Rory Cellan-Jones

1. Dialogue of the deaf?

   They are two tribes with power over all of our lives - but politicians and internet companies just don't speak the same language.

   That's become clear as I've spoken to some of those who'll be involved in Tuesday's meeting, called by the Culture Secretary Maria Miller to discuss what can be done to combat harmful content on the internet (see my previous blog here).

   Politicians from across the political spectrum accuse the internet companies of turning a blind eye to the issue. "Stop making excuses," the prime minister has said. "Enough is enough," said a spokeswoman for the culture secretary.

   Meanwhile, the web firms accuse the politicians of woeful ignorance about how the internet works and what constitutes a practical response to dealing with harmful content. "You just get kneejerk reactions which don't produce the outcomes they want," one executive at an internet service provider (ISP) tells me.

   "A dialogue of the deaf" is how Helen Goodman puts it. She's Labour's spokeswoman on this issue - and although she's critical of the government for not acting more quickly, she too is adamant that the internet industry just isn't doing its bit.

   Labour's policy now is that ISPs should provide a safe search filter for all their customers, new and old, and should contact them to ensure they make an active choice as to whether it is switched on or off.

   And she makes clear her impatience with the ISPs: "They started off by saying that you can't have filters. Then Dido Harding at TalkTalk showed you can. Then they say you can't make people switch it on."

   But the internet companies for their part are angry that what they see as separate issues - illegal child abuse images and children's access to harmful material - are being conflated. "We've been summoned in rather offensive terms," one executive tells me, referring to the culture secretary's invitation.

   He points out that one of the main weapons in the battle against online child abuse, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), was set up and funded by the industry, not the government, to produce a blacklist of offending sites. And while there's pressure on the donors to provide more resources to the IWF, they ask whether the government is playing its part.

   "The real problem is the producers and users of child abuse material," says an ISP executive. "The best organisation for combating that is CEOP (the Child Exploitation Online Protection Centre) and its budget is being cut."

   A call to CEOP proves this is indeed the case - its budget is down 10% to £6.062m this year, part of the ongoing programme of economies in Home Office spending. That £6m million also has to cover areas like the fight against child trafficking - so it's not clear how much is being spent tracking down the people who commit child abuse by putting these images online.

   Still, however cross the internet firms may be about the way they've been painted, the pressure seems to be working. BT has agreed to put up a warning notice rather than a simple error message when customers try to access child abuse images - something the IWF has been advocating for some time. And Google is investing in technology to eradicate images and track down abusers.

   The two sides remain mutually suspicious - but both know they are under pressure from parents and the media to act on this issue. An hour and a half around a table in Whitehall is unlikely to provide the answers - but don't bet against some vaguely worded agreement to use all their efforts to make the internet a safer place for everyone.

   If, that is, the two sides can understand what each other is saying.

2. Founders Forum - betting on our tech future

   If you're the sort of person who worries about shadowy organisations with designs on world domination, then a hotel just off the M25 near Watford has been the place to watch in recent weeks.

   The Grove has been the setting for the Bilderberg Conference and Google Zeitgeist, but the conspiracy theorists should have hung around for this week's gathering of the Founders Forum.

   For this annual get-together of tech millionaires from Britain and beyond may well outdo any of them as the place to see where power and money come together. Here you can bump into Richard Branson, Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom and teenage tycoon Nick d'Aloisio in one corner, and former Foreign Secretary David Miliband and current EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes in another.

   Then there is a sprinkling of celebrities, from the musicians Peter Gabriel and Nick Yates, to the Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher. And the night before the meeting at the Grove, the whole crowd had been invited round the M25 to Windsor Castle for a grand dinner hosted by the Duke of York.

   The organisation started by lastminute.com founder Brent Hoberman and technology financier Jonny Goodwin is pretty transparent in its aims; to make its members even richer by putting them in touch with new ideas and new businesses they might invest in. This year, though, there was also a message about philanthropy, with the launch of Founders Forum for Good.

   So the annual beauty parade of "rising stars", where young firms get to make an elevator pitch in front of potential investors, also featured a number of social enterprises. A good opportunity, then, for a journalist to spot what's coming down the track. Here are a few businesses that caught my eye:

   Flexible smart screens have been a long time coming. The Cambridge firm Plastic Logic has great technology but has struggled to bring it to market. Now, this collaboration with Canada's Queen's University seems promising. The Papertab demo showed a screen that you could use like a piece of paper - bend it, fold it and put it in your pocket. The idea is that they'll be so cheap you could have a number of them spread across your desk instead of opening separate windows on your computer. A great concept but still to be proven in the market.

   With a headset picking up signals from his brain, a man with a look of deep concentration makes a toy helicopter take off and hover for a few moments before falling back to earth. The Puzzlebox demo looked futuristic but the company says the technology employed has been used to help patients suffering from locked-in syndrome or other conditions for some years. Now it is being commercialised and marketed as an educational tool to promote concentration in the classroom.

   The use of all kinds of sensors to provide us with a mass of data about the way we live is a hot trend and, in the event's demo room, Cubesensors was attracting a lot of attention. This Slovenian business makes smart little cubes that measure everything about your indoor environment - temperature, air quality, noise - and stream that data to the cloud so that you can view it anywhere. Why would you want to do that? I'm not sure, but the business is taking off. They've sold out of cubes for now.

   Sensors are also promising to transform medicine and the crowd at The Grove enthused over a demo by one hot company in this sector, Proteus. It makes an ingestible sensor the size of of a grain of sand. You swallow it, your stomach fluids activate it, and signals are picked up by a patch you wear on your arm. "Awesome I can't believe the potential," tweeted one Founder. "Inspiring," said another.

   But it was a social, not-for-profit enterprise that really got the room buzzing. Samasource takes the idea of outsourcing data processing and gives it a twist. Women living in poverty in the developing world are given rapid training and then set to work on simple data tasks. Microwork is how it's described, or "a small, computer-based task taken from a larger data project. " The big technology firms who are the customers pay a bit more than they would to a commercial outsourcing operation but, says Samasource's founder Leila Janah, "they are getting higher quality work and the social impact is the icing on the cake".

   The people who come to the Founders' Forum have already made successful bets on what the future will look like. Now some of their money is likely to be heading in the direction of the firms that impressed them at The Grove.

3. Obama defends mass surveillance

   What this highlights is the way we now entrust our data and our privacy almost entirely to American companies, storing it in their "clouds" - vast data centres located in the US.

4. US spy chief defends surveillance

   What this highlights is the way we now entrust our data and our privacy almost entirely to American companies, storing it in their "clouds" - vast data centres located in the US.

5. Web privacy - outsourced to the US and China?

   Overnight, the Guardian and the Washington Post have made startling claims about the extent of the US government's surveillance of web communications.

   They allege that under a programme called PRISM the intelligence agencies have direct access to the servers of the biggest web firms, including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Skype and Apple.

   Now it must be said that all of the firms have denied any knowledge of this programme, insisting they only hand over data when they receive a subpoena relating to named individuals, rather than offering blanket access.

   Facebook, for instance, says it does not provide access to any government organisations, and any requests for information from law-enforcement bodies are dealt with on an individual basis in accordance with the law.

   But, unlike yesterday's story about the blanket surveillance of American Verizon customers, these latest revelations will raise concerns outside the US. James Clapper, the US intelligence chief, has sought to reassure the public by saying the web-monitoring operation only targets "non-US persons".

   Fear the cyber enemy within or without?

   Not much to worry about then, unless you happen to be a citizen of any other country. And then it only matters if you happen to use the services of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube or Apple. Which means just about everyone who has an online presence.

   What this highlights is the way we now entrust our data and our privacy almost entirely to American companies, storing it in their "clouds" - vast data centres located in the US. (Skype, which was founded in Europe, is now owned by Microsoft).

   They may be rigorous in their control of that data and our privacy rights - or they may feel obliged to cooperate with their government's demands for greater access. It is hard to know the truth.

   And it is not only the US which now plays a crucial role in overseeing our communications activities. Yesterday, Britain's Intelligence and Security Committee raised concerns about the key role China's Huawei plays in our telecoms infrastructure.

   So our data is with the Americans, while the Chinese control the equipment used to connect our mobile phone calls and broadband.

   Now you may or may not be happy about that. I'm of the view that life is too short to worry about whether the FBI is reading my emails, or scanning my Facebook updates, or China's Red Army is listening to my phone calls.

   But most people will agree that the privacy and security of our data should be a matter of personal choice, over which we have at least a degree of control. Now it seems that we have outsourced that control to the US and China and unless you want to withdraw from the digital world there is very little you can do about it.