Downtime

According to BBC Three's brand new series, Shopping is My Life, aired last night: "36-year-old IT consultant Nikki Moore is addicted to high-end fashion, gadgets and pampering, but despite her glamorous lifestyle she wants more out of life." Here she is, being confronted with just some of the gorgeous stuff her high-powered career has enabled her to accumulate:

Donwtime believes that this could be the single most effective way to encourage young women to consider a career in IT consultancy. Show them just how much stuff you can buy with the proceeds...

(Just don't let them watch the bit in the full episode where Nikki says she's not exactly satisfied with her job, and decides to take time off to launch Girl Geek Chic instead!)

Do all IT consultants have more money than sense? BBC Three's Shopping is My Life has, erm, shopped another retail-addicted IT professional to the nation. And this time it's a bloke.

IT consultant Andy Nicolau is the latest unfortunate to have his high income - and poor spending habits - subjected to national ridicule and shame in the name of televised therapy. Sadly, we are unable to bring you any footage of his aftershave addiction, gadget-gathering, or serious jeans habit, but if you're quick you can catch the full 60 minutes of IT professional shopaholicism on the BBC iPlayer now.

Downtime is not shocked to see that high-earners may also be high spenders. Nor is Downtime surprised to discover that people often shop to excess when they are lonely, bored or otherwise unfulfilled. That's why it's called retail therapy!

But Downtime is surpised that anyone with sufficient nous to get themselves a high-earning IT consultancy position would be willing to risk their reputation by exposing their shortcomings to the whole of the UK television viewing public...

Cecil, Austin and Muriel are snails on a mission to deliver email at a snails' pace..... equipped with electronic equipment allowing them to send emails on behalf of visitors to the website RealSnailMail.

Web filtering is needed to improve coffee-based solutions as hacking is added to caffeine as a major danger to coffee drinkers.

The failure of the makers of a web-enabled coffee making machine to build in security is leaving its insomniac users open to attack by hackers.

According to a report on Networkworld.com one reader had discovered his Jura Impressa F90 coffee machine, which links to the internet via a PC, allows a remote attacker to gain access to the Windows XP system it is running on.

This type of risk is common in internet connected devices, according to Geoff Sweeney, CTO at IT security company Tier-3.

"Making the coffee too weak is a problem that can easily be fixed, but if a security flaw allows a remote hacker to take over your desktop PC, then you have a real problem on your hands," he said.

According to Sweeney, the message from Craig Wright's experience with his internet-enabled coffee-maker is that Internet users should be careful before hooking up the most benign of internet-enabled devices to the office network, as there may be unknown security flaws lurking and waiting to be discovered.

We think others suffering this problem should take a granular approach to web filtering and avoid Java.

Okay, so we've shown you this before. But it's good. And this is the week it happens for real... So it's worth another viewing, no?

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

Flickr... It's a perfect way to waste time, randomly browsing the photos of others. As Jonathan Coulton demonstrates well in this song written as a tribute to the random-Flickr experience:

And if you liked that, you might like Coulton's Secret Heart of a Codemonkey, complete with a World of Warcraft machinima video by Spiffworld...