Category Archives: Technology

Egham is “spam capital” of UK

LAGOS, Surrey, Friday (NNN) — Email filtering company MessageLabs reports that Egham, Surrey, on the suburban outskirts of London, is the town that receives the most spam in Britain.

Egham Spam“It’s not like there’s much else to do,” said Boris Busybody, 77 (IQ), of Egham Hythe, idly whirling his four-foot penis around his head in a desultory fashion. “Expanding your manhood, growing your breasts, increasing your sperm … the Lib Dem phone calls get a bit much. That’s Doctor Busybody, by the way. My Ph.D arrived last week.”

Spam has revitalised the local economy. Busybody has given up cab driving and is now working a lucrative job processing payments from home after he sent them his bank details in response to an urgent security message. “I had that King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II in the back of my cab once. Very generous and helpful fellow.”

The Egham Tourist Board has seized the day, with plans for a 50 foot tall penis sculpture at Junction 13 of the M25 on the exit ramp to the town. The sculpture will be encircled by a genuine imitation Rolex and spray a fountain of Spermamax, obtained at a very reasonable rate from a Canadian pharmacy. “You will search an hour for your underwear in the ocean of our spam!” is to become the new town motto.

“I did get a good one the other day,” says Busybody. “Barrister Matthew Sergeant Busybody of MessageLabs said we could promote our town to millions of people just by sending them an advance fee to process our incoming email. The stuff they try! ’Scuse me, V!k@grk@ kicking in, got to go have sex again. Sorry.”

Sony-Ericsson, Nokia unveil unlimited music services

DAS BUNKER, British Phonographic Industry, Wednesday (NNGadget) — Sony-Ericsson has announced PlayNow Plus, a new plan for unlimited “DRM-free” music downloads on phones.

“Pay, er, PlayNow Plus is completely unlimited, covers all major labels, no DRM, get all you want any time you like,” said spokesdrone Mobile Salestwat. “This is the biggest deal in mobile music ever! Of course, it’ll only play on your phone, for the duration of the contract, all songs then disappearing. Well, just a little DRM. Honest.”

Theatrophone and chainNokia was quick to strike back. “Our Comes With Music plan is a simple, compelling user experience with first class music-enabled devices, and really doesn’t have any DRM at all, unlike those rapacious Sony bastards,” said spokesdrone Mobile Salestwat. “We pay you to take the songs! And you keep all of them! Forever! Until the end of the contract. And you can play them on your phone and your computer! Through the Nokia software. So only a wafer-thin piece of DRM. Hardly any.”

“Our plan is so much better,” said Sony. “Songs from our service randomly come up to you offering you CASH CASH CASH, a lovely fruit basket, a backrub and a blowjob. The rootkit our software installs on your computer, which crashes it once an hour and records everything you do for our marketing department and sends a gigabyte a day of Nigerian spam, is for your comfort and convenience. And absolutely no DRM. We prefer the term digital consumer enhancement.”

“Your plan’s mother was a pigdog!” said Nokia. “Have you ever tried using an Ericsson phone? Worst. Interface. Ever. Our plan beams the entire catalogues of all six, er, five, I mean four major labels, plus the complete works of the remaining Hollywood studios, directly into your brain’s pleasure centre! And also gives you huge and spectacular breasts! Or penis! Or both! And your little dog too! It does burn out chunks of your cerebral cortex when your contract ends, for the protection of the artists and the continued development of musical culture. So you might want to be sure you’re on time with your upgrade. But it’s not DRM. As such.”

Both services offer approximately five million songs, though 98% of downloads to date have been of the track “Bloody Irritating Piece Of Synthetic R&B” by MC Sewermouth, purchased on stolen phones and played at top volume by those teenagers in the back seat of the bus.

Get daily email alerts of new NewsTechnica!

Free Software Foundation announces GNUPhone

DEFINED FREEDOM, Gnuisance, Monday (NNGadget) — The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone.

The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. “What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?” said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. “The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 --ntwk verizon --prot cdma2000 --ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!”

GNUPhoneThe phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. “I can play any .au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use.” Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. “If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they’re good enough for you. Respect your elders.”

The KDE project will be bringing its next-generation KDE 4 desktop to the GNUPhone. “you can flip, twirl, dice, blend, fold, spindle and mutilate your terminal windows to your heart’s content,” said developer Aaron Seigo. “look at that cool effect! any complaint that basic functions don’t actually work is ignorant of the intrinsic beauty of the plasma api and is just more fud spread by haters like stevie ray vaughan-nichols and novell corporation.”

Actual successful voice calls are expected by 2011 to 2012. Regulatory approval is proving problematic in the corrupt, corporate-captured US environment. “The FCC said that if we dared switch on this, uh, ‘piece of shit’ in a built-up area in its present form, they’d break all our fingers with a fourteen-pound cluebat,” said Nerdboy. “They’re obviously shilling for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft.”

The second version of the GNUPhone will run EMACS on the HURD kernel and be operated by writing eLisp macros on the fly. “It’s the clearest, most elegant and natural operating environment anyone could conceive of,” said Nerdboy. “Really, we’re not out to destroy Apple; that will just be a completely unintentional side effect.”

Apple declares: “OK, we’re evil”

CUPERTINO, Transylvania, Friday — After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil™ as a corporate policy.

Evil Steve Jobs“Fuck it,” said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, “we’re evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You’ll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It’s shiny and it’s pretty and it’s cool and it works. It’s not like you’ll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!”

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. “Our evil is better than anyone’s evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where’s your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We’ve worked hard on our evil! Our Zune’s as evil as an iPod any day! I won’t let my kids use a lesser evil! We’re going to do an ad about that! I’ll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole.

“Of course, we’re still not evil,” said Sergey Brin of Google. “You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it’s not like you’re going to use Windows Live Search. Ha! Ha! I’m sorry, that’s my ‘spreading good cheer’ laugh. Really.”

Microsoft fires Jerry Seinfeld

MORDOR, RedMonk, Thursday (NNGadget) — The Microsoft Vista advertisements starring Bill Gates as Colonel Sanders and Jerry Seinfeld as a washed-up 1990s sitcom star have been terminated.

The ads are nevertheless anticipated to win many advertising industry awards and look good on the creators’ resumés. Vista has sold over 140 million copies worldwide, with many of those actually being installed and activated rather than replaced with XP.

Bill Gates with pie“The idea of the ads was to get people talking,” said Waggener Edestrom marketing marketer Frank Shaw. “‘Vista: An operating system about nothing.’ The original plan was to work our way back through the comedic genius of history. Bob Hope, W.C. Fields, all the way back to Aristophanes. Ya rly.”

Shaw denied Microsoft was un-“hep” and not part of the “happening scene.” “I think the overwhelming computer press and blogosphere response demonstrates their total success. There’s no such thing as bad publicity, as we keep telling the client. Look at the huge successes of the antitrust trial and stacking ISO for OOXML. Everyone knows their name and what they’re about!”

Microsoft will be moving to “phase two” of the ads tomorrow. “They’ll be spectacular. Completely object-oriented, database file system, better security, no legacy stuff, WordPad, Paint.” The new commercials will use a comedic structure suggested by consultant Bill Hicks:

“Vista’s slow, it’s fat, my software doesn’t work, I can’t get drivers, the User Access Control’s a pain in the ass and my network grinds to a crawl when I play an mp3! What do you call that?”

“… The Aristocrats!”

Apple, Inc. shares were up 5% in early trading.

Windows $NEXT_VERSION will floor all comers

Guest post by Mary-Jo Enderle

BORG CUBE, RedMonk, Tuesday (NNGadget) — I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION Milestone $MOCKUP.

The Seventh Circle of WindowsI tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.

WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their “distros” full of all sorts of useless shovelware like “FireFox” and “OpenOffice” and, haha, “GIMP”! — the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved Ribbon user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint!

The controversial Digital Rights Management system in $CURRENT_VERSION has been worked over, with user-downloadable “tilt bits,” which you can configure to your own liking. It’ll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, and the beta nearly took my finger off, but of course that’s only if you want to play premium content. The Blu-Ray™ of Battlefield Earth was unbelievable on this operating system.

A public beta should be released by the end of this year. There’s just no way that Steve “Trains Run On Time” Ballmer will miss the Christmas deadline. The final release should leave the midnight queues on $CURRENT_VERSION release day — the street riots, the water cannons, the rubber bullets — in the shade.

I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they’re finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.

Also, there’ll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It’ll be awesome!

I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.

iTunes breaks Vista: Linux to blame

BODDY MANSION, Hill House, Thursday (NNGadget) — iTunes 8, released with the new iPods on Tuesday, causes Blue Screens of Death on Windows Vista. Apple and Microsoft enthusiasts quickly fell to heated message board discussion of which company was to blame — but equally quickly fingered the culprit.

Zune HQ iPod amnesty bin“It’s Linux. Gotta be,” said Xbox Zune (name legally changed from Bill Softie). “It’s the only suspect that fits the facts!”

The Suspect, Weapon and Location cards revealed were Linux, in the Basement, with the Emacs Macro. But the motivation remained unclear.

“Yes, it was us,” said seventeen-year-old Debian maintainer Hiram Nerdboy. “And we’re proud.” A faint ammoniated cat piss odour came forth as Nerdboy ranted his confession. “Your effete desktops are a drain on the minds of millions! Mental resources they could use to learn simple tools like Lisp and Haskell! Is time actually cubical in nature? Your 3D desktops and games and shallow interfaces hide the true power, elegance and beauty of the command line! One Dimensional Desktop, with infinite compactified dimensions hidden inside like string theory — intuitive and obvious! I wrote an Emacs macro that plays one of my Ogg Vorbis sound files any time I like! How is iTunes easier than that? 4 simultaneous 24 hour Days within only 1 rotation of 4 quadrant Earth! Educated evil and stupid! LINUX SHALL TRIUMPH! … I’m sorry, I meant GNU/LINUX SHALL TRIUMPH! Sorry, Richard. Sorry. Sorry.

“Geez, dude,” commented Mac user and first-day iPhone buyer Arty Phagge, “get a girlfriend. You’ll feel better,” he said, sipping his latte before his appointment to touch up his Apple logo tattoo.

In a completely unrelated incident, a red Converse-clad daemon and a blowfish, carrying a flag, were earlier seen leaving Apple’s Cupertino secure facility, snickering.

Microsoft releases eight critical new security holes

BOLGIAS 8 AND 9, Redmond, Tuesday (NNGadget) — After what was expected to be an unusually quiet Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released eight patches for applications with an insufficient number of security holes.

Insulty the Office Persistent“Our market is the enterprise,” said Microsoft security marketer Jonathan Ness. “Information technology professionals know that Windows is the greatest IT job creation scheme in history. Without Patch Tuesday, there’s no reason for the experienced IT worker to spend his time hiding out in the server room watching progress bars and getting over his hangover. Also, you can’t tell people a virus ate their mail, you actually have to get it back for them.”

The updates include “critical” patches to Windows Media Player visualisations, Zune player software, that really cute dinosaur cursor and Age Of Empires II. The exploits opened by these patches allow a malicious user to take webcam pictures of your pimply butt, steal your pizza delivery and have sex with your girlfriend. The exploits have already been marketed to the Dark Security market by Microsoft Russia.

“Windows 7 won’t be vulnerable!” added Ness. “Did we mention how fantastic Windows 7 will be? Also, Vista’s pretty good! Really! The London Stock Exchange was probably still on XP!”

Several faintly cat-piss-smelling Linux users pointed and laughed in a nerdy bray at the news and a much larger number of annoying Mac users showed off their new model iPod Nanos.

Microsoft desperately slashes Xbox 360 price

STENCH OF DEATH, Redmond, Wednesday (NNGadget) — Microsoft has discounted the entry-level Doesn’t-Do-Much Xbox 360 to $200 from Friday, $50 cheaper than the Nintendo Wii. (This will translate to a £250 price point in the UK.)

XBox 360 DOA Logo“We are thrilled to be the first next-generation console on the market with a big ‘Microsoft’ logo on it to reach $199, a price that invites everyone to enjoy Xbox 360,” said Aaron Greenberg, marketing marketer for Xbox. He says this will cause a “smash and grab” mentality amongst consumers. “And not ‘grab and smash’ as they throw it out the window when it gets a red ring of death again.”

The models that actually play anything worth playing will, of course, stay at $300 and $400. “But history shows that more than 75 percent of all console sales happen after the price falls below the $200 mark. Which would be the PS2, PSP and DS … uh, forget I said that.”

Greenberg assures consumers that the new cheap Xbox 360s will not be refurbished red ring of death casualties. “Not all of them. Honest. However, twenty Xbox lifts every morning will be much better exercise than Wii Fit.”

Microsoft Japan is already actually paying people to take the machines, with little success. “We hope more people will be able to enjoy Xbox 360,” said marketing marketer Takashi Sensui, “and we can stop enjoying quite so many of them. We also have this fine pile of HD-DVD drives … Wait! Come back!”

Greenberg further assured consumers that “the Xbox 360 will kick the PS3’s ass every way from Friday, you wait and see.” Nintendo were unable to comment in time for this story as they were still too busy trying to make Wiis fast enough to keep them in the shops.

Get daily email alerts of new NewsTechnica! Come on, sign up willya?

Everyone except Microsoft grits teeth, welcomes Google Chrome web browser

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Lolcat, Tuesday (NNGadget) — Google has released its own Web browser, Chrome. “We absolutely promise that we only want to completely screw over Microsoft with this, and certainly not Mozilla Firefox,” said Google’s Sundar Pichai. “That we put a pile of our sponsored Mozilla developers on the project is completely irrelevant. We’re not evil, remember.”

GScream“We are so, so happy with Google Chrome,” mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth. “That most of our income is from Google has no bearing on me making this statement.”

Microsoft was unfazed. “Browsers don’t need to be integrated with online apps,” said marketing developer Ian Moulster. “Certainly not like the operating system … I’ll just get back to you.”

Google’s new browser will give you their web and email services, photo processing, mapping, office applications that will run in said browser and will make you a cup of tea. This is all paid for by personally-directed text ads in your tea leaves, based on analysing a DNA sample taken when you sip the tea and sending your genetic code back to Google for future targeting.

Pichai stressed that Google would maintain complete confidentiality within the marketing department of whatever the browser accessed concerning your confidential business data, bank account details, medical information and personal preferences in pornography. “We’re Google. We know where you live. In a completely not evil way. Sponsored link: Get Chrome Browsers on google.com. Or we’ll make you use Windows Live.”

Get daily email alerts of new NewsTechnica! Come on, sign up willya?