The Jimmy Savile witch-hunt sets us on a path to paranoia | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian

Jimmy Savile and the BBC the biggest story on Earth? Apparently so. Today the British media placed it above Romney versus Obama, above the implosion of Lebanon and above the birth of the world’s largest oil company. Savile was bigger than killer drones in Lincolnshire, bigger than Cameron’s prison policy, bigger than the sensational Birmingham terrorism trial. The mere “standing down” of the editor of Newsnight led the BBC news, as if the corporation had sub-contracted itself to its house journal, Ariel.

via The Jimmy Savile witch-hunt sets us on a path to paranoia | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian.

People do the silliest things…

Recently a lot of people have been talking about passwords and how they are too simple. What the researchers failed to mention is that it doesn’t matter how secure your password is it will not help.

There was a bit of a buzz on Twitter yesterday about an application called Twifficiency. It allegedly calculates “your twitter efficiency based upon your twitter activity. This includes how many people you follow, how many people follow you, how often you tweet and how many tweets you read.”

I saw the messages in my stream and thought they looked a bit spammy. Then I realised they were just automatically generated when someone took ‘the test’. Most memes and especially ones that stroke the ego. I must confess having worked in digital media for longer than I care to state I rarely go in for these online quizzes or automatic tests and popularity contests anymore. Still a few of my friends did. @greedoe @andyhewittlock @ianjamesdavies I’m looking at you…

Anyway back to the point about passwords. So you can plan a great secure password but people still authorise any old application on social networks without reading the small print. Although it states on the front page of the app that it will auto publish the result after allowing the app to link to your Twitter account most users didn’t read the caveat or didn’t know what it meant and selected ‘OK’. Now Twitter is ablaze with automatically generated scores. It’s almost like the ‘news’ that there is no official facebook dislike button. Is this really news worthy of the BBC and other media outlets?

Twitter Weekly Round Up for 2010-01-31

Twitter Weekly Round Up for 2009-12-20

Brrr


It’s official the Arctic chill has arrived. I woke up in the middle of the night and it was chilly so chilly I had to take a grab of the weather temperature on the iPhone provided by yahoo. Now I know severe weather warnings have been issued as temperatures in the UK dipped as low as -11C (12.2F) overnight but I never really believe it in fact normally I sleep through the coldest of the weather – like modern day hibernating.

The BBC seem to not be showing the weather at all today and just says Freezing Cold- maybe it’s so cold it’s broken?

The Arctic weather is expected to keep its grip on the UK, with lows of -10C (14F) forecast for southern England and Wales into Wednesday.

Apple pushes anti-virus for Macs

For the first time, Apple is recommending the use of anti-virus tools to protect Mac systems.
I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner in all honesty. Apple systems are becoming more and more popular and as such they will become a target for the virus makers.

The BBC website and The Register site both have more on the story. In the meantime I’d recommend ClamXav if you are running Mac OS X it’s free and frequently updated.

Robert Peston on why Vista is evil

Dear Bill Gates

Give me back my weekend. I bought a new Windows Vista laptop – and that’s when the trouble began.

My dislike of your new user interface you can put down to the conservatism that comes with advancing years. However having loyally stuck by the galumphing, unaesthetic functionality of your operating systems over the past 15 years, while faced with ridicule from pretentious Mac-loving types, I resent your attempt at an elegance transplant.

But what really grates is that your system is incompatible with two of the vital tools of my trade. Vista refuses to load the software for my newish Olympus digital recorder. And here’s what takes the biscuit. Vista rejects my HP IPAQ handheld device – even though the software for that was created by Microsoft!

So in order to put Vista at the centre of what I do, I would have to buy hundreds of pounds of new hardware. Which may be great news for your industry, but makes me regret never having defected to Steve Jobs. Perhaps now’s the time.

more on the BBC website

strange new spam

During the last seven days I’ve noticed a strange new form of comment spam. No longer advertising poker sites or pr0n. Instead they include urls to the BBC, firefox, yale, amazon. I’m sure this is some sort of attack to make automatic comment spam functionality block trusted sites in an attempt to make website publishers remove automatic filtering systems.
So in one respect I am heartened as it means the filtering systems are working well if the spammers are now trying to reduce their use.
On the other I’m disheartened that like any other war there are always new battles to be waged when the old ones have been won.

big bang

Andy and I were awoken at around six this morning by what we thought was an earthquake. True to form I fell straight back asleep. It turns out though that it was an explosion north of Londona at Buncefield some 50 miles away.
By now you have probably seen the news and know it’s a huge oil depot that has exploded. Lucky for everyone it was at 6am on a Sunday.
More on the BBC

HolyMoly it’s c****s corner

Very funny website with lots of mad rantings. May not be especially work friendly and quite possibly libelous too. So we love it obviously.
Things like…
“Philip Hayton
So you quit your job because of “incompatibility” with your BBC co-host Kate Silverton? Are you fucking serious?

I’ve got some news for you pal- we all have to work with at least one complete fucking cunt who we hate with a blue flame burning passion. Dry your eyes girly and tell the truth, you left cos they found all that gay porn on your laptop.” from HolyMoly