Today, news usually appears first on the web, or on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. When there's an earthquake, for example, people tweet about it while it's still happening, and journalists now use Facebook updates, tweets and "twitpics" (photos uploaded with links from tweets) as sources. People are everywhere that journalists are not.

Journalists still do valuable on-the-spot reporting. Journalists and editors still spend hours filtering and interpreting vast amounts of material to compile pithy reports that tell compelling stories. But the idea of news is changing, and journalism is slowly moving from creating to collaborating and curating.

Obviously the news cycle now runs faster than ever. When I started writing about computers for the Guardian newspaper in 1983, news items appeared the next day but features could wait a week or two. With websites and blogs, stories usually appear within hours or minutes, and thanks to webcasts and live-blogs, you can even follow events as they unfold in real time.

But some things have been lost, including context and a sense of community. On the web, it's not so easy to tell the leading story from the humorous filler at the bottom of the page. The old journalistic trick of getting two people to present opposing views on facing pages has become a recipe for disaster, with the "pro" and "anti" versions being read by different groups of people.

Search engines like Google enable people to pick the stories they want to read, but there is no simple way of providing variety or balance. There's a lot to be said for the virtual personalised newspapers such as DailyMe. However, if people only see stories about topics in which they have already professed an interest, how will they learn anything new? If you buy a real newspaper every day, at least you'll get a range of topics and usually a range of views. Newspapers have to be broad enough to appeal to large groups of people: they can't be as specialised as blogs.

On the web, communities are shifting from newspapers to news aggregators. Instead of being a loyal Guardian reader, you might be a loyal Reddit or Digg user, because these sites share links to thousands of different news sources. This type of aggregation is terrific, but it can skew reporting and presentation. Everyone loves hits, and like pop music, news is becoming a hits business.

Today, as print circulations and advertising revenues decline, some companies are trying to build "gated communities" (registered members only) on the web. The hope is that if people are willing to pay for access to, for example, The Times and The Sunday Times, which are now behind "paywalls", the publisher gets some gate money and can also charge advertisers higher rates to reach them.

As a long-time newspaper journalist, I'd like this idea to work. As someone who was on the internet before the web was invented, and who now blogs for a living, I'll be amazed if it does.

Nowadays, people are often more interested in reading the same story on five or six different websites than in reading five or six different stories on one website.

I used to believe in a science fiction solution: the newspad. Everyone would have a thin, flexible paper-like LCD screen at home, and each day's newspaper would simply be downloaded overnight for reading over the breakfast table. Everything would be the same - news, features, adverts, etc - except the delivery system.

That's no longer believable because nobody wants a single source of news delivered at a single time, and nobody wants to pay £1 a day for it. Today, news has to be instantly available everywhere, from an infinite number of sources. If you're on Twitter, or a similar site, you may even be involved in making it.

Newspapers now face a difficult transition from paid-for physical copies to free virtual ones, and we don't know how that will turn out. However, it's clear that things ain't what they used to be. For better and worse, the web is remaking the news.

Jack Schofield is a technology journalist and blogger who covered IT for the Guardian from 1983 to 2010. Before specialising in computing, he edited a number of photography magazines and books.

In the past week, protesters have managed to take down websites owned by MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and PostFinance for their actions against WikiLeaks (a website known for publishing controversial and confidential information). Many others have been hit over the past decade, including the governments of Georgia and Burma. Protest shades easily into cyberwarfare, and in the UK this can amount to law breaking behaviour.

A website is easy to attack using a Distributed Denial of Service attack or DDoS. The idea is to send it more traffic than it can handle. The website gets so bogged down processing fake traffic that it doesn't have time to respond to real users, who are therefore deprived of their service. You could get the same effect by having hundreds of people phone the same restaurant to order a pizza, then hang up if they get through.

Websites often get swamped even without being attacked. Servers can crash if too many people want to check their swine flu symptoms or visit online library Europeana, or whatever, and they all try to do it at the same time. The idea behind a DDoS attack is to do it deliberately.

Criminals do it by using networks of remotely-controlled home PCs that have been compromised by computer viruses ("botnets"). The amorphous and unorganised pressure group that calls itself ‘Anonymous’ is doing it mainly by publicising its plans via chatrooms and social networks.

Anonymous has had lots of media coverage because of its association with WikiLeaks (the two are not actually connected), but DDoS attacks have been growing recently. In 2008, Anonymous was involved in DDoS attacks against Scientology.

Then came Operation Payback, which was a response to moves against file-sharing sites such as Pirate Bay: hence Operation Payback's use of a sailing ship logo. This attacked a number of pro-copyright bodies including the UK's Intellectual Property Office (aka Patent Office), and some law firms.

But it's important to note that, in the UK, DDoS attacks are against the law. Following a court case in 2005, sections of the Police and Justice Act 2006 were drafted specifically to tackle DDoS attacks, says Lawdit, adding: "A conviction under this section can result in ten years imprisonment and a fine of £5,000."

If you want to protest online lawfully, you can sign petitions, join Facebook groups, or use Tweetminster to find your MP on Twitter. If you can summon the energy to put pen to paper the old fashioned way, that's even better.

Jack Schofield is a technology journalist and blogger who covered IT for the Guardian from 1983 to 2010. Before specialising in computing, he edited a number of photography magazines and books.