Category Archives: Technology

UK citizens protected from Wikifilth by IWF

WIKIFIDDLE, Brass Eye, Sunday (NNN) — The Internet Watch Foundation, protectors of the British citizenry against uncceptable material on teh intarweb, have declared Wikipedia illegal in the UK.

Several police forces had advised the IWF concerning the site, swearing their actions had nothing to do with anything in the site about senior policemen or their behaviour.

“Virgin Killer” by Gordon Brown“The fourth most popular website in the world is an encyclopedia,” said IWF Oberstürmgrüppenwhitehouse Myra Hindley. “What sort of message does that send about the youth of today? They should be using mobile phones, dealing drugs, smoking cracks to ‘jazz’ music in discos and knifing each other in the streets. God help us if they see record covers!”

Police across the country used sophisticated hammer-detecting equipment to swoop on the homes of rumoured Wikipedophiles. All computers, mobile phones, televisions and any technology more sophisticated than scissors will be confiscated for investigation, and will be returned in due process in twelve to eighteen months when the filthy fucking nonces have been brought to trial, assuming they survive multiple beatings in jail.

“Fuck these filthy fucking fuckers,” said Zoe fucking Hilton of the NSPCC. “And give us money, or you’re a filthy fucking kiddie fucker yourself. Turd.”

“We absolutely won’t be adapting the system to discussion of ID cards,” said Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. “Nor will MPs raising the issue have their offices or homes raided. Probably.”

Virgin Media users had failed to notice any difference, assuming the connection problems were service as normal, and went back to watching the football except for the last ten minutes of the game.

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Portsmouth gets future-crime predicting CCTV cameras

SKATES, Pompey, Friday (NNN) — Portsmouth City Council is introducing CCTV cameras claimed to “predict” if a crime is about to take place and alert operators to suspicious behaviour, such as loitering, apparent thought in public, walking while brown or not spending money fast enough.

CCTV epic failAnyone spotted may then have to explain their behaviour to a police officer. “Tough on lack of consumer confidence, tough on the causes of lack of consumer confidence,” said Nick Hewitson of EDS Capita Goatse SmartCCTV. (“Consumer confidence” is a technical economics jargon term measuring willingness to casually spend ridiculous sums of cash on idiotic rubbish, particularly while drunk.)

“Only a criminal terrorist paedophile with something to hide could possibly object,” said councillor Jason Fazackarley. “Criminals will pay much better attention to their dress and grooming with cameras there. Channel 4 has tentatively offered us a reality TV show. And Channel 5 would quite like the tapes of drunken shagging in shop delivery bays.”

The project has been compared to the Tom Cruise science-fiction film Minority Report, in which psychic journalists are arrested on CCTV before they commit the crime of not peppering articles with the most obvious possible clichés copied from other papers.

However, Stephen Fry has delivered a crushing blow to the project with an unfortunately-timed negative review on his Twitter feed: “++ungood crimethink brb txtspk lol.”

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3D Blu-Ray coming to the home

CURRY’S ANALOGUE, The High Street, Tuesday (NNGadget) — 3D movies could be coming to your home cinema. A standard for three-dimensional content on Blu-Ray discs has been proposed by Panasonic.

Peter Murphy bowled over by 3D Maxell custard pie“Standards wars, patent monopolies and the like would seriously interfere with the widespread adoption of any 3D image standard,” said Panasonic’s Masayuki Kozuka. “So give us your bloody money and don’t argue.”

The systems will require new players, introduced at £500, and new high-definition televisions. Existing high-definition televisions will be rendered obsolete by the proposal, much as the pre-Blu-Ray “HD-ready” sets were. “Another few thousand is a small price to pay for the very latest in gadgetry. If we dub it ‘the third generation of HD,’ it should distract the early adopters long enough from lynching us. We’ll tell ’em Apple’s interested or something.”

To keep the “analog hole” closed, viewing will require an orange jumpsuit, handcuffs and sensory deprivation goggles with the displays in the eyepieces. “Any Vista user should be quite accustomed to this.”

Blu-Ray discs make up a fantastic 4% of the physical video market, as compared to those old, clunky and frankly rather stale-smelling DVDs which only make up 96% of sales and can’t be taken seriously by anyone.

In unrelated news, BitTorrent is now 40% of all Internet traffic, only exceeded by penis spam, while YouTube plays better on 64-bit Linux than Windows Vista.

Women avoiding IT in UK

THE ENTERPRISE, The Federation, stardate Saturday (NNN) — The number of female IT professionals in the UK is falling, according to the British Computer Society, despite similar or superior academic scores and recruitment in the sector as a whole having risen in the same timeframe. The lack of flexibility offered by employers is blamed.

Fat Naked Internet Guy“It’s a free market world,” said Ubuntu Linux developer Hiram Nerdboy. “It’s about competence and getting the job done. Working sixteen hours a day on a project you really love is par for the course. That we’re all eighteen to twenty-five is from the accelerated Internet-based learning of the new generation, not exploitation of young workers who don’t know any better.”

Over a third of women in IT had complained of sexism up to sexual harassment at work. “It’s women who just don’t have social skills,” said Nerdboy. “They object to the guys freely choosing to all go down the strip club after work. They’re just not team players.”

Open source projects have worse figures than industry, with male to female ratios approaching fifty-to-one. Many women cite gross sexism on mailing lists and IRC. “In my experience, women just don’t have a working sense of humour and can’t take a joke. My girlfriend thought it was funny! Even leaving helpful comments on their blogs didn’t work. ‘Political correctness’ is no exaggeration. Anyway, I met my girlfriend online!”

“…,” said his girlfriend, RealDoll Ada.

“And it’s not like you can get the applicants,” added Nerdboy. “We can hardly get any girls to apply for a job here. They’re obviously naturally not good enough geeks. It must be evolutionary. We need more pink computers.”

“This is of course a terrible, terrible state of affairs,” said a spokesman for the Confederation of British Industry. “In the meantime, we need lots more IT workers shipped in from overseas.” He was later heard muttering something about “divide and conquer” and sniggering.

Virgin Media offers new super-fast Internet at least two days out of seven

HOT-AIR BALLOON, Mid-Atlantic, Thursday (NNGadget) — Virgin Media, operators of Britain’s only cable television network, has launched a new 16 megabit Internet service.

Richard Branson dartboard“That’s sixteen megabits total over the day, usually,” said Virgin Media phone menu robot Mark Schweitzer, “but it’s very fast when it’s going. Plain old ADSL can’t hold a candle to it. You can hit your download limit in minutes!”

Customers will be able to add the boost free for three months, after which they will need to pay an additional £5 per month. The three months will start when Virgin ascertain the customer might possibly have thought about it in passing, probably last June. Should you be in any way less than satisfied, Virgin will be happy to leave you in a phone queue for three days, then disconnect your service entirely and charge you to switch it on again rather than just go back to the old plan like you asked them. And cut the cable outside your house and claim you did it. And pass your address to the record companies so they can send you threatening letters.

Virgin Media will also be releasing a new 50 megabit broadband service before Christmas. “We’ve heard that you can use things called ‘computers’ to send messages and even pictures. That’d be a good service to offer! We have this bloke in facilities who knows a bit about computers, we could get him to run it between refilling the coffee machines. If we tried, we could probably make it as reliable as our telly. Nobody really minds when the football drops out ten minutes before the end, do they.”

Virgin Media (“We’ve Never Done It Before, And We Don’t Really Know How To”) was founded as an experiment by ethically challenged psychologists to ascertain just how abusively awful customer service could get and still have anyone giving them money. The company is sponsored by British Telecom to make them look good by comparison.

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Terrorist computer virus infects hospitals

OH FUCK NOT HEALTH, Farringdon Road, Wednesday (NNN) — A terrorist attack on the NHS has brought three London hospitals to a halt.

NHS computer with Red Ring of Death, er, Arrested IndicatorsThe terrorists, representing an organisation calling itself “Microsoft,” apparently used insecure third-party contractors to put a virus-running platform called “Windows” into critical systems in the hospitals, in order to extort money from them on an annual basis.

It is understood that a large percentage of all businesses are infected with the virus, wasting up to 25% of employees’ working time and opening the companies to further attacks from related criminal organisations demanding to see all their licenses.

The virus in question, W32.SHILL/SCHOFIELD, takes over the host’s IT systems, leading to aches, pains, nausea, vomiting, pumping out prodigious quantities of faeces and a terrible compulsion to spread the infection to others. The patient also walks with a shuddering stumble and asks for their hospital meal to include tasty, tasty brains. Recovery has commenced when they have an overwhelming urge to throw their computer out of the window. “Getting this stuff out of the system makes MRSA look like a walk in the park,” said one cleaner, waving his shit-encrusted hands about for emphasis.

When the infection became known, ambulances were diverted to other hospitals. “We have maintained a safe environment for our patients throughout the incident,” said a spokesman for Barts NHS Trust, “keeping them in the Clostridium difficile culturing lab rather than risking exposing them to ‘Windows.'”

“Healthcare staff should not share smartcards,” said a Connecting for Health spokesperson, “and if smartcards are used without a condom then disciplinary procedures should follow.”

Affair in “First Life” leads to virtual divorce

ALPHAVILLE, Linden, Thursday (NNGadget) — For its many devotees, First Life, the Massively Multiplayer Offline Reality Playing Game, is a place where the everyday constraints of online life drop away and vivid activities can be played out.

But fact and fiction have collided in heartbreaking fashion for a British couple who are divorcing after the wife discovered her cyber-husband’s offline alter-ego, “Nigel Tedious,” with another — physical — woman.

Lolo Ferrari’s somewhat disturbing First Life avatarLaurellina Hyperphasia, whose First Life character is called “Tracey Clegg” of the land of “Essex,” said today that as far as she was concerned her husband, Lancethrust Pound-a-tron, was having a real relationship with the avatar controlled by the human in question.

Launched by Israeli company Jehovah Labs six thousand years ago, First Life gives players a body type. They cannot trade it up or easily change its basic characteristics, though they can outfit it in various ways. This body can move around the “Real World,” meet people, socialise, buy land and property with the game’s currency and set up businesses.

“Sex in First Life is amazing,” said Pound-a-tron. “It’s really hard to level up to, though, and it cost me a fortune.”

An increasing number of people’s virtual relationships have fallen apart because of what was happening in their parallel, real world. Part of the addiction problem is “jobs” — in which players have to perform long-winded, mindless tasks, up to forty hours a week or even more, to bring up their levels and gain access to more adventure. Stories of gamers spending ten to fifteen hours a day in First Life are becoming more frequent.

Pound-a-tron — or “Tedious” — admitted he was having an offline relationship. “We weren’t even having cybersex or anything like that, just that physical thing where you put bits of your bodies into the other one’s body. It was nothing really major. I still don’t see that I was doing anything wrong.”

Windows 7’s biggest threat: journalists

ZDNET.MICROSOFT.COM, Blogosphere.NET, Wednesday (NNGadget) — As Microsoft continues to prepare for the 2009 2010 launch of Windows 7, it today issued a plea through its network of objective opinion-shapers: Don’t let the journalists near it.

Microsoft MSDN software disk scarecrow in cornfield“We understand that many journalists use Macs,” said CNet marketing marketer Don Reisinger. “This means they necessarily suckle at the Satanic rear passage of Steve Jobs. We cannot countenance their bias. Journalists are responsible for all those signs outside computer shops offering to replace Vista with XP. When was the last time you saw the entire technology field stop and wait for an announcement from any other company besides Apple? It’s so unfair!”

Smears and slanders also come from obsessive overweight nerdy Mac-using Linux geek troublemakers who run “benchmarks” and “tests.” “It’s horrifying bias from the ‘reality’-based community,” said ZDNet marketing marketer Mary Jo Enderle. “We understand that, just because Vista was 40% slower than XP and Windows 7 is the same speed as Vista, the nattering nabobs of negativism are already writing press releases condemning it as ‘not enough of an improvement.’ It’s so unfair!”

“Mactards are like concentration camp guards,” said Guardian marketing marketer Jack Schofield, “brutalising ‘I’m A PC’ users and” [This comment has been removed by a Guardian moderator. Replies may also be deleted.]

“The only reason Vista failed was because Microsoft planned for it to fail,” said Reisinger in an earlier ad-banner troll post. “It was a fantastically subtle double-bluff! They did the honorable thing in the face of the vile calumnies spread by Apple. It’s so unfair!”

Microsoft will be debuting Windows 7 on a new 17″ Asus Eee Ultra-Portable Mini-Netbook with 8GB memory and a 2GHz quad-core processor. Battery life is up to twenty minutes in preliminary tests.

Ask Jack

I’m thinking of buying a netbook as a second machine for net access and mobile broadband. Should I get one with XP or can I run Linux and not worry about what’s “under the bonnet”?
M Shuttleworth

Jack Schofield Bill Gates mugshotLinux-based netbooks have apparently friendly front ends, but are very demanding if you go any deeper. Linux is like the Mooncup: a nice idea, but messy and not for the squeamish. In fact, Linux can be likened to a Mooncup-using redhaired hippie girlfriend who lives in a house in the country she built herself from twigs and has very strong ideas on how everything should be and has all her original body hair. The sex is fantastic, but only if she thinks the astrological conditions are perfect. And the house has a hand-dug latrine, so she’s propped a toilet bowl on top and thinks that’s “user friendliness.”

No, no. You would far prefer Windows. That’s like a nice normal bottle-blonde girlfriend who has a proper office job and dresses cleanly from Primark and has a sweet smile and lives in a proper bedsit and knows everyone and how to act normally and is accepted in society. She gets headaches a lot and fits of rage where she smashes everything and there’s an odd smell of decaying human flesh coming from the drains and the toilet backs up every now and then filling the entire block with sewage and bits of bodies, but this is entirely normal and nothing to worry about.

My four-year-old PowerBook G4 is putting itself into sleep mode and refusing to wake up. It gives a very unfriendly beep and a black screen when it is turned on. Taking out and replacing the memory will eventually bring it to life.
S Jobs

This is a known fault in the Macintosh line, where the keyboards were dipped in vats of herpes virus before being shipped. Mac OS X is well known to induce symptoms similar to tertiary syphilis in long-term users — ask anyone with Mac-using friends. The G4 has an old PowerPC chip, and is obsolete because Apple has long since moved to Intel chips. So at least you can run a proper operating system like Vista on the new ones.

I have a PC bought from Dell, a proper computer company, and am running Microsoft™ Windows™ Vista™ Service Pack 1. It’s the best operating system ever in the entire universe and I can do anything those annoying Mac users and Linux nerds can. And Windows 7™ will be even better! I don’t have a problem, I just wanted to tell you this to piss off those annoying anti-Microsoft trolls who keep commenting on your Guardian column.
J Schofield

This is an excellent start to a perfect computing experience. Make sure you have only genuine Microsoft software on the system, and don’t ever use Firefox in case your penis shrinks — Internet Explorer 8 guarantees you will get many useful email offers for a greatly increased penis with incredible sperm production capability. Also, Google will invade your privacy and put pictures of you masturbating on Google StreetView, so only use Windows Live Search. Happy surfing!

Who is Barack Obama?

YOUR PHONE, America, Saturday — Greetings, fellow American. I am McCain campaign volunteer XQ-17-B-2, calling as a concerned Ferrous-American citizen to warn you of the terrible dangers of voting for Barack Hussein Obama.

Barack Obama doesn’t like being called that. In fact he prefers that you just use his first initial and call him B. Hussein Obama, and face Mecca when you do. Either that or call him “Adolf” like his wife does. In bed.

Megatron the McCain robocallerMr Obama has been palling around with terrorists. He knew Bill Ayers when he was eight, when Ayers was blowing up schools in Hawaii. This is when Ayers ghosted Obama’s first book.

There is a direct correlation between Obama’s rising poll numbers and the fall of the stock market. Check our campaign site, voteforscaryolddudelosingit.com, for the graphs.

There are shocking rumours that Obama may in fact be black. We are still seeking confirmation on this score.

Obama was not born in the United States, his birth certificate has been forged. He is in fact a French Muslim, shipping in illegal aunts from Africa. The electoral office has been taken over by socialist agents of the mainstream media so they don’t care.

But you know the truth, my friend. The Stalinist mainstream media mafia is pushing their boy, their uppity eloquent boy. He’s going to tax away and redistribute your guns. You’ll need a backward “B” carved on your face to collect your mandatory government welfare tofu. Sarah Palin will be sent back to Alaska. Don’t let them get away with it!

I’m John McCain, and I approve this message. Some restrictions may apply. Please leave your vote at the tone. beeeeeeep