Aug 7th, 2009 - Mike Maser, Chief Strategy Officer at Digg, has confirmed that Digg Ads will start rolling out in an early beta format during the next few days. So expect to start seeing sponsored Diggs mixed up with the real stuff, although the adverts will carry a 'sponsored by' title the screenshots suggest... (Read More)

Jun 28th, 2009 - Generally speaking I would not recommend reading a newspaper in the hot tub. If that hot tub happens to be of the spa-jet variety then that only makes it worse. If the newspaper is a rare item from the 19th century then surely only a fool would consider it. Yet this weekend I have been doing just... (Read More)

Jun 2nd, 2009 - On Thursday 2nd June 2009 it will be the 20th anniversary of the Tienanmen Square massacre when an undisclosed number of student protesters were killed after tanks rolled into squash the protests. You might imagine, then, that in China services such as Twitter would be a-buzz with talk about the... (Read More)

May 20th, 2009 - Now there is a headline that is right up there with 'Vatican endorses new Dan Brown novel' in terms of something you would not expect ever to be reading, but according to reports it is true. The Pope is apparently keen to emulate President Obama in the way he has embraced the Internet to spread his... (Read More)

May 14th, 2009 - Now this is interesting: with the arrival of a demand for some $4.5 million in damages, one of the founders of Pirate Bay has come up with an innovate method of paying it. Gottfrid Svartholm has set up something called internet-avgift which encourages ordinary Internet users who are friendly to the... (Read More)

Jul 29th, 2009 - The independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industry, OFCOM, was charged by the government to reveal consumers' experiences of electronic communications services, including broadband provision, and the results do not make for happy reading. The research saw in... (Read More)

Jul 28th, 2009 - According to a new Gartner survey, despite companies driving down overall IT budgets this year things are looking good for global software spending in 2010. Well, I say good, but perhaps I should say a teensy weensy little bit better than this year. Gartner reckons that organisations surveyed... (Read More)

Jul 28th, 2009 - According to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence Report from Symantec, things are looking good as web malware writers have taken a sabbatical. Unfortunately the spammers have gone multi-lingual in a lazy-ass automated kind of a way with great effect. Spam levels have, say Symantec, stayed at... (Read More)

May 19th, 2009 - Scared that students taking an exam might cheat, teachers at the posh Harrow School in England took the unusual step of banning them from using the Internet and re-routing their email so it could be read by the headmaster. The irony of the exam being concerned with Nazi foreign policy has not... (Read More)

Jul 27th, 2009 - The High Court in the UK will this Friday decide if an appeal against the Home Office backed decision to extradite Gary McKinnon on hacking charges to the US is to be upheld or, as seems likely, not. McKinnon has been accused of what US prosecutors refer to the biggest military computer hack of all... (Read More)

Jul 26th, 2009 - So Google reckons that it can provide the perfect operating system in Chrome, even to the point where according to Google's Engineering Director, Linus Upson, it will herald the end of malware. That's what he went on the record to say, promising that Google was "completely redesigning the... (Read More)

Jul 22nd, 2009 - Can anyone top this: the Ministry of Defence here in the UK has admitted that last year it managed to lose a server. A whole one, and get this, it was meant to be located in a secure government building for good measure. Over the years I have become more than a little immune to data loss... (Read More)

Jun 2nd, 2009 - Where would we be without the hole in the wall, that magical machine that provides us with cash whenever we need it? Where would we be without online banking, that magical system that lets us pay our bills via the Web? Customers of the HSBC bank in the UK found out over the weekend when it suffered... (Read More)

May 15th, 2009 - Ever wondered why your WiFi doesn't work as well as you expected, especially if you live in a highly populated part of town? The obvious, and oft-repeated, answer is that all those WiFi networks trying to work in the same vicinity just end up causing network edge congestion and that equals poor... (Read More)

Apr 28th, 2009 - Last week, former UK Prime Minister and current Quartet Envoy to the Middle East on behalf of the EU, UN, US and Russia, Tony Blair was hacked. Well, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation on Facebook was hacked according to reports at any rate. It seems that the site was flooded with abusive messages... (Read More)

Jul 21st, 2009 - Mainframe literate IT professionals are becoming as rare as rocking horse crap courtesy of demographics, the economy and the fact that the mainframe came close to death some years back. So what, you might think, but business is starting to embrace the mainframe once more and the dramatic exodus of... (Read More)

May 31st, 2009 - Now that's what I call a really cool idea, an air-fuelled battery for the ever popular iPhone. Actually, it is more than an idea, this is a development with legs. University researchers in the UK, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have designed something... (Read More)

Jul 19th, 2009 - According to a new poll the Apple iPhone 3GS is the smartphone that most Brits would want to be seen with on the beach this summer. The poll asked some 1500 people which smartphone they would be taking to the beach, and 28 percent of them said it would have to be the iPhone 3GS. In second place... (Read More)

Jul 3rd, 2009 - With the iPhone 3GS slowly coming back into stock after selling out during the first week of release, there is more good news for potential buyers: the 3GS has been jailbroken. Yes, 19 year old George Hotz who you might remember shot to hacking fame a couple of years back when he claimed to be... (Read More)

Jun 9th, 2009 - UK iPhone 3G users hoping that the network operator with the exclusive contract on the new iPhone 3GS might see sense and let them upgrade have been dealt a body blow as O2 confirms they can go and swivel on Twitter. The iPhone 3GS will be upon us in a week or so. Brilliant stuff, especially... (Read More)

May 11th, 2009 - You really couldn't make this up if your tried very hard indeed. The ongoing saga which is best summed up as 'what will Apple ban today' has just got stranger than ever. Apparently all BitTorrent iPhone apps are toxic, as is the notion of superimposing your own face upon that of Jesus, not to... (Read More)

Jul 12th, 2009 - Lawrence 'Larry' Roberts is something of an Internet legend, and for good reason: he helped build it. Way back in 1967 Roberts not only drew up the plans for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) which would eventually lead to the Internet, but he also headed up the team that... (Read More)

May 24th, 2009 - A survey of leased line Internet connections from 6000 organisations covering speeds ranging from 256Kbps right up to Gigabit Ethernet has revealed that as many as one in six are loaded to a degree where performance impacts are likely. NetEvidence, a network performance management outfit, undertook... (Read More)

Jul 6th, 2009 - comScore has just published data from the Video Metrix service which shows that the number of online videos being viewed here in the UK is up 47 percent on a year ago and fast approaching 5 billion in April 2009 when the measuring period ended. Google did best out of the sharp upturn in online... (Read More)

Jun 23rd, 2009 - Over the years there has been plenty of speculation regarding the sanity of Steve 'Monkey Dancing' Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO. But what is it with Microsoft and this obsession to pursue the search supremacy dream at any cost? Sure, I know Ballmer has sworn to kill Google before but the truth is... (Read More)

Jun 4th, 2009 - Just as British MPs line their pockets with taxpayer cash, just as Hollywood epics re-write history with happy endings, so Google was always going to want to compete with the Wolfram Alpha computational engine head on. And so it is that we get a sneak look at Google Squared in the Google Labs, and... (Read More)

Jun 4th, 2009 - This is interesting, as we are all used to reading about online resources being optimised for mobile devices. Take YouTube which has been successfully shrunk to fit the iPhone and other mobiles, but has now been writ large by way of a change. Google informs me that it has now introduced YouTube... (Read More)

Jun 2nd, 2009 - The Google Android OS is coming to the Acer Aspire ONE netbook, and sooner than you might imagine. As a happy ONE owner myself, and a keen observer of all things Android, the news that it could be as soon as Q3 this year really pleases me. Jim Wong, President of IT Products at Acer, was speaking at... (Read More)

May 22nd, 2009 - I have just been reading about the YouTube Porn Day scandal and it reminded me that I had been meaning to pass this little snippet of information on, direct from a YouTube Team Member and serving to illustrate just how popular the Google owned video clip sharing site has become. That truly... (Read More)

Jun 25th, 2009 - I am probably showing my age here, but I can recall when relationships started as a result of face to face meetings. If those relationships came to an end, they ended the same way as a rule. OK, a few cowardly types might have resorted to a 'Dear John' letter or even a phone call, but only a few.... (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)

Jun 5th, 2009 - "Opera Retakes Leadership from iPhone in Mobile Browser Market" reads the press release that arrived in my email this week. "Opera is the world's number one mobile browser, overtaking iPhone in May according to data from StatCounter Global Stats" it continues, which certainly peaked my interest.... (Read More)

May 27th, 2009 - The latest State of the Mobile Web report, published by mobile web browser client developers Opera, reveals that mobile web usage in the UK has grown by nearly 50 percent over the last year. The report also tries to make sense of other global trends as they impact upon mobile web usage,... (Read More)

May 14th, 2009 - While The Telegraph has been enjoying all the media attention this last week, at least here in the UK, thanks to exposing the scandal of British MP expense claims and breaking new details first online every day, it is not the most popular online UK newspaper according to newly published research.... (Read More)

Jun 2nd, 2009 - Gamers have got to love the E3 Expo, especially Microsoft gamers who are into the social side of the Xbox experience. If they happen to be obsessed with Twitter as well as Xbox Live then Microsoft had some good news to announce for them at E3: a Twitter client for the Xbox 360 with that all... (Read More)

May 25th, 2009 - File under strange but true. It would appear that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second has been presented with a specially commissioned gold-plated Nintendo Wii games console by THQ as part of a marketing campaign for some new game. The rather loose connection between British royalty and the game... (Read More)

May 18th, 2009 - Facebook, home of the 104 year old Frisbee Queen, would appear to have taken a disliking to large parts of Wales. You know, that rather lovely country which borders England and forms part of the United Kingdom. Wales even has a devolved Government in the Welsh Assembly, something the Welsh fought... (Read More)

May 3rd, 2009 - Some people like to get their free Microsoft products by adopting the eye patch and a parrot approach via sites such as The Pirate Bay. Some of us, however, rather like the idea of getting Windows 7 totally free, totally legally, and direct from Microsoft for good measure. Yes, I can confirm... (Read More)