Retro Yakking

Rupert Murdoch has today branded common Internet users ‘ruthless pirates worse than terrorists‘ for their ‘pure and simple content thievery’.

Apparently, anyone who has ever read any story on the website of The Times, The Mirror or The Sun is officially in debt to the Murdoch Corporation.

According to the media mogul, Google are the single worst offenders, providing access to millions of news stories worldwide completely and utterly free of charge — aside from the standard internet subscription/connection fee, but of course, we all know he gets absolutely nothing from that.

Murdoch, who we can only guess is close to bankruptcy, has accused Google of ‘common information thievery’ in a bid to blackmail some more cash out of the ‘well minted’ Internet search engine. It seems the ever alert Mr. Murdoch has only just cottoned on to the earning potential of this Interweb thingy — more than fifteen years after its inception — and decided it’s high time he started charging users for online news.

Free news online? This is an outrage! If you want free content, buy my papers, you fools. Google and other such glorified scraper sites masquerading as search tools must be eli-mi-na-ted. Kill all humans! — Rupert Murdoch

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GCHQ, the UK Government intelligence agency, is to begin recruiting members via XBOX Live, The Guardian are reporting.

It’s thought players of such games as Medal of Honour and Halo possess the skills needed and are the very people the country need to be signing up as future spies.

Whilst there is no shooting aliens in the real-life secret services (at least not to our knowledge), successful gamers tend to be quick thinking, good at problem solving and working as a team to accomplish tasks and (of course) blow a load of stuff up.

But GCHQ aren’t just looking for emerging James Bonds. A spokesperson revealed that their “work is also about helping government departments, such as the Ministry of Defence, to protect their information and communication systems”. Presumably, this means they’re on the lookout for potential hackers, so we can assume people with chipped XBOXes fall nicely into this category and will be getting a call from MI5 in the coming weeks.

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The Conservative Party have been accused of offering bribes to the programmers of Internet verification system ReCaptcha. Though the Tories deny this, compelling evidence can be found in the fact the program is definitely attempting to subtly and subliminally persuade me to vote for them. Exhibit A:

Seems the Tories have been spying on my Internet usage and identified me as the ‘kind of person that wants to vote Conservative but doesn’t because he feels like he’ll be beaten up by hard blokes in the pub’, namely everyone in Wigan.

It won’t work, though, because their reluctant and belated attempt to embrace the digital revolution is only a pants gimmick to capitalise on Gordon Brown’s complete ineptitude at video blogging. I would much prefer to watch Mr. Brown squirm for X number of years, if only for his creepy smile.

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Regular readers will be getting used to these ‘…is stupid‘ posts, a series of articles aggressively criticising a website, item or group of people whilst conveniently ignoring the good elements of said entity. They’re a bit of a cross between The Encyclopedia of Stupid and James Rolfe’s ‘You Know What’s Bull****‘ series, except with more of a northern twist.

It is widely accepted that one of the first web users to compile what is now known as a ‘blog’ was student Justin Hall at Justin’s Links from the Underground. Though he wasn’t the very first blogger, he certainly became one of the most ‘famous’ on the early web, notably for his 1994 guided tour of the web.

Hall’s blog still runs to this day, and is a perfect example of what a blog is: a load of opinionated nonsense that not many people outside your immediate circle of family and friends would give the time of day. Except Hall’s family was the immediate online community.

A blog that transcends such boundaries is a relative rarity these days: research suggests that 97.3% of all weblogs on the internet contain completely pointless information of no use to 99.9recurring% of the world’s population. The common blog has a poor reputation, and for good reason. The statistics seem to prove the majority of bloggers are goths and social outcasts, sometimes both; the number of bad blogs far outweigh the good ones, so they really aren’t worth your time.

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Google have sensationally declared the Cookie Monster’s 40th birthday as more important than Bonfire Night by choosing to use Sesame Street as the subject of their 5th November doodle (pictured above).

Shocked internet users have taken to Twitter to moan about the injustice in their droves, whilst others have resorted to the drastic measure of directly emailing the California-based company to complain about the issue. Yet more have sent hate mail to the Cookie Monster himself:

I h8 Cookie Monster. Hes a blue piece of bumfluff. i want to stick a Catherine wheel up his bum and watch him spin round like a windmill. — Anonymous Twitter user

We shall give them the benefit of the doubt, however, as the expected doodle could well appear on Saturday. As everyone knows, a lot of 5th November parties occur on the nearest weekend to Bonfire Night, so they could still redeem themselves, but our money is on them not even knowing what Guy Fawkes Night is. They don’t celebrate it in America, remember.

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