This article titled “Seedcamp: 20 top ideas from Europe’s talented dev pool” was written by Jemima Kiss, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 11th August 2011 23.35 Asia/Calcutta

Twenty pitches is a lot to sit through, but it’s a great way of taking the pulse of some of the most promising ideas trends and talent in the startup community. As ever, a good pitch doesn’t mean a good product, and vice versa. There were presentations today that were slick and funny but failed to succinctly explain the product, while otherwise were softly spoken and modest but quietly impressive at the same time. These three sites, plus 17 others, are buried in intensive mentoring sessions all afternoon.

Some, like Croatian Farmeron, were both. The team, most of whom have grown up with families involved in agriculture, have achieved the increasingly hard task of identifying an as-year undisrupted market with massive potential for what I hesitate to call a Web 2.0 interface – light, easy to use and consumer focused service. Farmeron provides an adaptable data management tool for farmers with a delightful, fun interface a world away form dull, agro-industry rivals – of which there are only two. Very impressive.

Anything that tries to solve the burden of email is worth watching, and ReplyDone is trying to help by learning how you respond to common emails and intervene to automate those replies. Simple, and brilliant. It’s starting life as a Gmail plug in but there’s potential here, at least until email is usurped by something that was actually designed to handle our communications, rather than something that just ended up doing it.

Italian site iubenda is a customisable, embeddable tool for the small print on your website. Great idea, bypassing costly lawyers. For most smaller websites, that will be a real benefit.

Photo by c3o on Flickr. Some rights reserved

Mini Seedcamp, London

• CityMapper (London, UK)

Travel tool. CityMapper combines buses, tubes, bikes, taxis and walking to suggest the best routes through the city. How is it different to otters apps on this space? By focusing on design and usability, claims co-founder Azmat Yusuf, a VC turned entrepreneur. With partner Mattias Linnap, who is studying at Cambridge for a PhD in location tracking, CityMapper claims to have a better routing algorithm than the competition, creating use cases around navigation. There’s potential for building an ad network around movement in cities, using navigation is a platform. Expanding in the US would be boring; CityMapper wants to pursue growing markets in megacities like Istanbul and Jakarta.

• ComodIT (Liege, Belgium)

IT management tool. ComodIT co-founder Laurent Eschenauer believes IT should be comoditised, greatly simplifying management of corporate IT systems through a web user interface. “The idea is to formalise, integrate and orchestrate your company’s IT system,” said Eschenauer, who says ComodIT has started direct sales and is targeting mid-sized firms. A software-as-a-service version is due out next year and ComodIT is hoping to stake out a chunk of the bn IT management market.

• ContactUsPlus (London, UK)

Customer service tool. Ever contacted an e-commerce website but had no response? ContactUsPlus estimates that 27% of consumers have had that experience and 45% have abandoned their shopping carts. In the context of a market that has lost £12.8bn in sales, there’s a big opportunity to help firms provide the customer support to complete those sales. ContactUsPlus provides a toolbar that can be added to the top of site, explained co-founder Adi Ben-Ari, inviting consumers to email, live chat or speak to a customer service rep. Response rates are shown to the customer, along with average response time. “We think this adds a new dynamic, a game dynamic, to sites to make them more responsive,” said Ben-Ari.

• Crowd (Paris, France)

Photo-sharing service. “Crowd is the closest thing to ubiquity until we sort out teleportation,” begins Gabriel Hubert, with no shortage of gusto. Crowd lets users experience and share locations through real-time, geo-tagged photo sharing. There’s potential for geo-targeted ads, and to bring in online newspapers who could offer a live feed from professional photographers at news events. Crowd currently has 80 beta testers. Strapline: The World. Live. Now.

• CubeSocial (Basingstoke, UK)

Professional relationship management for social networks. CubeSocial’s pitch is about new ways for professionals to win new businesses, and they think the way to do that is through social media. CubeSocial filters the most relevant content from networks, filters out the noise, “join the right conversations” and form the right relationships. Financial services, lawyers, accountants, consultants – these professionals are the target group. There’s a focus on Twitter and LinkedIn and co-founder Linda Cheung (former Morgan Stanley executive director) and Mark Bower (former lead program manager at Microsoft) think there’s far more potential in social networks than pushing daily deals to Facebook fans.

• EarningsCast (London, UK)

Shareable, interactive media tool for earnings calls. Earnings calls are the most valuable interaction between investors and a business, but calls are not very accessible, recordable or personalisable. EarningsCast’s attempt to solve this is a management system that lets investors organise a portfolio of earnings calls with private chartroom, integrated live commentary from social networks, and shareable and embeddable files. Co-founder Madhusudana Ramakrishna said the plan is to make money by running advertising around these calls with a freemium model, and the private beta has engaged 3,000 companies so far. Public beta starts next month.

• EnergyBob (Munich, Germany)

Smart heating meter. This is a smart domestic energy control system, adjusting your heating through The EnergyBob server which talks to Google’s Latitude’s API to determine when you’re on your way home, and when the heating needs to come on. The price is €99 installation and then €9 per month. There are rivals, but a rich potential market of 300m European homes and partnerships with European telcos and utility firms.

• Farmeron (Osijek, Croatia)

Agricultural data management tool. The Croatian team behind Farmeron want to help farmers struggling with boring data management, putting a useable, simple interface on a business management tool. The team come from families with agricultural backgrounds but are trained programmers and have already raised €12,000 funding. In an industry where there are only two major competitors there’s the opportunity to exploit a huge market worth .34bn a year in agriculture and food advertising alone. Farmeron will offer animal and grain management (down to a field that lets users assign names to each animal. Nice) and production planning and performance. The tea is planning to launch the site latter this month.

• Fractal (London, UK)

Email design tool. Fractal wants to make it easier to build and distribute email newsletters that work across multiple email clients. Co-founder Abs Farah said it’s a massive problem that isn’t addressed by current solutions, and is providing the service to marketing clients who can package Fractal as one benefit to their clients, as well as direct to designers. Fractal’s beta version launched eight weeks ago and version two is due out in two weeks. Farah quoted LinkedIn Reid Hoffman: “If you’re embarrassed by your first version, you’ve launched too late.” “And we’re terribly embarrassed,” said Farah. Fractal has finally settled for a cost of a 0 base fee, plus 0 per 1,000 API requests and a subscription model for regular users.

• Gnergy (Sofia, Bulgaria)

Energy efficiency service. “Our vision is to enable people to make better energy efficiency decisions,” said Gnergy co-founder Martin Gogov. Current solutions demand expensive smart meters or geeky engineering apps. Gnergy, however, asks questions to build a profile of your home and suggests steps for energy efficiency. There’s a gameification element where customers are motivated to create the most efficient home possible. Gnergy is freemium: free for consumers, and paid for industry professionals.

• iubenda (Bologna, Italy)

Small print for websites. Any website in the world has a legal obligation to respect privacy, but most companies have the choice of either paying an expensive lawyer or copying and pasting privacy terms from another site that might not be relevant. iubenda offers a customisable, easy to embed tool to frame legal T&Cs for websites, and charges a small subscription fee. “We make lots of money!” co-founder Andrea Giannangelo gleefully exclaims. Six weeks since launch iubenda has already delivered to thousands of sites. And the goal: Conquer the footer of every website in the world.

• Myows (Singapore)

Copyright management. Both founders Max Guedy and Chris Human have experienced their deisgn work and photography being reappropriated, but found it expensive and time-consuming to resolve infringement the traditional way. Myows – my original works – lets users store their copyrighted material (photos, artwork, music, videos) in one place, prove ownership of those, organise contracts that prove ownerships, manage rights and pursue infringements. In beta test until now, Myows is already storing 18,000 registered works and has solved 72 infringement cases.

• OpenSignalMaps (London, UK)

Real-world maps of mobile signal coverage. Coverage is unpredictable yet vital for mobile users, but coverage maps from operators are useless. OpenSignalMaps is crowd-sourcing coverage information instead – in real time, and for free, explains co-founder Sina Khanifar. OpenSignalMaps’s Android app has had 800,000 downloads, and the site 40,000 site visitors per month so far. But the team of four Oxford physics graduates wants to do more with this data. For B2B, data could be sold back to the networks, who typically outsource this kind of data research. iPhone and Blackberry apps are coming soon.

• ReplyDone (Vienna, Austria)

Email efficiency tool. Ben Freundorfer thinks replying to emails is a waste of time, because humans are good at creating new content, and computers are good at finding old text. So ReplyDone intelligently suggests your reply. Starting as a Gmail extension, ReplyDone will learn how you reply to common emails and suggest replies. The long-term vision is more ambitious, and doesn’t represent current email systems at all but is an intelligent, auto-responding email client of the future. Amen to that.

• RolePoint (London, UK)

Employee referral platform that uses social networks. HR managers can encourage staff to refer candidates they know, including the 85% of workers who are ‘passive candidates’- the ones who don’t know they are secretly open to new job offers . Co-founder Chris Le Breton said RolePoint will charge set fees to its target medium-large consultancies depending on organisation size. The target is initially the US. Talent, the strapline goes, knows talent.

• Sntmnt (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Market information service. Dutch startup Sntmnt helps pick stock to invest in by picking through market and online activity around companies and trends. Machine learning and predictive analysis tools are used to give a prediction of the “bullishness” of a particular market, accurate to 61% so far for the next 7 days. The Sntmnt team has been working on this for three months, but co-founder Vincent van Leeuwen says there’s huge potential in a market where many of the rivals are academics who have tried unconvincingly to commercialise research tools.

• StorkUp (Troon, UK)

Shopping tool for parents. Shopping for baby products for first-time mums is expensive, time-consuming and expensive. StorkUp lets new mums create shopping lists and recommendations for other new mums, with personalised responses, price comparison and then allows them to buy online. Beyond birth, StorkUp wants to create lists for birthdays, school and beyond. The market is huge, with 4 million babies born in the US every year alone and an average ,000 spend in the first 12 months. Big parenting sites like Mumsnet and BabyCenter aren’t product focused and price comparison sites aren’t focused on specific communities.

• TransferWise (London, UK)

Money transfer service. Taavet Hinrikus was the first employee at Skype, but his latest project is a money transfer solution that avoids expensive currency exchange fees. He said he knows of a North American bank that makes 0m profits per year from currency exchange alone. TransferWise is a P2P currency exchange; users say how much they want to send and to whom, transfer the money to a UK holding account, and TransferWise transfers the equivalent amount – based on market rates – to your friend for a flat fee of £1. Most clients are ex-pats, foreign students – and there’s one guy who uses the service to send his alimony payments. This time next year, TransferWise wants to be enabling £300m in transfers and will be adding support for US dollars and Swiss francs.

• Travelstormer (London, UK)

Travel organisation tool. There’s an ugly truth about organising travel for your friends – it’s a big burden, and they are often ungrateful, say founders Colin Armstrong and George Coltart. Travelstormer wants to make the process much smoother, helping organise the research, discussion, purchase of tickets, itinerary building and departure for travel groups of more than three. It’s a very Facebook-like interface with maps for locations of hotels, voting tools to help decide on options and booking incentives that show deals available for various options. A nice touch is that the organiser gets a small commission if the group decides on the option he or she suggested – gameifying the decision making process. There’s a lot of noise in the travel sector but the biggest competitor is email where most research and decision takes place.

• UntapTV (London, UK)

Mobile ad tool for TV. Why isn’t TV more engaging? When we don’t like ads, we find something to do for a few minutes. UntapTV wants to make ads more engaging by giving users incentives to keep watching the TV ads and interact more using their mobile, whether by entreating a competition, playing a game or giving feedback. It’s fast, scalable and brand-specific, says co-founder Tee Vachiramon. Brands can customise the ad experience by using the app, tap social networks and build relationships with consumers. UptapTV has an iPhone app in alpha, is in discussion with various brands over trials and plans to make money through fixed fees or pay per interaction.

• Read: Seedcamp’s Saul Klein on four years of tapping startup trends

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This article titled “Android and iOS both fail, but Android fails better” was written by Cory Doctorow, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 9th August 2011 15.00 Asia/Calcutta

My recent review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet stirred up a dreary and inevitable round of OS advocacy and such, with both Apple and Android lovers baying like wounded members of persecuted religious minorities, arguing about which OS is most worthy of our love and devotion.

For me, no love or devotion is due to an operating system or a gadget.

I’m enough of an old technology hand to know that any love we harbour for our gadgets is unrequited and generally tragic – not least because you are not destined to have a long-term love-affair with your gizmos, as they will be semi-obsolete in a year or two.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that some devices, apps and systems can work well – that is, they can make it easier to do something that was hard, or possible to do something that was impossible. That’s why we all use this stuff. But I think that how well a system works is only half the picture: the other half is how badly it fails.

Because technology fails all the time. Networked, general-purpose computing devices have so many different failure modes that they can hardly be counted. Your phone or tablet can have problems coping with something as abstract as bad Maximum Transmission Unit sizes in its network connection, or as concrete as being dropped and trodden on by your toddler.

A program that runs flawlessly one day can be derailed by another program, or an OS update, or a mysterious configuration problem – hence the old “Rename your preferences folder and restart” diagnostic procedure.

The general state of technology is to be broken; which is not so different from other complex systems, like technology’s users. You might have lost a pre-beach holiday stone thanks to diet and exercise, only to get a spot on your cheek, bad traffic on the way to the airport, a row with your spouse, and a jammed knuckle from your suitcase handle. Human beings who can soldier on and stay happy and functional in the face of adversity are said to be “resilient,” which means that they fail well.

After all, it’s no good being the world’s happiest, best-adjusted, nicest person if you fall to pieces the minute you get a paper-cut. And that goes double for interpersonal systems: any couple can be happy when everything is going right, but no marriage can survive unless both of its participants are capable of soldiering on when things are going pear-shaped.

I don’t use Android tablets and phones because I hate Apple; I most certainly don’t use them because I love Google. And I don’t prefer Android to iOS because it works better than Apple — in some aspects, it does, in some aspects it doesn’t.

I use Android because I don’t trust Google. Sure, I trust and like individual googlers, and admire many of the things the company has managed – but I don’t for one moment think that Google’s management is making its decisions in order to make me happy, fulfilled and free.

I think there are good days when Google’s management might believe that helping me attain those ends will make it more money, but if it were to believe that making me miserable would enrich its shareholders without alienating too many of its key personnel and partners, my happiness would cease to matter in the slightest.

So why use Android? Because it requires less trust in Google than using iOS requires that you trust Apple. iOS has one official store, and it’s illegal in most places to buy and install apps except through this store. If you and Apple differ about which apps you need, you have to break the law to get your iPhone or iPad to run the app that Apple rejected.

Jailbroken iOS devices have sometimes been targeted by Apple security updates that render them inoperable, and jailbreakers have a reputation for not keeping their devices up-to-date.

By contrast, Android allows you to run apps from any store you choose. Google still rejects plenty of apps submitted to its store, but if you don’t like Google’s choices, you can decide to make some of your own.

That’s failing well.

More of the internal workings of iOS are secret than their equivalent workings in the Android world. Apple’s operating system runs more DRM processes that are intended to allow code to run that treats you as an untrusted adversary and refuses to accept your commands. Not least, Apple has to run all those processes aimed at stopping you from choosing to use an app that Apple hasn’t blessed (and collected its 30% commission on).

I prefer Android because it’s relative openness means more people can and do inspect its workings to ensure it is doing what Google claims it is doing. I prefer Android because when Google decides to leave out a feature that users might want – such as tethering – the people making alternative OSes for the platform stick that feature in, and shame Google into adding it in subsequent versions.

My mobile phone can track where I go. It can record my voice and image, and the voices and images of those around me. It can leak email, voicemail, texts, and passwords. In the time since I’ve gotten a mobile phone, each passing year has meant that I rely on my phone for more things, and I don’t expect that will change.

Android and iOS will both fail their users in the years to come. Not a lot, but often enough, and dramatically enough, that it’s worth ensuring that those failures are as minimal as possible.

I’d like an official Android version without the DRM, with complete source code, and with generally greater transparency into the device and its ecosystem. I like the alternative Android OS, CyanogenMod, because it has many of those things. Functionally, a CyanogenMod Android phone and a stock Android phone work in much the same way, but CyanogenMod phones fail better.

Our relationship to technology is this: We’ve jammed ourselves into the cockpits of supersonic jets that are being constantly redesigned as they hurtle around the planet, in dangerously close proximity to everyone else’s supersonic jet. It’s good to pay attention to how fast our jets go, and how comfortable the upholstery is, but the thing we really need to keep our eyes on is what happens when they crack up, when their navigation systems go awry, and when they get a bad upgrade.

When you’re moving that fast, with that much at stake, failure is much more important than success.

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This article titled “Google and Facebook face new privacy code” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 3rd November 2010 16.26 Asia/Calcutta

Individuals would be able to get redress against internet companies such as Google or Facebook if they feel they have invaded their privacy, under a code of internet conduct being proposed by the culture minister, Ed Vaizey.

The code would be an updated and more concise version of the code for privacy online (PDF) which is used by the Information Commissioner’s Office, whom Vaizey is understood to be meeting today to push his proposal.

Vaizey, the Conservative MP for Wantage and Didcot, last week likened this prospective mediation service to the Press Complaints Commission, which works to resolve complaints by members of the public about information published in the UK press.

“One wants at least to attempt to give consumers some opportunity to have a dialogue with internet companies, as they would be able to do if a newspaper had inadvertently published that information,” he said. “There is huge scope for self-regulation.”

Vaizey is understood to be meeting with the UK information commissioner (ICO) today to suggest a refreshed code of conduct to be signed up to by internet businesses such as Google and Facebook.

The minister wants businesses to sign up to an updated and more concise version of the ICO’s code of conduct, and then display that in a prominent place on their home page with a link to the code. It has been described by one well-placed observer as “the first step towards a proper internet bill of rights”.

During a parliamentary debate on privacy and the internet last week, Vaizey said that “more well-known and legitimate websites” should be made to sign-up to the code, saying later that both Google and Facebook would be required to discuss opportunities for redress for aggrieved citizens.

“Critical momentum could be built up if more well-known and legitimate websites signed up to the code, made that plain on their home pages and allowed consumers to see what that code states,” he said.

Privacy and the internet has been accelerated to the forefront of public debate across the world this year following a number of significant and large-scale breaches. Facebook, which signed up its 500 millionth user worldwide earlier this year, worried users – and the European commission’s data protection working party – with its rollback of privacy provisions. Google, meanwhile, continues to face unprecedented class actions and investigations around the world into its “mistaken” collection of personal data from personal Wi-Fi connections by Street View cars.

Vaizey will also write to internet service providers and internet companies to propose a new mediation service, which would give people who feel their privacy has been breached another means of redress.

Facebook said of the proposals: “Facebook is an industry leader in giving people the best tools to protect their privacy. We look forward to hearing more about Mr Vaizey’s plans and continuing to work with both him and the ICO.” Google declined to comment.

A spokesman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said: “We are keen to explore ideas for how we can work together with industry to improve the customer experience around complaints and problems with service as well as other online issues, including a mediation service.

“Ed Vaizey will write to internet service providers and other key players to set up a meeting to explore various options.”

The ICO, widely thought to have insufficient power to enforce punishments against companies found to have breached privacy laws, will be given new capacity to protect citizens in line with new European Union privacy directives. The directive states that, among other things, the UK should establish a regulator to make sure the interception of users’ communication is within the boundaries of the law.

The European commission is in the process of taking the UK government to court for breaching EU laws on internet privacy over complaints about the Phorm activity-tracking web system and its failure to change the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) and the Data protection Act (DPA), the latter of which empowers the ICO.

In April, the ICO was given the power to issue monetary penalty notices to companies it rules have committed “serious breaches” of the Data Protection Act. Rob Halfon, the Conservative MP for Harlow, said last week that the ICO was prevented from taking stronger action against Google after its Street View cars collected sensitive Wi-Fi data because the Data Protection Act at the time limited its powers.

Halfon yesterday tabled around 50 written questions to the Ministry of Justice about the ICO, including a number on the office’s investigation into the Google Wi-Fi data.

The ICO ruled in July that Google had not breached data protection laws, but has subsequently said it will re-examine the data, following revelations uncovered by investigations from privacy commissioners in other countries. Last month Google admitted that the data harvested when its Street View cars mapped some locations was more sensitive than previously thought, in some cases obtaining full emails and passwords.

In a statement released on Monday, the ICO said: “Whilst we continue to work with our other international counterparts on this issue we will not be panicked into a knee jerk response to an alarmist agenda.”

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This article titled “Alternatives to Bloglines” was written by Jack Schofield, for guardian.co.uk on Thursday 28th October 2010 18.37 Asia/Calcutta

As the Bloglines RSS aggregator is closing at the end of the month, could you recommended another web-based RSS reader? I don’t particularly want to use Google Reader if there is a suitable alternative.
David Dixon

In a blog post, Ask.com says it is closing Bloglines on 1 November, and that “being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself. As a result, RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly, and Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall.”

This is true, but it’s not the whole story. First, in 2005, Ask.com bought Bloglines and Google launched Reader, and at that point, Bloglines was much better. Since then, Google Reader has been redesigned twice and got much better, while Bloglines hasn’t – the new Bloglines Beta went nowhere. Second, people have many other ways to consume RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds from websites. These range from powerful but complicated online services such as Netvibes (of which iGoogle is basically a knock-off) to simple email clients such as Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail (the desktop version).

The “line of least resistance” now leads from Bloglines to Google Reader, because most people already have a Google account. When you are logged into one Google service, Google Reader is just a pull-down menu option from the Google home page. And my warnings about putting too many eggs in the same basket – where you risk losing your data if your account is hacked or blocked – don’t apply to RSS feeds.

But although it looks as though the web-based reader market is closing down, leaving Google Reader with total market domination, there are still a few alternatives. If you like Bloglines’ relatively simplistic approach, for example, have a look at FastLadder, or possibly the beta version of FeedShow.

Nonetheless, the main market trends are to combine RSS webfeeds with feeds from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and to display the results in a more magazine-style format. If you fancy that kind of thing, try Activorus. (Feedly also takes that approach, but in a Firefox browser window.)

One of the benefits of reading RSS feeds is that they provide lightweight versions of stories without all the website’s furniture such as logos, widgets and navigation systems. Full RSS feeds mean you no longer have to go to the website and wait while your browser downloads JavaScript code, Flash and Java applets, large photos and other mostly-pointless rubbish. However, Feedlooks – which is still in beta – has now “reinvented” feed reading by letting you “read content in full visual glory without leaving the app”. Feedlooks looks like a basic feed reader (with a built-in Twitter client), but when you click on a link, it shows the original story from the web site. You can try it for an hour without creating an account.

Finally, for real geeks who think Bloglines was much too ponderous, there’s the open source Tiny Tiny RSS project. You can set it up on your own server (it requires PHP, MySQL, etc), which is the least transitory option. Unfortunately, the Tiny Tiny RSS demo site is no longer accepting new users, but you can hunt around for ones that people have set up on free servers.

As I’m sure you know, the key to trying different RSS readers is OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language), an XML format for outlines originally developed by Dave Winer for Radio UserLand. Before Bloglines closes, all users should click on Feeds, then choose “Export Subscriptions” and save the resulting OPML file. Your alternative RSS reader should be able to import it.

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This article titled “How do we counter cyber attack? That’s the £500m question” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 31st October 2010 04.45 Asia/Calcutta

The news that, according to the national security review at least, cyber attack comes second only to terrorism as the gravest security threat facing the nation will have come as a great surprise to most citizens. We are conscious of the annoyances of malware, viruses, worms, spam and phishing, but for most these are just minor irritations, not threats to the nation’s survival.

Yet the other day we had the foreign secretary gravely intoning why, in the midst of the most savage spending cuts in living memory, it is suddenly necessary to give an extra £500m to GCHQ to protect us against nemesis in cyberspace. At the same time, in America, we see the Pentagon setting up a whole new cyber command, USCybercom, with all the usual paraphernalia and awash with funding.

What, you might ask, is going on?

There seem to be two broad answers to the question. The cynical one is that this is just the latest development of the military-industrial complex that is the bane of industrialised economies. Changes in society and warfare patterns threaten the future prosperity of this colossal set of vested interests.

Aircraft carriers, missile systems and tanks are of little use against ragged-trousered terrorists and so a new and sinister threat has to be manufactured to ensure reliable cash-flow for BAE Systems & co into the next century. In which case, cyber security will do nicely.

And, say the cynics, the strategy is succeeding. According to the New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, the military-industrial complex in the US has morphed into “a military-cyber complex”. Hersh says that the US government spends between bn and bn annually for unclassified cyber-security work and about the same on the classified part.

The alternative explanation is that the threat really is more serious than many of us had supposed. The arrival of the Stuxnet worm was a salutary event because of its sophistication and the fact that it targeted a device that plays a critical role in innumerable industrial processes. Could it be that the threat truly has ratcheted up? Is there a real threat of “cyber warfare”? If so, what could be done about it?

At a seminar in Cambridge last week, Dr Herbert Lin of the National Academies of the USA gave a sobering overview of the challenges posed by conflict in cyberspace. The central problem is that, in the online domain, the attacker has most of the advantages. Passive defences (better firewalls, anti-virus precautions etc) can have some effect, but they’re never going to deter or prevent determined or sophisticated attacks.

So what does a nation do?

One answer is to seek lessons from the policy of nuclear deterrence. Many policy-makers see cyber deterrence as the only feasible policy in an offence-dominated domain. After all, we have lots of experience with nuclear deterrence and we know it worked. So maybe that’s the way to go?

Alas, no. As Dr Lin put it, while nuclear and cyber deterrence raise the same questions, the answers are different and much less satisfactory in the online case. Deterrence is a tool for dissuading an adversary from taking hostile action, but it depends on being able to identify the potential attacker. Nuclear deterrence worked for various reasons: only nation-states were potential adversaries; attacks would have been easy to detect and would have come from outside one’s territorial boundaries. It was possible to demonstrate that one possessed the capability for devastating retaliation and it would have been easy to determine when hostilities had ceased.

None of this applies in cyberspace. The resources to mount attacks are not the sole prerogative of nation-states. It may be difficult to distinguish an attack from incessant malware and cybercrime. Identifying the source of an attack can be problematic and an astute attacker might leave a false trail leading to a country that would regard massive retaliation as an act of war. There’s no obvious way of demonstrating a capability for retaliation. There’s no precedent for countries targeting nuclear strikes on companies. And there’s no obvious way of establishing that hostilities have definitively ceased.

The inescapable conclusion is that deterrence won’t work in cyberspace. We need a better idea. The £500m we’ve just donated to GCHQ suggests that it won’t come cheap.

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