Category Archives: Technology

Technology, United States

Microsoft Office 365 sees you’re trying to write a letter

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SCHESTOWITZ, Newham, Tuesday (NTN) — Office 365, Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go answer to Google Docs, delivers the same delight you’re used to from Office on your PC, only slower and clunkier and only working on Internet Explorer. Remember Internet Explorer? Of course you do!

Clippy all the wayMicrosoft Online Services have marketed Office 365 directly to your bosses, who have little people like you to do all the bits that involve actually touching a computer. It promises a fully integrated solution to your daily working needs, with the reliability of Hotmail and Sidekick. That is, it promises it to your IT department, who can now inflict ribbon toolbars on your system without you even having to reboot.

The application monitors your daily activity for increased efficiency, automatically timesheeting your use of Facebook or Twitter at work, for your comfort and convenience when demonstrating their business necessity and utility to your company’s social media strategy to your boss. Firefox no longer works, but that’s a small price to pay for this sort of well-maintained elegance.

The final Office 365 release will include a marketplace where Microsoft partners will be able to sell applications for your Windows Phone or BlackBerry. (Android and iPhone are not supported, and will in fact explode on contact.)

The ribbon toolbar will not be present in the next version of Office 365, whose interface will be based on the recently-released hit game Portal 2. “Windows 7 was my idea,” says user interaction consultant GlaDOS.

Technology, United Kingdom

Ubuntu Vista 11.04 defies expectations

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THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, “Venereal Vista,” based on the Unity Vista desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.

Ubuntu Desktop BacksidesUnity is Canonical’s response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.

“This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical’s vision of the desktop,” said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. “So we added a ‘minimise’ button too.”

Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth’s roadmap for Unity. “I woke up one day and thought, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I’m using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can’t think of a better user experience.’ We’re not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way.”

Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. “It’ll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called ‘phones’ and run Android.”

Entertainment, Technology, United Kingdom

Mind-buggeringly useless expensive gadget delayed

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HAMMERSMITH ODEOUS, Android Market, Friday (NTN) — The £500 LG Optimus 3D, the world’s first 3D smartphone, has been delayed until June, possibly due to 3D on a phone being stupendously pointless rubbish that doesn’t work.

3D technology has been the next big thing for only the last sixty years and is readily available on television, movies and video games. It offers amazing improvements over ordinary moving images: darkness, muddier colours, blurriness, headaches from watching for more than twenty minutes and slower action sequences so the viewer doesn’t throw up.

In video games, the Nintendo 3DS has been a huge hit with tens or even hundreds of end users, some of whom have left the 3D on for a whole day before switching it off forever. 3D on a phone has been heralded by manufacturers, mobile operators, the entertainment industry, the technical press, optometrists drumming up business and everyone else except the actual consumer.

“Five hundred quid for this tremendous advance in telephony?” said industry analyst Mobile Salestwat. “Who wouldn’t bootleg Avatar onto their phone for that! It’s worth every penny for the athletic catgirl boobs to actually poke out the screen at you.”

The phone’s dual five-megapixel cameras also offer the opportunity to drunkenly send grainy 3D photos of your tits to precisely the wrong person, and not remember until you get copies forwarded to your work email via ten other people three days later. “With 3D, people can take the photos and turn them into a 3D-printed plastic sculpture. Just the thing for your desk. Or theirs.”

Technology, United Kingdom

Virgin Media to sell 1.5 gigabit Internet to complete cocks

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TELLYHOUSE, Cable and Witless, Wednesday (NTN) — Virgin Media will shortly trial 1.5Gbps cable Internet, but only to festering dot-com media cocks who live actually around Shoreditch itself.

Richard Branson dartboard“As the pace of technological change increases,” said the ISP in the press release all the papers copied word for word, “it is vitally important to public health that these people have as absolutely much incentive as possible never to leave their homes. Wanking themselves silly over gigabytes of high-definition porn also reduces their likelihood of reproducing.”

With the warmer weather, the Hoxton toxic waste pool has been growing and spreading, with reports of hipster infestations washing up as far afield as Hackney.

If the creative industries cannot be kept under control, by 2015 the entire population of Britain may be beret-wearing latte-sipping surrender monkeys telling you how much they just can’t stand hipsters. Virgin Media is currently rolling out 100Mbps broadband to two million of the most endangered residential premises in the hope of effective quarantine.

In the wider world, high speed Internet will apparently let consumers access all manner of as yet nonexistent socially-redeeming services made of magic beans and pink unicorns, which actually means BitTorrenting a pirated movie in under five minutes. And hitting your download cap in another ten.

Virgin Media also announced that its overall revenue for the first quarter was up 5.7 percent to £982m, as a result of the utter lack of any correlation between making money on a service and actually being able to provide it in a manner even slightly resembling reliability or competence.

Defence, Europe, Technology

Europe simulates total cyber war

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WEB 0.1, Cyberspice, Saturday (NTN) — The European Union has run a simulated “cyber attack,” in which simulated outsourcing companies strike mortal blows upon national budgets for consulting fees for “cyber security” while still using Windows.

Atari 5200 Missile CommandThe simulation steadily reduced access to critical services to gauge how nations react, removing access to working email, letting loose old viruses and charging €300 callout fees to look at why you can’t log in.

Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for the digital agenda, said the exercise was intended to help expose short-comings in existing procedures for combating attacks on funding. “It is an important first step towards working together to combat potential online threats to essential infrastructure and the consulting fees therefrom.”

The exercise also tested how nations work together to avoid a complete shut-down of international links when internet service providers charge £50/month for a “super-fast” connection with a 20GB bandwidth cap.

The exercise was overseen by bouncing new baby quango the European Network Security Agency. “We considered just bombing Redmond, Washington from orbit, which simulations showed would have pretty much solved all attacks over the network itself,” said Dr Udo Helmbrecht, most recently of outsourcing firm EDS Capita Goatse. “But we’re not so silly as to put ourselves out of a job.”

Media, Technology, United Kingdom

Newspaper website “troll” punished

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PAGE 3, Channel 5, Saturday (NTN) — An “internet troll” who posted offensive messages on the World Wide Web has been revealed to be the Daily Mail.

Richard Littlejohn/John LittlerichardThe Mail “preyed on bereaved families” for its “own pleasure”, the Press Complaints Council heard.

The paper was charged with sending malicious communications that were grossly offensive. The posts included comments claiming the victims had brought it upon themselves by being asylum-seeking homosexual Poles who caused EU cancer.

It was only caught when it sent residents copies of itself saying “FREE DVD FOR EVERY READER.”

The term “troll” was described in court as someone who creates numerous identities, called “columnists,” and then posts offensive bollocks to upset or provoke a reaction from others and gain page hits and advertising revenue.

“You preyed on bereaved families who were suffering trauma and anxiety,” said chairwoman of the bench Pauline Salisbury. “We know you gained pleasure and you aren’t sorry for what you did.”

The paper has been convicted of sending “malicious communications” and the editor has been given a knighthood and a rôle as official advisor on government policy.

The defence raised possible mental health issues, but this was dismissed by the bench.

Defence, Technology, United States

Pentagon: Wikileaks “has blood on its hands, unlike us”

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MENTAX, Underground, Tuesday (NTN) — US military officials have condemned the latest war document release by Wikileaks as “potentially fatal to our credibility” and leading to 15,000 more officials spending time with their families than previously thought.

“The faltering forces of hacker infidels,” said the Pentagon’s Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, “cannot just enter an army and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege! There are only two Wikileaks tanks in the city!”

General George Casey has denied that the United States “turned a blind eye” to prisoner abuse. “Our policy all along has been to use our military might to encourage the already peace-loving Iraqi security forces to be agents of cosmic love and beauty. Whenever a prisoner was treated with crystals and aromatherapy in a more robust manner than would be acceptable to our dolphin brethren, we were sure to report it up both the Iraqi chain of command and the one that means anything. Then we sat down together and did serious thinking about how we could be more excellent to one another. Toke, dude?”

The festering scoundrel Julian Assange was lambasted last night on CNN for his reprehensible personal life and clearly unbalanced and unAmerican mental state, which are much more newsworthy than the release of more accurate documentation than any war has ever had in history.

“I remain opposed to the war in Iraq,” said President Barack Obama, “and so too to documentation of the so-called war. We harshly condemn the release of information on this terrible alleged event. We will bring the document leakers to military justice and teach them to love again.”

In the UK, Nick Clegg suggested someone might want to possibly look into this matter a little bit, assuming it was all right with Dave of course.

Technology, United States

Facebook shocked, shocked at privacy problems

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SOULS 5¢, Cyberspice, Tuesday (NTN) — Facebook staff have been amazed to discover that when Facebook passes users’ complete details to application developers and advertisers, some of the partner companies might accidentally let slip the information in some manner.

Abort the fetus and win a Playstation 3!“We are appalled at this information leak,” said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as he took a break from his personal RSS feed of drunk women’s tits posted to his service. “But I can assure you that we have sternly suggested to everyone involved that they take somewhat greater care not to get caught, and maintain a serious demeanor when rolling around in the great big pit filled with money in their basement.”

“I’m horrified and outraged,” said office worker Brenda Busybody, 43 (IQ), “that stuff I put on the Internet is on the Internet. It violates everything I expect. I want privacy when I’m calling my boss a useless fuckstick to the entire world, all my coworkers and my boss himself. And when I’m playing a bit of FarmVille before we nick off down the pub.”

Privacy advocates are working on Diaspora, a security-enhanced social network so far populated by Linux users who cryptographically sign every update about which episode of Babylon 5 they just finished watching alone in their parents’ basement. “START GPG KEY BLOCK!” said open source software advocate Hiram Nerdboy, 17. “WE WILL PROTECT YOUR FREEDOMS!” The next version of Diaspora will allow users to list more than three friends, should there be any demand whatsoever for such a feature.

Facebook works on the now-standard “Web 2.0” business model: 1. Brutally sodomise the personal privacy of anyone who comes within a mile of your service and say “hey baby, I’m sorry” every time you’re busted. 2. Sell ads.

Defence, Sport, Technology, United Kingdom

Cyber terrorism identified as major excuse for Olympics

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MISSILE COMMAND, South Bank, Monday (NTN) — A new generation of sophisticated “cyber terrorists” are to be blamed for the imminent failure of the London 2012 Olympics.

Robo-BorisAlthough the Coalition’s National Security Strategy identifies climate change, population growth, the rise of al-Qaeda and the return of Northern Ireland-based terrorism as significant problems, the document focuses on the most important threat to Britain: attacks on the economic interests of Conservative party backers.

The terrorists, hypothesised to be Internet fundamentalists devoted to copying MP3s, deriding software patents, editing Wikipedia and turning British athletic prowess into nanotechnological dust, will use artificial intelligence to hack into the ZX Spectrum that runs Boris Johnson and replace him with a slightly larger shell script.

A large-scale conventional military attack on the UK is rated only as a “tier three” priority alongside disruption to oil and gas supplies and a large-scale radioactive release from a civil nuclear site. “File sharing. That’s how they’ll destroy us all. Don’t say you weren’t warned! ACS:Law and the Ministry of Sound are just the first shots!”

The 8% cut in the defence budget will be patched with an additional £500m of spending on “all things ‘cyber,'” focused on the very finest snake oil that the party’s very dearest friends can sell.

In a joint foreword to the strategy, Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Cameron Nick Clegg said that there needs to be a “radical transformation” in British national security. “We are entering an age of uncertainty. This strategy should nicely put the wind up voters in time for the alternative vote referendum. Strangely enough, we both think we can get our way. This proves the deep agreement at the heart of the Coalition. Nick thinks so too, I’m sure he would if I asked him.”

Technology, United States

Microsoft releases actual cow turd as phone

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AXLE GREASE, Down Under, Tuesday (NTN) — Desperate to stay competitive against iPhone and Android mobile devices, Microsoft has released a two-pound lump of actual cow faeces that they claim constitutes a phone.

Steve Ballmer overjoyed at Microsoft’s quarterly resultsWindows Mobile 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.

US mobile carriers hailed the turd as the perfect physical complement to their world-famous customer service. “This powerful product will promote our growth!” said John Harrobin of Verizon Wireless. “We’re marketing them as edible.”

“We think we can really work the brand equity,” said Steve Ballmer, modelling the optional shoulder-length rubber gloves. “Everyone works with our stuff all day every day. They know who Microsoft is and what we do.”

“How about making our customers actually swallow our bullshit physically?” said John Harrobin. “Windows Mobile 7 was my idea.”