Apr 1st, 2009 - Yes, it is April 1st, the day that you have to read the news with just a little more skepticism than usual as the pranksters roll out their made up stories. Some are so close to the truth that it is hard to actually tell they are gags at all, of course. The best April Fools' Day pranks to have... (Read More)

9 Days Ago - Over the weekend news broke that a worm had started infecting Jailbroken iPhones in Australia. Nobody really took the exploit too seriously as all the 'ikee worm' did was change the phone wallpaper to a picture of 80's pop singer Rick Astley in a kind of warped tribute to the RickRolling Internet... (Read More)

Sep 9th, 2009 - All the news and social media feeds seem to have overdosed on one story this week: will The Beatles be on iTunes after the big Apple 'Rock and Roll' event today? News at eleven: I don't give a stuff, and here's my top ten reasons why. Most people would rather have an iPod with a camera than an... (Read More)

Aug 18th, 2009 - As honeymoon periods go, the Apple customer satisfaction one has lasted a remarkably long time. However, you might be forgiven for thinking that honeymoon is now over, given some headlines I have seen online. Forgiven but, I would maintain, as wrong as wrong can be. Google might not like Apple... (Read More)

Aug 8th, 2009 - Bob Monkhouse was once best known for hosting Celebrity Squares and Family Fortunes on British television. Then in 2003 he died at the age of 75 and all went quiet. Until now, when it would appear that Bob is back from beyond the grave and posting jokes to Twitter. It isn't the first time that... (Read More)

Jul 20th, 2009 - With some 11.5 million subscribers playing it worldwide, there is no denying that World of Warcraft is one popular online game. Nowhere more so than in China, where it has been reported around 5 million of those subscribers are based. It should come as no surprise that not everyone in China is a... (Read More)

Apr 17th, 2009 - It is usually the Apple adverts which get the positive column inches both online and off, even when they go straight for the Vista jugular perhaps because they do so with no small dose of humour. Microsoft has done less well in garnering media support for its campaigns. Who can forget those... (Read More)

Apr 19th, 2009 - It might seem like something of an odd question, unless your idea of a good night in is a box of popcorn and a copy of some dodgy DVD featuring a Captain Jack lookalike doing unmentionable things to his crew. Yet the answer is that these two things, the illegal file-sharing we commonly refer to as... (Read More)

Apr 7th, 2009 - I know that Apple has been expending a lot of hot air telling anyone who will listen that the new iTunes pricing regime is a good thing for consumers. I know that it reckons that for every song which is ramped up to the new 99p (here in the UK) price it will drop another 10 songs down to the 59p... (Read More)

Mar 12th, 2009 - (Read More)

Mar 4th, 2009 - Having already been accused of killing common sense with some bizarre App Store listing decisions, now it seems that an Apple sans Steve Jobs could be treading the path towards total market madness. Apple is displaying all the signs of losing the plot: announcing a raft of new desktops just as... (Read More)

Mar 6th, 2009 - That's what Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart is claiming as part of a federal lawsuit by the Illinois lawman. The lawsuit is seeking a ban on one part of Craigslist, namely the Erotic Services section, which is accused of acting as a clearing house for prostitution. According to The Times Dart is... (Read More)

Feb 18th, 2009 - The Pirate Bay is, without doubt, a huge thorn in the side of the music and movies business. As the worlds largest bittorrent tracker with more than 3 million users and well over 20 million peers it constantly flips the bird at The Powers That Be. Even the threat of legal action does little to... (Read More)

Feb 6th, 2009 - Plenty of people have done it, gone online pretending to be something they are not. Indeed, plenty of men have gone online into chat rooms, forums, virtual worlds and social networking sites pretending to be women. Usually it is for the attention, sometimes it is for the sexual kicks of a gay guy... (Read More)

Jan 15th, 2009 - He has gone from dead to having cancer to suffering from hormone problems in the space of a few short weeks, now the Apple CEO is taking six months off work to recover. So just how sick is Steve Jobs? Last year the mention of the word cancer in the same breath as 'Steve Jobs' was enough to send... (Read More)

Nov 15th, 2008 - Barack Obama is the very definition of an Internet politico-geek, not least as I just invented the term. However, there is no denying that the President-Elect of the US has understood the power of the Internet, the power of social networking, better than any other political candidate for high... (Read More)

Jan 9th, 2009 - Cast your minds back a couple of years to 2007 and as far as hacking was concerned there was only really one big story, and I do mean big. The biggest reported case of cyber-criminals using hacking skill to steal something in the region of 40 million credit card details. Although most widely... (Read More)

Dec 8th, 2008 - It had to happen, and it has. Ever since the Internet Watch Foundation, a British charitable organisation that acts as the official watchdog to track and report illegal content online, in particular child pornography, introduced a blacklist we all knew it would get controversial one day. That day... (Read More)

Dec 16th, 2008 - Generally speaking, it takes quite a few years of studying and hard graft before someone gets to wear the wig and robes of a barrister in the British legal system. Unless, that is, you buy them on eBay. Surprisingly, that's precisely what one man did and ended up defending a number of clients at... (Read More)

Oct 12th, 2009 - Jon Lech Johansen is perhaps best known as DVD Jon, the chap who cracked DVD movie encryption at the tender age of just 15. He may soon have to adopt a new nickname, how about iTunes Jon, as he releases software that takes iTunes out of the iPod music equation. doubleTwist exists on the... (Read More)

Oct 12th, 2009 - Sky, better known for news and sport television broadcasting, has today announced that it is entering the online music business with an ad-free streaming download service. All of the four million songs accessible by users of the service will be available by way of unlimited online streaming as well... (Read More)

Oct 5th, 2009 - If you are in the market for a new Apple computer, you might want to wait a few days. It would appear that new super thin iMacs, MacBooks and even a cheaper Mac Mini are on the way real soon. According to AppleInsider a raft of advertisements were published ahead of time, in error, by the... (Read More)

Aug 29th, 2009 - Continuing on its charm offensive, the music industry is apparently not satisfied with the $675,000 fine for sharing 30 songs imposed on Joel Tenenbaum or the $1.92 million Jammie Thomas-Rasset was hit with for illegally downloading 24 tunes. Now it is going after the lyrics pirates. The what?... (Read More)

Aug 12th, 2009 - Safari 4.0.3 is out now and available for download from Apple, for both Mac OS X and Windows operating systems. While there are the usual claims of making things more stable when using third party plugins and in particular for handling the HTML 5 video tag, it is with regards to security... (Read More)

Aug 8th, 2009 - Do cats have a taste for porn? Somehow I doubt it, and I doubt that a jury will fall for it either no matter how much one alleged downloader of the most disgusting of pornographic images tries to insist that's what actually happened in his case. When found in possession of a computer full of... (Read More)

Jun 19th, 2009 - Seems like a silly question, right? But $80,000 per track is exactly how much Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother from Minneapolis, has been charged. Well, I say charged but actually she was fined this amount for each of 24 songs downloaded via a file-sharing site at the end of a jury trial which... (Read More)

Jun 4th, 2009 - Across Europe people have been voting in the European Parliamentary elections, and it looks likely that a pirate or two will have got elected in Sweden. I voted nice and early this morning, with candidates representing the three main political parties here in the UK as well as a rather long list... (Read More)

May 5th, 2009 - Strange but true. The 02 Digital Families report was commissioned in order to get a grasp on the impact that technology has on family life in the UK. Perhaps unsurprisingly it revealed a nation obsessed by gadgets, with 40 percent of UK families spending 10 percent of their household budgets on... (Read More)

Apr 10th, 2009 - Apple has started the countdown to the billionth app to be downloaded from the App Store. The company has put up a live countdown counter on the web which is spinning so fast I am surprised it has not flown off the page. Mind you, when you consider that in December there were 300 million App Store... (Read More)

Feb 12th, 2009 - The Chinese Government obsession with eradicating all 'lewd' and pornographic content from the Internet marches on. It all started back in 2007 when the authorities declared war on porn and setting a seemingly impossible target of purging the web of sexually-explicit images, stories and AV clips... (Read More)

Feb 4th, 2009 - Surprisingly, the answer could well be yes. At least if a bunch of computer science researchers at Durham University have anything to do with it. The group have taken the 3D game engine that powers the immersive Half Life 2 game and used it to develop a realistic virtual simulation of the... (Read More)

Feb 4th, 2009 - Who would you back in a fight? Barack Obama or Stephen Fry? When it comes to being popular on Twitter these two are the only real contenders for the title if you discount news organisations and the like. Currently, of course, US President Obama has the size advantage with an incredible 220,000... (Read More)

Jan 24th, 2009 - Apple users opting not to grab a free 30 day demo version iWork 09, or even cough up the bucks for a full retail version, have found themselves getting more than they bargained for. It appears that something in the region of 20,000 people have downloaded a pirated version of iWork 09 which comes... (Read More)

Jan 20th, 2009 - Apple has had marked success with the 'I'm a Mac' advertising campaigns, and Microsoft is back banging it's head against a seeming brick wall of indifference with the ongoing 'I'm a PC' marketing drive that has featured both Bill Gates and Steve 'Monkey Dancer' Ballmer. Now, it would appear, that... (Read More)

Jan 7th, 2009 - It has been a long time coming, but Apple has finally announced that iTunes is going DRM-free. As in, all songs on the iTunes site will ditch DRM. That's everything from Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, Warner Music Group and EMI along with thousands of indie labels. All with their musical... (Read More)

Dec 16th, 2008 - Facebook can claim many things, from defeating the Nazis to recruiting spies and even helping to elect Barack Obama. Now it can add serving legal papers to the list. These days, it would appear, the legal process is catching up with the technological reality of the world we live in. Being served... (Read More)

Dec 13th, 2008 - Now that could be cool, or maybe not: a whole new look to the MacOS desktop could be on the cards after Apple puts in a patent application for a 'Multi-Dimensional Desktop.' The patent application, 20080307360, describes how the planned graphical user interface will have "a back surface disposed... (Read More)

Sep 25th, 2009 - Occasionally you see something exciting, which is why I'm very pleased to tell you about WorkSnug - a new iPhone app, also coming to Android, I was shown by the founder a day or so ago. It's one of those things that addresses a need you didn't know you had before. You take your iPhone 3Gs (and... (Read More)

Apr 30th, 2009 - Word emerged this week that Apple was in talks with Verizon and everyone assumed it was it about the iPhone, but buried at the end of a BusinessWeek article, AT&T's iPhone Dilemma, is an interesting nugget: That Apple is talking to other carriers seems indisputable at this point and has been... (Read More)

Dec 7th, 2008 - I like to follow news about Apple and its products as much as anyone. It's interesting and fun and watching the speculation is a kind of voyeurism, a way to get inside a company that keeps a tight lid on information, but much like baseball trade rumors, which I also love to follow, most of them... (Read More)