The UK Government is seeking to prevent an EU directive that could extend broadcasting regulations to the internet, hitting popular video-sharing websites such as YouTube.

From YouTube to Wikipedia, collective creativity and collaboration are replacing top-down management as a business model. Our correspondent believes the We-Think phenomenon will affect every area of our lives...

More than 60 years after the end of World War II, a distributed computing project has managed to crack a previously uncracked message that was encrypted using the Enigma machine.

The M4 project began in early January, as an attempt to break three original Enigma messages that were intercepted in 1942 and are thought never to have been broken by the Allied forces.

Microsoft is planning six versions of the next incarnation of its Windows operating system.

Three versions of the software, called Vista, will be for home users, two will be for businesses and one will be for emerging markets.

One of the home versions of Vista will include features that let users store and play back TV shows.

No fixed date has been given for the release of Vista but it is expected to be launched by the end of 2006.

Star Wars has tobogganed downhill in its cinematic form, but a band of rebel game developers are fighting back against Disneyfied characters and wooden scripts. May the force be with them.

Google announced on Thursday the beta launch of its new Web publishing feature, dubbed Page Creator. A select group of Gmail account holders can now access the tool, to create and publish their own Web pages.

Geared toward the consumer who is slightly less technically-inclined, the Page Creator interface doesn't require software downloads or knowledge of HTML or other programming languages to publish a page.

Girlfriend X, a new breed of "relationship management software," combines the tongue-in-cheek attitude of a Bud Lite commercial with an obsessively detailed personal information manager, offering the male version of the relationship quizzes and checklists often found in women's magazines.

Girlfriend X has three basic components, designed to help you maintain a "parallel dating" lifestyle giving each woman that extra bit of individualized attention.

First, there's a password-protected private browser that encrypts the sites you visit. When you exit the application, you have the option of clearing all or part of your session from the browser history. This is handy for keeping your porn and dating searches private when a woman borrows your computer to check movie times or to order post-coital pizza.

Second, there's a messenger application that handles all your IM and e-mail needs. "With just a few clicks," declares the user guide, "you can send general e-mails, date invites, date reminders, flowers, poems, booty calls as well as excuses directly to each girlfriend e-mail inbox."

Of all the companies in the technology community, Intel has to have had the hardest job of selling itself.

It makes one of the smallest devices in the computer, which you never see, and which is probably one of the most technically complicated devices available to the consumer.

Yet the vast majority of us know the manufacturer's name - no mean feat.

When big computers roamed the earth there was only a small number of people involved in buying them; they cost so much and were so specialised that only the richest of companies could have them.

So, like the mainframes that went before it, there was little clue as to what was inside and actually drove the first PC. This was a relatively new device and the microprocessor was only 10 years old and almost unknown outside the hi-tech world.

Think Secret can confirm recent rumblings that Apple is nearing completion of a completely revamped video iPod that will shed the ubiquitous mechanical click wheel for a touch screen and will sport a 3.5-inch diagonal display.

This video iPod, which has been in development and on the table since before Apple released the 5G iPod last year with video playback, will feature a display that will occupy the entire front face of the device. Sources who have seen the device report that it features a digital click wheel, one that overlays the touch-sensitive display and appears when a finger touches it and disappears when the finger is removed.

Apple has been working with at least two other companies to perfect the digital click wheel display technology. While not all the engineering was completed in-house by Apple, sources have said Apple could hold an exclusive license on the technologies it borrowed from other developers for a period of time, limiting the ability of competitors to copy Apple's design.

Toshiba and South Korea's LG Electronics have signed an agreement to share their worldwide patents for optical disc products, the two companies said Thursday. Toshiba also announced an additional investment in computer chips.

The cross-licensing agreement between Japanese electronics-maker Toshiba and LG is expected to expedite product development and reduce development costs for optical products such as next-generation DVDs, the companies said in a joint statement.

"Our goal is to reinforce our ability to bring competitive products to the rapidly growing optical media product marketplace at a faster rate," said Yoshihide Fujii, president and CEO of the digital media network company at Toshiba.