“Anonymous” is a name that can be used by anyone on the internet. When “Anonymous” does something, what that actually means is that one or more people using the name did that thing on behalf of everyone who identifies as “Anonymous”.

A statement like “Anonymous will hack Sony” is not a warning to Sony. It’s a request made to other people identifying with the name. So, “Anonymous will hack you” really means “hey, somebody should hack these guys, does anybody feel like doing it?”. Likewise, “Anonymous will boycott Sony for reasons xyz” is effectively saying “let’s boycott Sony, here’s why they deserve it”. The fact that the media scrambles to publicize anything anybody says under the name Anonymous plays directly into their hands.

If enough capable people feel like doing it, then it gets done. If not, it doesn’t. So no, Anonymous does not make promises, nor does it go back on them. Statements like “Anonymous never does anything” demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how the system works. If you’re mocking Anonymous for “attacking the wrong people” then you are way off-base. That video was released by a single person. If people don’t feel that Justin Bieber deserves to be attacked, then he won’t be. If they do, then to be honest, he probably does.

The point of hacking something like the PlayStation network is to make these complex issues directly relevant to the everyday lives of a large demographic. A convenient side effect of hurting the users’ experience is that it can cost Sony financially, but that was never the primary goal. The goal is to draw attention to the unethical behaviour of this company, for its support of SOPA, its obsession with drowning all of its products in DRMs, or anything else that could be considered harmful.

Sony is already on the lengthy list of corporations that I’m not going to fund. In that sense, I myself am participating in a Sony boycott (though as a pretentious indie).

And could somebody tell me who the fuck Kim Kardashian is?

Microsoft has been steadily changing the format of their Office documents with every release of Microsoft Office. They have also not released the details of these formats, which means the only program that can reliably read the file you sent is the same version of Microsoft Office that you wrote it with (or newer). People with older versions of Microsoft Office, or people who don’t own any version, cannot reliably read these files.

This means we cannot exchange information until one of two things happens:

1. the information is sent to me in a standard format that I can read with a program of my choice.

2. I purchase and install the newest version of Microsoft Office (and anything else I need to run it).

I will not be doing the latter. A good standard format to use is the PDF, and I humbly request that you not send Microsoft Office attachments to anybody in the future. Some people may feel that not owning the latest version of Microsoft Office is somehow their fault.

(For more information, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html)

If you’re still using Microsoft Office, do yourself a favour and install LibreOffice.

Let’s start off: Skype is currently multi-platform. It’s available for Windows XP, Vista, and 7, for Linux and Mac OS X, and for Android, iOS, Blackberry and Symbian. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has clearly stated that Skype will be continued for “non-Microsoft platforms”, but did not mention any specifically. He went on to state that limiting the userbase would reduce the value of Skype, which is completely true. However, it also works the other way – limiting Skype users to certain platforms reduces the perceived value of all other platforms.

My suspicion is that Microsoft will continue to support many platforms, but not all of them. I don’t think there’s any way they can drop support for Mac OS X without rendering Skype nearly worthless as millions of users switch to a different VoIP service. However, Linux doesn’t have nearly the installed userbase that the Macintosh has, and I suspect only a minority of Linux users are interested in Skype to begin with. I don’t believe that Skype for Linux holds much value, so I don’t think it’s very likely that Microsoft will continue to support it.

The second system to go will be Windows XP. Microsoft has been trying very hard to kill XP in recent times – just look at Internet Explorer 9 for an example. They want people to stop using XP for two reasons: because it’s holding up progress, and because they want to sell more Windows 7 licenses. Windows XP is still the most common operating system in the world, for the time being.

Lastly, I can’t see Microsoft funding work on Skype for Android. Google is probably Microsoft’s top rival, and Android is rapidly becoming one of the most popular mobile platforms. This product competes directly with the Windows 7 Phone. I’m predicting Microsoft will do whatever it can to curb the growth of Android, even at the cost of hurting Skype.

Don’t be too surprised to see Skype bundled with Windows Live Essentials and frequently pre-installed by manufacturers on all new Windows systems starting in a year or so. It’s the strategy Microsoft has used a dozen times before, with Office, Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, MSN, and Windows itself. Microsoft is fully aware that most people won’t know how to install a competing product, and it’s going to count on that to boost the usage of Skype. Once ubiquitous, they’ll use Skype to boost the rest of their products, from Windows 7 Phone to Windows Live and possibly even the Xbox.

A possibility that I’m not too sure about is embedding advertisements in the Skype client. Microsoft doesn’t seem to object to this practice, as they’re willing to do it to MSN users, but adding ads after Skype has been ad-free for years may result in a nasty backlash from the userbase. There’s no doubt that ads would make Skype more profitable in the short term, but it may have the side-effect of making it less of a weapon in the long term.

Has Microsoft overpaid for Skype? Probably, but not by too much. It may not have $8.5 billion immediate value, but with proper abuse, it could turn out to be the very thing Microsoft needs to catch up to its competitors. You Skype users out there had better hope they don’t mutilate it too badly.

That’s why I made this satirical newspaper last year.

Click the images to enlarge.

I’m an eighteen-year-old university student majoring in Communication, Media, and Film; I’m also a programmer and a web designer who spends a lot of time on my computer. I know exactly where Vishal Singh in this article is coming from. I frequently get distracted from my schoolwork to edit videos, check Facebook, and post on this blog. I’m fully aware that I can sometimes allow my hobbies with technology to get in the way of my school work, and I have that oft-levied student issue of staying up too late. The New York Times brings up some good points, but comes to the wrong conclusion.

Who is to blame for the academic disinterest of students? The students are.

Of course, most people would point out that students are (primarily) young people who should be guided by the education system, not punished. And that all sounds great on paper when you’re trying to appease people’s parents for political reasons, but I know first-hand that this is not a stance that holds any water in reality. This sort of nonsense is exemplified perfectly by Marcia Blondel’s experience with her classroom, as related in the article:

“Who wants to read starting in the middle of Page 137?” she asks. One student begins to read aloud, and the rest follow along.

To Ms. Blondel, the exercise in group reading represents a regression in American education and an indictment of technology. The reason she has to do it, she says, is that students now lack the attention span to read the assignments on their own.

“How can you have a discussion in class?” she complains, arguing that she has seen a considerable change in recent years. In some classes she can count on little more than one-third of the students to read a 30-page homework assignment.

I did high school and I remember teachers like this. They’re incompetent. Novel idea for Ms. Blondel: if your students won’t work, FAIL THEM. If that seems like something that’s going to get you fired, you’re probably an awful teacher. Students need someone engaging to make them interested in the subject matter. Assigned to a mandatory subject that requires you to teach unwilling students? Get out the red marker.

As someone who knows how to read, my worst enemies in high school were the teachers that read to me, or got other students to read to me. It’s condescending and it slows down the entire class; stop doing it. I understand that you’re doing it to get everyone on the same playing field, but it’s not working. People need to help themselves.

The fact that parent groups force teachers to be “nice” to their students — which results in junk like this — is a very depressing one. We’re talking about high school, here, not kindergarten. I’m fully aware that most work in high school is busywork — the kind of pointless drudgery that exists solely to make schools look good to the government — but this is also true in the real world.

If you want a job, you’re going to have to put up with the pointless drudgery. Learn how to deal with it: that’s what schools should be teaching. This “regression of American education” is the system’s fault, not technology’s. It’s the consequence of politics.

I actually agree with a lot of points brought up in Richtel’s article. That computers and cell phones have an effect on students’ attention spans is a theory supported by scientific data, as the article rightly states. But the conclusion drawn from this theory — the implication that young people are innocent of sabotaging their own intellectual development, and that the nature of distraction itself is to blame — is obviously fallacious. Distraction has existed for all of human history, and just because it’s (arguably) easier to access nowadays does not make it something you can scapegoat. It’s a force of nature, not some malevolent entity that can be challenged.

If you’re going to report on how technology has changed our lives, do it factually. Don’t try to blame it for all our problems. Telling us that our relentless procrastination isn’t our fault is just enabling us; you’re giving us an excuse for our own stupidity.

As HAL 9000 would say, “This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error.”

First off, let’s fast forward to the privacy models these websites use. Twitter is the most open of these networks. Facebook is essentially a walled garden because most people have privacy settings or have their profile completely blocked from non-friends. Non-friends, by the way, is slang for people who have not given into the smash hit service that wants to protect you from other people. Myspace is basically a site that intends to be a walled garden but nobody can figure out that fucking control panel.

Now let’s contrast this to what was going on during the 90s. AOL was trying to BE the internet by tricking n00bs into believe their interface was the “internet.” It was “online” in America. You have patriotism, tech bubble jargon, and those free coasters that everybody loves contributing to AOL’s success. For all your grandmother knew she was seeing The Matrix.

And that wraps up this ramble. I’ll try to post a little more often if I ever manage to free myself from Minecraft.

This article will take a look at various video games from their earliest roots to what they have evolved into today. From humble beginnings to graphically amazing some of these franchises are older than me!

The Zelda series started off on the NES in 1986 with The Legend of Zelda. The latest game The Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks (not pictured) was released at the end of 2009. I chose to picture Twilight Princess as graphically it looks better than Spirit Tracks

Super Mario Bros. was the very first game in the Mario franchise. Originally released on the Famicom in 1985 Mario has been the icon of Nintendo ever since having multiple games on every console and handheld they have made. The latest in the franchise is Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii released last month.

The original Prince of Persia was developed for the Apple II in 1989, it has been ported to various consoles and systems since then and has even had a movie loosely based on some of the later games. The most recent game in the series, Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands, was released for all seventh generation consoles and handhelds earlier this year.

The original Metal Gear was one of the first stealth-action games ever. It was originally released for the MSX2 in summer 1987 and later that year for the Famicom. The latest game in the series Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of the Patriots was released in 2008 for the PlayStation 3. It is often considered one of the greatest looking console games ever released and supposedly makes full use of all the PlayStation 3′s power. Though the game is dated there have been very few that have surpassed both graphically and technically.

The first Ninja Gaiden was released for the Famicom in 1988 it had many ports some of which featured upgraded graphics. The latest in the series Ninja Gaiden 2 was released only for the XBOX 360 in 2008 but a graphically improved port was released under the title Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 in 2009 for the PlayStation 3.

Fallout was released on both Windows and Mac OS computers in 1997, it was considered by many to be one of the greatest RPG’s of all time. The latest in the series Fallout New Vegas is still in development but is supposed to be released later this year. Although graphically it’s not so much more advanced than the previous title, Obsidian has promised to deliver a brand new experience.

Resident Evil made its way onto the PlayStation in 1996 and was later released ported to the Sega Saturn and PC. The series has since then had plenty of spin-offs, and more than enough movie adaptations. Resident Evil 4 which was originally released in 2005 brought the series back to life with it’s new take on the old franchise. It’s probably been ported to more systems than almost any other game with versions for the PS2, PC, Mobile Phone, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPad, Zeebo, and Wii. The latest game in the series, Resident Evil 5, was released in 2009 for Windows, XBOX 360, and PlayStation 3.

Street Fighter made its debut in arcades in 1987, and since then its been praised as one of the greatest fighting series of all time. The latest game in the franchise, Street Fighter IV was released in Japanese arcades on Taito Type X2 hardware. In 2009 it was brought to the XBOX 360 and PlayStation 3 as well as the PC. The upgraded version Super Street Fighter IV featuring a host of new characters and content was released earlier this year at a discounted price of $40.

Pokemon Red, Green, and Blue Version were originally released in 1996 in Japan. The Blue Version featured more than Red and Green Version and was consequently used in the port of Red and Blue Versions to the US and Europe in 1998. Ever since its release Pokemon has started a multi-billion dollar phenomenon all over the world with the latest versions Pokemon Black & White for the Nintendo DS to be released in Japan this year and everywhere else the following. With the release of the latest games the PokeDex has surpassed 500 Pokemon, and with each new iteration it continues to grow.

Final Fantasy was initially released on the Famicom in 1987 and didn’t reach U.S. shores till 3 years later. Each game tells a new tale so the need for gamers to have played a previous title is unnecessary. The ever expanding and ironically never ending “Final” Fantasy series continues to grow with a brand new online game Final Fantasy XIV to be released for PlayStation 3 and PC later this year.

The true goal in this exercise is to weed out the weak — the people who visit your website for such base needs as “content”. There’s an art to web design that some people just can’t appreciate on its own. These people need to be lost if you are to be a true artist, and my studies have shown that there is no better way to do so than to ruin your website with the following tips:

5. Don’t label anything clearly.
Common navigation tools are too easy to understand! Why have an “about” page to explain who you are and why you have a website? If you use a synonym for the word “about”, but provide the exact same information you would normally, you can confuse your visitors without having to do much work.

Consider words such as:

• Author
• Legacy
• Identity
• Pretentious Asshole with a Thesaurus
• Me

4. Abuse long filenames.
No one reads URLs these days, anyway. That’s why companies don’t put their website’s full domain on all their business cards, and popular domain names don’t get sold for huge sums of money. Why not show your disregard for basic readability by having the most unwieldy URLs imaginable?

To start off, you’ll need two or three hyphens in the domain. But make sure not to put a hyphen between every word, because that would create a pattern. Use something like bensawesome-web-site.org.uk — and make sure to never use a common TLD such as .com or .net! Those are for conformists, anyway.

When people go to your website, make an index.html redirect them to Main_Page.htm — search engines will thank you later! If you need to redesign your website, just put all your work in /New%20Web%20Site/. When your new design reaches the deployment stage, just change your index redirect to go to /New%20Web%20Site/Main_Page.htm. Who needs to do things like removing superfluous directories, or not using characters that require awkward workarounds? That’s just unnecessary effort. Note: The mix of spaces and underscores is crucial! Think different!

3. Tilt everything.

2. Make everything a PDF.
If your website has rich content that would benefit from a rich format such as PDF, make sure to put it in a PDF. If your website has ordinary content that could easily be placed on the website itself, make sure to put that in a PDF, too. And whatever you do, never make any indication that your links lead to PDFs. Everyone likes surprises!

If you put your text in a PDF without any ornamentation, though, people might notice how much of a dumbass you are. Take the extra time to underline random words and add inappropriate colours. Arrange everything in a table so it looks like a half-assed Excel spreadsheet, and your audience will be successfully fooled! Take another shot.

1. Don’t have a favicon.
A favicon is that little icon to the left of the URL bar in all modern web browsers. It used to be rather uncommon, but it’s totally ubiquitous on the web nowadays. But not for your website! After taking all that effort tilting all the images, putting all your text into PDFs, writing long filenames, and reading the thesaurus, who has time to make a favicon? It’s not like it only takes 15 seconds or anything! But this might not be the right approach for you…

There are certain Firefox extensions that can replace the hideous “no favicon” image with appealing shapes and such things. The only way to foil these extensions’ attack on your artistic integrity is to master the art of giving your website a bad favicon. A good start would be to take a picture of something irrelevant, then resize it with MS Paint. If you don’t have a camera, just take something off Google Image Search.

If you’re really feeling creative, why not skip the photo part entirely and just give your website a white box for a favicon? In fact, why not replace your entire website with a big white box? No one is going to read the damn thing anyway. And it might help you get into art school, what with all those high standards and all.

There really is an art to making a website so appalling that no one will ever read it. It’s an art that some people just don’t have the talent for, but they shouldn’t feel too bad. At least they’re trying. Some people just use Microsoft Frontpage.

Scrobbling seems to have an interesting effect on most people (or at least some people). People on Last.fm will often leave music playing all day, while not listening to it, just to get higher play counts on their profile. Having high play counts has no practical purpose, of course, but people do this anyway. How do I know? I could point out that my best friend Ryan does it, and I would be right, but the honest part of me points out that I do it, too. Sometimes. I try to refrain, but sometimes I slip and leave music playing for hours just for the sake of it. It’s an egotistical competition, yes, but it’s kind of fun. Besides, there’s no real harm in it, right? The numbers really are meaningless, after all, and the competitiveness that so many people create actually has its positive effects: namely, the fact that it makes people listen to more music. I listen to music sometimes just because I want more plays on my profile, but I also enjoy music that I would normally forget about. That’s kind of admirable, I guess, in a dumb sort of way.

One serious negative quality about scrobbling, however, is the fact it is is completely dependent on the ID3 tags. These tags are filled in by the users, which inevitably leads to mistaggings that clutter up the entire website. For the more OCD amongst us, this can be infuriating, and take the joy out of music. I asked my friend Matt Rebeiro for an exploitable quotation related to this phenomenon, and this is what I got:

“I usually avoid listening to things that are tagged wrongly [and I] listen to video game soundtracks less because I’m always unsure how to tag those.”
–Matt Rebeiro, obsessive nerd

It’s not the catchiest quote in the world, but it gets my point across. I’ve ignored albums before because I didn’t feel like filling out the tags. Granted, this is a problem that doesn’t apply to most people (because most people listen to music that’s actually in music databases, so they don’t have to tag everything manually). It applies to me, though, and it’s a very annoying side effect of the Last.fm experience.

I’ve also used my Last.fm profile as a reason to stop myself from listening to music even when I really wanted to. If you look at my Last.fm profile, you’ll see that my top artist by a huge margin is Lemon Demon, which is probably one of my favourite bands. Yet the stats on Last.fm are somewhat misleading; Lemon Demon was basically the only band I listened to back when I first joined, and then my music taste evolved on a generic MP3 player that wasn’t able to scrobble. I only got an iPod (with scrobbling capability) recently, so you can only see the beginnings of other top artists now. Since getting an iPod, I’ve barely listened to a single Lemon Demon song because I want to give the other artists a chance to catch up.

It’s very annoying, because I’m genuinely embarrassed at the huge gap between my top artist and all the others — it makes me look silly, like I only listen to one band ever. Still, I want to listen to Lemon Demon every once in a while. The competitive quality I’ve assigned to Last.fm is having a negative effect on my ability to enjoy one of my favourite bands, which is slightly annoying. It’s all my fault, really, since there really shouldn’t be a competition here at all, but it’s an inevitable side effect of the website. I have an exchange from Twitter to prove it:

mattgcn: Manually scrobbling two weeks of listening? Don’t mind if I do!
RyanLalonde: What do you mean by manually scrobbling?
mattgcn: http://lastfmstats.livefrombmore.com/universalscrobbler/
RyanLalonde: Oh wow, you can really cheat from this. I won’t do it tho.
mattgcn: Yeah, I only use it honestly but looking at the numbers it seems some people abuse it

That was an exchange between two people I follow, Matt Rebeiro (from above) and Ryan Lalonde. It demonstrates three ways that scrobbling’s competitiveness manifests:

1. Matt wants to manually scrobble two weeks of music, something which he later described as “tedious“.
2. Scrobbling music that you didn’t listen to is considered cheating. You can’t cheat if there’s no competition.
3. Some people do abuse the manual scrobbling system to “cheat”, combining points 1 and 2.

This is all just my long-winded way of saying: Last.fm can easily turn into a competition. It’s actually pretty predictable if you think about it. Isn’t a large portion of the music industry funded by people’s egos? Many groups are defined completely by musical tastes, and some musical tastes are completely defined by groups — when was the last time you saw a nuclear physicist listening to gangsta rap? I didn’t even like the Beatles the first time I heard them, but I forced myself to give them a chance because a lot of people I respect like them, and a lot of bands I already liked listed them as an influence. I like the Beatles now, but that only proves the point. Last.fm’s “compatibility meter” only furthers attitudes like this.

Last.fm is a lot of fun, but it might have some unexpected consequences. I do recommend that you join the site if you haven’t already, but I won’t hold it against you if you choose not to. Not everyone likes to be part of the high-horse circlejerk that Last.fm can easily become.

From: Vodafone
Time: 19-10-2009 16:51:33
Great news, Free
Weekends has been added
to your account. There’s
no charge, spend just
£2.50 in the week and get
free texts all weekend.
Call 2345 for info

http://live.vodafone.co.uk/

zr/friday To stop
textSTOP to9774

From: Vodafone
Time: 22-10-2009 14:31:25
Sorry for the Free
Weekends message sent in
error. Free Weekends has
successfully been added
to your pay as you go
account. Sorry for any
confusion caused.

From: Vodafone
Time: 23-10-2009 17:30:10
Sorry,due to a system
error you were charged for
SMS sent between 2-3pm
today that should have
been free.We’ll refund you
and let you know when this
is done