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Tech firm US petitions government to allow it to publish number of user accounts affected by secretive court's requests

Google has called on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to relax its gag order on tech companies targeted in US security investigations.

The search giant stepped up its campaign for greater transparency from the US courts Tuesday in the wake of the disclosure of the National Security Agency's top-secret Prism surveillance program.

The legal filing cites the first amendment's guarantee of free speech and follows on from a letter to attorney general Eric Holder asking for permission to disclose the number of requests Google receives under the foreign intelligence securities act (Fisa).

Those requests, targeted at people outside the US, are dealt with in secrecy by a dedicated court. Google is seeking permission to publish the total numbers of requests the Fisa court makes and the numbers of user accounts they affect.

The search firm already publishes a widely imitated "transparency report" that documents demands from the US government and from other governments worldwide. The report documents criminal requests and national security letters, which the government uses to gather information about US citizens in the US. But Google and its peers are barred from disclosing the number of Fisa requests they receive.

"Greater transparency is needed, so today we have petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to allow us to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including Fisa disclosures, separately," the company said in a statement.

Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo, the other major tech firms named in the Prism documents, have all called for greater disclosure about government requests for information. They have also strongly denied that they allow the government "direct" access to their servers, denials first reported by The Guardian when the story broke.

"Google's reputation and business has been harmed by the false and misleading reports in the media, and Google's users are concerned by the allegations. Google must respond with more than generalities. Moreover, these matters of significant weight and importance, and transparency is critical to advancing public debate in a thoughtful and democratic manner," Google said in its court filing.

Co-founder Larry Page and chief legal officer David Drummond have already called for the government to act. In a blog post the pair said the secrecy surrounding the current system "undermines the freedoms we all cherish".

• Google
• NSA
• The NSA files
• Privacy
• Surveillance
• Obama administration
• Internet
• US national security
• United States

We are concerned at the threatened closure of the northern "national" science museums: Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, the National Railway Museum, York, and the National Media Museum, Bradford (Report, 5 June). These are of enormous value to both scholarly and popular understanding of our industrial and scientific heritage, and represent one of the few areas where there has been a concerted attempt to develop national museums outside London. The news of the threatened closure of institutions which preserve our industrial and cultural heritage is particularly ironic, given that it follows shortly on the heels of the prime minister announcing his strong backing for the creation of a London-based Margaret Thatcher Museum and Library, at a cost of £15m.
Peter Scott Professor of international business history, Henley Business School at the University of Reading
Etsuo ABE Meiji University in Tokyo
Alison Bancroft Queen Mary, University of London
Bernardo Batiz-Lazo Professor of business history and bank management, Bangor University
Mark Billings University of Exeter
Regina Lee Blaszczyk Professor of business history, University of Leeds
Alan Booth Professor of history, University of Exeter
David Boughey Associate professor & associate dean, University of Exeter Business School
Martin Campbell-Kelly University of Warwick
John Chartres Emeritus professor of social & economic history, University of Leeds
Martin Chick University of Edinburgh
D'Maris Coffman Director, Centre for Financial History, University of Cambridge
Bill Cooke Professor of management and society, Lancaster University Management School
Richard Coopey University of Aberystwyth
Stephanie Decker Aston Business School
Neil Forbes Professor of international history, Coventry University
Dave Goodwin
David J Jeremy Emeritus professor of business history, Manchester Metropolitan University
John Killick University of Leeds
Katey Logan Business Archives Council
Peter Lyth Nottingham University Business School
Niall MacKenzie University of Strathclyde
Mairi Maclean Professor of International Management and Organisation Studies, University of Exeter Business School
Christine MacLeod
Ian Martin Senior Lecturer in Business Information Technology, Leeds Metropolitan University
Rory Miller University of Liverpool Management School
Robert Millward Professor emeritus of economic history, University of Manchester
Peter Miskell Henley Business School at the University of Reading
Simon Mollan University of Liverpool Management School
Stephen L Morgan Professor of Chinese Economic History, University of Nottingham
Simon Mowatt Associate professor of management, AUT University, New Zealand
Lucy Newton Henley Business School at the University of Reading
Richard Noakes Senior lecturer in history, University of Exeter
Derek J Oddy Emeritus professor of economic and social history, University of Westminster
Brian O' Sullivan
David Paulson University of Cambridge
Andrew Perchard University of Strathclyde Business School
Andrew Popp University of Liverpool Management School
Michael Pritchard De Montfort University
Michael Rowlinson Professor of organization studies, Queen Mary, University of London
Philip Scranton Professor, hstory of technology and science, Rutgers University, USA
Kevin D Tennent University of York
Steven Tolliday (University of Leeds), past president, Business History Conference
Steven Toms Professor of accounting, joint editor, Business History, University of Leeds
David Walker Scottish Oral History Centre, University of Strathclyde
James Walker Professor, Henley Business School at the University of Reading
Maggie Walsh Emeritus professor of American economic & social history, University of Nottingham
Peter Wardley Head of history, University of the West of England
Deborah Woodman University of Salford & Huddersfield
Judith Wright
Chris Wrigley Emeritus professor of modern British history, Nottingham University

• Museums
• Rail transport
• Transport
• Science
• Media studies, communications and librarianship
• Engineering

It's hard to see how any system that captures data from millions of law-abiding citizens satisfies our right to privacy

In the late 18th century the philosopher Jeremy Bentham developed a new type of institutional establishment which had a singular advantage over its predecessors: it allowed the authorities to observe inmates without their being able to tell in any particular moment whether or not they were being watched. The name given to this new architectural form of state control was Panopticon, literally meaning "watch all".

In our modern digital world the bricks and mortar of Bentham's Panopticon have been replaced by a network of cyber-surveillance systems. Now the inmates are not incarcerated criminals or the unhappy occupants of the asylums but potentially everyone on the planet, or at least anyone who has actively embraced the internet. Certainly, that is what the revelations about Prism seem to suggest. But is the deployment of such all-encompassing and apparently indiscriminate surveillance systems itself lawful? Is this something which as a matter of law we are obliged to tolerate, despite its ostensibly chilling effect on civil liberties?

Answering those questions from the perspective of our domestic law is not easy. This is not least because the law governing the use of surveillance by the state in the UK is complex, and still relatively untested. Those who have dipped their toes into the murky world of surveillance law will know there are typically three legal regimes which have to be considered, all of which focus to a greater or lesser extent on the concept of personal privacy.

First, there is Article 8 of the European convention on human rights, incorporated into domestic law through provisions in the Human Rights Act 1998. Article 8 recognises that all human beings enjoy a fundamental right to privacy. This right certainly extends to an individual's private online activities. A state agency that snoops on an individual's private e-activities will be acting unlawfully for the purposes of Article 8 unless the interference with privacy rights can be justified.

An interference will be justified only if it is both in accordance with the law and necessary in order to serve certain specified legitimate aims, including the aims of preserving national security, public safety or economic wellbeing. Importantly, an interference with privacy rights will not be lawful for Article 8 purposes if it is disproportionate. Put simply, the state cannot lawfully use a surveillance sledgehammer to crack a small albeit socially offensive nut.

Second, there is the Data Protection Act 1998, derived from the European data protection directive. This is a fairly intricate enactment that embodies a number of detailed rules relating to the circumstances in which personal data – including not only written information but also photographs, voice recordings and other recorded data – may lawfully be processed. The conceptual spinal cord on which the rules hang is that personal data must be managed in a way that avoids excessive infringements of privacy rights. In that sense, the effects of the Data Protection Act are similar to those of Article 8. The data protection rules will certainly provisionally apply to any personal data which may be obtained by the UK government from a foreign state, and also to any the government may itself wish to transfer abroad.

However, critically, the rules are effectively disapplied in any case where the government certifies that this is necessary for the purposes of safeguarding national security. The scope for challenging a national security certificate is very limited. Perhaps even more significantly, the affected individuals will only be able to contemplate a challenge if they know the state has disapplied the rules in their case. The difficulty here is that the disapplication of the rules may itself result in a situation where individuals are kept in the dark about what is happening to their data.

Third, there is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa). This fiendishly complex enactment is essentially intended to set out the circumstances in which secret surveillance activities undertaken by the state must be treated as lawful. Thus, for example, it sets out the circumstances in which individuals may lawfully be subject to surveillance (like using surveillance devices or covert human intelligence sources). It is clear that Ripa was enacted above all in order to ensure that the state was not using the veil of secrecy to conduct surveillance activities which unjustly interfered with the privacy rights of citizens.

But a fundamental difficulty with Ripa, as with the Data Protection Act, is that it is difficult to detect when abuses are taking place. The secret nature of the surveillance being undertaken means that the subjects of the surveillance are themselves not in a position to hold the relevant authorities to account.

Standing back from the detail, two things become clear. First, as a matter of domestic law, any surveillance system deployed by the state must operate in a proportionate manner. It is hard to see how any surveillance system that enabled the state indiscriminately to capture data relating to millions of law-abiding citizens could ever satisfy the requirements of Article 8. Second, it is a fundamental precondition to the exercise of legal rights that individuals know whether their rights have been infringed. Keeping the public in a state of ignorance about the very existence of super-surveillance systems is constitutionally offensive.

Even if there are good reasons why individual operations must remain secret in the national interest, there surely can be no justification for keeping people in the dark about dramatic expansions in the surveillance state. If super-surveillance systems are as all-encompassing and indiscriminate as the revelations about Prism tend to suggest, then all the more reason why these new modes of state watchfulness should be subject to robust scrutiny by both the public and the courts.

Of course we could simply sit back and accept the assurances given to us by our political leaders that the state can be relied upon to regulate itself, that it will scrupulously turn its attentions only to those who clearly seek to threaten our comfortable existence. But such a trusting, laissez-faire attitude is inherently naive. Our liberty as citizens depends very substantially on our ability to safeguard ourselves against arbitrary interference and excessive control by the state. If we abnegate our own responsibility to watch over the state's burgeoning surveillance activities, the price we will pay is an inevitable loss of personal liberty in the face of an increasingly data-bloated and overweening state.

• Privacy
• Surveillance
• Prism
• NSA
• Data protection
• GCHQ

Culture secretary says leading internet service providers have agreed to change approach and work more closely with police

Internet service providers have signed up to a fundamental change in their approach that will involve working more closely with the police to seek out and block "absolutely abhorrent" images of child abuse, the culture secretary, Maria Miller, said on Tuesday.

Leading companies have pledged £1m to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which will intensify its work with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) to identify illegal images of child abuse before they are widely distributed online.

Miller was speaking after a summit with some of the world's largest internet service providers (ISPs), which were summoned by the culture secretary because of concerns in government that they are failing to take adequate steps to crack down on images of child abuse.

Industry sources expressed irritation with the government's criticism as they noted that Ceop's budget has been cut by 10% this year. One source, who described the meeting as fractious, said: .

"The Home Office opened with some encouraging noises about international efforts but generally speaking the politicians there fundamentally (or wilfully) misunderstand the technical and legal aspects to the subject. Little discussion was given to the measures put forward by industry and any discussion of practical steps was closed down. We'll meet again in a month."

Another source said that the government only invited Ceop after protests from the industry. The source said: "It's very dangerous for the government to put all its eggs in the IWF basket as Ceop does a lot of important work on the behaviour and tracking down of paedophiles."

But the culture secretary hailed the agreement, which will see the IWF working directly with the police to seek out illegal images rather than waiting for a complaint before acting. The government estimates that there are 1 million unique users of images of child abuse online, but only 40,000 reports of illegal images are made each year to the IWF, the Cambridge-based charity founded in 1996 by the internet industry that collates warnings about illegal sites.

Britain's main ISPs – Virgin Media, BSkyB, BT and TalkTalk – have agreed to provide £1m to help the IWF in its work with Ceop, which has been incorporated into the National Crime Agency.

Miller told The World at One on Radio 4: "What has been agreed today is a fundamental change in the way that the industry will approach child abuse images and removing them from public view. It is important that we have made this change, that the IWF will be proactive not reactive for the first time, so it can actively seek out the sorts of images that people find absolutely abhorrent.

"It does mean that more of those images can be removed."

Miller added in a statement: "Until now, action has only been taken by the IWF when a child sexual abuse image is reported. Now, for the first time, the IWF has been asked to work alongside Ceop to search for illegal and abusive images and block them. This will mean more images of child sexual abuse will be tracked down and acted against.

"The abuse of children is absolutely abhorrent – and that child is further violated every single time an image is circulated and viewed. The IWF and Ceop already do important and valuable work. This agreement will mean these organisations will no longer be limited to reacting to reports received. They will now have the remit and the resources to take the fight to the criminals perpetrating these vile acts."

The summit also addressed the problem of "peer-to-peer" communication, in which child abusers distribute material by email to avoid detection. Miller said that work would continue to try to crack down on such distribution.

In one of the first steps after the summit, the industry has agreed to introduce "splash" pages by the end of the month. This will mean that if someone seeks to access a page of illegal images that has been blocked, a warning message will appear telling the user they have tried to access indecent or illegal content. At the moment an error message appears when users try to access such images.

Miller denied that the government was not taking the issue seriously after Jim Gamble resigned as chief executive of Ceop in 2010, following its incorporation into the National Crime Agency.

The culture secretary said: "We take it very seriously indeed. That is why Ceop is now part of the National Crime Agency and that is why we have 50% more staff working within Ceop. It is absolutely vital that their work continues and can reflect the scale of the problem."

In a statement, BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media said of the extra £1m they have pledged over the next four years: "The companies will work together with government, IWF and Ceop to establish how best these funds can be spent to tackle the availability of online child abuse content. ISPs have a zero-tolerance approach to this material. This funding will help to target those individuals that create and distribute the content."

Miller will arrange another meeting after the industry reports back to her within a month. She praised the industry for taking steps already to offer greater choice of parental controls for new customers.

The companies that attended the summit were Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, BT, BSkyB, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Vodafone, O2, EE and Three. Officers from Ceop and officials from the IWF also attended.

A Virgin Media spokesperson said: "We welcome the opportunity to restate our zero tolerance of child abuse material and efforts to combat this has our full support. Virgin Media and the industry created the IWF for this very purpose and it has successfully removed thousands of abusive images over the past decade. We have today committed to increase its funding going forward.

"Ceop also deserves credit for its work in tracking down and prosecuting the creators and distributors of this material. It is crucial this global problem is tackled at source so everyone must now work together to ensure the IWF and Ceop are empowered with sufficient resources and the clear legal framework they need to expand their activities. This effort will have our full commitment."

Peter Davies, the Ceop chief executive, said: "The Ceop centre has today contributed to the meeting with government officials and industry representatives, exploring opportunities to inform everyone's understanding of the threat posed to children online.

"With offending linked to indecent images of children (IIOC) and online child sexual exploitation so high in the public's mind, it is essential that we all work together to provide a positive, consistent and structured approach to prevent ISP platforms and/or services being used for these purposes. Ceop has worked with many service providers over the last seven years and has a strong reputation for not merely dealing with high volumes of referrals from the public, but carrying out cutting-edge proactive investigations.

"While we have excellent partnerships and co-operation with most service providers, we must acknowledge there is scope for a change of pace and that more can always be done. We will continue to offer our knowledge and expertise to support a collaborative approach to make the internet as safe an environment as possible. This will include helping the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to develop their ideas. We will be providing more information on the threats to children when we launch our upcoming thematic assessment on child sexual exploitation and abuse."

• ISPs
• Child protection
• Children
• Social care
• Maria Miller

Smartphone's 'instant facial beauty support' capitalises on growing trend for 'selfies' and will retail below price for latest Apple iPhone

The world's thinnest smartphone, with a touch screen so sensitive it responds to gloved hands, has been unveiled by rising Chinese manufacturer Huawei in the latest challenge to the iPhone.

The Ascend P6 is just over 6mm thick, comes in white, black and baby pink, and in language usually associated with skin creams rather than computer technology, its maker claims the camera's "instant facial beauty support" software reduces wrinkles and blends skin tone.

The phone capitalises on the growing popularity of the self portrait or "selfie", examples of which now litter the internet, with celebrities from Justin Bieber to Rihanna as likely to photograph themselves as their friends and family.

While smartphone front facing cameras – those on the same side as the screen - have tended to be low resolution, the Ascend P6 has 5 megapixels, compared to 1.2 for the iPhone 5. Its rear camera has 8 megapixels, equivalent to Apple's phone.

On sale from July, and with a recommended price of €449 (£385), or £21 a month with a contract, it is cheaper than the latest iPhone, which costs £529 in the UK. The P6 is made with metal and glass and less plastic than previous Huawei models, but the current version lacks the iPhone's ability to run on 4G networks.

"The keen price is evidence that Huawei is prepared to use pricing as a way of building share in major European markets," said analyst Ben Wood at CCS Insight. "Huawei has made substantial progress in design and quality, but the big unanswered question is whether consumers will accept a product from an almost unknown name in preference to established brands."

With Apple and Samsung taking the lion's share of profits to be made from smartphones, operators and retailers are keen to redress the balance of power away from the duopoly. Huawei's launch event in Camden's Roundhouse was attended by Carphone Warehouse chairman Sir Charles Dunstone, who took to the stage to describe Huawei as "the most fantastic partner".

Its phones are popular in China, but despite setting the ambitious goal of selling 60m smart handsets in 2012, Huawei managed a less dazzling 32m and failed to rank among the top five vendors, according to research firm IDC.

The company has been most successful as a maker of mobile and broadband network equipment., overtaking European and American rivals to become the second largest vendor after Sweden's Ericsson.

Its presence throughout BT's copper and fibre lines, and in the 4G equipment being installed by the UK's largest mobile phone company, Everything Everywhere, has raised security concerns in the UK.

This month, a parliamentary committee rebuked ministers for failing to monitor the use of Huawei's equipment in UK networks.

Blocked from buying companies in the United States, where politicians have discouraged telecoms companies from buying its equipment, Huawei is hoping to the P6 will enhance its own image in Western markets.

• Smartphones
• Apple
• Mobile phones
• Telecommunications industry

Website removed picture after initial complaint, but lawsuit alleges 'direct and contributory infringement'

A photographer who failed to see the funny side of a Buzzfeed post on "The 30 Funniest Header Faces" is suing the site for $3.6m (£2.3m) over claims it breached his copyright.

The professional photographer, Kai Eiselein, filed a legal claim against Buzzfeed after finding his picture had been used without permission in a comic compilation of football mishaps.

His picture of a grimacing player was removed from the article – now titled "The 29 Funniest Header Faces" – after he made an initial complaint in May 2011.

But in a lawsuit filed in New York, Eiselein accused Buzzfeed of "direct and contributory infringement" and claims he is owed $3.6m after his work was shared widely across the web.

He wants Buzzfeed to pay $150,000 in damages for each of the 23 sites that used his picture after the initial post, plus a further $150,000 for "contributory infringement" by another site, luuux.com.

Eiselein confirmed he was taking legal action against the popular site and said: "It is time for creatives to stand up and say 'This is enough'. We work hard at our crafts and others should not be able to profit from our talents without compensating us."

Asked why he is claiming such an inordinate sum in damages, he added: "In the suit I have asked for the maximum allowed by law. Ultimately it will be up to a judge and/or jury to decide the amount of damages, if any."

In the lawsuit, published on news site paidcontent.org, lawyers for Eiseleen said Buzzfeed is "unequivocally responsible both directly and indirectly for all subsequent infringements" because it published the original article".

If the claim succeeds, Buzzfeed is likely to find itself open to lawsuits from other photographers whose work has been used without permission on its site. The site's lists often use pictures taken from Flickr, where the provenance of some images is unclear, alongside photographs from agencies including Reuters and Getty.

A spokeswoman for Buzzfeed declined to comment.

• BuzzFeed
• Internet
• Digital media

By moving towards a GitHub flow with continuous integration, the Guardian's software team describe how they've streamlined development and testing

We're constantly seeking to find better ways to develop the software that's used to create and present the Guardian. One key element of developing software is a source control system, used to maintain a history of changes to code. Over the past year we've moved away from a trunk-based model to something much closer to the GitHub flow, using branches for almost all work. Whilst both models have their strengths, we've no intention of going back.

The key reason we initially switched to a flow based on feature branches was to better facilitate code review. From viewing and contributing to open source projects, we had seen that Github's pull requests provide a great way to collaborate on discussing changes. Since we were already using Github to host our repositories, it was a small step to take advantage of this through the use of feature branches.

As expected, this has proved a useful way to discuss the details of technical changes to the system, e.g. adding asynchronous attributes to our JavaScript tags or allowing deployment of applications via Magenta. Alas, it has also proved a source of gratuitous cat gifs.

We had also been moving to smaller, more frequent releases and feature branches work best alongside this approach. A branch is only merged when it's ready to go live and then released soon afterwards.

Much of the reasoning behind taking a trunk-based model is based around the importance of continuous integration and the pain of merging. These are real concerns, but tooling has ameliorated them considerably. Our continuous integration tool, TeamCity, now supports automatic builds of all branches of a repository meaning that, while different elements of work in progress are independent, changes are continuously integrated and tested against the rest of the application. Git is really good at cleanly merging.

Have we had some messy merge conflicts to sort out? Yes, but they are relatively infrequent and are caused by us failing to adhere to the supporting practise of finding ways to release small changes early and often, leading to branches hanging around for longer than necessary. They're pain that highlight a real problem.

It's much clearer what changes are being made to what by whom than it was previously. However, there's variation between teams as to the details of how new work is approved and merged in, so we have now started to make use of Github's contribution guideline support.

The really pleasant surprise we've had is that one of the biggest benefits has been to those who haven't previously used our source control repositories. Those members of the team, such as those responsible for QA of the system, now have a much clearer view and feel more involved in the process since we moved to using pull requests. This in turn has led to some progress towards actively contributing fixes to the repositories themselves, as the process has been demystified.

• Software

A discussion of the role of the professional photographer in an era dominated by smartphone cameras and image-sharing sites

The chief of the global media buying network explains how big data is transforming the advertising industry

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is accused of involvement in one of Denmark's biggest hacking attacks

The Swedish co-founder of the Pirate Bay file-sharing website can be extradited to Denmark to face hacking charges, a Swedish court has ruled.

Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is accused of involvement in one of Denmark's biggest hacking attacks – on databases holding driving licence records, official email messages and millions of social security numbers. The attacks on the databases, all run by a Danish subsidiary of the US technology company CSC, took place between April and August last year. A 20-year-old Danish man, alleged to be Warg's accomplice, is being held in custody in Denmark, having pleaded not guilty.

The decision by the Nacka district court comes as Warg, 28, who remains in custody in Sweden, awaits the verdict expected this week in a trial in Sweden in which he was accused of hacking into the IT systems of the Logica services company and stealing ID details of 9,000 Swedes. He allegedly attempted to transfer 5.7m Swedish kronor (£560,000) to various accounts.

He can appeal against the extradition decision, which will also be dependent on the verdict and any sentence in the Logica trial.

Warg and the other three Pirate Bay co-founders were found guilty in 2009 of assisting the distribution of illegal content online. They were all handed jail terms and a collective fine of $2m (£1.3m), increased at their appeal to $6.5m. Warg left the country before serving his sentence but was deported from Cambodia last year.

His case falls under a Nordic arrest warrant, which means there is no legal review of evidence in the case.

That distinguishes it from the case of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has justified sheltering in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for a year to avoid extradition to Sweden to face sex assault and rape accusations, which he denies, by arguing that he would face onward extradition to the US to face potential charges relating to the WikiLeaks releases.

• Pirate Bay
• Internet
• Piracy
• Filesharing
• Extradition
• UK criminal justice
• Hacking
• Sweden
• Europe
• Denmark

Chief engineer says companies still target myth of 'captive' audience and fail to embrace digital

Mark D'Arcy, Facebook's global creative director, has warned advertisers that they need to control consumer data gleaned from TV and internet campaigns, or they are wasting the billions of dollars spent on marketing every year.

D'Arcy said that the advertisers needed to take a leaf from the wider creative industries – such as musicians, authors and filmmakers – and protect and analyse the increasing amount of consumer data extracted from campaigns.

"One of the biggest disconnects in the industry is the world of media and insight of media and data from the creative process," he said, speaking at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity on Tuesday. "If you really care about your idea desperately, and you desperately want to share it with the world, you better be deeply embedded with the distribution methods on any platform. On TV or anything else where that story is going to be amplified and told in the world. Creative people have always cared about that."

Facebook's chief engineer Andrew Bosworth, responsible for Facebook innovations such as news feed, messenger and groups, was scathing about the relevance of the bulk of the 35,000-plus creative advertising campaigns launched globally each year, arguing that they are failing to embrace the digital medium, and still target the myth of a "captive" audience.

"The captive audience is on its way out," sad Bosworth,. "It is dying slowly and steadily – and we all know it. We know when we are watching TV we are all using a second screen. We know that print is declining in circulation in certain areas. And people are going to have a lot more choice with what they do with every minute of their time."

He said that it "worried" him how few of the campaigns he had been checking out submitted for Cannes Lions awards that had resonated with him, arguing that no one cares about small scale marketing.

"I thought maybe I wasn't connected to the right sources, maybe I wasn't paying attention or plugged in," he said. "It turns out a lot of these [campaigns] hadn't been seen by that many people. For Facebook, the same is true for almost any company in [Silicon] Valley, in New York, London, in Europe – if you are talking about a campaign that reaches 10,000 people, who cares?"

D'Arcy chimed in: "That's [the scale of] a small local newspaper. How do we [the ad industry] stop advertising at people, what can we do to make people connect with us?"

Dave Droga, founder of ad agency Droga5 and the most awarded creative executive in Cannes history, largely agreed.

"For so long we have been able to exploit a captive audience and we got lazy," he said. "For the first 15 years of my career I just thought about creativity [not effectiveness of campaigns]. We're an industry that likes to talk at people. We are competing against some guy putting a cat down his pants on YouTube, but the best stuff bubbles up."

• Cannes Lions 2013
• Advertising
• Cannes Lions
• Digital media
• Facebook
• Internet
• Social networking

Cartographer Andy Woodruff has made a stylised map of bus speeds in Boston, MA, using GPS data from the Massachusetts Bay Transport Authority and NextBus

Yes, Miss Utah flubbed a question in Miss America 2013, but don't let one stupid mistake remove her 'personhood'

Consider this individual: she has appeared on ABC's "What Would you Do?" and is the ambassador for "Healing Hands for Haiti," which aims to bring rehabilitation medicine to the country. She has attended Westminster College and Brigham Young University. Her profile explains that she wants to be an advocate for adoption. Her parents adopted her little brother, who was subsequently diagnosed with several medical issues, including an inoperable brain tumor.

Now consider: she entered an inoffensive competition, where under the gaze of an unknown and massive multitude, she was asked this question:

"A recent report shows that in 40% of American families with children, women are the primary earners, yet they continue to earn less than men. What does it say about society?"

Marissa Powell, Miss Utah in the Miss America 2013 competition, had mere seconds to answer, no preparation. She thus fumbled. This wasn't an examiner asking a doctoral candidate about her paper; this wasn't a teacher testing a student who was supposed to have prepared. This was a beauty pageant contestant thrust into answering a difficult – though important – question of economics and gender inequality.

She fumbled. And the internet was provided with yet another plaything, yet another tool to throw into the laughing factory. Look how silly she is. Look how stupid this dumb American beauty pageant person is. Wow.

Deadspin's Timothy Burke posted an unpleasant and mean-spirited response from the film Billy Madison:

"What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

How is this response proportional to her fumbling, under a glaring spotlight – metaphorically and probably literally – and with a sudden large question? Why are we OK with such meanness toward someone who appears to be a good person and someone who maybe many of us would respect?

(The Billy Madison quotation might be given more acceptance if it was, say, in response to an internet comment – instead of to a young person suddenly forced to answer a vague-ish question. However, even if it was to a comment, I think this response itself would be unhelpful and merely mocking.)

Why have we allowed people on our screens to be seen as automatic village idiots, worthy of derision and scorn, with our vulture-like gaffaws and mockery of their character fading out, as we move on to the next victim? A young, inexperienced person made a mistake – like many of us young, inexperienced people – only the wonder/horror of the internet makes her fumbling viral, makes her words "create education better" eternal (until we move on to the next village idiot for the week).

I think we should stop tweeting links to it, stop watching it, stop laughing at someone who briefly messed up. (I realise I'm doing this but hopefully you understand why.) Mistakes should not be thorns, but rungs in a ladder toward improvement. But by trending and buzzing and tweeting and liking and redditing someone's brief moment of mistaken response, keeping that alive rather than anything else of Powell – her work, her experience of adoption (and loss), her parents moral actions that inspired her – we remove her personhood; we think of her as yet another silly American beauty who said something funny, instead of a person who studied and has actually tried helping others. (Adoption is an important issue, after all.)

Don't send that link. Don't laugh at someone making a mistake. Treat yourself and others better than the internet so commonly would. It is we who make the decision to put this person up as the next target for our mockery darts and character barbs.

There are enough actual bad people to hate, enough actual stupid and suffering policies to fight – which can be fought with the tools of mockery and derision. Better these than briefly confused individuals, who are suddenly put on a spotlight so their mistakes will be digitally engraved for longer than is necessary.

• This post originally appeared on Tauriq Moosa's blog Against the New Taboo.

• Adoption
• Internet
• United States
• Twitter
• Reddit

Using a mobile while walking down the street is a challenge for most adults, but new figures reveal that children may be even more at risk from life-threatening distractions

The problem with much mobile technology is that it's not really designed to be used while you're actually mobile – or at least, not if being mobile demands that you concentrate on something other than your mobile technology.

Like driving, for example. There's a reason why the use of handheld devices behind the wheel is banned in the UK: research shows the response time of a driver using a smartphone to access social media, emails or texts slows by around 37.5% (far more than after marijuana or moderate alcohol use).

But we're not very good at using mobile technology while walking, either. YouTube has armies of unsuspecting texters slamming into doors, colliding with lampposts, tumbling down stairs or tripping into fountains.

In America, towns have started fining pedestrians who use smartphones while they're walking. Here, London streets have hosted experiments that have involved attaching pads to lampposts and bollards in an effort to reduce injuries from "inattention blindness".

There is even an app, CrashAlert, being developed at the University of Manitoba in Canada that uses a distance-sensing camera to scan the path ahead and alert smartphone users to hazards by flashing a red square on to their screen.

The issue is that the human brain can only pay attention to about three things at a time – and concentrate effectively on just one of them. Even though the consequences of smartphone distraction are sometimes amusing, they can also be serious.

The number of children admitted to hospital after accidents in public playgrounds has climbed by about a third in five years, according to NHS data. Experts in both Britain and the US – where a similar rise has occurred – suggest some of the increase may be a result of parents being too distracted by their phones to supervise their offspring properly.

When already distraction-prone children get their own phones, the consequences can be catastrophic. Katherine Littlewood, 15, was hit by a train and killed on a level crossing last year; her iPod, headphones and the the BlackBerry on which she had been texting friends were found next to her body.

And now comes evidence that shows that 11-year-old pedestrians are three times more likely to be hurt or seriously injured on the way to and from school than 10-year-olds – and also, since 11 is the average age at which children receive their first mobile phone, six times more likely to be sending a text when it happens.

A quarter of children surveyed admitted that they had been distracted by personal technology while crossing the road. "There is," the report concluded, "a clear correlation between the use of technology and the time of serious accidents with children". We, or mobile technology, need to evolve.

• Smartphones
• Parents and parenting
• Children
• Health

Company follows Apple, Microsoft and Facebook in publishing details of data requests from law enforcement agencies.

Yahoo has joined the increasing number of technology companies publishing details of how many requests US law enforcement agencies have made for data on their users.

The company gave more details of its dealings with US authorities as it sought to reassure customers in the wake of the scandal surrounding the National Security Agency's Prism surveillance programme.

A blogpost co-signed by Yahoo's chief executive, Marissa Mayer, and general counsel, Ron Bell covers the same period as Apple's disclosure earlier in the week: 1 December 2012 to 31 May 2013.

"During that time period, we received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests, inclusive of criminal, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and other requests," they wrote. "The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations."

Mayer and Bell stated that they were legally unable to publish details of request numbers under the FISA. "We strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue," they wrote, before outlining plans for more transparency about the data Yahoo shares with law enforcement agencies.

"Democracy demands accountability. Recognising the important role that Yahoo! can play in ensuring accountability, we will issue later this summer our first global law enforcement transparency report, which will cover the first half of the year. We will refresh this report with current statistics twice a year."

Yahoo's disclosure of US requests between 1 December 2012 and 31 May 2013 can be compared directly with that of Apple, which said on Monday that it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from federal, state and local authorities in that time period.

Facebook and Microsoft's disclosures covered a different period: the second half of 2012. Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests in that six-month period, while Microsoft said it received between 6,000 and 7,000.

All the companies are fighting hard to regain any trust lost with their users since the Guardian broke the news of the NSA's Prism programme. Their initial public responses focused on denying all knowledge of any programme giving the NSA direct access to their servers.

In recent days, their strategy has shifted to espousing transparency by publishing their US request figures, while seeking to stress that they push back against requests they see as inappropriate.

When Facebook's published its requests data, the general counsel, Ted Ullyot, wrote: "We aggressively protect our users' data when confronted with such requests: we frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested".

Apple's statement said: "Regardless of the circumstances, our legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it."

Yahoo's statement falls into that pattern too. "As always, we will continually evaluate whether further actions can be taken to protect the privacy of our users and our ability to defend it," write Mayer and Bell. "We appreciate – and do not take for granted – the trust you place in us."

• Yahoo
• NSA
• Privacy
• Obama administration
• US national security
• Apple
• Facebook
• Microsoft
• Prism
• United States
• Internet

But smartphone buyers may be less interested in Deep Neural Networks, and more keen to know whether Windows Phone 8 has their favourite apps

Good news for Windows Phone owners in the US: you can now shave 0.5 seconds off the time it takes to find a decent pizza in Seattle by speaking to your smartphone.

Okay, this isn't earth-shattering news, even for pizzaphiles. But Microsoft is excited about the technology behind this development: improvements to the speed and accuracy of Windows Phone's voice-to-text and voice search features.

"Now when you compose a text message or search using your voice, Bing will return results twice as fast as before and increase accuracy by 15 percent," announces Bing's speech team in a (possibly dictated) blog post.

The team has been working with Microsoft's research division for a year to improve the technology. Here's the science bit:

"To achieve the speed and accuracy improvements, we focused on an advanced approach called Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). DNN is a technology that is inspired by the functioning of neurons in the brain. In a similar way, DNN technology can detect patterns akin to the way biological systems recognize patterns.

By coupling MSR's major research breakthroughs in the use of DNNs with the large datasets provided by Bing's massive index, the DNNs were able to learn more quickly and help Bing voice capabilities get noticeably closer to the way humans recognize speech."

Actually, there's an even deeper science bit in a separate post on the Inside Microsoft Research blog, where senior researcher Dong Yu contributes this anecdote on a crucial point in the project:

"I first realized the effect of the DNN when we successfully achieved significant error-rate reduction on the voice-search data set after implementing the context-dependent deep-neural-network hidden Markov model. It was an exciting moment. I was so excited that I did not sleep that night."

Don't laugh: this is a genuinely charming insight into the work going on behind the scenes of the technologies we increasingly take for granted. Not least because Yu's sleepless night may contribute to a much wider range of benefits than just slightly-quicker ordering of a deep-pan Hawaiian with extra pineapple.

It's the smartphone battle between Apple, Google, Microsoft, BlackBerry and other platforms that's pumping investment into speech recognition, voice search and related technologies with wide applications.

Or, as Yu puts it: "I believe this is just the first step in advancing the state of the art. Many difficult problems may be attacked under this framework, which might lead to even greater advances."

Microsoft's challenge is to make the fruits of this research a big selling point for Windows Phone, as it tries to secure a bigger foothold in the market against iPhone and Android, which both feature their own prominent voice recognition features.

Many people's purchase decisions will come down to more basic questions: whether the phone looks nice, how good its camera is and whether their favourite apps are available for it, rather than its speech recognition speed and accuracy.

Nokia is working hard on the design and camera questions, while Microsoft seems well aware of the challenge faces on the apps side of things. Just this week, Business Insider claimed it is paying some developers up to $100k to bring popular apps to its platform.

In some areas, like games – N.O.V.A. 3, Temple Run: Brave, MapQuest, Jetpack Joyride, Rayman Jungle Run and Angry Birds Rio in the last month alone – its efforts are paying off. Elsewhere, even long-term holdout Instagram is rumoured to be on its way to Windows Phone, possibly as soon as the end of this month.

Microsoft's efforts, whether in the research labs with DNN technology or out in developers' offices with a cheque book, are important.

Apple and Google's fierce rivalry with iOS and Android means neither can afford to rest on their laurels, but stronger competition from a third player in Microsoft / Windows Phone (with BlackBerry, Firefox OS and Tizen all hoping for a say as well) is good news for smartphone owners. Whatever their pizza preferences.

• Windows Phone
• Microsoft
• Apps
• Smartphones
• Voice recognition
• Mobile phones

Culture secretary says companies have agreed to change approach and work more closely with police

Internet service providers have signed up to a fundamental change in their approach, which will involve working more closely with the police to seek out and block images of child abuse, the culture secretary, Maria Miller, has said.

Leading companies have pledged £1m to the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), which will intensify its work with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) to identify illegal images of child abuse before they are widely distributed online.

Miller was speaking after a summit with some of the world's largest internet service providers (ISPs), which were summoned by the culture secretary because of concerns in government that they are failing to take adequate steps to crack down on images of child abuse.

The government estimates that there are 1 million unique users of images of child abuse online, but only 40,000 reports of illegal images are made each year to the IWF, the Cambridge-based charity that collates warnings about illegal sites.

Britain's main ISPs – Virgin Media, BSkyB, BT and TalkTalk – have agreed to provide £1m to help the IWF in its work with Ceop, which has been incorporated into the national crime agency.

The culture secretary hailed the agreement, which will see the IWF working directly with the police to seek out illegal images rather than waiting for a complaint before acting. She told The World at One on Radio 4: "What has been agreed today is a fundamental change in the way that the industry will approach child abuse images and removing them from public view. It is important that we have made this change, that the IWF will be proactive not reactive for the first time, so it can actively seek out the sorts of images that people find absolutely abhorrent.

"It does mean that more of those images can be removed."

Miller added in a statement: "Until now, action has only been taken by the IWF when a child sexual abuse image is reported. Now, for the first time, the IWF has been asked to work alongside Ceop to search for illegal and abusive images and block them. This will mean more images of child sexual abuse will be tracked down and acted against.

"The abuse of children is absolutely abhorrent – and that child is further violated every single time an image is circulated and viewed. The IWF and Ceop already do important and valuable work. This agreement will mean these organisations will no longer be limited to reacting to reports received. They will now have the remit and the resources to take the fight to the criminals perpetrating these vile acts."

The summit also addressed the problem of "peer-to-peer" communication, in which child abusers distribute material by email to avoid detection. Miller said that work would continue to try to crack down on such distribution.

In one of the first steps after the summit, the industry has agreed to introduce "splash" pages by the end of the month. This will mean that if someone seeks to access a page of illegal images that has been blocked, a warning message will appear telling the user they have tried to access indecent or illegal content. At the moment an error message appears when users try to access such images.

Miller denied that the government was not taking the issue seriously after Jim Gamble resigned as chief executive of Ceop in 2010, following its incorporation into the national crime agency.

The culture secretary said: "We take it very seriously indeed. That is why Ceop is now part of the national crime agency and that is why we have 50% more staff working within Ceop. It is absolutely vital that their work continues and can reflect the scale of the problem."

In a statement, BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media said of the extra £1m they have pledged over the next four years: "The companies will work together with government, IWF and Ceop to establish how best these funds can be spent to tackle the availability of online child abuse content. ISPs have a zero-tolerance approach to this material. This funding will help to target those individuals that create and distribute the content."

Miller will arrange another meeting after the industry reports back to her within a month. She praised the industry for taking steps already to offer greater choice of parental controls for new customers.

The companies that attended the summit were Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, BT, BSkyB, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Vodafone, O2, EE and Three. Officers from Ceop and officials from the IWF also attended.

• ISPs
• Child protection
• Crime
• Maria Miller
• Internet
• Children

After 8m iPad downloads, startup also has big plans for 'better ideas' in collaboration

Apps startup FiftyThree, which makes iPad notebook app Paper, has raised $15m (£9.6m) in a Series A funding round.

The app, pitched as "the easiest and most beautiful way to create on iPad", has been downloaded 8m times from the App Store, and was feted by Apple in its 2012 Apple Design Awards.

It enables people to scribble, draw and take notes on virtual pages, then share them via email, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Paper makes its money from in-app purchases of specific features like Sketch, Write and Mixer for £1.49 apiece.

The funding round was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Highline Ventures, Thrive Capital, SV Angels and Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and chairman as well as chief executive of payments startup Square.

FiftyThree has grand ambitions with the investment. In a blog post, the company outlined expansion plans in two specific areas: collaboration and hardware.

On the former: "Social media has changed the way we communicate, but real collaboration has been left behind. Still nothing has surpassed the simple act of sitting down in a room with a group of motivated people," claims the blog post.

"We believe a breakthrough around collaboration will revolutionize the creative process. How we work together. How we discover new collaborators to work with."

On the hardware side, FiftyThree says it has designs on "moving beyond touch and into the physical world of accessories". Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon has published his own blog post outlining the potential he sees for FiftyThree in this area.

"The FiftyThree team spent their careers working on breakthrough computing projects, including lead roles on Office, Kinect, Sonos, and the Xbox," he writes. "Particularly relevant was a project they led at Microsoft called Courier that has been widely praised as a visionary take on tablet computing."

The Courier was canned by Microsoft in 2010 before it became a commercial product, but it seems the ideas behind the dual-touchscreen device may be revived in Paper's future products. Dixon is certainly bullish:

"In the past, they reimagined how we play games, view images, listen to music, create documents, and more. With FiftyThree, they are rethinking the very way we create and collaborate on ideas."

In his post, Dixon also claims Paper didn't need to raise money, but chose to take funding "to accelerate their efforts". If the company is planning something as ambitious as the Courier, it may well need more than $15m.

That said, with devices like the Pebble smart-watch and Ouya Android console having raised $10.3m and $8.6m respectively on Kickstarter, it's tempting to wonder whether crowdfunding may have a role to play in Paper's future strategy, alongside its more-traditional investors.

• Apps
• Tablet computers
• iPad
• Technology startups
• Apple
• Digital media

To children in distress, these shockingly tasteless images look like a menu. Outrage is a tactic – let's hope this one backfires

How far should a brand go to stay edgy, even if it means their readers end up dead? Vice magazine is aiming to find out.

The youth culture magazine has published a fashion spread of models recreating the suicides of famous female writers. There is Sylvia Plath poised in front of the gas oven, wearing an on-trend Suno dress and Virginia Woolf wading into the water in a gothic Christian Siriano coat and vintage frock.

On one level, we shouldn't be surprised by the raging tastelessness on display here: this is what Vice does. Its brand is all about shocking and busting taboos; its schtick is mixing serious reportage from some of the most hellish places on earth with pointless videos of topless models and headlines such as "Why are the British obsessed with sheds?"

But underneath the gonzo self-image it is so keen to promote, Vice is a giant old-school corporation. According to the New Yorker's recent feature on the brand, it has 35 offices in 18 countries and a million subscribers to its YouTube channel. It was valued at $200m in 2011 and its CEO, Shane Smith, says its goal is to be "the largest network for young people in the world". Underneath its yellow skinny jeans, Vice is wearing a suit.

This is the paradox of the new media age: some of the most wild, crazy-looking sites are being run like traditional businesses. Reddit, home of violently misogynistic forums called things such as Beating Women, is owned by Advanced Publications, the same parent company as Condé Nast, publisher of GQ and Vogue. It's just that neither side likes to talk about it.

So what is a slick corporation to do when it wants to appeal to young people? Why, outrage public decency, of course. And that is hard on the internet, where people swear like they breathe and you can't move for erect nipples. So companies like Vice have to poke at other taboos, like sexual violence, drug use and suicide.

The worst thing is, it works. Creating a Twitter storm every so often is exactly what Vice wants. It doesn't have aspirations to be taken seriously, so it doesn't need to apologise if anyone is offended. It doesn't have the kind of editors who are likely to be hauled in front of a select committee to explain themselves. And although it publishes a British edition, it doesn't feel like part of the fabric of the British media. There will be no Leveson-style inquiry into its actions; it can easily tell the PCC to bugger off.

But let's not be in any doubt about what Vice has done. The Samaritans have guidelines covering both journalistic and creative depictions of suicide, and they are very clear: avoid glamorising suicide and avoid giving details of the methods. It is widely accepted that following these rules reduces copycat suicides. If you live in London, you'll regularly hear announcements about passenger incidents and delays due to a person under a train, but you won't find them routinely written up in the Evening Standard. That's for a very good reason: the Samaritans quote studies from Vienna and Toronto where voluntary restrictions on reporting subway suicides reduced their occurrence by 75%.

Similarly, the inclusion of a particular suicide method in a popular television show or prominent media report has been shown to increase suicide attempts by that method. Every year in England and Wales, about 24,000 young people between the age of 10 and 19 attempt suicide. What will children in that kind of distress see when they look at those Vice pictures? They will see a menu. Using famous women makes it worse, because vulnerable people can fixate on a favourite writer and identify with them.

As a journalist, covering suicide is always hard because there is a fine line between raising awareness of a vital public health issue and contributing to a spectacle that could harm vulnerable people. Which of those two was the feminist website Jezebel doing when it decided to republish Vice's pictures, alongside outraged commentary? And have the thousands of tweets on the subject, not to mention this article, simply told Vice that it has found a tender spot in our collective consciousness, which it can jab to great effect?

I don't have the answer to that and it is easy to find things to be outraged about these days. But this one is worth being angered by, because tonight, there might be one less Vice reader in the world.

• This article was amended on 18 June 2013 to remove a reference to a particular method of suicide

• If you have been affected by the issues raised in this article, for information and support visit the Samaritans website or call 08457 909090

• Vice magazine
• Magazines
• Digital media
• Suicide rates
• Fashion industry
• Internet
• Consumer magazines

Radioactive glassy beads created by the first nuclear explosion may hold clues to earth's distant history

The sun was rising as a teenage boy swung a metal wand back and forth. The Geiger counter hanging at his waist clicked, testifying to the radiation streaming from the ground and through his body.

The White Sands Missile Range in the New Mexico desert is home to Trinity, the place where the nuclear age began on 16 July, 1945. Twice a year, in April and October, the site has opened to the public. Each time, thousands of people make a pilgrimage to check out the slight crater left by the first atom bomb test. Measuring just over 100 metres across, the depression is underwhelming, a slight dent in the ground. A stone obelisk marks ground zero, where the bomb was detonated atop a 30-metre steel tower.

The Trinity weapon, a version of which destroyed Nagasaki on 9 August, 1945, used plutonium. That fuel was more far more efficient than the uranium in the bomb dropped over Hiroshima on 6 August, but it was thought to be less certain to work.

When TNT in the Trinity device exploded, it compressed plutonium atoms inside. This set off a non-plutonium source of neutrons that split some of the plutonium atoms, triggering a chain reaction that led to the massive explosion and now famous flash of light and mushroom cloud.

J Robert Oppenheimer and the other physicists who assembled the bomb's core in a ranch house on-site, using tape and plastic sheets to keep the dust out, took bets on whether this process would work. No one knew how big the explosion would be if it did happen. In the end, the blast was equivalent to about 19 kilotonnes of TNT going off at once, and people over 300km away felt the force or saw the flash. (An official statement released in response to many concerns stated that "a remotely located ammunitions magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded" but that "there was no loss of life or limb to anyone.")

After rupturing, the plutonium atoms transformed into a host of radioactive elements. Some, such as a form of iodine, dissipated quickly. Those still present in the sandy soil of Trinity in significant quantities today tend to be entities that will stick around for a long time, such as caesium-137, europium-152 and europium-155. One particularly long-lived isotope has a half-life of 24,100 years.

When the teenage boy swept his Geiger counter back and forth near ground zero, the instrument showed he was getting about half a millirem of radiation per hour from these materials. That measurement squared with official readings from safety officials who regularly sweep test the site and haven't seen much change from year to year. At that rate, a two-hour visit delivered a dose of alpha particles and gamma rays equal to about a tenth of the radiation that a person soaks up during a chest X-ray.

My own Geiger counter, a yellow metal box stuffed with cold war-era circuits, proved to be a better conversation starter than scientific instrument. As I wiggled the knobs, the needle refused to budge. That turned out to be a good thing.

"If that needle were moving right now, we'd all be dead soon," radiation hobbyist Jim Hill told me as I struggled to get a reading. This particular model had been designed to detect only extreme radiation, he said, such as the high levels present in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear explosion or meltdown.

Hill has a long personal history with the bomb. When the mushroom cloud billowed up, he was 18 months old and living in Albuquerque, about 150km away. Army officials knocked on his family's door and said they wanted to check on his health. Every six months afterwards, all through his childhood, they showed up to check on him. He has never seen the report that he suspects the military officials were compiling on the effects of radiation on people. He said that so far he has hasn't noticed any health problems due to the bomb.

Brandishing his own radiation reader, Hill led the way to a particularly hot spot: an ant mound. As he passed his baton over the pile, the instrument clicked faster; the reading jumped by about 25%.

Ants play a special role in research being conducted at Trinity by retired physicist Robb Hermes of Los Alamos National Laboratory, a four-to-five-hour drive away. When Hermes first visited the site as a tourist in 2003, he noticed fragments of what looked like green glass littering the ground. It was a mineral called trinitite, formed by the blast and thus named for the site.

Taking some home would have been a federal crime, so Hermes called up White Sands officials and requested some ant hill sand. The industrious insects travel large distances to gather mineral grains for the walls of their homes. Chances were good that some of those grains would be trinitite.

"The ants don't care about the radiation," said Hermes. "They just care about gathering the beads."

Hermes doesn't care much about the radiation, either. He grabbed a handful of nickel- and quarter-size trinitite chunks for visitors to see as he explained his work. What interests him is the spherical shape of trinitite beads he has found in the ant sand, a shape that has revealed how the beads formed during the split second after the bomb detonated.

If the waves of heat issuing from split atoms had seared the sand like a creme brulee, as Hermes and many others have assumed, the mineral should have formed in sheets. Spheres and bubbles of trinitite, though, suggest the blast lifted sand into the air, melted it and then showered droplets over a wide area.

Poking around outside the fence a day before the masses arrived for the open house, Hermes found trinitite hurled more than 1.6km from the blast, visible on the ground. He suspects that many of the trinitite pieces he has found contain remnants of equipment used in the test. Dark green hues in some of the pieces may be remnants of the vaporised tower that cradled the bomb, he surmises. Other pieces stained red contain residue of the copper wires that connected the bomb to instruments in bunkers.

His ant sand, described in the Trinity brochures handed out to tourists, has also proved useful to scientists who study meteorites. Microscopic balls that have turned up at possible meteorite impact sites around the world are not trinitite beads, but they have a similar shape. They might be the remnants of a hail of space stones that pelted the planet about 13,000 years ago, bursting in midair and melting the ground like miniature nuclear warheads. Debris hurled into the sky by those explosions might have dimmed the sun and triggered conditions similar to a nuclear winter. The timing coincides with the start of the Younger Dryas, a cold snap that lasted more than 1,000 years.

Hermes and his team of international researchers, among them a nuclear scientist and several geologists, believe that the cold conditions were triggered when a meteorite slammed into Earth, leading to the extinction of large mammals across North America and to lean times during which hunter-gatherers turned to organised agriculture.

This theory is quite controversial; most scientists credit the sudden drop in temperature to volcano ash.

"The subject has become very contentious," says Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories who studies airbursts and isn't convinced by the evidence gathered so far. Radiocarbon dating of some of the samples suggests they are far too young to fit the theory, forming a mere hundreds of years ago.

But if Hermes and his team are right, the Trinity site may hold a significance beyond its role in the beginning of the nuclear era. It may also provide a window into understanding an important chapter in the history of humanity and the planet itself.

"The Trinity site gives us a way to study air bursts," Hermes said. "Many impacts [thousands of years ago] could have created a situation similar to nuclear winter."

This article appeared in Guardian Weekly, which incorporates material from the Washington Post

• United States
• New Mexico
• Nuclear weapons
• Meteors