Pesky kids probably behind Twitter crash, says expert

Twitter, the boring interweb micronetblogging website used by bad actor Ashton Kutcher to publicly humiliate his wife and by normal people to talk about their breakfast, mysteriously vanished this afternoon (or so we're told).

For approximately three hours, office workers found themselves with nothing to do but work, as popular advertising tool The Face book also crashed under the sudden influx of Twitter twats desperate for their post-lunch social networking fix. Facebook boss Mark Zuckerburg said: 'Yessss! It's like 2005 all over again!', but half an hour later added: 'Oh f*ck'.

The twoutage also had a significant effect on business: sales of fax machines rose by a reported 700% during the three hour period, while social media experts advised their clients to 'just buy TV ads or something'. Analysts estimated that global productivity rose by 8,000% and declared the recession over.

Unfortunately, normal service resumed at around 5pm.

Experts warned that future disruptions were likely because Twitter is rubbish and could be taken down by a child equipped only with an abacus, and people should delete their accounts and buy newspapers to be on the safe side.

Unknown technology and digital media consultant Colin Sweetman told The Daily Mail: 'It's probably the most common form of attack on a website because you don't need to be particularly bright to have a go at it. It's relatively unsophisticated. Quite often it's a 14 or 15-year-old or a university kid, not a skilled programmer, just someone with a bit of computer knowledge and nothing better to do with their time.'

Internet expert Sweetman's website E-Volutionary.net currently redirects to an unassociated domain name and displays a 'Page not found' error message when visited.

* Update *

True to form, the Mail has edited it's original article beyond all recognition now but the link remains the same (the piece is on its third rewrite now - in all fairness, it is difficult writing about stuff you have no idea about.)

Contradicting the Mail's original stance that the twoutage was probably just the work of some teenage nerd in his mum's basement, they now reckon it was evil commie hackers and perhaps even the Russian Government. Sources fear the event marks the beginning of 'Cold War 2.0'.

Commenter Barry from Woking warned: 'the Russians are way ahead of the rest of world when it comes to cyber attacks. if we ever fall out with Russia, they will blow the UK off the internet.'

For some reason, all quotes by, and references to, web expert Colin Sweetman have disappeared.

Twitter breaks your brain, say experts

Twitter is breeding a generation of emotionless sociopaths hell bent on nothing less than the total annihilation of humankind, a study hasn't shown.

According to hypnotherapist and BBC 3 psychologist Felix Economakis, the machine gun quick stream of 24-hour news, email, social networking sites, microwave ovens and colour TVs are overloading our brains with microscopic digital germs of doom.

Emitted by many common household appliances and absolutely everything on the internet, the so-called 'Gigagerms' wreak havoc with the easily corrupted empathy cells and compassion enzymes that make up the brain's squishy 'moral compass'.

Dr Economakis believes that web surfers have been at risk of losing their morals since the birth of broadband, but the problem has been amplified by the surge in popularity of evil social networking video game Twitter.

He said: 'Our poor brains are definitely suffering information overload...Our brains' attention levels are finite. When everything is screaming at us, we start withdrawing so that normally nice people become unempathetic. Brains brains brains.'

Twitter, originally known as Skynet when it was founded by parent company Cyberdyne in the late eighties, poses the most significant risk because updates are presented too quickly for the sluggish human mind to process correctly, the studies show.

Such an 'information overload can trigger the brain's 'fight or flight' response - and sideline more compassionate, thoughtful responses to news and information', Daily Mail science editor David Derbyshire added nonsensically.

Preliminary findings from similar research have indicated that Facebook and Twitter usage is also associated with reduced Midi-Chlorian counts, and may even reverse evolution when used with third party applications such as Tweetdeck which speed up the stream of information crashing into users' faces.

An expert said: 'These studies are irrefutable, and are based on rock-solid science. Everyone should stop using these silly internet things and buy more newspapers before something awful happens.'

Guardian special: The internet will destroy us all

Email provides no benefits, only 'impotence, disease [and] frustration' according to one embittered ex newspaper editor driven to distraction by the disturbingly fast moving world of anything that uses electricity.

As for the world wide web, far from providing the singularly most powerful medium known to man for creating, digesting and disseminating information, all it does is provide an orgy of 'porn and paedophilia', 'giant helpings of fear and disgust on demand', 'terrorism' and 'the end of civilised life as we know it', no less.

To anyone thinking the web is the most incredible research tool we have, a conduit for distant friends and family to connect and share experiences otherwise out of reach, or a landscape in which a multitude of often brilliant voices that might otherwise exist unheard can make themselves known to a potential audience of millions, well, they're wrong.

Indeed, 'we aren't better for grisly YouTube grimaces from Downing Street, or Obama twittering away when he could be thinking', we are hobbled by our slavery to the internet. Brown's YouTube video and Obama's now tweetless Twitter account prove it, representing the net in its entirety as they do.

One need only look at the scandals embroiling New Labour over the last two months for an irrefutable example of just how dangerous email and the web are to human morality: 'Before there was email, there was no Damian McBride hawking his poison from screen to screen', and, to be certain, Brown's spin doctor would never have been able to spread his bile without electronic letters. It is not he who is to blame, but the medium through which he plies his slander and deception.

Of course, the internet is a threat to humanity not only because of its ability to simplify, enable and accerlerate communication to the degree that life becomes nothing more than 'a deluge of puerile twitters and bilious blogs' and 'Susan Boyle videos by the zillion', but also because of the gigantic contribution it makes to global warming. It has been estimated that 17 polar bears die for every RSS feed subscribed to, and let's not even mention the well documented connection between penguin starvation and MSN Messenger conversations.

Yes, 'let's acknowledge, in the words of one highly experienced pro­cessor designer, that there is indeed "a possibility of computer equipment power consumption spiralling out of control [that] could have serious consequences for the overall affordability of computing, not to mention the overall health of the planet."' Forget about cutting corporate emissions, ignore industrial deforestation, don't give a second thought to renewable energy sources, for so long as we have Google, we are surely doomed.

'This is the way the world really ends: not with a bang, but with surges of nausea amid mounting heat, rising seas and carbon despair', all brought about by that scourge of modern newspapers living, the internet.

We have become hollow men, love, hope, ecstacy, the entire panoply of human experience replaced by lolcats, Flash animations and mindless monologues delivered in 140 characters of digital misery.

'Can mankind somehow be saved? Well, we could always switch the damned computer off.'

So what is this 'blogosphere' thing anyway? An analysis of blogging as seen by mainstream media

Readers from the real world may have been perplexed by the attention given to the so-called 'blogosphere' this past weekend, and left wondering why they should care about it.

The short answer is they shouldn't.

The British blogosphere is comprised entirely of frustrated writers bitter about their inability to land jobs at real newspapers, sitting in their mother's basement, stabbing endlessly away at their computer keyboards in the middle of the night writing cretinous, infantile forums of abuse dressed up as argument in the hope that people will read their inconsequential, misinformed diatribe.

Such hopes are miguided and futile. People don't care what these vicious, nihilistic bloggers have to say because all the news and comment worth reading is already published by the mainstream national press. Granted, print journalism is usually several days behind the blogs, and presents an often strangled version of reality, but, ultimately, it is written by real journalists unfettered by the mindless intricacies of the internet - a dying medium if ever there was one. These are the people to trust, not square-eyed internet zombies removed from reality by their 'modems' and 'processors'.

A recent example of this growing dichotomy of reportage between the real newspapers and the blogs is the fine work done by the Evening Standard - the Daily Mail's London edition - which exclusively broke the news that brave police officers tending Ian Tomlinson in the moments before his death had been bombarded with bricks by evil anti-capitalist demonstrators at the G20 protests. It is telling that not a single blog noted this critically important event - presumably because many of the bloggers themselves are evil anti-capitalists desperate to cover up the vile behaviour of their comrades.

Indeed, those who live online are destined to die online, and if you delve deep enough into the 'blogosphere' you find a world that’s very happy to be separated from the real one. So divorced is this new breed of citizen journalist from reality that they even consider Twitter - the boring website beloved of celebrities who want to tell the world what kind of muffin they're eating - to be a useful tool for reporting news and monitoring 'buzz' around particular current affairs. How absurd!

It is around this ridiculous, irrelevant mire of online tittle-tattle and rumour that the events of this Easter weekend spun.

Ironically, the now-defunct, directionless British blogosphere was invented by leading conservative pundit Iain Dale in 1984. His website, Iain Dale's Little Black Book of Westminster was an immediate success and continues to attract nearly 12 billion absolute unique visits every month. It has been hailed as 'compelling and entertaining' by Piers Morgan but it is noteworthy that Dale has attempted to distance himself from the murky waters of the blogosphere through frequent appearances in national newspapers and on television. It is precisely because of his detachment from the reality of blogging that he has been shortlisted for the prestigeous Orwell Prize for blogging.

But it is testament to how low the blogosphere has sunk that Dale was barely involved in the weekend's scandal, despite repeated shouts of 'I want to play!'. Instead, it was former Labour spin-doctor Derek 'Dolly' Draper whose blog, LabourList, caters for 60 million people, at the centre of attention for illiciting those fateful emails from his Number 10 pal, Damian McBride.



However, if it hadn't been for crusading, swivel eyed, right-wing, sleaze-wallowing blogger Guido Fawkes, Draper's foul attempts to smear the Tories would never have come to light and bored the British public to tears in the first place. Fawkes - real name Paul 'Pee' Stains - rose to prominance in 2004 after being declared bankrupt and deciding the best way to claw his way from financial hell was to start a blog. It is still a mystery how this questionable strategy succeeded.

This trinity of bloggers - it is illustrative to think of them in terms of the father, the illegitimate son and the greasy ghost - are followed by a bewildering multitude of smaller, less important internet scribblers who, collectively, form the wider blogosphere. Dale and Stains count amongst their brethren such wits as Donal Blaney, scourge of 20 something Labour candidates, such thinkers as Dizzy, a computer programmer with a taste for pornography, and Letters from a Tory, a man who supports capital punishment for those who smell of alcohol and look at policemen a bit funny.

On the left, the list is even more depressing. Behind the fecal point known chillingly as 'The Liberal Conspiracy', sit a gaggle of naysayers and angry old men determined to destroy the few remaining whisps of tradition and middle-class pride this country clings to. Tim Ireland of The Bloggerhead pursues a ceaseless, brutal agenda against The One True blogger in almost every issue of his online magazine and even dares question the veracity of the national press in using deluded fantasists as authoritive sources. Vicious nihilists such as the unpalatably named Chicken Yoghurt, meanwhile, appear to support no particular brand of British politics, instead criticising the actions of the Tory and Labour parties in a fence-sittingly un-partisan kind of way. Suspiciously foreign sounding bloggers like Hopi Sen peddle the type of meandering lefty drivel that attacks everything but never proposes any decisive, committed plan of action or solution to anything.

For more excrutiating examples from the left-wing piffle-osphere, see the links to the left.

It is plain to see that the interminable fountain of drivel pouring forth from these 'writers' only serves to create a chaotic, screeching, somewhat sticky sphere of blogs, hopelessly inadequate compared to the panoply of well written, increasingly successful national newspapers.

The events of the Easter weekend have led to some discussion of a rebirth of blogging amongst some left-wing commentators. Only in the self-aggrandising world of online punditry could such heretical Messiah-aping be tolerated. Surely it is time for the bloggers to scurry back underneath their moss covered rocks and give up; surely, if Derek Draper has taught anyone anything, it is that blogging is a silly, puerile nonsense to be ignored by anyone with a shred of common sense.

Google Street View must be banned NOW

Google Street View, the online website that allows burglars to rob your house without even stepping outside, came under fire today as The Daily Mail issued a rallying call to middle-class curtain twitchers to 'Stop it in it's tracks'.

Applauding the heroic actions of the furtive residents of Broughton in Buckinghamshire who martyred themselves at the wheels of a Google 'spy car' so commoners wouldn't be able to look at their lovely mock-Tudor houses and manicured bushes, The Mail asked plaintively why Parliament is taking so long to ban the sick service and protect us from 'The Google monster'.

Sources at Google revealed that the monster, a purple seven bellied frog-like creature with modems for eyes and keywords for arms, is kept chained up deep within the bowels of the Californian company's central lair and fed on a diet of usernames, passwords and internets.

In an exclusive interview with privacy crusader Paul Jacobs, who led the resistance force against the terrifying spymobile as it attempted to photograph his property, luddite Robert Hardman conveyed in vivid detail the epic battle of Broughton as the little Englanders repelled the invasion of their local town for local people by minions of the 'smug California-based cyber empire'.

Finding the 1984 style eye-wagon parked at the end of a cul-de-sac, Jacobs called for reinforcements to force 'matey from snooper command' to turn back and get off their land. The fearless band of men and women - a couple of housewives, a nurse, a Tory councillor and an energy consultant - stood firm as the sneering, dark eyed driver vainly attempted to squirm his way past the resolute human chain. Some witnesses report seeing the driver smacking his lips with a forked, serpentine tongue and scratching at what appeared to be a tail within his trousers.

After an hour and a half fighting with the man and poking him with pitchforks, the residents successfully ejected him from the village and he was forced to drive away in humiliation, as the victorious villagers cheered the removal of another threatening 'out-of-towner'.

Rebel leader Jacobs, who suffers from a lisp, told Hardman: 'I rather lost it, I'm afraid, and I used a word that I don't use very often.' It is thought the word was susurrus.

Hardman, without a shred of irony, described Jacobs as an 'international freedom fighter' and, predicting a forthcoming war against the Google machines, said that 'copycat rebellions now seem inevitable.'

But the Broughton incident has led to threats from cyber terrorists of a day of rampant unchecked photography in the small village as retaliation for Jacobs's successful counter-insurgency.

Organised on the hyperweb site 'Twitter', internet people are planning to descend upon the area to take hundreds of their own photographs in an attempt to force webocracy upon the brave little Englanders.

They have already begun posting pictures of the village online and used the photographs to post burglary masterplans and images of middle-class residents running in fear from the savage glare of their cameras. It is thought house prices have already begun to tumble as a direct result, while crime levels may have risen by a certain amount as well.

The organised orgy of aggressive imaging has led to increased calls for Twitter, which exposes children to pornography, prostitution and drugs, to be banned along with Street View and all other new things.

Quail Lite: Google Streetview stops taxpaying Britons committing crimes

"Google today launched a site [sic] showing 360 degree photographs of almost every street in London...Critics say it could be used to plan crimes or expose people involved in illegal activities"

A local criminal said: 'This is outrageous. I suffer from an exceptionally rare condition whereby I am unable to plan crimes unless I use the internet to look at virtual representations of the banks I'm going to rob first. Street View was my only hope for commiting crimes without physically seeing my target or leaving my house.

Now they tell me it will also expose my illegal activities too. What am I supposed to do? Not commit crimes?'

Critics of the Street View service have also demanded that irresponsible multi-national corporations such as Nikon, Canon and Sony immediately put an end to selling products that enable burglars to look at pictures of buildings or cars. It is thought that as many as 100% of criminals have used digital equipment such as computers and televisions in their lives.

Now Daily Mail Website uses Kelly Brook in a gold bikini to get hits

For a newspaper so permanently bewildered by the internet, perplexed at the inexplicable appeal of Twitter, terrified of Facebook, and unable to grasp just how Google works, The Daily Mail certainly seems to enjoy a suspiciously well optimised web presence.

While lesser news publications might shy away from stories about celebrities appearing on condom packets, snobbishly deeming them 'inane' and 'barrel-scrapingly puerile', The Mail Online has no such qualms.

Within the first few paragraphs of a hard-hitting investigative report on Kelly Brook's likeness being used by the Chinese to sell prophylactics, the words 'sex', 'bikini', 'body', 'David Beckham', 'Sean Connery' and 'erectile dysfunction' appeared, suggesting that someone at Northcliffe House - probably hidden away in the basement, shackled to one of the latest Acorn computers - actually knows how the internets work.

Indeed, so full of search-engine friendly optimised keywords is the hypertext home of the tabloid behemoth, that some experts have suggested that The Daily Mail does in fact approve of the internet, despite incessant warnings that it will corrupt your children and rot your reproductive organs.

One insider, who wishes to remain anonymous, even reported seeing left-wing student idol Charlton Brooker making clandestine late night visits to an undercover Daily Mail contact in east-end London, where a bag of ready-optimised keywords was seen being exchanged for a family-sized multi-pack of Cajun Squirrel flavoured Walkers. Brooker is a well-known 'Googlebomber', attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to his 'weblog' thanks to a wily and subtle use of popular keywords.

A spokesman for The TaxPayer's Alliance said long-windedly: 'We fully endorse The Daily Mail newspaper and its online website in their mission to attract the widest possible audience with the promise of free pictures of Kate Winslet's breasts and Emma Watson wearing a dress. By conditioning web users to associate casual racism, religious intolerance and outright homophobia with delightful pictures of half-naked celebrities, The Mail is providing British people with a valuable brain washing service that might just make Joe Public realise how terrible the world outside www.dailymail.co.uk really is, and just how much taxpayers' money New Labour squanders on politically correct nincompoopery.'

Facebook and Twitter Bully Your Children, Says Newspaper

Facebook and Twitter - but not MySpace - are encouraging online 'cyberbullying', a newspaper claimed today.

According to CyberMentors, a new social networking site set up to allow young victims of bullying to talk to peers about their problems, 50% of 11-18 year olds have been subject to some form of cyberbullying, but 29% had never told anyone about it. As many as 70% of all young people have experienced some form of bullying more generally.

The CyberMentors site, run by support organisation Beatbullying, has won praise from Gordon Brown and Education Secretary Ed Balls, and counts Mozilla, The National Union of Students and The Department for Children, Schools and Families amongst its partners.

But The Daily Mail took issue with Beatbullying's statistics, claiming that the number of young victims of online bullying was actually 17% lower, at one in three.

Describing as-yet undisclosed research, reporter Mark Prigg named Facebook and Twitter as the two biggest progenitors of cyberbullying, despite the fact that neither were named in the CyberMentors press release, other than to highlight Facebook's commitment 'to find new ways of preventing cyberbullying'.

Prigg went on to imagine a terrifying case that may or may not have happened once but might happen in the future maybe, where: 'bullies have even set up Facebook groups allowing dozens of people to band together to abuse schoolmates or colleagues.'

It is thought that Facebook actively encourages normal children to become bullies with competitions to 'Find the meanest jerk' and rewards for those voted 'Most efficient tormentor of Year 7 kids'. Twitter probably does the same somehow.

Readers reacted with world-weary incredulity at the short-sighted attempts to protect children from trivialities like intimidation and torment:

Helen from Cheshire recommended that those misguided enough to believe that bullying was hurtful or in some way unpleasant should grow up:

While warm-hearted J from Sheffield agreed that it's a dog-eat-dog world out there and bullying was an inevitable, and enjoyable, part of Darwinian evolution:


But it was Skitter Brown from Scotland who really hit the nail on the head, suggesting a simple, quick and effective way of remedying all of the modern evils caused by Facebook and Twitter in one fell swoop:

Sources from the internet said: 'I can't quite believe that we'd never thought of that. Let's just turn the whole godless thing off!'

Online Video Games 'More Addictive than Crack'

An obscure internet video game has been condemned for causing children as young as 12 to become allergic to reality, after a Swedish teenager suffered an epiliptic-type fit when he realised he wasn't really a mighty Paladin from Stormwind.

Massively Addictive Multiple Player Online Life Replacement Role Playing Internet Computer Games, or MAMPOLRRPICGs for short, are at the centre of a disturbing new crisis that has claimed over 11 million victims worldwide.

Extended sessions in virtual universes such as the 'World of Warcraft' are so gripping that many players forget how substandard real life is, causing them to suffer convulsions when they stop playing and remember that they still live in their parents' basements and don't have girlfriends. Experts fear that an alarming number of Warcraft users are beginning to exhibit classical 'reality allergy' - over-sensitivity to natural light, an inability to digest anything other than fast food and carbonated drinks and an irrational terror of employment.

The 15 year old Swede had been playing 'Warcraft' for over 24 hours before collapsing from a combination of sleep deprivation, malnourishment and over concentration. After leaving hospital, he told reporters: 'At least I have chicken.'

Sven Rollenhagen, who led a study into gaming addiction lambasted 'Warcraft' for being 'more addictive than crack cocaine'. A report from Sweden's Youth Care Foundation in Icecrown Glacier agreed, describing it as 'the most dangerous game on the market'.

Sources close to Warcraft dismissed the study, claiming that the researchers 'were just noobs'.

MySpace Bans Paedos; Your Children At Risk

Web based internet hyper-site 'MySpace' has banned 90,000 paedophiles from its pages, leading to fears that the displaced sex offenders will now pose an even greater risk by transferring their accounts to a social networking site that people actually still use.

According to internet security firm Sentinel, which is owned by MySpace, child abusers have already begun flocking to rival world wide net page 'The Facebook' in the hope of luring children as young as three - including yours - into their gnarled, yellowing talons.

John Cardillo, head of Sentinel, revealed that a staggering 0.0056% of The Facebook's 150m users are dangerous child sex offenders: 'We found 8,487 registered sex offenders on Facebook in just a few days by doing a basic search that any user can access' he said.

Cardillo added that it could prove extremely difficult to weed out the vast number of peadophiles that managed to slip past Sentinel's advanced peadophile hunting methods by using advanced evasion tactics like registering 'fake names and details'. Experts warned that up to 100% of Facebook users could in fact be paedophiles masquerading as normal people.

A spokesman for Facebook, which encourages supermarket employees to insult customers, allows teachers to denigrate parents, causes teenagers to shoot each other, has helped gatecrashers ruin peoples' homes, grooms youngsters for a life of crime, bans teddy bears, and has led to the amoral rise of 'generation SEX', said that the site had already removed 4,679 suspected paedophiles' accounts 'as a precaution'.

The remainder of those flagged up by Sentinel consisted of name-only matches for very common names that had a high probablity of not actually being paedophiles at all, meaning that the 8,487 figure is utterly misleading and basically meaningless.

However, sources recommended that the made-up number be taken as representative of just how scary and dangerous Facebook, and indeed, the internet is and that it would be best to remain suspicious of everything invented within the last 40 years.

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The Internet is Full of Lies and Piffle

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the internet, has called for a system to expose hideous left-wing online lies by creating a classification system that will allow surfers to separate fact from fiction.

While the world wide internetwork communication system (the 'internet') has become the medium of choice for people to find things out, its 2million websites are all rife with errors and misinformation, most of it put there deliberately by bureacrats in Brussels.

Another newspaper reports that Sir Tim 'was concerned about the way the internet spread misinformation about the unproven links between the MMR vaccine and autism' and that he 'cited emails and websites that promoted the myth that the latest Cern atom smasher - the Large Hadron Collider - could create black holes capable of gobbling up the earth' as evidence of the need for moderation.

To ram the point home, we present below...

FIVE INTERNET MYTHS.

• The MMR vaccine causes brain damage and epilepsy, as well as autism and bowel disease. Recent studies have confirmed without doubt that this is patently untrue. The doctor behind the autism claims has since been discredited by the medical community and now faces charges of professional misconduct.
• Failed asylum seekers escape deportation by throwing tantrums. In fact, they did not 'escape' deportation. Deportees who were denied boarding by airlines were transfered to removal centres, to await, unsurprisingly, removal.
  
• Police officers involved in a fatal collision with a pedestrian were 'fetching a takeaway' with the police car's siren and blue lights on. Actually, the officers were responding to an armed robbery at a McDonalds in Bromley.
  
• Women can work out whether a man will make a good father just by looking at his face. The claim relied on research carried out by scientists at St Andrews University. However, the research actually only found that 'Pregnant women were more attracted to the men who appeared healthier.' A claim was also made that the researchers 'have even come up with the face of the perfect man', whereas in reality all they did was use images of men which were doctored them to make them look ill.
• The EU makes Kent a part of France. This sensationalist claim implied that Britain was to be carved up by a shadowy body known as Interreg. The truth is that Interreg is a community initiative which aims to stimulate interregional cooperation in Europe. The map was simply to show which regions would be co-operating on common issues such as tourism, health and the environment.