Children should be protected from inappropriate material on the internet, but does responsibility lie solely with their parents?

Who's to blame if your child watches porn? It's the greedy internet service providers, say MPs from an all-party committee, who want ISPs to apply automatic filters to prevent access to adult material. To access porn, you would have to opt out. But before you think, "Phew, job done", Naomi Gummer, a Google executive, said last week that technology moves too fast for filters to work and that parents are to blame if their children watch porn. Now, I really don't want my children watching porn, but no filter is 100% effective. So must I still be vigilant 5% of the time? Can filters pick up inferences, so that, when my daughter types the name of a book (The More the Merrier) into Google images, we won't get references to group sex? I'm with Ms Gummer. While I hate blaming parents for anything and sympathise with our learned helplessness around technology, I can't see ISPs as being more responsible for my children than I am. Porn is bad, but so is the hatred spewed out on the internet – the violent images, pro-anorexia sites. Can my children be protected from these things, too (without my involvement), while we're at it? I'm not averse to help, but I'm their parent and it's my job to protect my children. Part of that involves policing what they access.

The question isn't about whether responsible parents should get involved in protecting their children from inappropriate exposure. It's about what our responsibilities, as a society, are to protect the vulnerable. The tens of thousands of children who are officially considered at risk of abuse from their parents rely on us to help them have a less risky childhood. If car manufacturers had no responsibility for safety measures – ie car seats for children, airbags, seatbelts – and it was entirely up to parents if they chose to use these, there would be an outcry. So what is the difference with social networking sites? We know the dangers; we know there are negligent parents. We have to protect the children whose parents can't or won't. You argue quite rightly that it is your job to protect your children, but it is not just your job. Otherwise, police, social services and any other statutory organisation would not have the mandate that they have. The social networking and search engine sites make massive revenues from their activity: they should spend and research more on safety measures for our children.

LD I'm a big fan of public health measures, research and the concept that it takes a village to bring up a child. But believing that our children can, with no parental input, be kept safe from the internet will give us a false sense of security.

Using the car seats analogy, they and seat belts work because they are made to mechanical standards. A seat belt is a seat belt. But what are the mechanical standards for images and words to be? Who will judge them? I wouldn't want to argue against protecting the vulnerable. But does catching a glimpse of internet porn cause more damage to a child than being cyber-bullied? The ISP can only be part of a solution. It isn't in loco parentis, much as we sometimes use it that way. Have we really thought this through? What would be the liability of the ISP if its filters didn't work? Parental responsibility is as much to do with what children post as what they see online. The ISP can't help us with that.

If we could automate our children's internet experience to be safe and palatable, we would also be forgetting something. It's the process of a parent saying 'no' and explaining why not that matters even more than the denial itself. Trying to find porn is part of the teenage condition. Parents (and schools) need to educate children about sex rather than believe, incorrectly, that one fine day, they won't be able to find it on the internet any more.

DN It's never been the case that parents haven't a role to play in safeguarding children online. But the gap between parental ignorance and teenage savvy is still huge. At a Bath Spa University conference last week, Facebook admitted that it had evidence of parents opening accounts for under-13s (the permitted age) and then lying about their age – even adding 10 years sometimes! Apart from this, they estimate significant numbers of under-13s have pretended their way to getting personal pages. We demand proof of age for drink, mobile phone contracts, cigarettes etc, so why is it beyond the wit and resources of social networks to come up with solid proof-of-age requirements? Use a few of the millions to fund schools to verify as well as enabling educational programmes. What about photo IDs with a 24-hour delay?

How can we rely on and be confident when a significant minority of parents don't even password protect their own sites and publish all sorts of pictures of their children for public consumption and, more worryingly, as a handy source of material for paedophiles?

LD I'm glad you brought up Facebook. For a year I have been pestered with: "X has got Facebook. It's not fair." Now my daughter is thirteen and a half, we've set up her page together (with privacy settings), talked about Facebook's risks, and I insisted I knew her password. She showed me the photo she was putting up. If she does anything that I think is unsafe, I will restrict her use of the internet to the living room or take her laptop away.

Yes, I know that some parents are relaxed about Facebook and collude with their children to help them sign up. These same parents will collude with their children to bypass any ID controls (should controls be possible). They may be the same parents who buy cigarettes and rent 18-certificate films for their underage children. Not all parents see controls as support. The assessment of risk plays a big part in this discussion. There is a risk to the internet but also a benefit, and it is an open door to some of the best and worst in life. A blunt control, I fear, will have limited effect. There is no equivalent to the nine o'clock watershed for the internet. And any controls to safeguard teenagers may be better placed protecting them against their biggest risk – being killed on the roads.

DN Safety of our young people isn't a competition. Whether they are killed on the roads or abused by ignorant or neglectful parents – both should require our full attention.

It can't follow that because some parents like yourself take time and trouble to look after their children that all parents will follow that example. We have a duty to get involved in aspects of child safety, which should be an integral part of family life, the same as road safety – important but not smothering. So, whether we are talking about food content, equipment, sports and social clubs, cinemas, alcohol or pornography on the internet, we have a duty of care as a society. ISPs should spend significant revenue on making the internet an acceptable place for our young people.

The internet is a fantastic resource for all – no question about that – but it provides a service and we, the consumer, are entitled to expect a continuing commitment to improved safety.

• Pornography
• Internet
• Sex education
• Child protection
• Google

San Diego-based Zebit has raised $25 million in a fourth round of funding to grow its platform, which enables retailers to assess the risk of selling items to an individual consumer on credit. Mohr Davidow Ventures led the round with Crosslink Capital, Leapfrog Ventures and QED Investors also participating. To date, Zebit says it has completed more than a million transactions.

Entrepreneur is latest executive to leave 'too bureaucratic' HP as tech giant announces 27,000 job cuts and drop in net profits

British entrepreneur Mike Lynch, who built his company Autonomy from the ground up to a $11.2bn (£7bn) acquisition by US tech giant Hewlett-Packard, is leaving, the company announced abruptly on Wednesday night.

Lynch's departure was the latest in a stream of resignations by former top executives at the Cambridge-based company, amid accusations that HP was too bureaucratic, and counter-claims that Lynch and his team failed to deliver on revenue targets.

But it now means that Lynch – a Cambridge graduate whose off-hours tastes include koi carp and model railways – could set up a new business in the "big data" space where Autonomy and rivals are competing to process huge amounts of data.

"He's not going away," said a source familiar with Lynch's thinking. "He still has entrepreneurial ambitions."

Lynch is a brilliant mathematician whose initial work exploited a branch of mathematics called Bayes's theorem – essentially, determining how you make choices as data becomes available.

Its simplest exposition is called the "Monty Hall" problem, from the US TV show Let's Make a Deal.

You're shown three doors and told that behind one is a car, and behind two others nothing. Choose the one with the car, and you'll win it. So you pick a door. But then the host – who knows what's behind which door – opens one of the other two, with nothing behind, and gives you the chance to change your choice. Should you? (The answer's at the end.)

Lynch, who founded the business in 1996 with Richard Gaunt, also encouraged risk-taking as part of its culture to stay ahead of the technological curve.

As computing power has increased exponentially and the amount of data available – and needing – to be processed has grown astronomically, that has served him well.

Autonomy's systems drive the UK police's Holmes 2 system which can tie together fingerprints, witness statements and police reports.

It has 20,000 clients, with management contracts for giants such as Citigate and Shell. Yet it was known as a lean ship with few management layers – completely unlike HP.

The signs that the takeover wasn't working became clear quite quickly as the head of financing, marketing and several sales chiefs left after the takeover completed in October 2011. "It's not just Mike," said a source who knew of the departures at Autonomy.

That HP was seen as too bureaucratic is ironic, as it was for years the company seen as the Silicon Valley touchstone for innovation – producing, among others, the inkjet printer, still one of its major sources of income.

Sources close to Lynch indicated that he and his former team had been unhappy at the scale of bureaucracy after the merger.

"It's not the kind of environment that helps this sort of company," said the source. "It was a clash of cultures. Mike was previously dealing with a small, nimble atmosphere. Whereas HP is the size of a small city. It's a hard place to do what you need to do."

HP is trying to shrink that city, formally announcing 27,000 job cuts – about 8% of its workforce of 340,000. (That's almost as many people as live in the Australian capital city of Canberra.)

Those cuts will be completed by November 2014, and will be used "to boost investment in innovation around its three areas of strategic focus: cloud, big data and security, as well as in other segments that offer attractive growth potential," the company said.

Autonomy, by contrast, was the size of a village: around 1,800 people, split between the UK and US, with key accounts in banks and large enterprises. Autonomy's software can sift emails, documents and even phone calls and elucidate the meaning inherent in them.

"Our technology allows computers to make sense of human conversations," Lynch told Director magazine in May 2011. "That's the unfair advantage that allowed two slightly nerdy people from Cambridge to create a FTSE-100 company." A few months later, it was the subject of a colossal offer from HP.

Now the shine has come off the takeover. HP announced Lynch's departure as part of its second-quarter results on Wednesday night, with net profits down 31.6% year-on-year to $1.98bn, on revenues down 3% to $30.7bn.

Even so, the results were ahead of Wall Street expectations, where HP is seen as a once-great business that is trying to transform itself into a rival to IBM – and failing because its management cannot execute, and can't inspire innovation from the ranks. The fact that the company is on its third chief executive in as many years is telling too.

HP's former chief executive Leo Apotheker led the bid for Autonomy in August 2011. The deal was concluded even after Apotheker was forced out by a boardroom revolt over his leadership of the company in September, when former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman took over.

But it is the failure of HP so far to integrate Autonomy, and to keep its managers happy, that has drawn the focus of investors and analysts.

"I think [Lynch] took the money and ran," said one analyst. "If you look at the price HP paid, it was an excellent deal for the Autonomy shareholders. I wonder to what extent he has really put his shoulder to the wheel since."

Even so, HP is still betting its future on Autonomy. "This big data field is as hot as mustard," said an HP source. "The challenge is how you scale that business from being $4bn in revenues to $8bn in revenues, which Meg [Whitman] knows about from eBay."

An HP executive, chief strategy officer and enterprise software executive vice-president Bill Veghte, will take over Autonomy's running.

HP sources also indicated that the board didn't try to persuade Lynch to stay on – a sign that the two cultures, of the entrepreneurial Cambridge mathematician and the gigantic Silicon Valley giant, weren't ever going to see eye to eye. But everyone will be watching to see which door Lynch next opens.

• The doors problem? You should switch. When you originally chose, you had a 1 in 3 chance of being right. If you switch, you have a 1 in 2 chance of being right. (Try drawing a grid of the options.) A longer explanation is at Wikipedia.

• Software
• Autonomy
• Hewlett-Packard
• Technology sector
• Computing

The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), the French data protection authority investigating Google’s new privacy policy on behalf of the European Union’s 27 member states, isn’t getting the kind of cooperation it would like from the search sovereign. And its patience with the company is wearing thin. So much so that it’s publicly upbraided Google for its lack of forthrightness in responding to the agency’s questionnaires about the new policy.

In a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, CNIL head Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin said she’s reviewed Google’s response to its questions and found them to be sorely lacking — in clarity and specifics.

Answers, too.

“For a large number of questions, the elements provided do not give a precise, clear and comprehensive response to our questions,” Falque-Pierrotin wrote. “While in some cases the questions themselves may have been misunderstood or not clearly expressed, many answers merely provide illustrative examples without describing the exact [processes], procedures or systems Google actually operates.”

In other words, Google’s answers to CNIL’s questions were often incomplete or approximate. And while Falque-Pierrotin generously offers that this might be the result of poor communication, it’s hard to accept that as a legitimate explanation. At this point the CNIL has clarified its questions to Google twice — once in writing, and a second time during the in-person meeting with Google executives that evidently preceded her letter. During that same meeting Google was given a third version of the questionnaire and a June 8 deadline to answer it.

Are we really to believe that Google, a company that prides itself on hiring PhDs, that once sought out cream-of-the-crop engineers with a “mind-bending” Google Labs Aptitude Test, whose mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” can’t properly answer a few questions about its privacy practices and handling of consumer data?

Because that’s about as likely as Larry Page faking his Master’s degree in computer science.

A more reasonable explanation: Google not only doesn’t want to answer these questions, it doesn’t even believe it’s obligated to do so. Indeed, it essentially said as much back in April when it specifically questioned the authority of the CNIL and the Article 29 Data Protection Working Party to even investigate it. From Google’s April 5, 2012 response to the CNIL:

1) What is the legal basis for the Working Party to act as a regulatory body, or to mandate the CNIL to conduct a regulatory review on behalf of 26 other independent DPAs?
2) What law is being applied to this review?
3) Could the Working Party explain the process being followed and the ultimate aim of the
review?

Questions respectfully asked, certainly. But they clearly reflect an uncooperativeness and, more to the point, an overweening arrogance that’s so prevalent these days it might as well be one of Google’s hallowed “10 Things We Know To Be True”. As Christian Sandvig, a researcher in communications technology and public policy at the University of Illinois, recently told the New York Times in an article on that very subject, “Google doesn’t seem to think it ever will be held accountable. And to date it hasn’t been.”

The biggest problem with 3D is its disrespect towards viewers' intelligence. People know when they're being ripped off

There was a time – let's call it "2009" – when 3D looked like it could be the future of cinema. At that point, it was a technology long thought of as the last refuge of theme park gimmickry. James Cameron's Avatar, despite having a script written by Ralph Wiggum, changed all of that. It used 3D as a cinematographic tool – specifically built into the production and integral to its execution. It was impressive. What's followed since, isn't.

For Avatar made money – a lot of it. And what started as a risky revival of a 1950s 3D craze has now become the saturated embodiment of Hollywood laziness and cynicism – a "we'll stick any old shit in 3D" attitude that shows nothing but contempt towards its audience. And it's safe to assume, they agree: despite initial interest (mainly due to Avatar and Toy Story 3), 3D audience figures are falling, with ticket sales down 4% last year despite a record number of 47 films released in the format. Not only that, but with a YouGov poll last year showing interest waning, complaints mounting about headaches and, with the release of Men In Black 3 this week, a row between studios and cinemas over just who pays for 3D glasses, the cracks are beginning to grow larger.

You may have guessed, but I am not a fan of 3D cinema. I've tried. Honestly, I have. I've put in the time. I've spent the money. I even thought, at one point, there might be a future for us. But no. The main problem, beyond the expense, is that cinema is an immersive medium – one that stands or falls on the suspension of belief and its ability to rip you out of your surroundings. Some berk talking, another eating popcorn too loud, an Adam Sandler film – those are things that snap that suspension to remind you that, yes, you are sitting in a room gawping at a screen. 3D has the same effect: it's a distraction from what is actually on show; a vandalism of vibrant imagery.

The greatest uses of 3D – Martin Scorsese's Hugo being a prime example, and the recently released Hara-Kari: Death Of A Samurai being another – have been those with a sense of purpose behind it. Technology has been woven into the film process as an actual story-telling device, rather than just slapped on top for the sake of it. And there lies its biggest problem: a disrespect towards the audience's intelligence. Did The Avengers (or "Avengers Assemble", if you want to be an arse about it) really need to be converted to 3D? Does Baz Luhrmann's take on The Great Gatsby, out later this year, really need to be in 3D? People are not stupid. And they know when they're being ripped off.

With general cinema attendance falling and the film industry in flux, focus has shifted towards the "cinema experience" in order to get people away from their TV. It's happened before. In 1951, US film attendance fell to 46 million from 90 million in 1948. The very first 3D film, Bwana Devil, tried to fix that in 1952 to modest success. In 1953, widescreen colour images and stereo sound did considerably better. But what now? No matter how much James Cameron pushes it (with, as this blog interestingly points out, dubious reasons), 3D is dying a slow, painful death.

An obvious, reactionary answer would be: "Make better films." After all, it was the character-led stuff such as The King's Speech and Bridesmaids that did well last year – not 3D. Yet in terms of the cinema experience itself, quality over quantity seems to be the key. For instance, in a recent interview, Christopher Nolan revealed that he refused Warner Bros' request to film The Dark Knight Rises in 3D ("films are 3D. The whole point of photography is that it's three-dimensional… if you're looking for an audience experience, [3D] is hard to embrace"), opting to shoot nearly an hour of it on Imax cameras instead – the operatic, larger-than-life "gold standard" of cinema, as Nolan dubbed it.

Even on a smaller scale, cinemas such as the Prince Charles in London – with its sing-along showings and Labyrinth balls – are showing that you can do a lot more with the cinema experience than simply whacking some 3D glasses on it. That's not to say Hollywood should adapt that approach directly, of course, but it could certainly do with learning a thing or two about fun, thought and imagination. Or else, they'll just release, re-release and re-package until film eats itself. And no one wants that – especially if it's in 3D.

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