For those who are unaware of Misha Glenny's work, he has built up an increasingly distinguished career reporting on the region of Eastern Europe, first as Balkan correspondent for the BBC and then more recently as an independent author (covering extensively the fall of Yugoslavia), freelance speaker and journalist.

His experience of Eastern Europe undergoing post-Socialist transformations in the 1990's enabled him to closely observe some of the key fallout from those rapid and unpredictable socio-political changes, especially the rise of organised crime networks in Russia and former USSR states. This research formed the basis of his 2009 book, McMafia: Seriously Organised Crime, which looked at less well-known and under-studied global crime networks covering everything from Nigerian 419 fraud, the Japanese Yakuza, Eastern European smuggling and global money laundering operations (see his TED talk on this here).

Glenny has now followed this up with Darkmarket, a book-length study of one of the most modern, fast-growing - and, consequently, little understood - forms of organised crime: cybercrime. He spent two years (between 2009 and 2011) conducting a wealth of interviews with key players in a number of high-profile busts related to credit card and bank fraud, centred in particular on three notorious websites Shadowcrew, CarderPlanet, and Darkmarket. Everyone from cyber security experts, police officers (from as far afield as Istanbul, Pittsburgh, and Scunthorpe), fraud victims and, most crucially of all, hackers and carders themselves are included in the research.

All of those interviews have been carefully adapted and compiled into a mazy and fascinating book, that will inform you of all those things you didn't understand about the web - like why spam exists (who sends it, how, and why) to what those ads that invite you to 'earn $$$ while working from home' really mean (in short: using your online bank account to assist in money laundering for credit card fraud). Likewise, the absolute headache that the internet presents to legislators, the judiciary, and many police forces (who are often equally caught out and outmanoeuvred by the fast moving nature of cybercrime) comes through very clearly as one of the key areas of our legal system that requires reform and clarification for such purposes.

As well as meticulous research, the other thing that Glenny does exceptionally well is build human relationships with those involved - including many now-jailed hackers. This, combined with his snappy and effective writing, enables us to see both the online identities of renowned cybercriminals - and their 'real-world' human personalities and characters. Understanding the hacker as a human being (and not only as online or criminal entity) is essential - according to Glenny - if we are to truly get to grips with an issue that could be increasingly central to matters of national and global economic and military security, as well as personal privacy.

It is this aspect of Glenny's book that really elevates it to being more than an account of a few illicit web forums and the police cases surrounding them and instead a fully fledged and perceptive new contribution to thinking about cybercrime - what it is and how and why it exists. As the book makes clear, this type of crime, while often mirroring traditional organised crime networks in many ways, does have one unique element to it - the complete and utter reliance on people with an extreme level of computing ability and intelligence. Unlike most crime, it requires individuals who are at the pinnacle of human ability in a certain field (programming, maths, etc) and is totally reliant on these relatively rare creatures. Getting to the core of who the hacker is, and why he hacks is therefore the central question for those interested in understanding or reducing cybercrime (this is also the core message of his second TED talk).

Anyway, Darkmarket reads like a police/espionage thriller with all the classic elements: double agents, backstabbing, undercover cops, glamorous playboy lifestyles and so on. As befits a book about the web, the chapters are very short (almost like blog posts) and multiple narratives unfold simultaneously, overlapping, and intersecting - sometimes in the virtual world, sometimes the physical. Likewise, as we would expect with a tale of the web, the multiple identities belonging to many of the main characters also often overlap, proliferate (or are appropriated by others) - which can sometimes be confusing as a reader, but only because that is a consequence of the increasing ubiquity of the online world - identity sometimes gets very complicated and as a result we need to update our concepts somewhat for the 21st century.

In short, Darkmarket will make your head spin - both with excitement at learning and discovering something which is a tangential aspect of everyone's (virtual) reality and with confusion at the sheer complications that this creates for law enforcement and legislators. As I said earlier, Glenny's book is that very rare thing: a study of an important and complex, but potentially dry, subject - that is executed with such skill that it is never anything but thrilling, engaging and informative.

(N.B. Q1 2012, perhaps confusingly, refers to sales and revenue for the 14-week period ending December 31st 2011. The naming refers to when the results are published, i.e. early 2012 - and not the period of economic activity itself - although fiscal years do vary from country to country so this might not hold true for all the examples below - I've indicated where there's a difference).

1. Apple

The obvious starting place since their results have been the most discussed of the lot. In short: scarily good figures, record-breaking in fact. $46.33 billion in revenue ($13.06 billion of which was profit). Share prices have soared yet again and, by way of contextualisation, there's a good point over at Techcrunch: only 3 companies have ever achieved figures like this before and they were all oil companies. (Unsurprisingly, US mobile network provider and iPhone carrier AT&T also posted a decent quarter with revenues up 3.6% to $1.1 billion).

2. Google

Basically share price falling (from super high to slightly less super high, but remains higher than Apple's) mainly due to the fact that Google missed some targets despite posting more mega profits. Main worry is about the increasing move to mobile and whether Google can fully translate its profit making aspects (search and Youtube) to this arena, despite the fact that Android tablet market share is up to 39% and will probably soon surpass Apple's iOS (which runs on the iPad). 2012 will probably be an interesting year in this respect.

3. Nokia

Mixed bag for the company trying to revive their mobile standing through collaboration with Microsoft with Windows Phone models such as the Lumia devices. Note, Nokia is Finnish so their fiscal year is different - these results are for their Q4 (which is the same period as Apple's Q1). Nokia massively improved on the previous quarter, Q3 2011, but not enough to avoid a significant drop compared with the same quarter in 2010. The Lumia devices are selling well, but apparently this seems to be at the expense of Symbian phones (Nokia's previous mobile OS). The company registered an operating loss of $1.3 billion. The reports also revealed that Microsoft paid Nokia $250 million to adopt Windows Phone - a figure which had previously been kept secret.

4. Nintendo

Very poor results for Nintendo's Q3 (again, same time period but different name as Nintendo use the Japanese fiscal year from April to April). Sales are down 31.2% on the equivalent period the year before but there was a big announcement promising a turn-up of fortunes - the follow up to the Wii, the Wii U, will probably be on sale towards the end of 2012.

5. Netflix

Interesting analysis of Netflix, who recently launched in the UK, over at Techcrunch. Though revenues are at an impressive $847 million for the last quarter, the profit margins of the new streaming service (which is the fast-growing side of Netflix) operates with pretty measly profit margins when compared to the much more lucrative DVD side (which is now shrinking in subscribers).

6. AirBnB

OK, so while they're not a publicly traded company (and don't release detailed financial reports yet), AirBnB did also release some very interesting data. After registering 4 million overnights in the past year, the company will be opening 6 new international offices (Barcelona, Milan, Copenhagen, Moscow and Paris) and looks set to really break the mainstream in 2012.

There we go, a smattering of highlights from the last fiscal quarter (whatever you want to call it).

The frequency with which scandal erupts around a misjudged tweet or an offhand comment, caught on someone's iPhone and uploaded to Youtube, suggests that social media practically entraps people into such costly blunders with its pretty user interfaces and seemingly inconsequential virtual nature - and then the real world mess catches up with you. Last week for example, an English footballer was sacked by his club after posting a homophobic tweet in response to a TV show he was watching. I picked that example at random from my memory, but there were at least three or four others just from last week here in the UK (Ed Miliband, Diane Abbott, Tom Harris, Wojciech Szczesny etc).

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that we know better than ever what people are thinking - perhaps even to a detrimental degree - wherein thoughtless comments which people might not otherwise say in the company of others, get instantly shared with thousands. I'm not, however, here to debate the philosophical implications of all this. Instead, I'd just like to give a quick example where this insight into public figures' real thoughts can be quite illuminating.

Rupert Murdoch has recently joined twitter and has been using the service to share his views on SOPA (which he supports fully) and piracy (which he doesn't). His recent comments have now been excellently 'storified' by journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis, who breaks down Murdoch's rants against Google and Barack Obama (in the wake of today's setbacks for SOPA) and illustrates the fundamental problem facing Murdoch in the internet age: he doesn't understand the web.

Ok, so this is hardly news (there was the small matter of Murdoch's News Corp. running Myspace, then the world's most successful social network, into the ground) but nonetheless, since usually his personal views reach us in a highly mediated form via his spokespeople, his media outlets and his press officers, we've never really had as direct evidence of Murdoch's web views as we have now.

The point is that, while we should be wary of reading too much into 140 character tweets, what is clear is that Murdoch personally does not display a huge degree of enthusiasm for the innovation that publishing industries are being forced into by the web and would prefer to merely port existing (but increasingly outdated models) over to the web - and protect them with prohibitive legislature.

Look at those tweets and ask yourself - would you invest in the man who wrote them if he came to you asking for funds for his web start-up business? Does he seem like someone who is gonna do something clever or new online?

The answer probably would be no. Murdoch doesn't need your money anyway (he has plenty of it already in all likelihood), but what his recent tweets illustrate, for me at least, is that he is involved with the web purely out of necessity and hasn't developed a massively sophisticated view of how the internet works. If I wanted some creative ideas and fresh views on the online publishing landscape for example, I probably wouldn't call him.

Who, for example, are the Concerned Women of America - and why do they support SOPA so much? What about the mysterious Centre for Individual Freedom? Americans for Tax Reform? Let Freedom Ring?

Well, in case you hadn't guessed from the names of these organisations, they're all US right-wing pressure groups and their presence on the SOPA list of supporters worries me. It worries me because I'm deeply suspicious of why they would invest such extensive lobbying energy supporting SOPA if all they cared about was internet piracy. Movie studios and record labels have obviously vested financial interests in the internet piracy debate and thus it is obvious why they might spend time and (lots of) money supporting anything which might even possibly curb piracy, at least in the US.

Why on earth do these right-wing pressure groups care so much about SOPA? This is the question that worries me in relation to the anti-democratic threat of SOPA (covered in my previous post). In short, I don't have any answers as to why these groups have chosen to get involved with SOPA, but I will provide a list of those signatories that I consider most alarming, and why:

• American Bankers' Association - Powerful lobby group for the financial services industry, representing many of the largest US banks. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of how the 2008 financial crisis came about should be deeply suspicious of any effort by finance lobbyists to influence US legislature...
• Americans for Tax Reform - Pressure group who demand economic de-regulation and flat, low, tax rates (so that basically a millionaire pays the same rate as janitor). In other words, people who share the same ideological position as the ABA above, advocating the interests of the financial services industry at the expense of regulation and transparency.
• Centre for Individual Freedom - This organisation claims to be non-partisan, which seems slightly incongruous with the incessant negative coverage of Democratic President Barack Obama, which is obviously anything but neutral or balanced (click over to get a flavour for yourself - my favourite is where they quote an anonymous tweet about Obama's 'corrupt style of governing' - a great way to circumvent the legal obligation to substantiate your stories).
• Concerned Women of America - Another openly right-wing organisation with various shocking statements to its name. My favourite is their defence of Pastor Scott Lively as a man who 'speaks the truth'. Lively is the co-author of a book which claims that Nazism's extremist excesses were actually caused by homosexuals.
• Let Freedom Ring - Another right wing pressure group which advances the level of ignorance on various issues (especially economic ones - in which 'Growth' and Government 'Spending' are shown to be diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive, and George Bush is hailed as an economically successful president, despite presiding over the reckless build-up to, and financial crisis of 2008. Incidentally, Barack Obama, is blamed for the crisis by virtue because he presides over the fall-out).

Anyway, I'll leave it there - I could have gone into more detail with almost all of the organisations above, but there's little need since a quick glance over at their websites will quickly reveal to you their ideological positions. I'll finish on a simple question - why do these right-wing groups, who between them combine traditional American religious conservatism (anti-abortion, anti-gay etc) with extreme economic neo-liberalism (you know, the exact reason why we've had yet another economic crisis - leaving millions of people without homes, jobs, or savings), want to support SOPA so much? Is it because they have suddenly become crusaders for copyright and intellectual property, and decided to expend time and energy fighting to protect it? Or could there be other ways in which SOPA might be desirable for them?

Foodsplore helps users to discover great new restaurants and cafes by combining location based services with social networking. You can see where your friends are eating and what they thought of the food, service, ambience and everything else thanks to Foodsplore's community feedback features. And, with the aid of our new iPhone app (Android and Blackberry versions coming soon), finding a great snack or meal while out and about has never been easier.

Simply fire up the app, see what's available in your area and what your friends (and other users) have to say about it. Or, if instead you're just keen to discover something new to tingle your tastebuds, Foodsplore also helps you find places you'll love in advance - so no more finding out the hard way that a place isn't for you (paying through the nose for a meal you didn't enjoy, having a nice occasion ruined by below-par service, or whatever else).

As well as location based searching, you can also find new eating-out options by food type, deals, or glance at the social calendar feature which shows you where your friends are planning to try in the next month. As well as tips, users can share their experiences with photos and location-based check-ins, all of which are aggregated in a 'Splat' score - which gives you information as to how detailed and successful someone's recommendations are. In short, whether you're a foodie looking to explore new experiences or simply need somewhere decent for lunch in an unfamiliar town, Foodsplore is for you.

The Foodsplore team will head to SXSW Interactive for the 5-day conference in March 2012, along with 33 other hand-picked UK digital start-ups as part of the UK Trade and Investment mission. Here at Etondigital we're very excited for Zainab and Foodsplore and will have more coverage of the conference when it comes around in eight weeks. In the meantime, head over to Foodsplore.com, or check out the iPhone app in the Apple app store, to find out more right now. Sign up with an email address, or simply log in with facebook, and get exploring!

The problem with the bills, as most opponents see it, generally hinges on two points:

• that draconian web censorship powers are dangerous and should not be granted lightly, since they could be abused to harm democratic opposition and activity
• that the bill will inhibit creativity and freedom online (an obvious economic disaster for a country where tech is a major industry)

On the first point of censorship, the issue is that the bill would allow US authorities to shut down a website instantly and indiscriminately, without adequate judicial process. Websites can be shut down even now, but the 'problem' is that this takes too long due to the awkward matter of respecting legal procedures. The proposed measure would essentially give the US government the same powers enjoyed by those authoritarian regimes in China, Iran, and Burma - who all make use of the powers precisely in order to control information flow so as to prevent democratic opposition and free speech.

What is interesting here is that, even though this is potentially against the US constitution (first amendment on free speech), this aspect hasn't really filtered through to the American public to the extent that they oppose the bill enough to kill it - which is usually what happens when a bill is seen to interfere with the constitution - whether it actually does or not. (Try tightening gun ownership laws for example...) Nobody is denying that piracy contravenes or undermines many essential laws - but the issue here is whether or not SOPA, in attempting to tackle the problem, might create another - arguably more worrying - one.

On the more tech side of things, since the bill proposes allowing interference with the web's DNS (Domain Name System) - which converts url addresses into machine-readable code - engineers fear that this risk of blanket censorship could stifle innovation massively. This would happen because the DNS would be used to remove an entire domain from search engines results (like wordpress.com for example) even if there was only a few actual posts or blogs which contravened piracy law. The implications for social media would be massive...

The bottom line is that by raising the stakes to such an absolute level, web companies and start-ups would have to expend huge energy in making sure SOPA rules were not breached, since the economic consequences would be huge for them in such a case. Imagine for example I start a group on Facebook for sharing copyrighted material of some sort (illegal NFL highlights or whatever). Facebook would eventually close my group - but maybe not before I'd shared the video clips with a few other users. Now, if 'content producers' are unhappy with Facebook's efficacy in dealing with this would they appeal to SOPA to get facebook.com removed from the DNS? What would the US economy's net gain/loss be from such an episode?

All that is even before we get to the question of whether or not SOPA would actually tackle piracy effectively? Couldn't offending websites just re-register and move to a different domain within hours of being taken down? Also, wouldn't this merely tackle a superficial aspect of piracy rather than going to the core of the problem? If technologies and the web change over the next couple of years, isn't it highly likely that piracy will look different and so need a whole new raft of laws again? Banning Napster didn't solve the problem, neither did getting rid of The Pirate Bay - so perhaps it's a bit naive to think that yet another ban will do the trick?

So, things are clearly far from straightforward. As an excellent Guardian piece on this issue has pointed out, new technology should really be creatively embraced by content industries since in the past they have always found ways to profit from such developments (cassette, VHS, DVD, etc) albeit the change was one they were partially forced into. After all, a limited ban will hardly change the fact that the economics of certain industries have changed irrevocably over recent decades.

Film industries were all too happy for innovation to be encouraged when it brought them better technology to make money (improved recording equipment, computers with special effects etc) but have decided that 'bad' technology that compromises their older business models should be in some way banned rather than responded to with new and innovative revenue models. iTunes and Spotify are just two examples of viable and extremely lucrative ventures for getting users to pay for music in a digital age, and I doubt that they will be the last ones we ever see.

Luckily, opposition to SOPA is building and there are various ways you can register your opposition. For non-US residents, the question is whether  or not this matters elsewhere. In my opinion, it's not hard to see that such an act would be a disaster for other countries as well, both in the scenario where they would then also be forced to adopt a similar law and where they aren't. In the former case, we end up with the law because domestic content industries demand it in order to protect themselves against the now even more powerful US studios/labels, while in the latter situation, our industry is undermined financially because US studios represent a sounder investment (with film production for example), thus weakening non US studios access to funds for example.

I won't pretend to have a solution to a problem which has persisted for almost as long as the internet has. I will however venture that since the entire problem only exists because technology has changed the economic behaviour of a certain good ('content') the solution will need to be a little more creative and innovative than simply stomping around trying to ban anything that looks like an internet pirate might have touched it. Especially, when such bans might also have serious implications for the valuable tech sector as a whole and perhaps even democratic rights to free speech.

There's already been a few notable interviews and keynotes worth mentioning; from Steve Ballmer's curious interview (summary: slow and steady wins the race, i.e. Microsoft is doing just fine) to Samsung's jam-packed forthcoming product line which will probably be a hard act to follow for the other tech players. Sony's press conference is live at the moment however, so we'll soon know what they have in store also.

Anyway, I'm sure there'll be plenty of interesting talking points cropping up over the next few days so I won't try to guess too much in advance right now - though if I were pushed to make one prediction it would be that we'll see fewer tablets this year as some manufacturers have decided to cut their losses on this front and simply accept that their half-hearted iPad rip-offs were no good in the first place. This doesn't mean that we won't see any tablets, just that I expect we'll only see ones with at least a semblance of a USP, rather than identikit iPad clones on every companies' display stand. (I'd also venture that the main interest with regard to new tablets will be in the form of lower-end devices with sub $100 price tags).

For the majority of us who are not able to go to CES in person, there's plenty of decent coverage online to keep you in the loop. Here's some highlights so far over at Guardian tech, while the other usual players (Engadget and Techcrunch especially) are all as reliable as ever in covering the event.

Don't worry though, the feature is not compulsory so your profile will still look the same as it did when you last left it. At the moment, if you wish to enable timeline you need to head over to the intro page and click 'get timeline'. This will then take you to a preview of your timeline profile which is only visible to you for the first 7 days (while you work out what the hell is going on) before then going live to everyone else. Alternatively, if you're already happy with how things look, you can click the 'publish now' button and send it live immediately. (Anyone struggling with it should check out this little screenshot-featuring guide).

Moreover, there's also the mobile version to contend with which is accessible for Android 1.8.1. users and also through the mobile HTML5 facebook site. It's almost the same as the 'normal' version except that there's no activity log (and hence no privacy control for posts etc). For mobile users keen to get a little intro, I recommend this handy guide over at Techcrunch.

Personally, my initial thoughts on timeline are these:

1. It's a huge great big mess (or at least it is when you first enable it). The main problem is this two-column design which feels awkward to me at least, although maybe I'll get used to it. I'm sure once you take the time to edit things and decide what you want displayed it'll all look much better. Right now though I'll just say exactly what I'm thinking - I haven't seen such a messy, 'scroll-y' and chaotic social networking profile since the old days of Myspace custom profile editors...

2. The Activity Log is really quite good for giving you an accurate overview of how you actually use facebook (which the old profile didn't do very well). Plus, it's also quite good for managing your facebook use in terms of privacy since you can easily set the controls for who sees what in terms of your activity. That's actually a first for facebook - making privacy controls easier to understand and use - so well done for that.

3. Did I mention it was scroll-y? It really is quite scroll-y... and not in a good way.

4. With the whole concept of timeline, Facebook might actually get users to commit even more info to their profiles - namely stuff from their pre-facebook days. Consider it an invitation to 'back-fill' into facebook all the stuff you did before the network was around. This could obviously work out very well for the network and their potential financial profits from delivering advertising etc.

Anyway good luck with it. I'll leave it there for now since I'm sure everyone is too busy fiddling around with it to read too much now. Let me know what you think once you've had a little gander at it.

After a couple of days it was proving so successful in driving fan engagement that the team's owners asked the fan to hand over the account in return for courtside season tickets. Then they reconsidered - courtside season tickets and a job as social media manager for the team.

Now that's not a bad return considering the total time expended by the creative fan totalled only a few hours and cost him him nothing financially. And it's not only social media roles that get filled with the aid of social media activities. It's all kinds of roles...

Since 89% of employers claim to use social media in their recruitment efforts (up by 6% on last year) it is increasingly essential to have an 'employer-friendly' social media presence if you're looking for work.

The there's the concept of the 'twesume' - the 140 character twitter-based resume. There's a great post over at Mashable giving tips on how to maximise the potential of this idea - something which might only take 10 minutes to do but could be key in finding leads on the kind of jobs that would suit you.

Finally, in this little round-up of social media based job hunting tips and resources, there's some very handy analytics from Linked-In doing the rounds at the moment which reveal the most over-used words that users describe themselves with on their profiles (in English-speaking countries 'creative' came top of the list for example).

This can give you a good idea of how much your profile and CV actually stands out from the crowd (without having to stalk 100 other users to get an impression) and also an idea of what employers are looking for - i.e. what works.

Anyway, I'll leave it there for now but will return to this subject at regular intervals in the future as it becomes an increasingly prominent manner in which social media is shaping the world of work, even for those who don't work anywhere near the IT sector. Plus, in these cash-strapped and job-anxious times it's probably useful to have all the help we can get...

Overall there is something disconcerting about looking at the picture in that it's hard to connect the two people in question (the one in the photo and the one created in your mind by all their later success and fame) and really believe that they are indeed the same person.

Or perhaps it's like seeing a baby photo of someone like Cl. Gaddafi or George Bush (either, take your pick) - men who have so much blood on their hands, to the point where sometimes it's hard to remember that they once too were also children. Well, this is a bit like that. A bit.

Basically, this lengthy pre-amble is all geared towards sending you off to look at a Mashable gallery of the launch versions of the sites which now dominate the web (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon etc).

It's an interesting and quite wierd experience (not only for the reasons above) because it reminds me of the fact that not so very long ago these absolute tech giants were just young start-ups or student projects, with super limited functionality and sometimes pretty shoddy UIs (although in those web 1.0 days this was less of a sin than it is today).

You are also reminded of the fact that there is little in those original projects that guaranteed they would become the successes they are today - the journey from there to here was not prefigured by some Eureka invention but instead required constant work and sound decision making (not that they've never made mistakes).

Anyway, the final thought is one that returns a little to the rambling opening paragraphs of this post. The reason the launch-versions seem so odd to look at (particulalry twitter and Amazon) is down to the fact that we're so used to seeing them in their succesful later form almost every day that we probably forget how instantly recognisable their UIs and brand logos are to us.

The odder the launch versions, with their (generally) lumpy ugly UIs, look to you - probably the more ingrained is your association of Google with the white screen, search box and multi-colour logo - or Facebook with the blue and white colour combo and that lower case font... Soon you might realise that you spend longer staring at that UI than your parents' or childrens' faces...

(N.B. That last bit isn't meant to sound dystopian or anything, it's just an observation).