No one likes a cheater, but since there have been games, there has been cheaters, and video games, even online games are no exception. While cheat codes are often used in single player games to skip particularly hard parts of the game, cheating is not good clean fun when you’re competing online. Multiplayer games are supposed to be contests of skill and strategy, and most gamers don’t want to take part in a game where some players won’t play by the rules.

Online gaming has been a haven for cheats, as it allows them to remain almost completely anonymous. The software is difficult to secure and new hacks tend to spread like wild fire on the net once they have been discovered. Cheaters cheat because they want to impress people, or ruin the game for others, or in recent times possibly because they want to acquire “game currency” which can be sold for cash on Ebay.

Cheat codes can be removed from multiplayer versions, but early games weren’t really designed to deal with cheating. A decade or so ago just being able to play a computer game over the internet was an impressive feat. It wasn’t long though, before the availability of hacks and cheats began to ruin gaming for the majority.

Some online games experienced a massive loss of players when the level of cheating became intolerable. The gaming community has always been keen on keeping online gaming fair, and server administrators compile lists of players known for cheating and ban them. But before long software was developed to help with the problem. Software like Punkbuster emerged, which is used widely by many online action games.

Subscription games online have been even more at risk, since their business relies on players not leaving in droves because someone has hacked the game. They have to make catching and banning cheaters a priority from the get go, but they do control the server which the game is played on. Still it is inevitable that cheating will happen, the best anyone can hope for is for these cheats to be identified and banned or corrected quickly.

Unfortunately there is a multitude of ways to cheat in most online games. One common form of cheating is for two players on different teams to be in communication with each other, either through instant messaging software or telephone, to gain advantage over the other players. The effectiveness of this strategy varies from game to game, but there is still no way of combating this kind of cheating yet.

Collusion may give you some insight, but it does not change your abilities within the game. This is why hacks and file modifications are popular, which allow the cheater to alter the software, such as changing the enemies’ appearance or their own. Hackers reverse engineer the game, and circulate these hacks to lazy cheats across the world.

Downloading hacks for games and installing them on your system is riskier. Many of these hacks are actually spreading viruses, Trojans and spyware which will slow down your computer. Often the hacks don’t work, or the author will try to charge you for it after you’ve downloaded it.

Cheating has become significantly more difficult recently, with developers finding better ways to secure their products. Valve Anti-cheat, Cheating Death, Hi Guard and Punkbuster perform automatic checks for known cheats, but also provide server administrators with powerful tools with which to investigate cheating.

The war against cheaters will always be an ongoing one. Hackers see anti-cheat mechanisms as a challenge, and they won’t stop until they crack the software again. Usually the developer can effectively defend against the new cheat within a few days so their effectiveness is limited.

The future of online gaming isn’t just Halo 2 or Second Life. It’s draughts, chess, pool and other so-called casual games. There’s no guns, there’s no action, but with over 82 million players in the casual gaming sector these games have twenty times more users, while EverQuest and World of Warcraft receive all the media attention.

Online gamers aren’t just spotty teenage boys, it’s housewives, grandmas and granddads these days. Supposedly it is mainly women 35 to 54 who play casual games online. The market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars every year, mainly through advertising since most players are reluctant to pay to play such games.

Casual games seem to be reaching new audiences online. Microsoft, Yahoo! And EA are all expanding teams to release hundreds of casual games for these users, but they are all waiting to make the next Tetris.

Released in 1987, Tetris changed the gaming industry by proving that a simple shape puzzle could make millions, even next to Super Mario World and the like. Today, Tetris serves as an excellent example of how massive number of middle-aged and elderly people were in engaged in computer games for the first time. The creator of Tetris, Alexev Pajitnov is designing at Microsoft, who must be hoping he can repeat his magic for them.

Casual gaming online means games must be light on a computer’s memory, say 1 megabyte instead of 60-meg for most PC titles. The games must function on low tech equipment, like a Pentium II running Windows 98. The emphasis is on the playability or addictiveness of the game, rather than exciting graphics or gruesome characters.

EA and Yahoo! Have adopted a less risky approach. Saving money on Research & Development, they mimic or “improve” exisiting titles. EA sells solitaire, bingo, backgammon and bridge, while Yahoo! provides much the same. They make a distinction between “gamers” and “casual gamers”, but then what is casual about someone spending 6 hours on Yahoo! Chess?

Yahoo!’s biggest success is its pool. It’s cheap to produce and well known enough to not require much tuition. This pool game can be put together for just one hundred thousand dollars, compare to the multi-million dollar projects like Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider. With around ten million unique users each month, Yahoo! is the most popular gaming destination on the web, for pool and other casual games like chess, dominoes and checkers.

The new web browser from Google, Chrome, has generated a fair amount of media attention for a variety of reasons, but there has been little talk about its effect upon contextual advertising.

Applications on our computers are ad-free zones. For example, word processors are free of advertising. Web applications are different, the owners of web applications like Gmail or Facebook can place contextual advertising within the software.

The use of web applications is sky-rocketing. There’s even good quality image editors online now. And Google’s Chrome will accelerate this. Pointed at web applications like Google Reader, Chrome excels at handling complicated tasks.

Having said that, Chrome will not snatch large amounts of the market from Internet Explorer or Firefox overnight. Many users stick with browsers they know, and Firefox’s extensive plug-ins are bound to compete with Chrome.

But providing a better experience with web applications, Chrome will encourage more people to use them. Competition from Chrome is likely to encourage Apple and Microsoft to improve their browsers. The Mozilla team is working on some changes to Firefox, including a new incognito or “porn mode”. As the quality of the browsers increase so will the quality and use of web applications.

That, in turn, will provide more opportunities for companies like Microsoft and Google to sell contextual advertising.

Contextual advertising can be very powerful since it appears when users are either searching a related topic or researching it. From the paid search entries on the search engine to content networking advertising, advertisers can reach the right users.

If contextual adverts break into web applications, ads will display when the user is not searching for information. Type an article about insurance and an insurance advertiser might show you their ad. If users watch a particular video, then relevant advertisers could grab those readers attention.

If a user uses a web application to plan a journey then the Road Traffic Authority could place an advert about driving dangers. Contextual advertising could even “talk back” to web applications, and interact with the software depending on how the adverts are to be displayed.

Soon interactive marketers will be able to offer the user what they need before they ever realised they needed it. By correctly analysing users behaviour, advertisers will be able to tap into the precise type of user they are after. Chrome may lead to Google’s domination of the web as a whole, rather than just search.

The social networking website LinkedIn, has seen a 25% increase in registering users since the credit crunch hit in September, as worried professionals hoard contacts and look for backup jobs. It is a website which many recruiters use to find specialist employees, and contacts on the site can recommend each other and spread information about each other.

The site claims that the downturn has boosted sign-ups and activity as business people hedge their bets by ensuring they stay well networked in this uncertain time.

Through spring and summer, LinkedIn held a growth rate of one million new users every 20 days. Kevin Ayres, the European managing director of LinkedIn said “Economic issues and uncertainty has highlighted the importance on networking and information exchange”.

“We have seen a significant increase in the rate of sign-ups and in the amount of activity our users have been conducting on LinkedIn over the last two months.”

Since the latest financial crisis began with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the rate of growth has increased to one million new users every 14 days. This is attributed to massive job losses among the financial services sectors as well as some advertising-dependant media companies.

There has been a 15% increase in activity in the last two months on LinkedIn, mainly in the issuing of invitations to get users to join business networking groups. There has also been a 14% increase in the recommendations made by users endorsing other users.

LinkedIn makes its money from job listings, subscriptions for premium services, advertising and a corporate service Recruiter.

Kevin Ayres also said that the LinkedIn user group and highly targeted advertising opportunities had made the website immune to the economic downturn. Many recruiters use LinkedIn to find highly qualified or experienced individuals.

He argued the company had “very, very little wastage” for recruiters who used the site as advertising on the site could be so targeted. “As companies review [their advertising] spend they will look to put budget in places where there is the most impact. It is about finding the right individuals and we are highly targeted”.

He also said that despite the global economic downturn, LinkedIn was still on target to achieve its full-year revenue forecast of between 75 and 100 million dollars. It seems that in the credit crunch, the internet could be a good way for the career minded to stay ahead of the pack.

In total LinkedIn has 30 million users, with 7 million of those located in Europe.

As the UK finally begins to take its climate change commitments seriously, maybe it’s time to invest in new renewable technology instead of wind turbines. If they were affordable enough to become popular, hydro cars could make a significant contribution to the target of 15% of all our energy being from renewable sources by 2012. We are a nation of car drivers and to address the waste of energy is the way forward.

Hydrogen fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, heat and water. It converts the energy produced by a chemical reaction into electricity. What is revolutionary is the lack of waste involved in fuel cells, producing only water as a by-product of the chemical processes.

NASA has been using liquid hydrogen to propel space shuttles and rockets into orbit for decades. Hydrogen fuel cells power the electrical systems, producing a clean by-product - pure water which is drank by the crew.

Toyota and Honda have both developed hydrogen-fuelled vehicles, which are being leased to customers in California and Japan. The drawback is that these hydro-cars are currently costing $1 million US dollars each to produce because of the complicated and expensive nature of fuel cells.

The aspiration is to reduce the cost in order to compete with gasoline engines. Toyota hopes to reduce the cost to around $50,000 per vehicle by 2015, which would make such cars economically viable in the marketplace. It will be a lengthy transition as few people are likely to be prepared to give up their cars for benefits which may take years to arrive.

Many companies are working on techniques to reduce the cost of producing fuel cells, in a variety of ways including reducing the amount of platinum needed in each individual cell. The development of fuel cells relies on whether governments and other institutions can invest heavily enough in this burgeoning technology to bring the costs down.

The EU has just announced a massive investment in fuel cell research. They are promising a 940 million-euro investment to help kick-start the commercial takeoff of hydrogen powered cars between 2010 and 2020.

So wind farms and nuclear power might be the current favoured saviour, but perhaps we should consider more seriously the possibility of using fuel cells instead. If the price can be brought down, hydro cars could catch on and help us help the environment. As water is the only by-product, imagine urban areas free from thick exhaust fumes!