Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context - that's what we're looking for in the journalism we read, isn't it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use.

NewsTrust is a media technology organization funded by the Omidyar Network and MacAurthur Foundation. Yesterday it launched a personalized news filtering tool called MyNews. The tool helps users review the quality of journalism from all over the web and discover high-quality content they and their friends might enjoy. A light-weight, crowd-sourced, personalized recommendation engine that adds value on top of existing content? Sounds like our kind of app!

Sponsor

When reading content from around the web through NewsTrust, the user is presented with a well-designed interface through which to review the quality of journalism in question. Users are prompted to evaluate stories based on things like how well they were sourced, whether both sides of a controversy were explained and how enterprising the story was. Short and long reviews are supported and it's easy to review a story in less than 30 seconds if you feel so inclined.

The ability to post links to Twitter and Facebook with a single click means that users who already share articles around social networks have an opportunity to pause briefly and add another layer of value by using NewsTrust.

The new MyNews product released yesterday leverages that network of reviewers to draw in a stream of high-quality links from around the web, on particular topics. In addition to NewsTrust reviewers, the service also delivers stories discovered and vetted algorithmically and it pulls links shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter into the NewsTrust ecosystem. It's one thing to get a vote of apparent approval from friends sharing links on social networks, it's another to peruse those links through a lens of community grading for journalistic quality.

The end result is a personalized news reader populated with generally high-quality topical stories that have been reviewed by other readers. It's a useful product and one that would work well as a mobile app, where browsing through lots of content of variable quality is less appealing.

NewsTrust and MyNews aren't for everyone, though. Only so many people will be interested in a news consumption interface so closely wedded to review activities. Many people will, no doubt, bristle at the prospect (or reality) of amateurs reviewing the quality of professional journalistic product. Some will find the site too left-leaning for their tastes. (Though it tries hard not to be.)

Many people will enjoy MyNews, though, and we suspect everyone who follows social software in general will find this project particularly interesting. Projects like this may or may not be able to change the way news producers operate, but the news consumers who use it will likely find MyNews a helpful way to enrich their time on an otherwise all-too often low-quality web of news content.

Discuss

· LTA confirms that Lloyd has stepped down from post
· Great Britain face Turkey in relegation play-off in July

John Lloyd has resigned as Great Britain's Davis Cup captain, the Lawn Tennis Association has announced.

Following the recent defeat by Lithuania, the chief executive, Roger Draper, asked the LTA player director, Steven Martens, to review Great Britain's Davis Cup performance.

But Lloyd has now opted to leave the role, leaving the position vacant ahead of the relegation play-off with Turkey in July. Failure to beat Turkey would see Great Britain drop into Europe/Africa Zone Group III, the lowest level of the competition.

"I am very proud of my time as Davis Cup captain, and grateful to all the players for their support," said Lloyd. "Davis Cup captaincy is a tough job and I'm sure that the next captain will be as passionate as I was and have no doubt that the team is capable of defeating Turkey in July."

Draper added: "I would like to thank John for all his efforts and in particular recognise his real achievement in guiding the team back into the World Group of the Davis Cup. He has always shown great passion and enthusiasm as captain."

Lloyd is the nation's first Davis Cup captain to preside over five successive defeats. The former British No1 Greg Rusedski is one name thought to be in the running, though Tim Henman has ruled himself out.

Andy Murray, the current British No1, has said previously that players should be involved in the process of selecting the next captain.

• Davis Cup
• Tennis

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Crackdown pledged by Madrid and Paris after occupants of stolen car open fire at routine check

France and Spain vowed to intensify efforts to clamp down on Eta activities today after suspected members of the Basque separatist group killed a French policeman in a shoot-out in a town south-east of Paris.

Jean-Serge Nérin died of his injuries yesterday evening in Dammarie les Lys shortly after he was shot from a car that had been stolen by a group of at least six people, all but one of whom fled.

Spain's prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, left no doubt as to whom he believed responsible. "France has paid a high price for its help against Eta," he said.

The fatal shooting marks the first time in over four decades of violence that a French policeman has died at the hands of Eta. Members of the national police and gendarmerie have been injured but not killed amid increasing Franco-Spanish efforts to crack down on the group.

French anti-terrorist investigators were today questioning Joseba Fernández Aspurz, a suspected Eta member wanted by Spanish courts to answer charges related to a petrol bomb attack in Pamplona, over the killing.

Aspurz, one of a number of young radicals thought to have joined Eta in the past few months, was part of a group which French police said had stolen several cars from a nearby used car dealership yesterday afternoon.

When their activity on the outskirts of Dammarie les Lys prompted Nérin, a sergeant in his early 50s, to carry out a routine check of the vehicles and their occupants, members of the group began shooting. Although wearing a bullet-proof vest, the father of four, who had served the police for 30 years, was hit in the armpit and died shortly afterwards.

As the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, prepared to visit the victim's family tomorrow, experts said the killing could trigger an increase in already intense French pressure on the group.

In a phone call this morning, Sarkozy and Zapatero vowed to "intensify" their fight against Eta. François Fillon, the French prime minister, said that Nérin had been "coolly assassinated by a terrorist group".

"For us Eta is now no longer a Spanish, Basque or terrorist problem. Eta members have dispersed across France and have become an internal, criminal problem for France," a French police source told Spain's ABC daily.

French police have done much to weaken Eta in recent years. They captured the group's military chief, Ibon Gogeaskoetxea, and two other Eta members at a country cottage in Normandy on 28 February. They were about to embark on a campaign of bomb attacks in Spain, police said at the time.

Eta and its supporters are also furious with French authorities over the death of Eta member Jon Anza, whose body was identified at a morgue in Toulouse last week.

Anza's body had been in the morgue for 10 months. He had died in a Toulouse hospital after collapsing in a local park. The body remained unidentified despite months of pressure from his family and radical Basque organisations to find out what had happened to him.

Eta has claimed Anza, who was said to have been carrying €300,000 (£270,000) of the group's money when he disappeared, was a victim of Spanish police. French doctors who carried out an autopsy this week said there were no signs of violence. He had €500 on him when he was taken to hospital.

"This is a campaign of lies organised by Eta," Spain's interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, said this week, adding that he would sue anyone who repeated the claim.

As Eta finds it increasingly difficult to operate in southern France, it has moved north to Paris and elsewhere. French authorities also recently hailed the discovery of an Eta safe house in Obidos, Portugal, as proof the group was finding it difficult to operate from France.

• Global terrorism
• France
• Spain

Giles TremlettLizzy Daviesguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Devo's presentation at SXSWi was a no-doubt-about it business pitch, yet it was so silly that people were nearly falling out of their seats.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Usually the purpose of a virtual private network is to establish a secure, tunneled route between two points in an IP network. Is the idea that such a network could be secured using two encryption layers rather than one, and without the need for a user to log in first, worthy of a patent? These were questions central to the latest Tyler, Texas patent infringement case for Microsoft to lose: VPN technology provider VirnetX was awarded $105.75 million yesterday, in a case closely followed by the Seattle P.I.'s Nick Eaton.

It's clear from a reading of VirnetX's key patent on VPN technology, issued in 2002, that it is an attempt to go one step further with the VPN concept. The firm calls its system Tunneled Agile Routing Protocol (TARP). Here, the communications between VPN hosts are encrypted at one level, but then the routing information is hidden behind a second level. The intent is to hide not only what's being talked about or shared over a VPN, but who is sharing it, and what route it's taking to get there.

"Each TARP packet's true destination is concealed behind a layer of encryption generated using a link key," reads a portion of the summary from US Patent #6,502,135. "The link key is the encryption key used for encrypted communication between the hops intervening between an originating TARP terminal and a destination TARP terminal. Each TARP router can remove the outer layer of encryption to reveal the destination router for each TARP packet. To identify the link key needed to decrypt the outer layer of encryption of a TARP packet, a receiving TARP or routing terminal may identify the transmitting terminal by the sender/receiver IP numbers in the cleartext IP header. Once the outer layer of encryption is removed, the TARP router determines the final destination."

Microsoft implemented its own interpretation of VPN technology for Office Communicator, the endpoint for the company's bold Unified Communications project -- its effort to render the phone networks, and PBXes that support them, obsolete. To make the Internet work more like a phone, people using a telephone console need to be able to pick up the receiver and dial. They shouldn't have to go to some dialog box and log in. Avoiding that option is what UC tries to do, and is one of the acts for which VirnetX cried foul.

In hearings last July (which Eaton also covered closely), Microsoft defended itself by asserting that the whole point of a VPN is to establish both secure and anonymous communications between points, so the idea that VirnetX was somehow inventing the addition of anonymity was absurd. If you doubt that a VPN is supposed to be anonymous, counsel argued, just look it up in a glossary. Which the judge did, and that got into a wholly separate argument over the quality of glossaries, resulting in the judge in the case issuing his own glossary for the jury to interpret as fact.

An excerpt from Judge Leonard Davis' opinion last July shows the extent of the argument over how deeply a glossary may define a concept, especially if that concept may be proof of "prior art" that could invalidate a patent (PDF available here, from SeattlePI.com): "Microsoft cites the portion of the 'FreeS/WAN' glossary definition for 'virtual private networks' that states, 'IPSEC [Internet Protocol Security] is not the only technique available for building VPNs, but it is the only method defined by RFCs [Request for Comments, Internet documents??"some of which are informative while others are standards] and supported by many vendors. VPNs [virtual private networks] are by no means the only thing you can do with IPSEC, but they may be the most important application for many users.'...Microsoft points out that IPSEC is the only method defined by RFCs and supported by many vendors. Microsoft argues that this narrow language shows that the 'FreeS/WAN' glossary does not identify Secure Sockets Layer ('SSL') or Transport Layer Security ('TLS') as methods for building 'virtual private networks.' Microsoft then argues that VirnetX's proposed construction is overly broad because it allows for a network using SSL and TLS. However, Microsoft's cited excerpt is an ancillary portion of the 'virtual private network' definition and is set apart in a different paragraph from the primary portion of the definition...Also, Microsoft selectively asserts that IPSEC is the only method defined by RFCs and supported by many vendors and ignores that its cited excerpt states that, 'IPSEC is not the only technique available for building VPNs.' Thus, Microsoft's cited excerpt does not support that the 'FreeS/WAN' glossary restricts 'virtual private network' to IPSEC."

If Microsoft could have proved that VirnetX's contribution to VPN architecture was so obvious that it would still be covered by a published glossary definition of the term, then it might have persuaded the jury that no patent should have been issued in the first place. But that assertive defense became problematic (at best) last summer when it was revealed that Microsoft itself attempted to patent the same technology, in an application that was denied by the US Patent Office. The basis of the denial was prior art -- specifically, the pre-existence of patents issued to VirnetX.

As the jury no doubt heard from plaintiff's counsel, if Microsoft didn't know about the existence of VirnetX's patents before, it did when it received its rejection notice. No haggling over glossary definitions could save the case at that point. In a statement, Microsoft continued to assert the invalidity of VirnetX's patents, and will begin the long and arduous process of appealing to overturn the verdict.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

This is quite literally what happens when you spend the entire week chatting on a videogame-related newspaper blog...

"I'm too full of pizza to do anything constructive this afternoon, so I thought I may as well submit it now." And with those gallant all-too descriptive words Office Pest emailed his Best Of text to me on Friday afternoon, no doubt assuming that nothing of gargantuan importance would hit the Chatterbox past 3pm on the last day of the working week.

Fortunately, plenty happened before hand, including Final Fantasy XIII, great game quotes and how to become a meat-up regular. That sounds wrong, doesn't it?

Final Fantasy XIII – tempted?
On Monday morning, a beautiful weekend had just passed – clear blue skies and lovely bright sunshine. Such a shame that FFXIII didn't arrive on most people's doormats (myself included – hrumph), which meant we couldn't spend the whole sunny 48hr period indoors, in the dark, sat in our underpants, crouched over a controller. Or would that just have been me? [Regretably, I'm thinking, no - Keef]

Tuesday (release day) spawned a few early blogger reviews of FFXIII for those of us lucky enough to get it a day early (w00t!). Plus points seem to be the shiny visuals, impressive cut scenes, frenetic battle system (when you eventually get it). Negative points are the very slow pace (20 hours of linearity for a start) and typical angsty-teen and fluffy-girlie characters. It seems like this one needs time to settle in, but has already done a good job in dividing the blog.

Heavy Spoilers (again)
Despite Heavy Rain only being out for just over a week, many people had already completed it and the blog was resplendent once again with posts headed 'HEAVY RAIN SPOILERS'. This was frustrating to say the least for those waiting for the Qauntic Dreams masterpiece to hit the bargain bins, and it all got too much for Bigworv – "Can you go and talk about Heavy Rain somewhere else. One of you f****rs will forget spoilers and ruin it for me."

Bargain Spotters
In between talk of Modern Warfare 2, football and mugs, PhilosopherK1ng managed to find a great bargain on Valkyria Chronicles – only £19.95 from ShopTo! Chubster2010 later spotted another bargain buy – Chinatown Wars on PSP for £4.99 from play.com. Sadly this one was quickly whacked back up to £24.99, but a couple of people did get their orders sent out at £4.99. Good bargain spotting fellas – keep it up!

What a bunch of mugs...
On Wednesday morning Be4ch expressed a desire to have his own Gamesblog mug, as his company now requires people to bring their own mugs to work for... you know... 'green' reasons. He even mocked up several and has linked them to a Wiki page that he also set up.

What a legend! He clearly has too much time on his hands (as do the rest of us I guess, else we wouldn't be on the blog all day).

Great London Pubs and Worst Places to Live
See Wednesday's box for a full list of the best London pubs. As for the worst places to live, honourable mentions go to Feltham, Canary Wharf, St Mary's (Southampton), Hull and Stockport. Apparently PipSickness once found a dead lady on his bonnet when he lived in St Mary's, which led us all to wonder whether he is in fact the famous Southampton Ripper.

Favourite game quotes
On Wednesday we got to discussing the best gaming quotes of all time, including such beauts as "You were nearly a Jill sandwich!" from Resident Evil (actually, it was "almost, a Jill sandwich" - Keef), the synthesized voice that said "Good luck!" as you exited the tunnel in Starwing, the garbled voice that says "Treasure Island Dizzy!" in the game with the same name and the all-time classics "Rise from your grave!" and "Welcome to your doom!" from Altered Beast. (I would add "Another visitor, stay a while, stay FOREVER", "Welcome to the stage of history" and "Game over, yeah!" though the latter is technically a song lyric - Keef)

Get bitten by the bug...or dog
On Thursday our resident abstainer timthemonkey regaled us with his story of the night prior:

"Gaming – None, as I went for a nice jog in the evening sunshine in an effort to get slighter fitter before Cricket season starts. This, however, turned out to be a poor plan as it lead to me getting savagely bitten by a dog on the back of the calf. 12 stitches and a three hour wait in A&E and the fitness kick had lost its appeal. Looked at it this morning and the surrounding area has gone a wonderful shade of purple as well. Feet up tonight!"

Cue jokes over purple, swollen limbs. There was of course plenty of advice on how to sue the owner. Or take revenge on the dog.

Let's meat up...
On Thursday morning, as people trickled onto the blog, there were some confessions of feeling rather ropey after the previous night's blog meat up. Somebody chundered but nobody seemed to want to 'fess up to it. Worryingly, these nights seem to be becoming a regular occurrence. What have I done?!

If you want to join up to one of the London-based blog meat ups – generally a night to sit, drink and chat games (and war dollies if you want) – speak to resident organiser CunningStunt.

Friday Ranting – adverts
The usual Friday vitriol was reserved for the terrible adverts we see on TV nowadays. Here are some examples:

"Moonpig. Think it's the only way I can get a card to my mother before Sunday. However, their constant looping of the same annoying advert for years has built up my lava pit of hatred for them."
SuperSmashIn voices his wrath at the personalised greetings card industry

"Adverts. Go compare, We buy any car/gold, Moonpig - take a back seat. Has anyone seen the new Dove for men advert? Good. F*****g. Lord."
Uncle3en lets loose

"I've always reserved a special hatred for the poorly dubbed Glade adverts. If your products that good, why haven't you shelled out the money for decent advertising instead of getting the receptionist to speak over the smug German woman?"
Timthemonkey goes ape (see what I did there...?)

"Those Ray Winstone Radio Adverts for Volkswagen Veeeeaaaaans. '20 poun' a mumf' 'Vowkswagin Transpowtah.' Get out."
KayJayM quotes an advert I've never seen, but sounds very annoying.

This went on for some time and eventually evolved into hatred of Sunday morning show 'Something for the Weekend'. The language was such that it cannot be repeated here. (Thank goodness, my delete finger is getting tired - keef)

Quotes of the week

"Cashback - Went to the cashpoint at lunchtime and got out twenty quid, and it gave me four fivers! Incredible scenes. Had to check I wasn't in 1987 by mistake."
An exciting afternoon for Limni.

"@Whoever mentioned it was Chuck Norris' Birthday. He shares his birthday with Osama Bin Laden. Coincidence or something more sinister...?"
Robotron2000 goes all 'conspiracy theory' on us.

"Has Cunning died? Or is he still going up and down the Northern Line?"
Henrypootle's worried concern after Wednesday night's meat up.

Also discussed

Games: Battlefield Bad Company 2, Heavy Rain, Final Fantasy XIII,

Films & TV: Avatar, Hurt Locker, District 9

Welcome to: Albatri, CobraOB

Keith Stuartguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

You thought GPU-accelerated fonts in Firefox were cool...? Well, Internet Explorer 9 will go one HUGE step further: GPU-accelerated HTML5. Websites will, at long last, be hardware accelerated -- as long as you're using IE9 anyway.

I have no idea why we've had to wait quite this long for DirectX utilization in the browser. Zooming, scrolling, physics -- all REALLY fast, really smooth.

They are now talking about SVG in the keynote -- and of course, they're using Clippy as an example. It seems like IE9 (or at least the developer version) can modify SVG mark-up in real time, through a console. Very cool. We'll see the same with WebGL no doubt. Now Clippy has appeared in a real-time multiplayer browser game -- one's in Firefox, one's in IE9. Both running the same code.

Big news: standards don't interact. A Flash element is locked within its box. It looks like IE9 might have less boundaries on element interactions (look at the Falling Balls demo in the IE9 Test Drive)

Internet Explorer -- GPU-accelerated HTML5/Interwebs; ALL apps hardware accelerated originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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