Technically Incorrect

I wonder how management at Facebook might have reacted should they have come across some of President Obama's words Friday.

The president was speaking at the Buchenwald concentration camp, one of whose sub-camps, Ohrdruf, was liberated by his own great uncle. And he made sure to express his own feelings very clearly on a subject that Facebook believes should freely be discussed, Holocaust denial.

"To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened--a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful," he said. "This place is the ultimate … Read more

I want to Bing. I want to be Binged.

I want to hear the Binging bells from a million laptops ringing the news that there might be an alternative to Google's dominant bong.

So I was only too delighted to hear that two TV ads have already emerged to do the Binging ringing.

The first so-called anthem spot (ad agencies love to tell clients they need an anthem spot, in the same way that England really, really needs "God Save the Queen"), disappeared almost before it appeared.

The ad seemed, to my timid heart and mind, to … Read more

Let he who has not been fooled by a fake Twitter page cast the first stone.

Yet, though Kanye West has demanded that Biz Stone and friends do something about fake feeds, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa has gone one step further.

He's suing.

According to the Associated Press, La Russa who is, let's not forget, a lawyer, was appalled to discover someone had set up a Twitter account allegedly bearing his name and a sick sense of humor.

According to the complaint, filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, one … Read more

Technological progress always comes with a hefty price. (Unless it's a PC, I suppose)

So I must admit to feeling a little heartskip at hearing that the search to commune with aliens in the outer beyond will leave humans looking like, well, porky aliens.

According to a report in the Telegraph, scientists believe that long flights into space will not have beautifying effects on the star-crossed trekkers of the future.

In fact, they will make them short, fat, and bald.

I wish I could find more comforting words to describe their fate. Just as I wish that more people … Read more

Correction, June 3 at 8:57 a.m. PDT: This story was originally written on a mistaken assumption that Phil Spector was tweeting from jail. We subsequently learned that we had been taken in by a hoax, by a Twitter user who was posing as Spector. Thanks to our readers for pointing out the error.

In the interests of full disclosure, we are leaving the original post below, but as you read, bear in mind that the quotes (tweets) attributed to Spector are not trustworthy. As the person behind the hoax wrote earlier this morning, "I copied many of … Read more

I wonder about college basketball coaches. It's hard for them to be squeaky clean. Or even vaguely shiny.

So they certainly don't need their daughters' social networking to cause more discombobulation in their attempts to be a cross between Vince Lombardi and Mahatma Gandhi.

You see, I am currently placing my mind beneath the shiny hair of John Calipari, the new basketball coach at the University of Kentucky.

Calipari does seem to make quite a few people tense involuntarily. I am suddenly reminded of a 1994 incident in which Temple coach John Chaney threatened to kill Calipari at … Read more

Human behavior is changing at a blistering pace.

Why, someone in Starbucks held the door for me today and actually waited until I could grab the door from him, rather than letting it swing tantalizingly before I could get there.

However, a British office worker called James Coleman has pointed us toward the perils of over-committed tweeting. According to a report in the Telegraph, Coleman, 23, was jogging when he suddenly felt the enormous uncontrollable urge to pull out his BlackBerry and Twitter.

Perhaps you have experienced a similar sensation. The buttocks tighten, the eyebrows begin to quiver and your … Read more

Sometimes, a CNET handler gives me homework. "Read this, you slovenly, ill-dressed, strangely smelling artist type," they say, "and learn something."

So I have spent the past many hours of my life looking at the wedding scrapbook of Time Warner and AOL. A marriage made where Vegas feared to tread. A marriage in which what happened there didn't, unfortunately, stay there.

I open the scrapbook on January 10, 2000. I read phrases like "stunning announcement."

I read that an analyst called Phil Leigh says this is the most significant development in the Internet … Read more

Sharon Adams, a 45-year-old mother of four from Reading, England, underwent a mastectomy in March.

Instead of concentrating on her own misfortune, she decided to use Facebook to spread the need for women both to have regular checkups and not to feel shame should they endure such awful surgery.

So she posted four pictures of herself, revealing the right side of her body, scarred after the removal of her breast.

Within 24 hours, the pictures were removed by the so-called porn cops at Facebook as being "sexual and abusive."

"For Facebook to claim they were sexual and … Read more