Downtime

Virtually pointless non-fire night

2009-11-05T12:24:34Z

As virtualisation of just about everything gains popularity due to cost saving in the enterprise world, health and safety red tape has succeeded in making bonfire night virtually pointless.

Organisers of a Guy Fawkes party in Devon say safety officials have forced them into a virtual bonfire.

Revellers will have to make do with projected image of a bonfire on a giant screen, electric heaters and bonfire sound effects because of the mountain of paperwork needed to organise the real thing.

Downtime goes error-free

2009-11-04T16:17:44Z

Downtime is indebted to Pulitzer prize winner Joseph Hallinan for writing the book on mistakes, why we make them and how to avoid them. It is called Erronomics, no doubt a tribute to the earlier Freakonomics, which showed why drug dealing is poorly paid, unless you are the boss. Downtime hopes that the title of Hallinan's book is not in itself a mistake.
But Downtime thought that readers would be more interested to know how to avoid mistakes. The rules are:
1. Make a list. And check that your heart surgeon uses one too, because it cuts their error rate 47%.
2. Guess twice; your second is likely to be better.
3.Write it down. The palest ink is more reliable that the strongest memory.
4. Get more sleep. Your decision-making capacity is better with a blood alcohol level of 0.05% than after 17 sleepless hours.(That does not mean what you hope it means.)
5. Do less. Multitasking is error-making.

Party comes to an end as fugitive discovers policemen can read

2009-10-22T14:06:35Z

A fugitive from justice was arrested after alerting the US authorities to his whereabouts through Facebook.
Maxi Sopo, who was wanted for falsely obtaining more than $200,000 in credit, wrote a number of extravagant boasts on his Facebook profile after fleeing to Cancun, Mexico.
Status updates from Mr Sopo said he was "loving it", described himself as "living in paradise" and said he was "just here to have fun".
Not content with publicly disclosing the information on the internet, Sopo added a former justice department official to his friends list, who promptly tipped off his old employer.

Call centre automation takes macabre twist

2009-10-22T13:56:13Z

The Register brings news that Japanese programmers have developed an algorithm which can tell, just by listening to your voice, if you are about to die.
The software was developed by trawling through six months' worth of records from the Yokohama ambulance service, corelated with data filed by paramedics about how alive the caller was when they arrived.
Of course the program will be of literally life-saving value in helping ambulance services decide which emergency calls should take priority.
However, technologies have a habit of straying from their original application and, just as the space programme gave us the non-stick frying pan, Downtime can not shake the uneasy feeling we may be seeing the Japanese doomware pressed into the service of some gruesomely sadistic TV gameshow in the very near future.

Bloggers mob libel lawyers, restore free speech

2009-10-14T11:21:26Z

Just as starlings can mob predators like hawks, so too Twitterers and bloggers managed to drive off newspaper editors' most feared predator, libel specialist solicitors Carter Ruck.

Carter Ruck had stopped the Guardian from publishing a report about a parliamentary question. Normally, newspapers are allowed to publish all parliament's business.

Carter Ruck withdrew its opposition after the blogosphere rose up in the Guardian's defence, published the documents at the heart of the issue on Wikileaks, and parliament went on with its work.

Downtime now awaits a blog attack on Downing Street over its cancellation of the Serious Fraud Office's investigation of BAE Systems' Al-Yamamah deal.

Scandinavian sex tourism saga continues

2009-10-14T09:19:52Z

After Danish tourism bods pulled a promotional You Tube video that basically described the nation as a place to get your leg over without worrying about a problem nine months later, the Swedes have a bigger problem.

Millions of Chinese men are trying to find the whereabouts of a town in Sweden which is 100% inhabited by women. It was apparently set up by a man hating widow in 1820. And these women are also desperate for men.

According to internet rumours, the women have turned to same-sex relationships to satisfy their desires. And any men attempting to gain entry risk being beaten by the blonde sentries at the gates. Scary

Single, dead female

2009-10-14T08:53:44Z

Proving that social networking can be murder, a jilted lover killed his partner in south Wales when she changed her status to single on Facebook.

Brian Lewis is to serve a minimum of 14 years in jail after strangling and stabbing his partner to death.

A strong warning to socials networking devotees everywhere to think twice before posting any provocative updates to personal profiles.

Smart phones, not users

2009-10-14T08:51:16Z

Twitter members are so addicted to the microblogging service that thousands are risking their lives to do it.

One in ten motorists are using mobile devices to send tweets while on the road say researchers, even though they are 23 more times likely to have an accident.

Smartphones are said to be fuelling the addiction and could be responsible for many of the set going from being "dead cool" to just plain dead.

Downtime notes that "smart" applies to the phones, not the necessarily the users.

MOD leaks plugged on Wikileaks

2009-10-08T14:51:01Z

Downtime didn't know whether to feel insulted or honoured by the inclusion of investigative journalists among the Ministry of Defence's list of people to defend the realm against.
The comment about us hacks appeared in Wikileaks' copy of a 2001 46Mb MoD file, which gave chapter and verse on how to avoid information leaks.
Nuisance people, according to the MoD, include parliamentarians, foreign agents, terrorists & criminals. The document tells squaddies how to deal with leaks, sexual entrapments in Russia and China, diplomatic pouches, allies, classified documents & codewords, compromising radio and audio emissions, even computer hackers.
The MoD seemed pretty sanguine about it, noting it was an old document, so posed no security threat, but Downtime is checking into who's guts have replaced garters in Saville Row.

Regulator speaks as it sees

2009-10-07T15:43:21Z

Cyril Connelly, a British critic, said that no-one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book.

This is absolutely true. And so it is with the over-35s media experts at Monitor, the independent regulator of NHS Foundation Trusts.

On Monitor's website are the wisest words ever issued by the regulator. Downtime would go so far as to say that Monitor takes us to the extreme limits of wisdom.

Dictionary in hand, this is what we read on its website:

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

Ernest Marples

2009-10-05T15:50:18Z

When Downtime heard that the Royal Mail had shot down ernestmarples.com for allegedly infringing its rights to post codes, we did some checking. Wikipedia, that font of all wisdom, had quite an extensive referenced and footnoted entry on Mr Marples, a former Postmaster General and the man who hired Beeching to trim the rail network.
But when Downtime tried to get on the actual website, our trusty moral guardian Websense banned entry. Reason? Sex. Well, perhaps it was because it read on Wikipedia that McMillan had named Marples as one of two cabinet members tied up in the Profumo scandal, so to speak...
But no doubt Marples will be best remembered for introducing subscriber trunk dialling to what became BT, putting thousands of switchboard ladies out of work, and perhaps some into the oldest profession.

Downtime's black market value

2009-09-25T13:28:51Z

Downtime is indebted to Trust's blog which alerted him to the new Norton calculator. This works out what one's personal information is worth to cybercriminals. Having answered the questions, mostly kindly pre-filled in by Norton, Downtime was delighted to discover that his net asset worth was so low as to encourage cybercriminals to send him money, rather that do business as usual.
However, pushing up his cash and near cash (pension fund, ISA, etc) value to a mere $150,000, Downtime's details were suddenly worth $1165 to the bad guys. On a good day. Soberingly, Norton noted that at auction, such details were likely to start at the princely sum of $20.55.

Rodent or primate?

2009-09-18T10:51:54Z

Scientists have made a breakthrough and cured colour blindness in Squirrel Monkeys.

Two squirrel monkeys were trained to perform standard colour-blindness tests and communicate what colours they were seeing to the researchers via a computer touch screen.

Downtime applauds this, but can't help thinking think the scientists should have cured the Monkeys' split personalities first. Who cares if you can't recognise colours if you can't identify your own species?

MoD undecided on value of IT

2009-09-18T10:50:12Z

Three of the biggest departments of state - the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs and the Department of Health, have CIOs at the top table - but not the MoD which, at the top, is still coming to grips with the importance of technology in the 21st Century.

Clearly the absence of a CIO has nothing to do with the fact that Chinook helicopters are grounded because of software issues, the joint payroll system for paying salaries and allowances is said to be unfit for purpose, the MoD has to guess how many Bowman radio systems it has, and electronic records at the data held by the Defence Storage and Distribution Agency cannot be relied on although its systems control two-thirds of the Mod's inventory of supplies.

Not forgetting the £3bn-7bn Defence Information Infrastructure, the costs of which nobody is sure of.

Tory MP Edward Leigh, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee said of the MoD: "In the current economic climate, it is simply not acceptable that its finances and inventory are in such a poor state,"

Never mind. There are lots of big personalities at the MoD's defence board. That their benefits in kind alone exceeded the salaries of many soldiers is to be expected. No sign of any pay cuts there.

Time the MoD woke up to the fact that IT is important enough on the modern battlefield that it merits a CIO on the Defence Board. Sometime before the 22nd Century, perhaps.

One cannot help but imagine the machines are laughing

2009-09-18T10:45:32Z

It can only be a matter of time before a coroner records a verdict of death by satellite navigation.

Downtime has previously documented examples of drivers happy to trust the directions of their satnav devices over the evidence of their senses. Most notable was the case of the Polish man who drove his car into a lake and had to be towed out, earning himself the nickname "Moses" - found, as he was, among the reeds.

This week, however, the long arm of the law has intervened. A Doncaster man, who tried to drive his £30,000 BMW Series 5 off a cliff because the satnav told him to, has been found guilty of driving without due care and attention.

Downtime considers the charge something of an understatement: the court heard how Robert Jones swerved his car off the road and up a narrow footpath at his satnav's insistence, only stopping when he went through a fence, leaving the Beemer teetering over the edge of a precipice.

As one local witness commented: "It was like The Italian Job."