I’m not in San Francisco for the event, partly because I can’t afford the plane ticket but mainly because there’s more chance of me getting a free ticket to Hell than a visa to the United States. Still, I’ve been keeping in touch with the Macworld floor and speaking to friends and colleagues, students alike, about what they expect out of the event - and out of Apple.

I spoke to Beau Giles, a friend of mine living studying in Australia. I asked him what he wanted out of the event:

“Web based versions of iWork which sync with MobileMe would be a great advantage. I’d be able to work on things from everywhere, and always have my MacBook in sync with the cloud; I could have local copies of work, sync them with the cloud, then use the cloud based versions of iWork on other computers. What would be even better is not just Macs, but PCs too.”

As both a student and a Mac user, I asked him about other opportunties Apple could jump into, which other companies have already done:

“Well, even mobile versions of iWork for the iPhone and other mobile devices would be really useful. I could tap out some work on the iPhone, and arrive home to have it already synced and ready to go on the Mac.”

Windows 7 beta is only around the corner, expected in the next few days, the next version of Mac OS X, “Snow Leopard” is slated for a mid-summer release. I asked him about “Snow Leopard”:

“Any performance improvements are obviously good improvements, and I’m sure everyone would love to see these. Microsoft Exchange integration will be a big plus - no longer forced to use Microsoft software, with Exchange being integrated into the core apps (the Mail application, iCal, Address Book).”

I thankfully have many friends who use Apple products; mainly the iPod, but for those who use the Mac, I wanted to get a bit of balance. I spoke to my good friend Elliot Harrison, who has written on iGeneration before:

“Just off the top of my head, online storage applications like MobileMe free for students. It would mitigate the costs of expensive backup storage drives and provide students with a ’safe’ place to backup work onto. Instead of paying £60 (around $100) a year, maybe if a person buys a Mac as a student, to throw that in for free.”

In a hilarious twist (for me, anyway), he said afterwards:

Elliot: For f**k’s sake get rid of the Mac mini… it’s well outdated.
Zack: Apparently they’ll be bringing it back.
Elliot: Urgh, well as long as it’s updated I don’t care. 1.8Ghz of processing power can barely run a toaster nowadays.

There is plenty going on, and more sources you can shake a stick at to keep up to date. I’ll write again once the expo is over to see whether students, and those at college and university, have anything to look forward to.

If you had 5 minutes with Steve Jobs, what would you ask for? Share and share alike.

I make it my New Year’s resolution is to halve, at least, the amount of technology on my desk, to make me a faster, more efficient worker. For example, this is my desk as it is now.

(Click for a larger version of this over-cluttered mess, of which I call a “workspace”…)

As you’ll see, I’ve got myself a laptop, a keyboard and mouse (obviously), a monitor, and a digital frame with a picture of me looking out of my office window. I also have my iPod nano and a dock, a remote control for the dock, desktop speakers, my Nokia E61 in a dock, a LiveSide sticker and a bunch of Windows Live Messenger branded Post-it notes that I stole from the Microsoft UK office.

It’s ridiculous, and it drives me mad. I can barely write essays with the amount of crap I’ve got to handle.

I have watched in the last week a number of my colleagues doing strange and peculiar things as their resolutions tick over. I’ve joined my colleague Jennifer Leggio in trying to curb all emails to “Twitter or less”, but will try and keep away from Jason Perlow’s “prehistoric computing adventure”.

The challenge

Major brownie points go to anyone who can take photos of their desk, upload to ImageShack or their SkyDrive, and post the URL in the comments below. Show your shame people; take heed, de-crap your desk today!

At university, email can and usually are absolutely everything. Not having access to it can shun those who involve themselves in societies, miss out on information relating to essays being handed in, as well as all kinds of email of vital importance.

But the inbox size can be little to none, at best. Students at the University of Kent get a measly 20MB, which when I use to try and get in touch with people, soon mounts up. Considering I use it to communicate with people in relation to ZDNet, it mounts up further. But for 20,000 people who have email accounts with the university, This equates to only 400GB used for email. Surely we should be able to get a little more storage, or an extra server, considering we’re one of the main backbones of the web in the UK?

This will run through some of the options you have, the advantages and disadvantages; looking at online email forwarding, taking your email to the desktop or limiting your ability to reply all the time by sending it to your mobile. Trust me, when you have only a number keypad, it makes life difficult when writing long emails.

Windows Live Hotmail

Because I used to work there, for some reason I get the advertisements turned off and the premium services enabled. I presume there’s a connection as I can’t think why else. It shall not, however, make me biased towards the service, but some forwarding/receiving services may require a Hotmail Plus subscription to get full services.

The new wave of Hotmail has always been about simplicity, keeping things refined and to the point, concise if you will. The main beauty of Hotmail is being able to link your accounts, so there’s no more logging in and out; merely switching from one account to the other. If you have, say, a university email and a Hotmail account, switching between the two is a piece of cake.

But that’s not why we’re here. Hotmail provides the forwarding, as well as receiving of email from another service provider. To enable POP access, Hotmail Plus is required, but other than that you can still forward to other Hotmail accounts. It works for some, but for many it won’t be quite enough.

It has “minimal” features for what it looks like; you mainly see white space if you have it on the settings which I have,

Hotmail definitely works well if you use Hotmail to access your university email, provided you can forward from your initial server (usually in the options). Other than that, getting your Hotmail to your university email account will be a little more difficult, and definitely more costly.

Then again, if you can work out how, there should be a way to activate your university email address as a Windows Live ID, but it’ll be restricted by the university, and probably one hell of a pain in the arse to get it sorted anyway.

Google Gmail

Gmail has been a best friend to millions of people worldwide. The slightly complicated interface isn’t necessarily to my taste, but with the vast and ever increasing storage capacity offered, it certainly makes up for.

The Gmail service allows you to be very dynamic in how you handle your email. You can “take control” of another email account by forwarding everything through to Gmail. With the wide variety of themes, it’s very customisable, options and integration it has with other Google services, G-addicts will find this to be a very strong solution.

Some email accounts only allow web access, but most if not all will allow forwarding. With this, you can use Google as a proxy service, by bouncing email from your original client through to Google, and enabling IMAP or POP to allow desktop access. Getting the settings and lines of communications first set can be a pain, but once you have the settings in place, you can use anything from Thunderbird to Nokia Email.

On your mobile device

Most people have a mobile device nowadays, and if you don’t it’ll be most likely down to Megan’s Law. Students aren’t always fixed to their computers, as we’re busy with social lives and binge drinking (or as they called it 20 years ago, “drinking”…), having email on your phone can be vital.

I’ve discussed mobile devices and email before, and will continue to bring you some interesting thoughts in the coming weeks about the Blackberry especially. With Nokia still claiming the mobile marketshare according to Forrester Research, the iPhone still popular and the Blackberry on the rise, email on your mobile device is getting easier and easier.

Many university accounts don’t work with mobile devices properly; this isn’t in detriment to the universities as such, but they can’t always afford Exchange Server. Again with Hotmail and Gmail, as well as other services such as Mail2Web, you can access email as you go. Using the same settings as mentioned above, you can access Hotmail and Gmail from the mobile portals (http://m.live.com for Hotmail; http://m.google.com/mail for Gmail).

You may as well forget BlackBerry Enterprise Services because there’s almost no doubt your university won’t support it. If you can get BlackBerry Internet Services to work, then you deserve a knighthood for your efforts in progressing the human race. I can’t get it working for the life of me.

iPhone’s work by entering in the settings for your desktop client, and for those with Nokia phones can use Nokia Email. Not only does it discover your settings for you automatically, it’s provided free for those using a Series 60 phone, and allows full access to almost any university email account when roaming around.

I guess ultimately, it depends on how productive you are and which best works for you. It’ll be interesting to see how people respond, so feel free to leave a comment.

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This came in the form of BitLocker, a hardware enabled solution which allows only you access to your entire computer. If your computer is stolen, the perpetrator will not be able to decrypt the contents, as the encryption key is just as secure, if not more secure than the SSL sequence.

However, getting the damn thing working has been a nightmare for as many Google searches of people I can find. Whilst I may not be able to give a sound solution to the problem, at least Windows 7 is making headway with a portable encryption solution. For those interested in BitLocker-to-Go, which enables easy encryption of flash and portable drives in Windows 7, skip straight to page 4.

First things first

If you have a new-ish Intel processor, great! You’ve probably got a TPM chip. If you’ve got an AMD processor, the chances are you don’t.

You’re also meant to do this before you get your files, folders, settings and applications sorted. If you haven’t, you will need to re-partition your hard drives and this is hardly user friendly.

Just to screw you over even more, BitLocker is only available on Windows Vista Ultimate and Enterprise editions, the two editions which aren’t on DreamSpark or MSDNAA. However, if you are using Windows Server 2008 like I’ve previously suggested, bingo, you can use BitLocker. It just seems to Microsoft that home users aren’t as important as the rest of us…

In case of a massive boot failure, such as “BOOTMGR is missing” which I unfortunately suffered, these can be fixed with these two handy links. Print them out so you’ve got them offline, and keep your Vista DVD to hand just in case.

And finally, this is at your own risk. Backup everything first, because knowing your luck, if it could go wrong, it absolutely 100% will go wrong.

Getting the messy big bit out of the way –>

While this video may not directly involve or to do with students, it’s an interesting delivery style which should be noted for those inevitable presentations we’ll have to give. Also, some of the content about the next generation of identity; how we use it, in what forms, online and offline, is certainly for students. After all, we are the next generation of IT users - this is what we need to look out for.

Update: I’m sorry, I misspelt the title and have changed it. A little too late for Google, though.

Dr. Vince Miller, lecturer in sociology, spoke to me about journalism and blogging. He teaches where I study, at the University of Kent, researching concepts of social networking, blogging and new-age media. Of all the people I could have spoken to, I trust his knowledge as one of the most influential thinkers in his field.

His latest journal article is available online to those with Athens, Shibboleth, SAGE or e-journal access, and for those without, an abstract of the text can be found here.

Citizen journalism hit the news when it was used against China to rebel against the strict regime of government. What is the difference between “blogging activist” and “citizen journalist”?

Well, I think that citizen journalism is a much broader topic of ‘non-professionals’ engaging in information collection, distribution and dissemination. This includes, for example, the Indy media movement and I suppose really could have even included aspects of ‘community’ media or journalism (as long as it was not done by professionals). I guess that ‘blogging activism’ would be one example of citizen journalism, but the two are not synonymous. Use of traditional websites, e-mail, chat rooms and forums could be seen as forms of citizen journalism outside blogging as well.

With hundreds of blogging websites available, can blogging and online journalism be the death of the good old fashioned newspaper journalism? 

A couple of years ago, Andrew Keen wrote a book called ‘The Cult of the Amateur’, in which he argued that the user-generated content of the internet, through things like blogging, YouTube and the like, were having a destructive influence on our culture by undermining what is true and false, undermining any notions of quality (or quality control), and blurring distinctions between fact, fiction, logic and opinion, the noteworthy and the banal.

I think to a certain extent he has a point. But it is hard to make that point without sounding elitist or like some sort of cultural conservative. But I seem to remember Jack White of the White Stripes, making a similar point once in an interview, when he was talking about the difference between music journalist reviewing albums (to use and old fashioned term), versus bloggers reviewing albums. He said that he found amateur reviews annoying because most of them had very little overall knowledge of music, and therefore could only really state their opinion within the narrow contexts of their tastes (for example ‘the new White Stripes album does not rock as hard as the last one’). At least with a music journalist, you can assume that he/she has a large music collection, and some overall sense of where music has come from, and where it is going.

So it is more of an ‘informed’ opinion than some 15 year old kid writing on a blog. To your question, I suppose it is not necessarily the ‘death’ of old-fashioned journalism, but perhaps a transformation in three ways:

1. A decline in the authority of the journalist as holding a superior or ‘well informed’ position vis-à-vis anyone else.
2. A transformation in terms of where ‘old-fashioned’ journalism gets its stories and information from. A good example of that is the Clinton/Lewinski scandal, which originated from the Drudge Report; at the time a pretty disreputable gossip page.
3. It reflects a fundamental shift from mass media to niche media. Within journalism, this means that instead of everyone being forced to watch a narrow number of news sources for a narrow selection of stories deemed significant. People can now seek out the news that they want to hear, from the sources they want to hear from. This leads to a much more Balkanised public sphere as people seek out what they want to hear, and blogger/journalists increasingly preach to the converted.For example, right wing nationalist bloggers comb the Internet for any stories related to certain ethnic minorities (not always the case, but as a generalisation) and feed them to a specific audience who are deliberately looking to confirm their prejudices. Similarly, anti-EU bloggers will publish any anti-EU story or rumour to support their cause without any desire for verification, explicitly for the purposes of motivating their political audience.

As a side note, strangely from my experiences on the web, I get the feeling that the lack of verification and professional obligation in blogging has further undermined the legitimacy of mainstream media journalists. As now, in my experience, many people who frequent more user-generated sources for news (both left and right leaning) now see mainstream media as untrustworthy and biased, but fail to recognise that in their own sources are similar, if not more so (I suppose because those sources speak to their prejudices more). This, however is my own opinion based on my experiences, and not to be considered a real academic argument…

What, if any, is the difference between a journalist and a blogger? 

A journalist (ideally) has a professional responsibility to verify information, check sources, print ‘facts’ (as best as they can be defined), portray the story from different viewpoints, and at least have a pretence of being ‘objective’ (although objectivity in news is not really a burden in Britain, where biases are obvious and held up for everyone to see). To this end, what journalists write has gone through some sort of peer or editorial review process.

Bloggers, by contrast, have no such professional responsibility or obligation. They can, within certain legal limits, print what they want without any obligation to verify sources or separate fact from opinion. The only obligation they have (if even that), is to maintain their audience. I also think that blogging revolves around a certain intimacy between the writer and audience in a way that is different from mass journalism.

Microblogging has really taken off with services like and including Twitter. If blogging replaces newspaper journalism, can microblogging be another successor, or is quality better than quantity? 

Microblogging is a bit of a different case, I think, and builds much more on this idea of intimacy with the audience and among the audience. Barack Obama certainly used this well on his campaign (I was following him on Twitter). I don’t think that microblogging will be the next step from blogging, but more of an offshoot, and more related to social networking than blogging.

Feel free to post your thoughts, comments, ideas, theories and experience; the more the merrier.

Since becoming a student, my eyes have been wide-opened to the world. Through my research, learning, understanding and general mayhem, I realised my perspective on the world of “students and technology” isn’t in reality what it should be.

We can “want” all we like, but students need to focus on what they “need”. Super-fast Internet speeds aren’t always needed, but having open access to academia in places where freedom is restricted is a necessity.

Faster broadband speeds

Education nowadays relies on the Internet as a major source of academia, journal articles and research. As I’ve previously shown, broadband is essential to some students. Most academic institutions have at least a 1GB line running into the campus, but with the rise of optic cables, we could be seeing faster broadband in the home.

The rise of ADSL2+ which can enable speeds of up to 24Mbps, depending on line quality and distance to the telephone exchange, could open up the floodgates to new ideas, academic research, and on-campus cloud computing which I shall explain shortly.

Restrictions lifted on Chinese academics

There has been mass controversy in regards to Internet democracy and freedom of speech in China; a discussion I don’t particularly want to dive into too much myself. Whilst I can understand why the Chinese government does this, I condone such behaviour.

The “great firewall of China” doesn’t just have cause-and-effect on citizens, but university students, learners and academics. One of my criminology lecturers left China because the work she wanted to conduct simply couldn’t be undertaken in the environment she lived in.

I feel more needs to be done from democratically-developed countries to lift the restrictions imposed on academics - as a first step towards Internet freedom in the region. I know many will agree with my sentiments on this topic.

Windows 7 and multi-touch

Windows 7 will be the first operating system which fully supports multi-touch features. This could well be the revolution we are looking for; high performance machines, and full human-interaction with models on display. Just take a minute to think; a medical student fully examining a 3D model of a body, an engineering student pushing down on a virtual chassis to see the load bearings, or an architecture student brushing a building as if it was a high wind. I have high hopes for

A new theory as to why we’re here

When I first heard of the Large Hadron Collider, I thought it was a cocktail drink… “larghadron colada”… instead, it could hold the key to the Big Bang, and essentially why we are here. Crikey, that would be a bit strange; a cocktail which could end civilisation as we know it, or as we call it, “an ordinary Friday night in Manchester.”

The LHC, if it works, could literally blow open the world of physics as we know it, and revolutionise the way we think about the universe. After the disappointing breakdown shortly after it was first turned on, we can expect the LHC to power up again in the summer.

Cloud computing reliability and stability

The ability to access your files from anywhere and everywhere is no longer a thing of the past. Using mesh technology, linking and connecting your devices together, working from home and the university library becomes a seamless, lossless experience.

With Windows Azure, a highly scalable platform for developing web applications, cloud computing can be brought to the campus, essentially creating a “cloud campus”. There will no more web browsing directories of files, mapping of network drives, VPN or FTP. The power of the mesh shall be realised in 2009, and I hope, as all students should, that universities jump on the mesh bandwagon and create studying a more meshified experience.

Micro-blogging/emailing to rocket

I’m not a huge fan of Twitter, and still don’t see the point. But after reading an article on micro-emailing by my good friend, Jennifer Leggio, it made me think about the power on how “shorter is power”.

University students are busy, busy people. When we’re not struggling to cope with our caffeine overdoses as we scribble down the final words of our essays, or partying like its 1988, we’re emailing and organising our lives. Shorter essays are always harder to write because of the concise nature of what is being written. Having shorter, more information packed into one short space could take off as being “more efficient and more powerful communications”.

We will just have to wait and see. Let me know what you think.

Cut out the XPS nonsense

Microsoft embarked on the XPS file type in Windows 2000 originally, but only really came to light with the release of Windows Internet Explorer 7, where functionality was integrated into the browser. With a standalone XPS viewer in Windows 7, I cannot foresee many people using it. It may be an open XML specification, but the PDF has a long way before it is knocked off the majority market share.

It has potential, and it works well, with many manufacturers taking the specification and using it in their hardware. But to see the XPS as a “PDF killer” is incredibly unlikely, and personally think Microsoft should drop it. Have you ever seen a document provided in an XPS format over a PDF file? I can’t say that I have.

Search sucks

Of all the operating system search engines I’ve used, I still find Windows XP easiest to use. With some interesting “improvements” in Vista which had barely changed from beta to release, this complicated things for me quite a bit. Now in Windows 7, searching for a file has become increasingly difficult. Often when I search, it’s a specific file type or a file size greater than 30MB or so; to de-clutter my hard drive. The size option is still available, but for the life of me I cannot work out how to search by other parameters. Whether the Start menu search has replaced the main functionality of the F3 key, I am still unsure, but I just want a decent search box with plenty of options, please.

Make BitLocker a little bit easier

I have always found BitLocker to be a right royal pain in the backside. You need a compatible chip on your processor otherwise the setup process won’t even begin, and having the compatibility between Windows and the chip is another problem. In theory, BitLocker is a great idea; locking your entire hard drive if it is stolen or misplaced.

In practice, buying a whole set of laptops for your employees, may not even be compatible with the software because of the lack of a trusted-platform module (TPM) chip. There are hacks out there, but I’ve never seen a solution which actually works. Not only that, for those who have their computers already set up, may have difficulty because an extra hard drive partition is needed. Would you really risk your all set up and configured computer for the sake of an extra bit of security? Tempting, but when time is involved, it’s probably going to be “no”.

“BitLocker to Go” works a treat. If only they had left a BitLocker enabled flash drive on that train instead of a wad of top secret documents, they (probably) would have been fine.

Consider the ergonomics of the taskbar 

For decades, Windows users have learned the ways of the taskbar. Think about it; you don’t move your cursor to the Start menu to then click, you simply move your mouse towards the bottom left of your screen. The same with the clock; to access the clock you move your mouse to the bottom left, without even thinking about it. There’s no accuracy involved, there’s even little in terms of thought process.

With the added feature of “Preview Desktop” taking the clock’s place in the bottom-right of the screen, I fear some users may be thrown off guard by it. It’s only a little change, and it can easily be turned off. I cannot see why it can’t be placed to the left of the clock, keeping the taskbar layout the same. Although, with the taskbar changes already in the beta, maybe it is time for a change.

Compatibility woes

Common applications which were not fully supported when Vista first came out was a big step back for Microsoft. While their own brand of products; Windows Live, Office 2007 and the developing applications like Visual Studio worked a treat, many anti-virus companies felt the brunt of the sharp compatibility stick. A few of the programs I use and love do not work in this version of Windows. WLMLite, a portable version of Windows Live Messenger, ideal for those at work who can’t download it, doesn’t work. Nero 9 Essentials won’t even install without spitting the dummy out. Skype works, but only after a handful of warning messages telling me of the incompatibility, and I won’t even start on what iTunes does; suffice to say, “a world-class meltdown”.

Aero Shake and Tourette’s

I have Tourette’s syndrome, as many of you are aware, and it’s the full whack of Tourette’s where you swear, shout, twitch, and generally look a bit of a nutter. When using a computer, my hand twitches and I occasionally smack the mouse onto the table, resulting in a number of mice being destroyed. But when I’m moving windows around my screen, my hand twitches, resulting in all but the active window being minimised; the new feature “Aero Shake”. Now, this is a good feature to have, but at least have an option where we can disable it easily. I’m sick of my windows being minimised without my conscious say-so.

Is there anything I’ve missed?

Update: even with a critical post, I have just discovered something aesthetically brilliant. Holding the shift key as you click on a taskbar icon opens up a new window, but does it in a mini firework show of vibrant colour. I have yet to discover though what this feature is called, or what it is meant to actually do.

With so many intelligent people all in one place, the ultimate in secondary socialisation takes place; learning from others, sharing ideas, challenging constructs and thinking outside the box. And in the rise of social media, there are new ways to connect with others to report on matters of terrorism. But social media can also be to recruit, considering the numbers: just under half of the population of London have joined Facebook’s “London” network, the biggest on the social networking site.

An interesting point made by “the unofficial Facebook blog” points out the dangers of joining extremist groups on the social networking website:

“Think about it like this: If the British government decides to say that joining a Facebook group is the same as joining an extremist group in the real world, it may cause a great deal of people to take a moment of pause when deciding what Facebook groups they join.”

Of course, when my generation of students heads into jobs that require security clearance and vetting, they’ll certainly get pounded for what they have on their Facebook profile. I did. The spread of terror on Facebook not only reaches the end-user but spreads to even the most “prestigious” of university campuses.

In terms of what we use, with the amount of information available on the Internet and with the amount of data held on us as individuals, it wouldn’t surprise me if these were the next targets for the next advanced generation of terrorism. This can apply also to the “vital core services” of our online live; news, stocks and shares, email and even Google.

“Terrorism” is a social construction, created by us and manufactured by the media into being something scary. It’s no longer planes into a building, car bombs in the streets or children with explosive belts around their chests. Terrorism can be confined to the Internet through hacking, manipulation, massive disruption to a place, service or infrastructure. It doesn’t have to be in the “offline world”.

Google can’t viably be vulnerable to a denial-of-service attack, considering the scale and breadth of the back-end services propping it up. However, how would the world cope even if Google was offline for a mere hour? It would cause massive disruption, on a scale we couldn’t comprehend - and why? Because it’s a part of our life, so much so much that we’ve immortalised it as a verb in our languages.

A group, known only as “Anonymous,” is still leading police on a wild goose chase, whilst the world’s intelligence services are chasing their own tails, trying to understand the structure. Anonymous have made the news as an elusive Internet group with no names, no agenda, no leaders and no structure. This group, clever and calling for change, might be deemed “a terrorist organisation”  by some. But others say they succeed where the police fail.

There are deep rooted controversies with Scientology, when Anonymous launched an e-attack on the Church of Scientology website, causing it to shut down for a short while. The group made progress when they ousted an online sexual predator through Internet vigilantism, but also caused severe disruption to an innocent group hosting an epilepsy forum.

The web helped Obama’s government get elected but, as we’re seeing with an increase of attacks on the web, it can also fall a government if enough resources, energy and are put into electronic attacks.

If the flu virus were deliberately dispersed in a crowded place in New York City, it would be considered a “biological terrorist attack.” But when a computer virus hit the Northern Ireland government’s network, it was almost brushed off as if the creator of the virus was “a little scamp.” No, this could have easily been a targeted attack; a terrorist attack. Had this been a virus attack against the U.S. government instead of just a tiny government, and it had spread further, the current president probably would have ordered an “extension of the war on terror”.

It may not be as “simple” as a bunch of students in a dinghy in the Atlantic Ocean with a huge pair of bolt-cutters trying to cut one of the vital infrastructural parts of the Internet. With the wide availability of documents such as “The Anarchist Cookbook”, created by a man of student-age to protest the war in Vietnam, the Internet is being used to help to spread terror through the wires.

For the last year, countries all over the world have been adopting a policy of tackling extremism in universities. While some claim it “risks encouraging universities to treat Muslims with suspicion”, a high proportion of terror-like attacks on university campuses around the world have been non-Islamic - the tragic shootings in the U.S. over the last few years, and the University of Wisconsin bombings in 1970, for example. As I’ve mentioned before, the security services encourage academic freedom, but monitor for signs of extremist activity.

From MI5 to Mossad, MI6 to the CIA, these will soon be redundant in fighting online terrorism. If electronic virus attacks, denial-of-service attacks, and propaganda-generating groups are to be destroyed, I can genuinely say I’d rather have a company like Kaspersky to take care of these. After all, as one hilarious comment says, “in Soviet Russia, Windows activates you.”

To conclude this mass of an article, terrorism has and always will be created by a generation of intelligent, strong-believing people, and students are often enticed into a lifestyle of change, revolution and politics. Terrorism can be fought but the war cannot be won, and the Internet and national critical infrastructures will most likely be the next target of terrorism; replacing the mass casualty aim by militants and paramilitary organisations.

Can you spare a moment to comment? Your views are always greatly appreciated.