Outlook Don't be fooled by the headline numbers – Goldman Sachs' net earnings might have fallen by 23 per cent, but that was a whole lot better than Wall Street expected.

Many people doubted whether peer-to-peer lending would ever really take off, but it appears that the sector is going from strength to strength and increasingly being accepted as a credible alternative to the banks.

Essentially, a high-school band playing old-fashioned R&B and soul with a rock attitude and rhythm section: unrefined, unresigned, occasionally clunky, frequently obtuse but always, always fit to bust.

Firms offering to put ordinary people in touch with each other to borrow or lend offer an alternative to banks.

Kim Dotcom, the founder of the file-sharing website Megaupload, was released on bail today after a New Zealand judge determined that authorities have seized any funds he could have used to flee the country.

Legal action against illegal file-sharers has helped to bring an 8 per cent rise in global digital-music revenues, but an industry report claims stars should stop boycotting streaming services such as Spotify.

The music industry saw worldwide revenues from digital jump 8 per cent to $5.2bn (£3.3bn) last year, and these now represent one third of all sales, according to the IFPI trade body.

Cutting out the middle man and becoming the lender yourself is growing in popularity, but is it safe? Chiara Cavaglieri and Julian Knight report

Police in 22 countries across Europe have arrested 112 people after a year-long investigation into child pornography. Reporting the raids, Europol said technology was making detection ever more difficult.

As investment decisions go, buying into a company just as it admits that trading is on the wane may seem counter-intuitive. Yet that is exactly what punters were being told to do with Whitbread yesterday, despite the Costa Coffee owner's disappointing figures earlier in the week.

An uncensored version of the entire US State Department's cable database obtained by WikiLeaks last year has been circulating on the internet, prompting fears that lives have been put at risk.

Illegal file-sharing websites face a fight to survive after Hollywood studios won a landmark high court ruling forcing BT to block access to Newzbin2, a site providing links to illegal downloads of films, music and games.

Downloading copyrighted material without paying is supposedly a sneaky, clandestine activity, concealed from the raging, helpless copyright owners beneath some kind of impenetrable digital cloak. But it's not that clandestine.

Even though the base rate has been stuck fast at 0.5 per cent for the past 27 months, the interest rate charged by banks and building societies for personal loans is at the highest level for over a decade.