News of the News

SPILL, Aisle 2, Thursday (NNN) — Supermarket giant Tesco plans to establish itself as a major force in the broadband Internet market with Tesco Value Internet, setting itself up as a rival to to BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk.

“It’ll be hard work,” said Tesco Telecoms head Lance Batchelor, “but we have the customer service and engineering excellence ready to equal the market frontrunners. For ten quid a month, you can have internet and phone that cut out at random, customer service from a call centre in Uzbekistan — second-line support will actually have an English vocabulary of over twenty phrases, learnt phonetically! — and random viruses being uploaded to your computer. Even if it’s a Mac.”

The company will sell customers a “cheap and cheerful” modem, in white with red and blue accents, hard-wired to their account. Connection speed will be 16 megabits, with a bandwidth cap of 32 megabits. The basic plan will include “full access to all Internet sites,” particularly those that pay Tesco for access. Web search with Microsoft Bing! is free, web search that finds things will be an extra five pounds. The Sainsbury’s shopping site is anticipated to remain inexplicably nonfunctional at all times on all plans.

Not to be outdone, Asda and LiDL have announced their own broadband offerings. The Asda Smart Price Modem will have flashing white and green lights with electric bits placed inside at random. The LiDL modem will, quite literally, be a block of German-made cheese with wires in.

Waitrose sneered at their competitors’ plans, unveiling their own £40/month offering that connects using a superior piece of tank-like stainless steel design that finds your favoured MP3s and porn for you and pre-sorts them for your convenience.

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ARGLETON, Lancashire, Saturday (NNN) — A Google Maps error has created a phantom city: “Perth” in Western Australia, in what is in fact a completely empty space.

The mystery has locals so intrigued that a few have made the journey to the enigmatic spot. “I started to weave this amazing fantasy about the place,” said one intrepid local explorer, “an alternative universe, a Narnia-like world. I was really fascinated by the appearance of a non-existent place that the Internet had the power to make real and give a semi-existence.

“Of course, it’s inconceivable that an empty space on the map like that could have a city in it. Imagine what it’d be like living there. It’d be pleasant enough, but imagine growing up there, thousands of miles from civilisation. You’d go mad. It’d be like a J. G. Ballard story. The only people who could enjoy it would be deranged millionaires. Nice to retire to, though. I bet the drivers wouldn’t be able to tell left from right.”

Still, though “Perth” appears to be a town without residents, streets, coordinates or even a history, it has taken on a life of its own online. People put it as their place of residence on Facebook or Twitter. Others claim to come from there, always adding that they’re never going back. There are even films about the “vibrant” Perth indie music scene.

Google said in a statement today: “Google Maps data comes from a variety of data sources. While the vast majority of this information is correct there are occasional errors. Thankfully they’re quite obvious like this one. Why would anyone put a city there, of all places? Someone’s obviously having a lend of us.”

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ISLINGTON, Socialist Republic of North London, Tuesday (NNN) — President Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Bono are being invited to back a “vague middle-class interest portal” website, Hope Plus, to promote social politics.

“A global eBay-PeaceCorps-wiki-social-media-network-community-thingy is absolutely the most useful thing the modern world could have right now,” says founder Phil Noble of PoliticsOnline. “We already have lots of pictures of smiling African children.”

Mr Noble was inspired by his previous work for the BBC. “If we can tap into that Guardian demographic, we should be able to get people to really feel they’re doing their bit for the world, reducing their carbon footprint, cutting the poisons out of our air, water and food and feeding and educating the hungry by clicking on a website. People are good at clicking on stuff. We might even have some online petitions!“

The initiative is being bolstered by seed money from Microsoft. “I’ve long held that giving the poor the finest of our technology and the highest quality patented seeds is the way to advance everyone’s interests,” said Mr Gates, “particularly my own. I mean, my charity’s.” U2 has donated another copy of the bassline they have used on their last eight albums.

The Daily Mail will be starting Grumpy Plus, a portal for people to show their support for everything being so much worse than when they were young and everyone was polite and helpful and beat Hitler and you didn’t have to worry about coloured gay Polish asylum seekers ruining the price of your house. The Mail’s demographic is not as Internet-enabled, so the site will work by people mailing in coupons from the paper.

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PAGE 3, Wapping, Saturday (Mediocre Grauniad) — Your Super Soaraway Sun! comes out today against DISGRACEBOOK, the vile “social networking” system used by perverts, murderers, paedos, Catholic priests, Guardian readers, Labour ministers and other SICK FILTH.

Your Sun has mounted a FULL INVESTIGATION into the Facebook DEN OF INIQUITY, with an intrepid Sun journalist risking his life and reputation going into the front-line of fire on the site, posing as an ordinary person and yet securing several SERIOUSLY DIRTY afternoon liaisons with previously decent and innocent young ladies (pictures on pages 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12) — all carefully verified as being just over sixteen — so as to courageously root out this CYBER-FOULNESS.

The Sun can reveal that Farcebook has NO flagging mechanism to filter out PERVERTS, MURDERERS and FRAUDSTERS, unlike socially responsible places for friends such as the family-friendly MySpace network.

“Facebook DISGUSTS any decent British person,” says Luscious Lucy, 19, of Sheppey, in her editorial opinion column on page 3 today. “MYSPACE is a much more decent, wholesome and PATRIOTIC place to meet people. I’d never let my family anywhere else. Here’s my perky, puffy nipples on the site, in case you’re not sure.”

Even our NEXT PRIME MINISTER Dave “DAVE” Cameron agrees. “Yes, I saw about Facebook on Sky News. We’ve consulted with relevant senior media figures, and will be looking into severely restricting Facebook’s odious operations in the UK and requiring MySpace for widest possible public access to government services. I’m also told there’s an excellent service called Delphi that the British people should be encouraged to use. Toodle pip!”

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GEFFEN, Westminster, Wednesday (NNN) — Lord Mandelson has today announced that the outgoing Labour government will be going ahead with the “three strikes” plan against Internet filesharing, thus ensuring the widespread use of encryption in all routine network communications.

“Encrypted communications as standard is the best possible thing for everyone’s privacy,” he said today, “but there’s so much inertia from the installed base of unencrypted systems. This will provide a rapid incentive for everyone to upgrade as soon as possible. In our last few months in power at the fag-end of a failed government, we need to leave a real legacy for the future.”

The benchmark for the new system will be illegal filesharing dropping by 70%. “That’s measured illegal filesharing, of course. We have set out our metrics quite clearly. Furthermore, home taping is killing music.”

MI5 and the police have objected to the plan due to the difficulty of mass-monitoring encrypted systems, even with the RIPA power to obtain passwords, since mass anonymity systems such as TOR and Freenet have been constructed where the end-user never has nor sees the encryption key. “But a few hideous terrorist atrocities is a small price to pay for less Lily Allen songs being shared. Particularly if they happen on the Tories’ watch. MuWAAAhahahaha. By the way, have you noticed just how much Dave Cameron looks like Iggle Piggle? Uncanny.”

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KARADZIC, Seattle, Tuesday (NNN) — Microsoft has commenced its “Windows 7 Was My Idea” campaign, a series of TV advertisements required of it after its conviction in the International Computer Criminal Court in the Hague for crimes against productivity, office workers and the human brain.

The advertisements feature the software developers and project managers responsible for some of the most famous features of Windows. Many had to be tracked down to jungle lairs in Paraguay, where they were hiding under cover of being mere ex-Nazis.

Particular public favourites include a sixty-second spot of the unnamed developer responsible for the system rebooting by itself after a background update, running random programs off a web page automatically, Windows Genuine Advantage and, especially, that fucking paperclip, being whipped by demons with barbed-wire Apple and Tux logos on chains on a live video feed from Hell while Adolf Hitler curled his lip in disgust and Steve Jobs laughed long and deep in the background.

Further punishments for Microsoft have been delayed as the Linux enthusiasts working on sentencing have yet to agree which distribution to run the hanging software on, and can’t get the FreeBSD and OpenSolaris users to shut up for a tick.

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WEB 1.99 RC 1, Oh God it’s nine o’clock, Monday morning (NNN) — Two-thirds of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook during the working day, wasting an average of 40 minutes a week each.

The survey was conducted by Morse IT, with no consideration whatsoever of the company’s extensive line of Internet filtering products.

Twatbook was costing the economy £1.38 billion zillion a year, pointless meetings learning to synergise our buzzword growth were costing £65.23 billion zillion a year, MP3 file sharing was costing £12 billion zillion a year, reading the Daily Telegraph was costing £15.25, drinking tea and eating food was costing £17.243154 (recurring) billion zillion a year, blinking on the job was costing £5 billion zillion a year and employees going to the toilet rather than having catheters fitted to stay at their desks 24 hours a day was costing £6.66 billion zillion a year. b3ta was free, for some reason.

The total losses to the economy added to more than the national gross domestic product, strongly suggesting that showing up to work at all, and indeed the capitalist system in toto, was a net loss, and we should all live off farming our back yards and send our tweets via actual carrier pigeons.

Temp agency OfficeAngels disagreed. “As younger generations join the workplace, I believe UK businesses will, inevitably, have to embrace social networks, recognising the benefits of providing staff with potential for business networking. So they can find a job somewhere that doesn’t insult their intelligence by blocking a knitting needle shop as a ‘weapons site’ or something equally twattish.”

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TELEVISION OUTSKIRTS, Off-White City, Thursday (MSBBC) — Microsoft National Party leader Windows 7 has insisted it was “not Vista” during its first appearance on the BBC’s Question Time.

The political discussion programme was recorded as Macintosh and Linux campaigners protested outside Television Centre. The BBC maintained Windows 7 deserved representation on the programme for having outsold its closest direct competitor, a Harry Potter book from a couple of years ago.

Windows 7 was booed at the start of the recording and accused of having “malware politics” as it was attacked by fellow panelists and the audience. Its opposition to immigration from Windows XP was also controversial.

Windows 7 said it was not out to viciously kill other operating systems and, when David Dimbleby asked if it denied that the monopoly abuse happened, merely smiled and said that it had never actually been penalised for monopoly abuse. It also denied that it had said that “Bill Gates went a bit too far,” despite having been captured on video saying so. It merely advocated Microsoft Nationalism, such as the classic Microsoft national diet of lard, lard, lard and a bit more lard on top.

It said it had been “demonised” and repeatedly denied doing things which have been attributed to Vista. It attributed photos of it wearing a T-shirt saying “The Wow™ starts NOW!” to youthful foolishness. Windows 7 also decried the leak of Microsoft’s latest dismal quarterly results on Wikileaks, saying the contents were complete fiction and a breach of private matters between the Microsoft National Party and the financial authorities.

But it claimed its popularity was vastly increasing and mentioned a report it had commissioned saying that two-thirds of UK business would move to Windows 7 by the year 2100. Probably.

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THAWTELESS, West London, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release later this month of Ubuntu Linux 9.10, “Karmic Koala,” to men.

Project founder Mark Shuttleworth explained that “this stuff is difficult to explain to girls” and thought they’d have gotten the hint when he called 8.04 “Hairy Hardon.” “Worrying about sexism in open source just detracts from the battle for Linux. So we’ve put the tits back into the default desktop. And arses.”

Crime-fighting geek Shuttleworth, who dresses as a billiionaire playboy by night, swore that plenty of women liked him lots and that he obviously wasn’t unable to get laid or anything, having gotten seriously rich in the dot-com era, not to mention having gone into space. “Chicks dig that stuff. Trust me, I’ve met lots of girls. More than five!”

Canonical Community Manager Jono Bacon echoed this sentiment on his blog. “We just don’t understand how come women are 15% of all computer programmers but only 1% of open source programmers. It must be a bit complicated for them. That’s why I’ve written this spontaneous blog post, completely unrelated to anything my boss may or may not have said, on all the fantastically talented women in free software, even if none of them seem to work much on Ubuntu any more. Also, I’m absolutely confident that saying I’m in a computer geek heavy metal band will get me lots of chicks too, even if their pretty little heads can’t understand Linux.”

A special women’s edition of Ubuntu 9.10 will be released on a bright pink CD. “It doubles as a makeup mirror!” said Shuttleworth.

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NOWHERE LAND, Seattle, Sunday (NNGadget) — Microsoft today implemented its 100% Data Confidentiality package for T-Mobile Sidekick, comprehensively protecting users’ contacts, email and messages from any possible attacker.

“Our data security is impenetrable,” said Steve Ballmer, “and will reassure everyone of the data integrity of our Windows Azure Screen Of Death cloud computing and Windows Mobile initiatives.”

Microsoft plans to leverage the new confidentiality mechanism to finally purge the horror of Vista from the face of the earth, in the same manner as firing all the contractors who knew how to build Windows 2000 and having to reconstruct Windows XP from bits of NT 4.

Microsoft Sharepoint users looked forward to a similar denouement as the only safe way to scour their hopelessly incompetent organisations from the world in a manner that would not infect successor organisations.

Microsoft is putting together an outsourcing proposal to the UK government for data protection.

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TWO HUNDRED METRES, Turn Left, Thursday (NNN) — Minicab saviour TomTom has announced their latest navigation device, the Stop, targeting motorists on a budget. The price is subsidised by donations from the motoring public in honour of the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.

The user interface has been greatly simplified, with just an on-off switch and a microphone. No installation is required, the user merely beating the gadget into place on his (usually his) dashboard with his forehead.

In operation, the user shouts his planned destination at the Stop and the device determines its mode of operation according to the precision of the destination, the estimated intelligence of the user and the number of casual ethnic slurs and appropriately applies the latest database of railroad tracks, Ministry of Defence firing ranges and cliffs before announcing“Mon aeroglisseur est plein d’anguilles” and shutting down.

The voice is the standard GPS “Dominatrix” voice, the new interface adding images emphasising its withering disdain for the driver’s motoring prowess and genitalia.

The Stop will be available free to white van men, real estate agents, students whose parents have just bought them their first car and Chelsea mothers in Range Rovers. It will be made mandatory for Daily Mail readers.

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YESLER WAY, Seattle, Monday (NNGadget) — Microsoft Windows has once again trounced all comers in security, with a recent survey showing 59% of all Windows machines on the Internet being infected with malware and under the control of botnets. Malware rose 15% just from August to September this year.

Windows users continued to be stupidly complacent Typhoid Marys, telling Mac and Linux users that they were every bit as susceptible to viruses and Trojans, despite the Windows:Mac:Linux virus proportions in the wild continuing at approximately 100%:0%:0% for the fifteenth year in a row, and pumping out gigabytes of spam and denial-of-service attacks from their thoroughly 0wn3d computing cesspits.

“The truth is out,” said Steve Ballmer, taing care not to wash his hands when preparing the food for his Windows 7 House Party. “Mac and Linux users are just too pussy for viruses. Gotta keep your immune system up! What are you, some sort of faggot? Too artsy or nerdy for MANLY food?”

The time on the digital clock behind him changed at random as he foamed slightly at the mouth. “Windows — we’re NUMBER ONE! And here you were saying Windows was a load of ‘number two.’”

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ANOTHER INFINITE LOOP, Cupertino, Monday (NNN) — In its latest move to protect the consumer and, of course, its valuable intellectual property and reputation, Apple has brought a trademark violation suit in Australia against nature.

“The violations are all over trees, sometimes orchards full of them,” said Steve Jobs today. “And not a compatible USB connection to iTunes in sight! We feel this is grossly deceptive and misleading.” Apple has already sent legal letters to several supermarkets and greengrocers.

Apple’s legal challenge attempts to prevent nature from using an imitation of its famous logo. The company is upset by nature having exercised a blanket trademark that would allow it to put “apples” anywhere it pleased, in any of the forty-five trademark categories in Australian law. “It’s as if they think it’s a generic word!”

”While we can’t rule anything out,” said Metatron, the voice of Almighty God, “we haven’t got any further market plans at the moment. We had enough trouble bringing apples back into favour after we started the clothing market, not to mention the entire basis of economics, six thousand years ago. And I’m an angel, you idiot, not a Transformer. Didn’t you see me in Dogma?”

Macintosh users quickly rallied behind the company, Daniel Eran Dilger writing a 75,000-word Roughly Drafted article weighing Apple’s trademark defence against Almighty God’s “bigoted and homophobic attack” on Sodom and Gomorrah.

Almighty God Himself said he had considered the issue. “But as long as … that guy … can get new livers, I’m a bit at a loss as to what to reasonably attempt next.”

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GET ON UP, I Wanna Do My Thing, Sunday (NNN) — James Gordon Brown, the hardest-working Prime Minister in show business, has warned the economy to buck up its ideas and get on its feet or he will unleash his erudition in a weekly podcast.

Downing Street compared the podcast to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” broadcast on radio in the 1930s. “Not that we are saying that present economic circumstances are comparable to the Great Depression. Ha! Ha! Did John Kennedy do radio broadcasts? Perhaps we should do something to compare Gordon to him. Peter suggested a visit to Dallas.”

FDR’s Fireside Chats were some of the most popular radio shows of the era. Echoing this success, downloads of Mr Brown’s first podcast by people other than journalists writing about it are soon to break double figures.

Iran has stated that it would treat any active deployment of Gordon Brown podcasts as an act of war and is building up its strategic reserve of recordings of the wit and wisdom of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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WELL I NEVER, What Will They Think Of Next, The Future (NNGadget) — The “tech world” is awash with excitement for today’s scheduled release of a hundred thousand invitations to preview Wave, Google’s innovative new website, communication protocol, interactive environment, multiplayer online role-playing game, bulletin board, wiki, dessert wax and floor topping. Experts, all heavily consulted by the media while Parliament is in recess, say it will revolutionise how we do business, organise parties, manage projects, make friends, waste our employer’s time at work, pick up girls we swear we didn’t realise were under sixteen and cheat on our homework.

I’ve been testing the Google Wave Developer Preview. The implications for journalists alone are stunning:

• Collaborative reporting: Using the Google Wave interface, two reporters can take turns at the keyboard of an Internet terminal and “type” both their names at the top of an article. Then they can both write material for the article below the double byline! Incredible!

• Record and archive interviews: We can write down the words actually spoken by an interviewee. The words can then be “saved” for use later. Amazing!
• Timelines: The Google Wave Timeline™ can be used to show a timeline of events — just type a clock time and then note what happened around that time! Punctual!
• Discuss what you read: People who read stories can write “comments” on them, by writing them in their Google Wave interface, then “e-mailing” then in to the editors for due consideration and possible publication on the next day’s edition of the “site”! Interactive!
• Smarter story updates: Instead of adding “Updated” to the end of an updated story, we can use the Google Wave Cursor™ and the Google Wave Arrow Keys™ and edit the story text in the middle! Make those commenters look as silly in their supposed “corrections” as you know they should do!

In conclusion, Google Wave is clearly an absolute boon to the noble institution of the Fourth Estate in its mission to protect the public good, further the dynamism of social discourse and watch the watchmen. And this is why we at News International consider Google a threat and menace to the news media and the institution of journalism that must be reined in by government edict without delay. God bless you all, and please PayPal us 20p for having read this article, you parasitical pixel-stained technopeasant. And now, Tories and tits.

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YESLER WAY, Seattle, Friday (NNGadget) — Office supply company Microsoft has reassured consumers and industry analysts that its decline will continue with the new video on how to run a Windows 7 house party, whose “viral” nature goes beyond “herpes” or “swine flu” to “SARS.”

Originally thought to be a devastating satirical spoof before being confirmed as genuine, the video features Stepford wives and husbands reading lines off the autocues in each others’ blank eyes on how to hold a party. The digital clock on the cooker in the background jumps around at random. The black guy and the MILF go off to fuck. Finally, everyone drinks the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and looks forward to being one with Steve Jobs in the next world, before discovering that they have been judged unworthy and will spend eternity with Steve Ballmer instead.

The video was produced by the same team that advertised Vista with comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, working again with abnormal psychology researchers from the University of Washington. “Count the headlines!” shouted one of the marketing department’s several thousand monkeys with video cameras. “Count the YouTube views! It’s clear that my work gets the brand out, and if I don’t get appropriate compensation in my annual review I’ll be suing.” The Polish version of the video features a white face crudely cut-and-pasted over the black guy’s head.

“Windows 7 was getting great reviews,” said completely independent ZDnet marketing marketer Mary Jo Enderle, “even the geeks loved the preview versions, everyone was amazed that Microsoft appeared to have successfully grown past the Vista disaster. But the mind-sodomising cluelessness of thinking this video was actually a good idea has firmly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, blessed Windows 7 with the stench of death, confirmed that it really is just Vista with a coat of paint and set everyone’s mind at rest.

“That’s why my column this week talks about all the great stuff coming in Windows 8. Windows 8, that’s the one to beat! It’ll work on netbooks! It’ll be secure! It’ll have a database filesystem! Snow Leopard can’t touch it! Businesses should definitely move from XP!”

Microsoft has previously shown its deft ability to drop the ball two yards from the end of the field with the XBox 360, in which a powerful and popular game console was manufactured so shoddily that over 50% of machines turned out defective, and the Zune, in which an MP3 player of decent hardware capabilities at a good price point was crippled with bad firmware and unusable software and sold in a package the color of baby shit. “In a stroke of genius, they put in wifi but not a web browser, so the iPod Touch could steal their thunder six months later. You don’t get brilliance like that for free.”

The new, abbreviated Windows 7 house party instructions have been sent to marketing: “Here is a Windows 7 DVD. Here is a bottle of vodka. Here is a gun with one bullet.”

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ABBEY NORMAL, London Lite, Wednesday (N! News) — Major British recording artists will meet to try to hammer out a truce on their views on the Mandelson-Geffen “three strikes” proposal to cut off filesharers.

Radiohead, Pink Floyd and Blur have said the proposals are unworkable and will only alienate people. However, Lily Allen has come out strongly in favour of the proposals, saying that “the fackin’ slags need a good fackin’ kickin’. It’s fine for the rich fackers, but it’s all a bit of a rum do for the starving artistes like me, what? Er, I mean, fack the fackin’ fackers. Innit. Blud.” She then accidentally exposed one of her nipples.

Lily Allen came to popularity from filesharers pointing to her MySpace page. “Fackin’ fans, fackin’ fack the fackers,” she wrote in a blog post plagiarised without attribution from TechDirt. If she copies two more blog posts, or if anyone notices the mixtapes of other artists’ music on her website, her Internet will be cut off.

James Blunt has backed Ms Allen’s position strongly. Respecting his stance, filesharers across Britain have sworn never to download a James Blunt song again if they can possibly avoid it, several taking out insurance against such an event.

Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group has put forward a proposal for a small mandatory licence percentage for copyright holders, as on radio and television. “We plead with the music industry not to throw us into the mandatory licence briar patch,” said Mr Killock, “in which no-one ever buys a record again otherwise as they’ve already paid for it. Please.”

“Punk Floyd … weren’t it them what did ‘Beatlearchy In The UK’? Hippy crap,” said 14-year-old music fan KT Myspce, loading up another Lady Gaga song to play in the background from YouTube.

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MONDAY MORNING, In A Human Face Forever, Monday (NNGadget) — Millions of British workers are to be made redundant as companies install robotic Facebook readers, with F5-clicking robot arms, in the workplace to save human time interacting with social networks.

“Computers are in the workplace to improve our economic efficiency,” said killjoy researcher Chris MacKenzie. “We thought companies would really go for something that would give an actual reason to lay off complete wastes of space without all that tedious waiting for them to post their tits or publicly slag off their boss.”

Additional functionality includes posting to Twitter through that page someone made that looks like a spreadsheet and looking up the anatomy photos on Wikipedia so IT won’t flag it trying to go to porn sites at work.

“The next model is showing great promise — it talks about football and last night’s telly in the breakroom with the other computers, automatically drinks tea and never tells Facilties about the tea bags running out, and nips off to the bogs for a sly tug over porn on its iPhone when things are quiet. And do you think you’ll get a drop of work out of it on Friday afternoon after it’s been down the pub drowning its peripherals with the other ’bots? I don’t bloody think so.”

The only barrier to adoption may be the threat of redundancy for large swathes of senior management should the software be adapted to 19″ Sony Vaio laptops. However, many workers who actually work at work were clamouring for a version that would automatically translate scientific papers from English to Faeces-Flinging Monkey and back and find funny videos on YouTube, thus enabling it to both write and read Metro and London Lite and saving everyone else the trouble.

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WHAT’S ON THE SLAB, Steampunk Seattle, Monday (NNGadget) — Microsoft is improving its stratospherically successful “decision engine,” Bob Hope, with a feature that allows you to “visual search” on “web” “sites.”

“This is what happens at the cutting edge of research, y’know,” said marketing marketer Yusuf Mehdi at the Tech Crunch 50 conference yesterday. “You can use Microsoft Search™ to ’search’ for any page on the Information Superhighway! And it’s really quite amazing what’s out there. Man. That’s actually our slogan — ‘Microsoft Search™: It’s Really Quite Amazing What’s Out There. Man.’”

The “search” feature is part of technology acquired in the deal with Yahoo! “We bought this fantastic thing they were working on. It’s a directory of links to web pages. People put stuff into classifications. You can ‘crowd-source’ it, you know! You visualise what you’re looking for, type it in words and this stuff shows up. Amazing! I don’t know how anyone never thought of it before. We have about fifty precomputed ’searches’ in there at the moment, with more to come. Windows 7! The ‘wow’ starts now! You know, sometimes I wonder how people even managed to use computers before Windows 7.”

Search™ requires installing Microsoft Silverlight, .NET 3.5, the latest service packs and Windows Genuine Advantage. Office 2007 is also recommended. It runs best in Internet Explorer 8 on a Windows 7 computer. “We don’t see how Goog— that other company can possibly compete. Theirs doesn’t use anything extra. How the hell are you supposed to get people hooked like that? They just don’t have a business model.”

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BLETCHEROUS PARK, Milton Springsteen, Sunday (NNGadget) — Today, on Programmer’s Day — September 13th, the two hundred and fifty-sixth day of the year — it is time for deep reflection on who we are and how we reached the current state of things.

After breaking the German Enigma Machine codes during the second World War and inventing computer science as we know it, I started work on my next and greatest project: to build the ultimate politician. We would put together a force of bright and shining intellects, prominent academics of brilliance and perspicacity, but adept in the rough and tumble of practical day-to-day politics. A simulated “Max Headroom” smiling face as the frontman, and only a small amount of unearthly, unspeakable eldritch horror as the directing node behind the cluster.

It’s hard to say what I was thinking at the time. A thriving, computer-mediated economy, where machines would do the hard work and hard thinking for the benefit of all humanity. The prospect of a chancellor-bot singing “Daisy, daisy” as I removed his competence boards one by one to turn him into a Prime Minister. The sheer epic spectacle of huge mecha-politicians fighting it out with laser cannons over the smoking ruins of London. At least we got that one.

So on behalf of British technologists, and to all those who live under the CCTV’s watchful eye thanks to my work, I am now free to say: I am so very, very sorry. You deserved so much better.

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