Posts by happygeek

I'm a little more cynical and, as much as I love the idea of a truly open and progressive coalition government, it strikes me as being window dressing more than anything. Not least, as you say, there is no clear path to implementation.

I can't see them repealing the Human Rights Act, for example, even if 99.9% of the 'ideas' put forward were demanding exactly that. The concept, as conceived here, seems fatally flawed.

Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has asked the British public to help decide which laws should be repealed by way of what can only be described as an exercise in crowdsourcing via the government sponsored ' Your Freedom ' website. However, it seems the great British public are not taking this journey into online democracy in action quite as seriously as the politicians would have hoped.

"The Coalition Government is committed to restoring and defending your freedom" Clegg says "and we're asking you to participate." Which is nice, as is the notion that "Rules in society create good law and order. But too many nannying, unnecessary rules restrict freedom and make criminals out of ordinary people." Many members of the public will agree with that sentiment, and will be happy to that they have been invited to help the government "root through the laws of our land, identify anything which looks unnecessary, pointless, or just downright daft, and ask – are these necessary?"

However, no sooner had Clegg posed the question: "Which offences do you think we should remove or change, and why?" online than things started to go wrong. First there was the completely expected, by everyone other than the government and those responsible for running the site itself it would seem, deluge of public interest that resulted in the crowdsourcing site crashing to a halt under the sheer volume of traffic. On day one …

Saw your pix in the DDinner - I ain't gonna argue - whatever you decide that's fine by me!

I'm just a big pussycat really :)

Thanks to the US dollar getting stronger against the Euro as the European debt crisis takes hold, and shows no signs of weakening for the remainder of the year, so the outlook for IT spending growth looks dim. So dim, in fact, that Gartner analysts have cut back the worldwide IT spending growth forecast for 2010 from 5.3 percent to just 3.9 percent.

According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is now forecast to total $3.350 trillion through 2010, which equates to an increase of 3.9 percent over the 2009 spending total of $3.225 trillion. In the first quarter of this year Gartner was forecasting worldwide IT spending to growth of 5.3 percent based on the devaluation of the Euro versus the US dollar since the start of the year.

Worldwide, the computing hardware spend is being forecast to reach $363 billion in 2010 which is up 9.1 percent from 2009 spending, benefitting from a continuing healthy PC sector accounting for some two-thirds of total spending in this area. Gartner expects PC shipments to remain robust throughout 2010 and 2011 with consumer shipments continuing to be powered by a strong mobile PC uptake, and professional shipments buoyed by a new replacement cycle with migration to Windows 7.

Richard Gordon, research vice president at Gartner, now says that the continuing strength of the dollar will "likely continue in the second half of 2010" and warns that this will "put downward pressure on US-dollar-denominated IT spending growth." Longer term. Gordon …

I'm seeing a 'Featured Poster' badge when I hover over your avatar here, are you not seeing it?

Unless you are a techno-luddite of the first order, the chances are that you would agree the Internet has become an integral part of daily life for those blessed with decent access to the thing. But would you agree that broadband access of no less than 1Mbps is your legal right? If you happen to live in Finland, from today it will be.

Yes, Finland has become the first country anywhere in the world to make access to the Internet by broadband a legal right for each and every one of its estimated 5,313,399 citizens. But the good news for the Finnish does not stop there: as well as bringing in a law that obliges all telecommunications providers to make affordable (between 30 to 40 Euros per month) minimum 1Mbps broadband lines available to all residents, but the government has pledged to increase that to a near universal (well, within 2km of 99% of the population) 100Mbs minimum no later than 2015.

This is, without doubt, a monumental move as far as the right to Internet access goes and puts it on an equal footing with postal and telephone services. It's also likely to be a huge task, practically speaking. Although it is thought that around 96% of the Finnish population is actually already online, which only leaves the service providers needing to track down and supply about a quarter of a million people - assuming, that is, this 4% that makes up the unconnected population actually wants …

The research includes malware. If a website hosts and distributes malware then it is infected as far as security researchers are concerned.

As for tracking cookies, there are far more non-adult content sites 'dishing out' them as well.

Nobody is saying you should not trust your AV software, just that the knee-jerk reaction that all adult sites are dangerous is wrong. All sites should be treated as equally dangerous until proven otherwise.

For the longest time there has been an implied, some might even say explicit, connection between computer infection and online pornography. According to one developer of AntiVirus software that connection has now been well and truly broken.

Ondrej Vlcek, the CTO at AVAST Software, has announced the results of research which suggests that for every 'adult' site that is infected in some way there are 99 sites with non-sexual content that are also infected. That's worth running by you again, websites with non-adult content outscore porn sites when it comes to being infected by a ratio of 99:1

"We are not recommending people to start searching for erotic content" Vlcek insists "but the statistics are clear, for every infected adult domain we identify there are 99 others with perfectly legitimate content that are also infected". The AVAST research discovered that, in the UK alone, there were more infected domains being uncovered on a daily basis containing 'London' as a keyword than those containing 'sex'.

Earlier this year I was reporting how in Britain we appear to prefer most everything online, from Twitter to news, over porn anyway. So it would appear that the myth has been busted that visiting porn sites is the most dangerous of online activities.

However, none of this means that porn sites are somehow the safest place online either. Truth be told the same 'safe surfing' advice applies no matter where on the web you are travelling: have …

EG - no need to apologise for trying to help. I've had a look at your posting in the virus/spyware forum and can't see anything wrong with it being there to be honest - and I've reversed the warning you were given as a result. Don't be too hard on our moderators though, they are all volunteers and all do their best here but sometimes make mistakes, they are human too. :)

Someone posing as Apple head honcho Steve Jobs on Twitter has managed to fool a major UK newspaper into reporting that the iPhone 4 would be recalled after posting a Tweet which said "We may have to recall the new iPhone. This, I did not expect". The Daily Mail website ran a story with a headline which proclaimed "Apple iPhone 4 may be recalled, says Steve Jobs" which was pulled soon after. Of course, this being the Internet there can be no hiding from such mistakes, especially when Daily Mail content is syndicated far and wide.

I was able to locate plenty of copies of the article by Richard Ashmore which that is was "a hugely embarrassing move for Apple" although truth be told it was actually much more embarrassing for the Daily Mail I would imagine. What a shame that a "spokesperson for Apple was not immediately available to comment" to the story, or Mr Ashmore would have probably have been pointed in the direction of the bio for that ' ceoSteveJobs ' account on Twitter which clearly states: "Of course this is a parody account".

Or maybe the journalist should have looked at some of the other ceoSteveJobs Tweets before coming to the conclusion that it must the real deal. Would the CEO of one of the biggest companies on the planet actually post such things as "FaceTime video calls are the future of AppleCare support" …

Hah! I've managed to reel in both freshwater and seawater trouts!

I know my plaice...

The Browsershots web-based service is pretty awesome at doing this for a quick idea of compatibility across multiple OSes and browser clients - you give it the site URL, it gives you a ton of screenshots showing you how it looks.

I'm not involved in the site development side of DaniWeb, but would be very surprised if Dani (or the web design consultants) had not done compatibility testing.

And before anybody bangs on about the 'unfeasibility' of testing every possible combination - rubbish. A partitioned machine running multiple OSes, each with a full bank of browsers shouldn't be beyond a dev company. However, is it something to do with FF's new release? Does the previous version react in the same way?

If you cannot wait to get hold of the new iPhone 4, should you have been lucky enough to have successfully pre-ordered, then you could always upgrade your existing iPhone 3G/3GS to iOS 4 and get many of the same features.

Be warned, though, the update itself is not without some problems. Things got off to a bad start when the iPhone 3GS decided to take rather longer than usual to back up before starting the upgrade procedure. A deep breath, a reboot and I started again, but the upgrade froze during the backup portion completely. Third time was the charm, although it was still a painfully slow process which took over an hour from start to shiny new iOS 4 finish. I've read reports across the Internet of users experiencing very similar backup freezing and slowness. But once installed, what does iOS 4 bring to the iPhone party which is worth waiting for?

Well the multi-tasking support is great fun. Or at least it would be if more third party apps actually supported it. So far I've been able to enjoy using a Twitter client (Twittelator Pro) and Safari, cutting and pasting between the two and accessing them with the 'double home click' trick to pop up icons for running apps. I can listen to streaming radio courtesy of the TuneIn Radio app which has been updated for iOS 4 while doing something else with the iPhone now, which is nice. But that's pretty …

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has just sat down after speaking for an hour to deliver the coalition Government's 'Emergency Budget' to a crowded and noisy House of Commons - and it's not good news for the games industry.

Of interest to those in the IT industry in general are the following announcements:

The proposed video games industry tax relief announced by the previous Chancellor earlier in the year, and worth an estimated £1 billion a year to games developers, has been abolished.

The landline levy which was also proposed in that same previous budget, estimated to cost every household £6 per year for every telephone line they have in order to fund superfast broadband development in the UK, has also been abolished.

Finally, the rate of VAT (Value Added Tax) will increase on 4th January 2001 from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. This will inevitably impact upon all business, and the IT sector is no exception with an additional 2.5 percent to be added to the cost hardware and services.

Barry Murphy, UK technology leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, said:

"Today's announcement to withdraw from introducing any relief for the video game industry will hit many businesses, but is not unexpected given the fiscal crisis and much of the economic commentary on the role of such incentives. The lower corporate tax rates and some of the employment tax reductions will help the sector, but the competition for global …

According to the BBC, although you'll need to understand Urdu to read it (here is a rough translation using Google for your convenience if you don't), Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg stands accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a Pakistani court filing under something known as 'Messenger Law' for which the punishment can be death.

The case stems from a competition that a Facebook user started which invited users to 'Draw Muhammad' and led to Facebook access being blocked in Pakistan back in May. A competition which proved quite popular with the Facebook 'Everybody Draw Mohammed Day' group attracting over 40,000 members before it was pulled. That said, the 'Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day' group which was not pulled managed to attract more than 60,000 members, so make of that what you will.

Boxcrack informs us that on May 31st "a High Court judge, Justice Ijaz Ahmad Chaudhry, ordered the government to take action in respect to alleged blasphemy on Facebook. On June 11th in consequence of this order, the Deputy Attorney General authorised and initiated the first stage of investigation and prosecution of Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook". Now reports are emerging that a Pakistani lawyer, Muhammad Azhar Siddique, has filed a "First Information Report" (FIR) alleging that Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is responsible for the distribution of blasphemous Islamic content.

Zuckerberg is not the only person facing this police investigation as the FIR …

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and be a professional and do the research yourself as we have already done it for you once!

C'mon, that's more than a little harsh. Dani is professional through and through, and just trying to reach out and get ideas, new as well as old, about things that she could do to improve the place. She does read the threads here, and has taken on board what has been said previously, that doesn't mean she should not ask for further ideas.

And talking of keeping it professional, isn't this all getting just a little bit too personal? My mum always told me to count to ten before responding to anything I was angry about, advice that I have often ignored to my cost but good advice nonetheless. Let's not be too harsh on Dani, without her DaniWeb would not exist in the first place (and that is not meant to devalue the community, just a statement of fact) and without her continuing dedication and hard work (I know the hours she puts in on keeping DaniWeb going and growing) it would not be the place it is now.

Just saying...

Teens just love using social networks for everything from posting naked photos online to wasting time during class at school. We also know that parents have little idea what teens get up to online but, it would appear, the teen online love affair has not gone unnoticed by young hackers who are actively targetting their fellow teenagers.

Researchers at the Imperva Application Defense Center have uncovered a new hack attack which specifically targets teens using the popular Habbo Hotel virtual world come social networking site. Since it launched in 2000, Habbo Hotel has gone on to see around 75,000 new avatars being registered daily and with monthly visitor totals of around 8 million uniques you can see why it might present an attractive target for hackers looking to spread malware or spam to a 'trusted' circle of freinds via compromised accounts.

According to Imperva ADC it was pretty easy to do the detective work that uncovered the Habbo Hotel attack. First researchers searched the T35 hosting site, favoured by certain hackers as it allows for PHP execution as well as providing sufficient free space for their nefarious purposes, using a simple filetype search for passwords stored as plain text at t35.com

This revealed a site, the URL of which I will not repeat here as it appears to still be up and running, containing a directory listing of thousands of Habbo Hotel users with data such as …

File that one under 'duh' methinks :)

"Linuxquestions" sends out a periodic (optional!) e-mail containing, among other things, links to "unanswered questions". Sometimes this is a motivation for sporadic users, like myself, to log in and answer a question which seems to be in my sphere of knowledge.

Interesting. That's something we could maybe add to the existing monthly DaniWeb Digest email newsletter perhaps? A link to a few unanswered posts under a 'can you help' heading...

OK, firstly if you had ever read any of my output you would not come to the conclusion that I'm a Microsoft fanboy, quite the opposite I would imagine.

Secondly, people get to know about the Apple update in the same way they get to know about the Microsoft updates that have been done 'secretly' in that they read the news stories that appear. Once they read them, it seems to me, the Linux/Mac brigade are all over 'Evil Microsoft' yet strangely silent about Apple doing the same thing. Even the dumbest of asses has to think that's a little, well, hypocritical. No?

Sure, not reporting the update could be overlooked, and as a Microsoft fan boy, I'm sure you believe it should be.

As you said, yourself, the update was secretly deployed. So, how are users of Mac OS X, let alone Linux users, supposed to have found out about it? You're being the dumbest of asses here.

Microsoft recently admitted, via the Director of it's Security Response Centre, that it doesn't report every Windows security vulnerability discovered and subsequently fixed via patches and updates. No big deal you might think, as long as the holes get fixed that's all that matter. I happen to agree, however that most vocal section of Microsoft-haters the Mac and Linux fanboy brigade certainly did not. Indeed, there was much waving of arms and displaying of indignation that Microsoft was 'cheating the figures' by not declaring security updates so as to be able to claim it was more secure than it actually is. Odd then, that the same folk have not as yet starting kicking up a similar fuss when Apple is caught doing the same thing.

According to security researchers at Sophos Mac OS X (10.6.4) includes limited protection against the Pinhead-B Trojan, and claim that Apple "secretly updated" the anti-malware protection built-into it when it released the new version earlier this week. The OSX/Pinhead-B (AKA HellRTS amongst Apple security aficionados) update, in the file XProtect.plist containing elementary signatures of some Mac threats, was not documented by Apple at all.

"What's curious to me is why Apple didn't announce they were making this update in the release notes or security advisory that came with Mac OS X 10.6.4. It's almost as if they don't want to acknowledge that there could be a malware threat on Mac OS X" says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at …

Some of us just want a satnav which tells us how to get from A to B while avoiding traffic congestion. Others, apparently, want a satnav that imitates SpongeBob SquarePants for reasons which, to be frank, are completely beyond me. After all, I don't live in a pineapple under the sea.

Yet the market leader in satnav devices, TomTom, has today announced the availability of a SpongeBob SquarePants voice (following the success of the Homer Simpson satnav) for users of its products. Indeed, the jovial press release even informs me that it will help users to navigate beyond Bikini Bottom. Well whoopy bleedin' do.

So what do you get courtesy of this partnership between TomTom and Nickelodeon, other than extremely annoyed and a headache by the time you arrive that is? Well I am reliably informed that SpongeBob "and his friends" (oh God help us all) add to the navigation commentary with such comments as "Hey, I don’t have a license to drive. So is it illegal when I drive Mr. Krabs crazy?" and "Exit ahead. Hey, we’re cruisin’ in a car! I’ve only cruised in a boat before!"

If that's not bad enough, and believe me it is, it really, really is, then you could choose Dora the Explorer quipping "We need to exit left ahead. ¡Vámonos! We're getting closer!" or "Adventures are better with an explorer like you" if you prefer a different route to your mental breakdown.

The TomTom …

The Twitter account of the Conservative MP for Suffolk Coastal, Therese Coffey, has been well and truly hacked it would appear. According to London Spin "The attackers bombarded social media users with sexually explicit messages and comments after gaining access to her Blog, Facebook and Twitter account details".

Although the Facebook account would seem to be back under Tory control, with a message apologising that her account had been hacked and stating that she has the email address "of the person who has hacked in" which will enable her to "do something about it" the Twitter account would appear to still be awaiting a clean up after the hacker, calling himself thegh0st, posted a handful of offensive anti-Tory tweets.

The last warned another Twitter user, Tim Montgomerie who is editor of ConservativeHome blog, that "youre next on the chopping list...freak" and other postings included one which stated "David Camerons wifes a slut...she dresses like a whore!!!"

Yep, seems to be working for everyone now.

Nope, refresh makes no difference as far as I can see.

I think what people are getting at here is that when you go to a member profile page the avatar pic used to show up next to the username, but it has now vanished completely.

I recently argued 'Why Goatse was right to disclose iPad data leak' after it came to light that the FBI had started an investigation into the hacker group following the responsible disclosure of an iPad data leak caused by poor AT&T security measures. I said "The security researchers which discovered the vulnerability ensured that AT&T were not only informed, but that it had also closed the hole down, before going public with the news. So why are they, and not the dumbass security folk at AT&T responsible for not securing that data in the first place, the ones under investigation by the FBI?" at the time, and now it seems an arrest has been made.

However, it looks like I might have been right about Goatse doing nothing wrong legally, despite what others argue, as that arrest had absolutely nothing to do with the iPad data leak at all. In fact it appears to have been on drugs charges. According to reports Andrew Auernheimer, aka 'Weev' and 'Escher' from the Goatse group, was arrested on four felony and one misdemeanor charges "involving possession of a controlled substance" on Tuesday. The Register claims that police "allegedly discovered cocaine, ecstasy and LSD during a search of his home".

There's no denying that, if the charges stick, Mr Auernheimer has broken the law by possessing these controlled substances. However, it does seem a little arse about face that the drugs discovery was only made after …

He is Justin Bieber and I claim my five pounds...

This community has been growing year on year, and continues to do so. Sure, there is churn as in every online community and some long term members will eventually leave. However, we do not chase them away they choose to leave for many reasons. The important thing being that there is always plenty of fresh blood to replace them.

UI changes are made, you might find this hard to believe, to improve the experience not make it worse.

If, as you suggest, the support provided by the DaniWeb community was poor most of the time then we simply wouldn't have survived this long in such a competitive marketplace and we sure as heck wouldn't continue to be growing.

Remember, for every person who complains about changes there are thousands who do not. Dani does, again no matter what you may think, read every post here and take every view into account. But being open to criticism and comments does not mean that she has to act upon every suggestion - they are suggestions, they are noted and Dani keeps them in mind when she is developing the site.

The notion that DaniWeb management somehow sees itself as being apart from the membership, and acts selfishly, is pretty laughable in my opinion. Dani, Eyal and I are all members of this community and every decision taken is taken in order to ensure the community continues to grow and prosper - it's as simple as that!

So we now have a button at the top and bottom of the page and still there are complaints. [montypython] Is this the five pound argument? [/montypython] :)

I've never understood what the anti-purple thing is all about. DaniWeb has had a purple hue, on and off, for years now.

Anyway, I prefer to think of it as a calming deep lilac myself :)

welcome aboard the good ship DaniWeb, again :)

More often than not I'll be writing about the security problems facing Windows XP users, such as when I recently reported how a large number of enterprises are still running XP SP2 machines which will shortly stop being supported by Microsoft in terms of security updates, hotfixes and the like. So imagine my surprise, at the same time that Microsoft reminds us that it's the end of the line for Windows XP netbooks, to finally get hold of a story about Windows XP being good for security.

OK, so the report from the Webroot Threat Blog is a pretty damn specific one, relating just to a single Trojan downloader executable, but it's a Windows XP good security news story nonetheless.

It would seem that researchers at the security labs have caught the first Trojan, a variant of the Tacticlol downloader, which simply refuses to execute under Windows XP. A new spam campaign was distributing the Trojan and it executed as expected under both Windows Vista and Windows 7, but repeated tests on both virtual and real machines, with various levels of patching, have determined that the thing just will not run in an XP environment.

So there you have it, Windows XP users are safe from a Trojan downloader which kick-starts what Webroot describes as a "devastating malware infection" while users of the more secure Windows versions are vulnerable.

The really interesting thing for me is the notion that this …

Unfortunately, everyone's avatar seems to have vanished from their profile pages. I'm guessing mine is actually in my browser cache which is why I can see that one.

Now that's bizarre! Mine seems to still be there but everyone else's profile I've looked at so far is sans pic.

I think Dani is off to a conference in California this week, leaving today, so this might take a tad longer to fix than normal but I'll flag it up with her now.

Facebook users have been making a lot of use of the new 'like' feature which allows users to link to webpages that they, well, like funnily enough. Not so funny when Facebook users are claiming to like a site called "101 Hottest Women in the World" which features an image of Jessica Alba. But don't be seduced...

Not that I've got anything against the Hollywood actress and sex symbol, but I do have a dislike for clickjacking (or Likejacking if you prefer) and that's what is happening here. According to security experts at Sophos as soon as anyone who is logged into Facebook clicks the like link and arrives at the destination, a single click anywhere on the page will update that user's Facebook profile without permission in order to add another 'like' recommendation and so virally spread the attack to an ever broader audience of unsuspecting fans of hot women.

It accomplishes this by using a hidden invisible button underneath your mouse pointer (a hidden iFrame) which captures any click and redirects it to the 'like' button. Of course, this is just the latest clickjacking attack in recent weeks. We've already seen similar scams using sites with link titles such as "This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS" and "This Girl Has An Interesting Way Of Eating A Banana" which are designed to attract the curious users within a social network. The attack growth trend is starting to get worrying. At …

So you did, and yes she is :)

The glasses were 'nerd glasses' and people were being photographed on the red carpet with them for a bit of fun. I have no sense of humour so declined :)

Further DaniWeb events down the road are certainly something everyone involved would like to see happen, so watch this space...

You´re also a lot smaller then I expected, this is very clear on the pic with you and Davey. There´s more then a feet difference between the two of you :D

And I'm only 5'6" tall myself...

And on the moderator front jay11 was there, oh and InsightsDigital who is active in the Internet Marketing forums was there.

1. I have no idea who turned them down or who they offered the story to and in what order.

2. I have not commented on the Gawker handling of the story, other than to say that the data list was responsibly redacted. However, I agree Gawker should have blamed AT&T and not Apple - this has nothing to do with Goatse though, and that's what my news story and comments are about.

3. Because a handful of examples proves there is a problem, over 100,000 of them proves there is a bloody big problem.

Err, Goatse did turn it over to AT&T to fix, and did so before handing the story over to the media. Indeed, it even ensured the vulnerability had been fixed properly before going public. Which kind of shoots a huge hole in the forehead of your argument, does it not?

I am new here so I was not aware of the dates these threads are posted. If you check my profile it is definitely new and i am not spamming or something.

And stellarios is new here as well, but posts from exactly the same IP as you, and has the exact same signature links as you, and oddly enough voted down the same posting as you after you stated you would "deal with" the posters reputation. Odd that...

Almost as odd as user snipzers who has a different IP to post from, but the exact same signature links as you, and also downvoted that post.

Or how about the other handful of brand new accounts all started on the same day, all with no posts but all of whom happened to downvote that same members post that you threatened to 'deal with' on the reputation front?

You can see why someone might think that these were all the same person, and that person was involved in some kind of spamming activity can't you?

iPad users in the USA have found themselves caught up in a security gaff which saw subscriber data of some 114,000 of them exposed for anyone to see. Subscriber data such as email addresses the Integrated Circuit Card ID that authenticates them on the AT&T network. The security researchers which discovered the vulnerability ensured that AT&T were not only informed, but that it had also closed the hole down, before going public with the news. So why are they, and not the dumbass security folk at AT&T responsible for not securing that data in the first place, the ones under investigation by the FBI?

According to a Goatse spokesperson "All data was gathered from a public webserver with no password, accessible by anyone on the Internet. There was no breach, intrusion, or penetration, by any means of the word. The dataset was not disclosed until we verified the problem was fixed by the vendor". Indeed, the timeline of events could not be much clearer as far as the matter of acting responsibly goes.

The vulnerability was discovered and verified, with user data extracted as proof, and AT&T were informed via a third party. AT&T then acted to fix the vulnerability, and Goatse ensured that this fix was in place and working (meaning there was no further threat to use data) before contacting a journalist at Gawker with the story and the proof in the form of the acquired dataset. The journalist concerned, Ryan Tate, then acted …

The really interesting thing is that Google is worried enough by Bing to want to copy it in the first place.

Photos are up on the DaniWeb fans page on Facebook here. I'm the big bald one with the tattoos in the photos...

The event itself was very cool, from the Dinner with Dani part through to the after party.

Great minds think alike. I'd just written an opinion piece elsewhere entitled 'Google, the Bing Edition: an exercise in hard of thinkingness' in which I said "Google should be man enough to admit it gets it wrong every now and then, rather than blame the most unlikely sounding of bugs for a hard of thinking moment".

The bug, I suspect, was someone failing to paste the link in...

The failure, I'm certain, was in Google thinking that people actually want a confusing full screen image that you cannot remove (only replace with another confusing image) instead of the clean and crisp screen that helped make Google what it is today.

All in all, a massive FAIL

What do you, dear reader, call a posting on Twitter? I'm guessing the chances are high that you call it a tweet, like pretty much everyone else I know. Apart from the editorial elite at the New York Times that is, which has just banned the word 'tweet' from being used in conjunction with anything other than birds making chirpy noises, on the grounds that it is a silly word amongst other things.

According to reports the New York Times has sent a memo out to contributors asking them not to use the word tweet, in which a man with the title of 'standards editor' says: "outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English" and insists that "standard English is what we should use in news articles".

Phil Corbett, the standards editor in question, then goes on to justify his assertion with some nonsense about favouring established usage over jargon, and how regular people using Twitter would not use the word. Really? I think Mr Corbett might be surprised, if he actually bothered to ask a bunch of Twitter users about this, as to just how many of them do. However, the really telling bit, I feel, comes towards the end of the memo when Corbett admits that "Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly".

The official advice from the New York Times appears to be to use the words 'say' or 'write' …

A big thanks to everyone who braved the torrential rain to make it to the Dinner with Dani event in New York on Wednesday. It was really great seeing everyone there, and the technical discussions at the various tables seemed to go well.

I couldn't make it to the end of the after party myself, jet lag beat me into submission, but congrats to whoever won the free raffle for the iPad! I'm not jealous at all, oh no...