Flip, now owned by Cisco, has quickly carved out a name for itself in small handheld video cameras such as the Mino and MinoHD. Why bother with lumpen camcorders with huge lenses when you can instead wield something about the size of the Little Book of Calm? Its latest offering is the 8GB Flip UltraHD.

Priced at around £160, it adds more storage – up to two hours – plus remarkably detailed video capture, with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels and millions of colours, which it grabs at 30 frames per second. Much of these improvements are directly in line with Moore's Law: quicker, faster, cheaper. Flip has now moved to H.264 for video encoding, unlike the MPEG-4 AVI wrapper it used on its previous models such as the original Mino and MinoHD. That ups its compatibility with video-editing programs; AVI covers such a myriad of flie encoding wrappers that it's a gamble whether it will function with any given editor. H.264 is a known quantity which performs very well at all sorts of compression rates.

Flip is also paying attention to the little elements: you can choose to have the back (lens) side of the UltraHD in shiny chrome. Why? Because Flip discovered that its younger buyers wanted to be able to see themselves using it as they composed self-regarding videos for YouTube. The UltraHD's automatic light balance also showed its paces. I tried it at Wimbledon, where there's huge contrast in brightness between the sky, the court, and the seats; the automatic adjustment was almost instant; certainly if I'd had a tripod (rather than holding it in my wobbly hands) you'd have barely known how the light conditions above the court were changing as clouds scudded overhead. The only criticism is that at the speeds at which professionals play tennis, the ball "strobed" – the frame capture isn't fast enough to make the motion of the ball (which is of course travelling at around 100mph, or 160km/h) smooth.

But for all its improvements, Flip needs to watch its back: the arrival of video recording on the iPhone 3GS, plus that device's capability for a line-in microphone, is a dangerous challenge that can't be ignored.

The controls retain their simplicity: big red button to begin recording, two touch-sensitive controls to zoom in and out. For editing there's a simple trash button and reverse and forward buttons to scroll through the choices. Though the UltraHD is not, like its companions, a still camera, you can extract stills from the MP-4 stream very easily.

The zoom is adequate, though it would be good to have more control over focus: the camera's limits are revealed when you zoom in on an object more than about 30 feet away, at which point the conflicts of the aperture (which determines depth of focus) and the CCD sensitivity (which determines how bright the picture seems) become stark. It turns out that focus loses; that's where a larger camcorder, with its more expensive lenses ( and more expensive price tag, of course) wins.

Despite this, the UltraHD is a weapon of choice in almost every respect, but what it still needs is a microphone input so that it can be used for proper interviews. That may sound trivial, but it's going to become urgent quite soon. The addition of video to the iPhone, which also has a line-in for a microphone (free in the headphones, and perhaps coming through Bluetooth for a remote mic) means Flip has less time than it otherwise would. After all, everyone's improving as fast as Moore's Law at the moment. Flip needs to outpace it somehow.

Pros: small, light, high quality, good automatic light adjustment Cons: no line-in for sound; fuzzy at extreme zoom

Here is the website.

Reassuring people about privacy makes them more, not less, concerned. It's called "privacy salience", and Leslie John, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein – all at Carnegie Mellon University – demonstrated this in a series of clever experiments. In one, subjects completed an online survey consisting of a series of questions about their academic behaviour – "Have you ever cheated on an exam?" for example. Half of the subjects were first required to sign a consent warning – designed to make privacy concerns more salient – while the other half did not. Also, subjects were randomly assigned to receive either a privacy confidentiality assurance, or no such assurance. When the privacy concern was made salient (through the consent warning), people reacted negatively to the subsequent confidentiality assurance and were less likely to reveal personal information.

In another experiment, subjects completed an online survey where they were asked a series of personal questions, such as "Have you ever tried cocaine?" Half of the subjects completed a frivolous-looking survey – "How BAD are U??" – with a picture of a cute devil. The other half completed the same survey with the title "Carnegie Mellon University Survey of Ethical Standards," complete with a university seal and official privacy assurances. The results showed that people who were reminded about privacy were less likely to reveal personal information than those who were not.

Privacy salience does a lot to explain social networking sites and their attitudes towards privacy. From a business perspective, social networking sites don't want their members to exercise their privacy rights very much. They want members to be comfortable disclosing a lot of data about themselves.

Joseph Bonneau and Soeren Preibusch of Cambridge University have been studying privacy on 45 popular social networking sites around the world. (You may not have realised that there are 45 popular social networking sites around the world.) They found that privacy settings were often confusing and hard to access; Facebook, with its 61 privacy settings, is the worst. To understand some of the settings, they had to create accounts with different settings so they could compare the results. Privacy tends to increase with the age and popularity of a site. General-use sites tend to have more privacy features than niche sites.

But their most interesting finding was that sites consistently hide any mentions of privacy. Their splash pages talk about connecting with friends, meeting new people, sharing pictures: the benefits of disclosing personal data.

These sites do talk about privacy, but only on hard-to-find privacy policy pages. There, the sites give strong reassurances about their privacy controls and the safety of data members choose to disclose on the site. There, the sites display third-party privacy seals and other icons designed to assuage any fears members have.

It's the Carnegie Mellon experimental result in the real world. Users care about privacy, but don't really think about it day to day. The social networking sites don't want to remind users about privacy, even if they talk about it positively, because any reminder will result in users remembering their privacy fears and becoming more cautious about sharing personal data. But the sites also need to reassure those "privacy fundamentalists" for whom privacy is always salient, so they have very strong pro-privacy rhetoric for those who take the time to search them out. The two different marketing messages are for two different audiences.

Social networking sites are improving their privacy controls as a result of public pressure. At the same time, there is a counterbalancing business pressure to decrease privacy; watch what's going on right now on Facebook, for example. Naively, we should expect companies to make their privacy policies clear to allow customers to make an informed choice. But the marketing need to reduce privacy salience will frustrate market solutions to improve privacy; sites would much rather obfuscate the issue than compete on it as a feature.

Back in May, my crystal ball twitched with wonderment at the idea that Microsoft might be feeling a frisson of excitement that Apple had decided to make an ad in response to Redmond's "Laptop Hunters" campaign.

I suggested that Microsoft executives would be dancing with fair glee and abandon.

It seems that, for once, my crystal ball may not have been full of Bay Area fog.

The revelation that Apple's lawyers allegedly called Microsoft to complain about the Laptop Hunters ads has brought much needed amusement to those who have not seen humor in quite some time.

Indeed, Friday, AdAge began to speculate as to whether Apple might become a Microsoft Hunter and drop a little lawsuit on Redmond's charmers.

The report quoted Michael McSunas, an attorney at Chambliss, Bahner and Stophel, who said that legally Apple "would have a leg to stand on."

McSunas continued: "If, indeed, you now can buy a MacBook for under $1,000, then [the 'Laptop Hunters' campaign] would be inaccurate and misleading."

But grinding your teeth and filing suit are two different things.

So McSunas speculated: "Apple seems to have this sort of cool image; I'd be surprised if they'd file suit on something like this...It would be bad publicity and only make people talk about Microsoft being more relevant."

Does having "this sort of cool image" really preclude Apple from suing or at least doing a little more than wearing black and looking superior?

There is precedent for ads being taken off air when the claims within them were no longer accurate. Chrysler, McSunas pointed out, persuaded Ford to remove an ad for its Freestar minivan in 2004.

But the truth is that in any kind of legal action, the PR is more important than the actual legal action.

If there is one area (and, of course, there are more) in which Apple is extremely talented, it is the area of making people feel exactly what the company wants them to feel.

If the company thought there might be PR value in publicly upbraiding Microsoft, you can be sure that it will lay the groundwork meticulously before delivering a nasty two-fingered jab just below the eyebrows.

It is one thing your lawyer calling Microsoft and telling the company to knock it off. It is something slightly different (and a lot more fun) when Redmond tries to make PR capital from your phone call.

Will Apple file suit? Unlikely. But will it let it all just bubble away like a virus on a cheap PC? Somehow, I doubt it.

Mars 500 sojourners emerge from isolation!

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, perhaps, we'll all be as excited about people landing on Mars as we were 40 years ago about the first moon landing. But don't hold your breath.

In the meantime, mission-to-Mars dreamers and wannabes will have to make do with Earth-bound exercises such as the European Space Agency's Mars500 program. Earlier this week, a group of six Mars500 participants emerged from a mission-to-Moscow mock-up meant to simulate part of what will eventually be a very long journey to the Red Planet.

The Euro-sextet ended their simulated Mars mission on Tuesday, after 105 days sealed into an isolation facility designed to replicate many features of a potential spacecraft built to fly to Mars and back. Since March 31, the participants (one from Germany, one from France, and four from Russia) have been engaged in science experiments, monitoring of their physiological state, and posting chirpy weekly updates.

"We had an outstanding team spirit throughout the entire 105 days," said Cyrille Fournier, the French airline pilot who posted many of the cheery log entries. "Living for that long in a confined environment can only work if the crew is really getting along with each other. The crew is the crucial key to mission success, which became very evident to me during the 105 days."

Team-building exercises included watching movies and playing music. The participants also grew their own veggies, including tomatoes, strawberries, radishes, and cabbage.

The other members of the Mars500 isolation ward were Oliver Knickel, a mechanical engineer in the German army; cosmonauts Sergei Ryazansky (commander) and Oleg Artemyev; Alexei Baranov, a medical doctor; and Alexei Shpakov, a sports physiologist.

In an entry from June 23, Fournier describes a typical day.

Along with the close quarters, the Mars500 crew had to endure modest hardships, including a 20-minute delay each way in communications with "Earth" and at least one incident that, in a real spacecraft, could have proved very bad indeed. Wrote Knickel in a May 19 account that had echoes of the Apollo 13 mission:

As Murphy's Law would have it, just after midnight on 12 May, we had an off-nominal situation when the air purification and conditioning system in the crew quarters failed. This could be seen from the operation center of our module, where you can watch and tune all parameters in all three modules--including temperature, atmospheric humidity, and the concentration of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. We quickly noticed an increase in temperature up to 30 degrees Celsius, as well as an increase of the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide concentration in the air, which can quickly become life-threatening.

The in-house repairs turned out to be fairly simple, and the crew was able to press ahead with a celebration of Knickel's 29th birthday that included balloons, gifts, and karaoke in Russian.

Since there were apparently no "Silent Running"-style meltdowns, the European Space Agency and its Russian partner, the Institute of Biomedical Problems, plan to proceed with a longer simulation, a 520-day sojourn expected to start in early 2010.

Google fixes flaws in Chrome

New versions of Google Chrome are out, fixing bugs and patching security holes in both the stable build and the beta build.

Two serious security flaws have been plugged. One had allowed for malicious code exploitation within the Chrome tab sandbox. Found by the Google security team, the threat was serious enough that Google has declined to be more specific until "a majority of users are up to date with the fix," the company said in a blog post.

A second security risk caused by memory corruption was found in the browser tab processes. It could have been used to run arbitrary code that would crash all of the browser tabs, creating a second security hole through which an attacker might be able to run code with the privileges of the logged-on user.

Other bug-fixes include updates to the V8 Javascript engine, updates to Google Gears, and getting forward and backward navigation to work even when site redirection is involved.

The full list of changes can be read here.

Accenture to acquire Nokia's Symbian service experts

In a move that will further increase Symbian's independence from Nokia, the Finnish phone manufacturer has agreed to sell its Symbian Professional Services unit to technology consultant firm Accenture.

The unit is responsible for customer engineering and customer support for Symbian OS, the world's largest operating system for smart phones. About 165 people will be transferred to Accenture as a result of the agreement, the terms of which were not disclosed.

The transaction, announced Friday, is expected to close by the end of the third quarter, according to a press release from Nokia.

Nokia acquired Symbian last year and transferred the operating system to the nonprofit Symbian Foundation. The organization on Thursday announced its take on application distribution--the Symbian Horizon application-publishing platform.