace Talbot Rothwell and the Pinewood posse, I fear we have to conclude that the longest running farce on the small screen has got some acts left to go before conclusion.

This is a pure rumour, sourced from random tweets. But it comes from Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome and Mono, so it has a certain investment of radiance.

His first tweet:

"VMware is creating a new Linux distro, according to the recruiting spam they are sending on Linked In."

and a little later:

"Leaky VMware-istas confirm that VMware is creating a Linux distro. Investigative Journalist De Icaza signing off."

Nice work, chap. In subsequent discussions with other hacks, we agreed that it had a lot of sense behind it, although the thought of getting Linux support from VMware did rather unsettle some correspondents. The prevailing opinion, though, was "If they don't do that, where do they go?" - which has a certain logic to it.

More on this as it happens...