Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Virtual terrorism...

It was from his bedroom down an ordinary road lined with trees and randomly 'laid' with dog faeces and on a laptop that Mr Killing Time set up a website to build a network of extreme half-wits. In the space of just a few years, or many months, as interweb users prefer to call the passage of time when they're not expressing their opinions in binary, Mr Killing Time 007, as he became known, was the king, and occasionally the queen, of cyber stupidity. When an international team of intelligence experts who had never actually been online descended on Mr Killing Time, they found him plotting to log off and go and have a cup of coffee. For several more years, forensic experts viewed the thousands of files on Mr Killing Time's computer equipment, finding dozens of half written plays, several jpgs of Agyness Deyn and Kate Moss and an mp3 of Goon Show clips. The evidence against Mr Killing Time is so underwhelming that he now intends to set up a central hub for terrorists.

Is it just me, or does all this Younis Tsouli business seem a bit, well, daft? I suppose it's more the John Craven's Newsround-style patronising coverage that makes Terrorist 007's crimes seem about as serious as an afternoon updating your profile on Facebook while sitting in the same office as the boss. "The number of websites doubles by the day," a Newsnight reporter has just told me. Well, as long as a good half of them contain funny .avi files of skateboard accidents I really don't object.

In more serious news, and back on a Facebook tip, Facebook has been asked to remove the rather addictive Scrabulous by Hasbro and Mattel, who are quite rightly keen to protect their copyright of Scrabble, which the popular electronic Facebook version rips off lock, stock and triple word count. Bit of a silly thing to do, really, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, eh? But Scrabulous was a bloody good way to pass a few hours.

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