I’ve spoken before about how the ease with which the Internet can be both a blessing and a curse, so I felt it was only fair to highlight another instance of it doing good for the community. Earlier this week there was a lot of outrage provoked by a vidoe posted on You Tube which showed a youth dressed in pyjama’s and a balaclava. This youth referred to himself asn Timmy and showed the camera into his ‘laboratory’, once inside he picked up a cat and proceeded to slam it against the wall as well as delivering several blows to it with his fists in what was over a minute of sustained abuse. Continue reading »
You can hardly turn on the news now with out some horror story appearing about a government department misplacing a USB stick or losing a laptop containing a large amount of personal information about people. In this age of data protection it’s becoming more and more important for companies to safe guard the information they keep on file about people to stop it falling into the wrong hands (i.e. the hands of people looking to steal your identity).
People spend a lot of time worrying about who holds what information, even down to who has their email and postal address. After all no one wants extra spam either. Major companies and government departments are not the only things to watch though, most people forget about a much larger source of personal information that they have more control over than anyone, Facebook. Continue reading »
It’s been touted around on news sites for a while now. Facebook is getting a new look! Infact for a few months now memebers have been able to try out the new interface by adding new. infront of Facebook in the site url. Initially you were given the option to switch back to the old look if you wanted to, but recently this has been disabled as they look to push out the new look to all users.
Following on from my previous post about the good things open source can do I thought it only fair to point out that its not all good. The corner stone of the open source movement openness. Releasing API’s to allow other people to interact with your application or allowing them to modify things directly (as in the Wiki model). This can be a good thing, opening your project up to outside influences like this allows thousands of minds out side your group to introduce interesting and creative features, things that you wouldn’t normally come up with on your own. There are some truly creative minds out there and its not always easy to ensure that that’s what you get inside the boundaries of your project.
Anyone who has read my previous post The Facebook Addiction might think I dislike Facebook after this one. The BBC 3 program The Wall produced this little promo. Its cast in a comedic lighty but I feel the way it protrays Facebook is very true to life.
I’m sure I’m not the only person to notice this nor the only person to dedicate a blog post to it! There’s an addiction running through the country but for the life of me I cant understand why even though I’ve been afflicted myself. I mean there are people who seem to spend all their day on the thing and the only benefit I can see is to be really annoying to other people (for the last time I don’t want to be a vampire or a werewolf, and I sure as hell don’t have enough friends that I want to sell any of them) Continue reading »
