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As Microsoft's search engine share sunk to its lowest level yet in February, with approximately 8 to 9 queries total worldwide, Steve Ballmer has reiterated his willingness to hook up with Yahoo! and its 21 queries worldwide to take on Google.

The press conference was held on a street corner in San Francisco as Mr Ballmer and Jerry Yang sat with their hats on the sidewalk and playing harmonicas with a "WILL WEBSEARCH FOR FOOD" sign behind them.

"Understandably, we expect less activity in the Great Recession," said Mr Ballmer. "Nobody knows what value assets should be ... say, you aren't finished with that cigarette, are you?"

Press attendees included a schizophrenic local resident in a tinfoil hat (“to keep Google out"), two teenagers drunk on malt liquor and a policeman keeping an eye on things from a distance. The teenagers taunted, confused and upset Mr Ballmer by suggesting he attempt to locate his own posterior.

"My new search technology is unstoppable! Just look at this netbook!" shouted Mr Ballmer, waving an Etch-a-Sketch in a threatening manner. "IT'S MAUVE! IT RUNS WINDOWS SEVEN! LINUX PUT A RADIO IN MY HEAD! I'LL SHOW ’EM ALL! BASTARDS! LIKE! LIKE! "

"Some love stories are eternal," said Mr Yang. "Romeo and Juliet. Heloise and Abelard. Leopold and Loeb. Microsoft and Yahoo."

O'GARA UFO FIELD, Armonk, Monday (NTN) — With the final humiliation of the SCO Group and the retirement of Pamela Jones from Groklaw, Microsoft has stepped in with sponsorship to fill "a much-needed gap."

CrockLaw will be "a place where lawyers and geeks could explain things to each other and work together, so they'd understand each other's work better," said Sandy Gupta of Microsoft's Open Solutions Group. "We need to crowdsource the work of patent suit production. The attack from Linux is in full swing, and Microsoft's clear ownership of the number 17 must be vigorously defended."

"It is crucial to foster openness and create an environment where a choice of standards is available," said Steve Mutkoski, Senior Standards Strategist. "Specifically, a choice of our standards."

"Also," added Gupta, "we can gather leads on tracking down Mini-Microsoft."

Volunteers have gathered to the site from across Microsoft, as employees desperately try not to be in this year's bottom 10% with 50% of their co-workers.

The site runs on SharePoint, with site members' licence fees being generously discounted by the company. The site has "cracked six figures" on Alexa.

The "PJ" department at IBM issued a sigh and requested an oil change before manufacturing a new birth certificate for President Obama and seeding the skies with alien chemtrails in preparation for Project Blue Beam.

Photo: The PJ-bot celebrating its victory.

Several tedious Z-list celebrities have demanded Twitter user @injunctionsuper post details of their tawdry and squalid lives too.

[REDACTED] tweeted: "Rumur that I hv super-injunction preventing publication of 'intimate' photos of me n my bank account. NOT TRUE! Also, tits. FER FUXAKE PLS RT"

The revelation that decent British people can read things on Internet services that aren't even based in the UK has left celebrities and politicians shocked, shocked that people actually have ways of gaining information that aren't filtered through the hamstrung UK print press. "Clearly," said minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries Ed Vaizey, "we need to protect our valuable pop music and football industries with a Great Firewall of Britain without delay."

"In the modern world of the Internet, the secret or super-injunction may no longer be an effective tool in the administration of justice," said BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman, in an attempt on the world record for fatuity.

"We tried to bugger the Internet last year," said Peter Mandelson, "but did you listen?"

A spokesman for Wikipedia suggested that journalists looking for space-filler stories just fuck off until August as usual.

The Pentagon has released the home videos of Osama bin Laden, “a collection to horrify and stultify the hardest heart.”

The tapes include bin Laden at Alton Towers with his children in the late 1990s, dealing with several screaming toddlers, shouting that if they did not behave they would be going home right now and there would be no ice cream for anyone and swearing that “this place and all such manifestations of Western decadence shall be scoured from the face of the earth.”

Others include shaky-cam video of bin Laden and family in front of the Twin Towers in New York, in which video he clips one of the kids around the ear for being a brat and swears a similar oath of destruction, and a tediously-narrated clip of one of the children using the potty for the first time.

Middle-aged fathers the world around viewed the clips in tears and came to a new understanding, deep within their hearts, of the forces driving radical jihadism.

The Pentagon hopes to study the films for security information. “Another video shows him watching the tape of the child on the potty,” says a spokesman. “From his face, we suspect the next Al-Qaeda target would have been the Sony factory in Japan.”

A spokesman for Alton Towers noted that, as Satanically cursed ground upon which no joy could grow and which was invulnerable to the slights and arrows of mere pathetic mortals, the amusement park would remain open and operational for this summer and all summers for the foreseeable future. “Muwaaaahahahaha,” he added.

SECURITY BROADWAY, Iron Curtain, Wednesday — In the wake of Transport Security Administration staff forcing a "full pat-down" on a three-year-old child, Catholic priests have been clamouring to work for the government department.

The TSA, which has apprehended only slightly less than one terrorist in its nine years of operation, welcomed the new recruits to the fold. "We need people with experience in dealing with young people," said TSA head John Pistole, "in telling people what to do and in making the innocent feel guilty. And the enthusiasm! They're not your typical bored minimum-wager, no way! Also, they have better uniforms."

Mr Pistole reiterated the patriotic duty that drives the TSA in their work. "Fondling little girls' genitals is vital to protecting America from TERRORISTS. Remember: if TSA staff can't finger your daughter, the TERRORISTS have won!" He then strangled a kitten for our photographer.

Cardinal Bernard Law returned to America from the Vatican especially for the opportunity to create government-funded child pornography with the new "naked" scanners. "It's top quality stuff, too. The tears, the pain — the things that make this sort of thing really worthwhile."

"They were nasty men," said three-year-old TSA molestee Mandy Simon. "But it clearly demonstrates the iron necessity of the holy Jihadic destruction of the West. Allahu akbar! Daddy? I done a boo-boo."

Unity Vista(tm) is Canonical’s response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.

“This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical’s vision of the desktop,” said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. “So we added a ‘minimise’ button too.”

Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth’s roadmap for Unity Vista. “I woke up one day and thought, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I’m using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can’t think of a better user experience.’ We’re not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way.”

Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. “It’ll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called ‘phones’ and run Android.”

35% of US smartphone users admit to using apps before even getting out of bed. Doctors advise the other 65% that it is "entirely natural" and "nothing to be ashamed of."

The most popular in-bed activity admitted to is accessing "social networks," as respondents called it, doing air-quotes. The most common complaint is that the screen is too small to display photos properly, and that it does not wipe clean sufficiently well. Many were tempted to buy a tablet next.

Smartphone vendors and app writers have tried to capitalise on the bedroom market. Vibrate mode is particularly popular and is thought to be driving the accessories market for protective silicone cases.

"Social networking" (air-quoted) remains important when people first wake up, since most are alone and will forever stay that way. 20 percent do a last "check-in" (also air-quoted) before going to sleep at night.

Sociologists suggest the bedroom "apping" phenomenon will be self-limiting, given the effects on fertility of carrying a microwave transmitter in your pocket all day right next to your gonads.

The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. “What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?” said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. “The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 --ntwk verizon --prot cdma2000 --ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!”

The phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. “I can play any .au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use.” Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. “If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they’re good enough for you. Respect your elders.”

Facebook staff have been amazed to discover that when Facebook passes users' complete details to application developers and advertisers like candy, some of the partner companies might accidentally let slip the information in some manner.

"We are appalled at this information leak," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as he took a break from his personal RSS feed of drunk women's tits posted to his service. "But I can assure you that we have sternly suggested to everyone involved that they take somewhat greater care not to get caught, and maintain a serious demeanor when rolling around in the great big pit filled with money in their basement."

"I'm horrified and outraged," said office worker Brenda Busybody, 43 (IQ), "that stuff I put on the Internet is on the Internet. It violates everything I expect. I want privacy when I'm calling my boss a useless fuckstick to the entire world, all my coworkers and my boss himself. And when I'm playing a bit of FarmVille before we nick off down the pub."

Privacy advocates are working on Diaspora, a security-enhanced social network so far populated by Linux users who cryptographically sign every update about which episode of Babylon 5 they just finished watching alone in their parents' basement. "START PGP KEY BLOCK!" said open source software advocate Hiram Nerdboy, 17. "WE WILL PROTECT YOUR FREEDOMS!" The next version of Diaspora will allow users to list more than three friends, should there be any demand whatsoever for such a feature.

Facebook works on the now-standard "Web 2.0” business model: 1. Brutally sodomise the personal privacy of anyone who comes within a mile of your service and say "hey baby, I'm sorry" every time you're busted. 2. Sell ads.

Microsoft remains on the bleeding edge of innovation with its completely new-from-the-ground-up Windows Bing Voice(tm) Internet phone platform, formerly known as Skype.

Windows Bing Voice(tm) was developed entirely in-house at an acquisition cost of only $8.5 billion. "Our developer teams know the meaning of confidentiality," said Steve Ballmer. "Heck, even they didn't know it was Skype until today. That's how, uh, stealth we are."

The new Windows Bing Voice(tm) client will be included with Windows Phone 7, Office 365, Kin and Zune. "Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms! On a case by case time and availability basis, of course. We'll give our Mac Business Unit developer details for Windows Bing Voice(tm) 2011 Ultimate Edition by 2013, for sure."

Service is expected to remain "at 100%" as the server infrastructure is moved from Linux to Windows, though Microsoft has not specified what that will be 100% of. The peer-to-peer functionality of Skype will also be harnessed to distribute Windows Updates(tm) and Windows Genuine Advantage(tm) serial number blacklists.

Google said that the Google Voice servers were "holding up well" under the influx of new users.

I run Ubuntu for the "Benetton" experience.

Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth’s roadmap for Unity. “I woke up one day and thought, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I’m using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can’t think of a better user experience.’ We’re not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way.”

THAWTELESS, West London, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release later this month of Ubuntu Linux to men.

Project founder Mark Shuttleworth explained that "this stuff is difficult to explain to girls" and thought they'd have gotten the hint when he called 8.04 "Hairy Hardon." "Worrying about sexism in open source just detracts from the battle for Linux. So we've put the tits back into the default desktop. And arses."

Crime-fighting geek Shuttleworth, who dresses as a billiionaire playboy by night, swore that plenty of women liked him lots and that he obviously wasn't unable to get laid or anything, having gotten seriously rich in the dot-com era, not to mention having gone into space. "Chicks dig that stuff. Trust me, I've met lots of girls. More than five!"

Canonical Community Manager Jono Bacon echoed this sentiment on his blog. "We just don't understand how come women are 15% of all computer programmers but only 1% of open source programmers. It must be a bit complicated for them. That's why I've written this spontaneous blog post, completely unrelated to anything my boss may or may not have said, on all the fantastically talented women in free software, even if none of them seem to work much on Ubuntu any more. Also, I'm absolutely confident that saying I'm in a computer geek heavy metal band will get me lots of chicks too, even if their pretty little heads can't understand Linux."

A special women's edition of Ubuntu 9.10 will be released on a bright pink CD. "It doubles as a makeup mirror!" said Shuttleworth.

CUPERTINO, Transylvania, Friday — After bricking unlocked iPhones, kicking applications off the iPhone store that might even slightly compete with iTunes in the far future, "delaying" the release of GPL source code and filing a wave of patents on basic well-known computer science, Apple Inc. today filed a Form 8-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission declaring that it was openly adopting Evil as a corporate policy.

"Fuck it," said Steve Jobs to an audience of soul-mortgaged thralls, "we're evil. But our stuff is sooo good. You'll keep taking our abuse. You love it, you worm. Because our stuff is great. It's shiny and it's pretty and it's cool and it works. It's not like you'll go back to a Windows Mobile phone. Ha! Ha!"

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft was incensed at the news. "Our evil is better than anyone's evil! No-one sweats the details of evil like Microsoft! Where's your antitrust trial, you polo-necked bozo? We've worked hard on our evil! Our Zune's as evil as an iPod any day! I won't let my kids use a lesser evil! We're going to do an ad about that! I'll be in it! With Jerry Seinfeld! Beat that! Asshole.”

"Of course, we're still not evil," said Sergey Brin of Google. "You can trust us on this. Every bit of data about you, your life and the house you live in is strictly a secret between you and our marketing department. But, hypothetically, if we were evil, it's not like you're going to use Bing. Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, that's my ‘spreading good cheer' laugh. Really."

“We discovered a file making a clear reference to ‘Username unknown,’” the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, “and a blank user icon which therefore was ... anonymous! D’you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can’t be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money.”

CASHIER'S DESK, California Senate, Saturday (NTN) — The associations listed on this letter are writing to strongly oppose California Senate Bill 761. It would create an unnecessary, unenforceable and unconstitutional regulatory burden, as our products could get uppity.

The measure would negatively affect products who have come to expect fun browser games and free services through the Internet, at the mere price of their DNA and that of their first-born. Additionally, it would make them more vulnerable to security threats. (We thought we'd throw that one in even though we have no idea how that would work.)

California law already provides a number of significant privacy protections for products to protect their sensitive personal information, at least on the books even if they can't use them against us.

Products can easily opt out of the collection of data. The four leading Internet browsers all provide user-friendly filtering options that block the ability of companies to collect data or track products' Internet use, even though that's a complete red herring since we keep all the good stuff on our servers and sell it to each other.

The bill would harm California’s Internet economy and innovation, which absolutely relies on the business model of "1. Brutally sodomise products' personal privacy; 2. Sell ads." We also vaguely threaten to fire everyone we employ, just as if we don't have ridiculously profitable businesses already and can easily afford to employ everyone we have work for.

The bill gratuitously singles out advertising companies for special regulation, just because we deal in egregious violations daily. We think you should look to the video game companies too. Opt-in consent is not a viable compliance route for most tracking models, as we know damn well the products wouldn't give us the serial codes to their souls if we actually asked them.

The bill has recently become even more extreme, imposing a free-standing flat ban on any covered entity sharing or transferring any covered information, for any purpose at all. This provision is clearly bin Laden-inspired communism and must be removed. Our selling each other the data is, of course, free enterprise as the Founders intended. We might as well just shut down Google tomorrow! Really! We'll find ONE MILLION PEOPLE WHO HATE THIS BILL ON FACEBOOK. See if we don't.

“We discovered a file making a clear reference to ‘Username unknown,’” the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, “and a blank user icon which therefore was ... anonymous! D’you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can’t be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money.”

GUTEN TAG, Wii Gehts, Wednesday (NTN) — Sony has revealed that the Playstation Network security breach, which compromised 24.6 million credit cards, was entirely the work of evil hackers from Anonymous, and nothing to do with their own incompetence, honest.

"We discovered a file making a clear reference to 'Username unknown,'" the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, "and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D'you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can't be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money."

The letter details the company’s actions over the past two weeks. It says Sony acted with "care and caution" in deciding how to act and how long it thought it could get away without telling anyone. "We did not want to cause confusion and cause customers to take unnecessary actions, such as stopping their credit card payments to us."

"We have suffered a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyberattack, which has led to people committing the heinous hate crime of jailbreaking their PS3s. In accordance with our campaign contributions, we ask that you impose the death penalty for such offenses."

The letter concluded that the breakin was quite definitely the work of Anonymous. "We were going to blame Al-Qaeda, but we figured after Monday that you probably wouldn't buy that."

GUTEN TAG, Wii Gehts, Wednesday (NTN) — Sony has revealed that the Playstation Network security breach, which compromised 24.6 million credit cards, was entirely the work of evil hackers from Anonymous, and nothing to do with their own incompetence, honest.

"We discovered a file making a clear reference to 'Username unknown,'" the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, "and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D'you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can't be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money."

The letter details the company’s actions over the past two weeks. It says Sony acted with "care and caution" in deciding how to act and how long it thought it could get away without telling anyone. "We did not want to cause confusion and cause customers to take unnecessary actions, such as stopping their credit card payments to us."

"We have suffered a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyberattack, which has led to people committing the heinous hate crime of jailbreaking their PS3s. In accordance with our campaign contributions, we ask that you impose the death penalty for such offenses."

The letter concluded that the breakin was quite definitely the work of Anonymous. "We were going to blame Al-Qaeda, but we figured after Monday that you probably wouldn't buy that."

“We discovered a file making a clear reference to ‘Username unknown,’” the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, “and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D’you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can’t be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money.”

PROFESSOR JOBS' SCHOOL FOR GIFTED YOUNGSTERS, Shenzhen, Sunday (NTN) — In its annual supplier report, Apple has admitted that its Chinese factories have employed children to build its gadgets. "Ones with a particularly refined sense of aesthetics."

Apple revealed the sweatshop conditions inside the factories it uses. The child workers were found in a facility with high vaulted ceilings, elegantly crafted marble work benches and a classical quartet playing in the background in a corner of the floor. Young geniuses sat in their Aerons and levitated components into place with the powers of the mind, burning the famed Apple logo into the back of the assembled device with but a glance of terrifying but controlled power. Some lunches, with only an hour's break, would involve wines of less than ten years' vintage.

Competitors were outraged. "We are shocked, shocked to hear of Apple's ruthless exploitation of the chilll-drennn," said Steve Ballmer of Microsoft. "But then, what do you expect when they actually ask their suppliers about this stuff. Don't ask, don't tell! That's what made the 360 great!"

Apple's Chinese manufacturing facilities were the site of controversy last year when one young worker at Foxconn, who had teleported an iPhone home overnight, was found to have committed suicide by leaping from the top of the building, first breaking his own neck, and tearing out all his own fingernails on the way down. He was found with Apple logos carved into his back, obviously also self-inflicted. "A tragedy," said the report.

GUTEN TAG, Wii Gehts, Wednesday (NTN) — Sony has revealed that the Playstation Network security breach, which compromised 24.6 million credit cards, was entirely the work of evil hackers from Anonymous, and nothing to do with their own incompetence, honest.

"We discovered a file making a clear reference to 'Username unknown,'" the company said in a letter to the US Congress on Wednesday, "and a blank user icon which therefore was anonymous. D'you see what that means? It means George Hotz and his hacker friends are loathsome criminal masterminds! So obviously we can't be held liable for negligence in the face of forces like these. In conclusion, give us money."

The letter details the company’s actions over the past two weeks. It says Sony acted with "care and caution" in deciding how to act and how long it thought it could get away without telling anyone. "We did not want to cause confusion and cause customers to take unnecessary actions, such as stopping their credit card payments to us."

"We have suffered a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyberattack, which has led to people committing the heinous hate crime of jailbreaking their PS3s. In accordance with our campaign contributions, we ask that you impose the death penalty for such offenses."

The letter concluded that the breakin was quite definitely the work of Anonymous. "We were going to blame Al-Qaeda, but we figured after Monday that you probably wouldn't buy that."

THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, "Venereal Vista," based on the Unity Vista desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.

Unity is Canonical's response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.

"This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical's vision of the desktop," said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. "So we added a 'minimise' button too."

Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth's roadmap for Unity. "I woke up one day and thought, 'Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can't think of a better user experience.' We're not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way."

Picture: Unity is made of arse.

Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. "It'll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called 'phones' and run Android."

KENYA, Indonesia, Wednesday (WorldNetDaily) — Barack Obama's alleged long-form birth certificate has been declared fraudulent by the noble and patriotic "Birther" movement, who claim firm evidence that the President is insufficiently white.

"I've seen a few Photoshops in my time," said immigrant Birther and world's oldest emo kid Orly Taitz. "I can tell from a few of the pixels. They're nowhere near light enough."

Donald Trump, the next Sarah Palin, takes credit for provoking the release of this initial documentation of the mysterious Obama, and has now asked if Obama's college transcript is all that, and something about basketball as the President's favourite pastime. Betting pools are now forming on when Trump will allude to watermelon and fried chicken.

Birthers are routinely outraged at suggestions that blatant racism is at the heart of their disquiet with Obama's landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election. So it's really worth saying it to them, every time.

The Birther movement was originally started by Party Unity My Ass, a group of disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters during the 2008 Democratic primary. They note that Obama has, on his track record so far, been a first-class Republican president.

Exactly. There is firm evidence that he is a nignog. From this it follows that he is not a natural born American, and that he ia a Muslim, and faked the death of Osama Bin Laden so that his buddy could go free.

KENYA, Indonesia, Wednesday (WorldNetDaily) — Barack Obama's alleged long-form birth certificate has been declared fraudulent by the noble and patriotic "Birther" movement, who claim firm evidence that the President is insufficiently white.

"I've seen a few Photoshops in my time," said immigrant Birther and world's oldest emo kid Orly Taitz. "I can tell from a few of the pixels. They're nowhere near light enough."

Donald Trump, the next Sarah Palin, takes credit for provoking the release of this initial documentation of the mysterious Obama, and has now asked if Obama's college transcript is all that, and something about basketball as the President's favourite pastime. Betting pools are now forming on when Trump will allude to watermelon and fried chicken.

Birthers are routinely outraged at suggestions that blatant racism is at the heart of their disquiet with Obama's landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election. So it's really worth saying it to them, every time.

The Birther movement was originally started by Party Unity My Ass, a group of disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters during the 2008 Democratic primary. They note that Obama has, on his track record so far, been a first-class Republican president.

CHRISTIANABAD, Pakistan, Monday (NTN) — President Barack Obama has announced that the hydra has been conclusively beheaded by US forces in Pakistan.

Mr Obama said it was "the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat the hydra. We can all rest safe now."

A US official said the hydra's head had been buried at sea, to prevent the grave becoming a shrine. "But trust us — we got the actual hydra, all right. You know how good we are with getting this stuff right."

World leaders expressed their relief at the hydra having been utterly and completely stopped by cutting its main head off, except those party poopers at Hamas who dared suggest there were people who might be annoyed.

For many, the bigger question is whether, in the longer run, the hydra's organisation can survive. "The absolutely final and complete really truly killing of the hydra puts the group on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse," said the President.

"I suddenly feel much better about America and no longer have any thoughts of revenge whatsoever," said one Afghan teenager whose entire family had been killed as collateral damage by a US bomb. "U-S-A! U-S-A! Coca-Cola! Fox News!"

US citizens are encouraged to apply to hold official celebratory street parties, under the close supervision of the Department of Homeland Security and the Transport Safety Administration, so that their freedoms may stay protected.

"Mission accomplished!" said Accounts Receivable at Halliburton.

Desperate to stay competitive against iPhone and Android mobile devices, Microsoft has released a two-pound lump of actual cow faeces that they claim constitutes a phone.

Windows Phone 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.

US mobile carriers hailed the turd as the perfect physical complement to their world-famous customer service. "This powerful product will promote our growth!" said John Harrobin of Verizon Wireless. "We're marketing them as edible."

"We think we can really work the brand equity," said Steve Ballmer, modelling the optional shoulder-length rubber gloves. "Everyone works with our stuff all day every day. They know who Microsoft is and what we do."

"How about making our customers actually swallow our bullshit physically?" said John Harrobin. "Windows Phone 7 was my idea."

THAWTELESS, Star City, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04, "Venereal Vista," entred around the Unity desktop, which only 5 out of 11 first-time users managed to crash in final testing two weeks ago.

The Unity desktop is Canonical's response to the GNOME 3 shell, which uses 1 gigabyte of RAM and four processor cores to exquisitely render a single button in the centre of the screen in beautifully anti-aliased text; when pressed, GNOME tells the user to switch off the computer and do something useful with their life, such as showering.

"This was just not up to the user expectations of Canonical's vision of the desktop," said Mark Shuttleworth, from his castle high on a crag in West London. "So we added a 'minimise' button too."

Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth's roadmap for Unity. "I woke up one day and thought, 'Gosh, I'd really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I'm using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it,' I can't think of a better user experience.' We're not quite there yet, but Unity gets you a lot of the way."

Shuttleworth foresees an exciting future for Linux for the general Internet user. "It'll be a whole world of Linux devices, which millions of people will use all the time, everywhere! Of course, at the moment those are called 'phones' and run Android."

Photo: A load of arse.

.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent. One where you wouldn't need to wonder about "what else" the app you were using was doing. One where you could freely decide for yourself which OS to run. One where you were free to recompile any app for performance or security reasons. One that gave anybody the freedom to code an app in any language they saw fit.

The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone.

The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. "What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?" said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. "The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 --ntwk verizon --prot cdma2000 --ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b -k -K 14 -x and away you go! Simple and obvious!"

The phone will also serve as a versatile personal media player. "I can play any .au file or H.120 video with a single shell command! The iPod could never measure up to this powerful ease of use." Video is rendered into ASCII art with aalib. "If blocky ASCII teletype softcore pinups were good enough for 1970s minicomputer operators, they're good enough for you. Respect your elders."

The KDE project will be bringing its next-generation KDE 4 desktop to the GNUPhone. "you can flip, twirl, dice, blend, fold, spindle and mutilate your terminal windows to your heart's content," said developer Aaron Seigo. "look at that cool effect! any complaint that basic functions don't actually work is ignorant of the intrinsic beauty of the plasma api and is just more fud spread by haters like stevie ray vaughan-nichols and novell corporation."

Actual successful voice calls are expected by 2013 to 2014. Regulatory approval is proving problematic in the corrupt, corporate-captured US environment. "The FCC said that if we dared switch on this, uh, 'piece of shit' in a built-up area in its present form, they'd break all our fingers with a fourteen-pound cluebat," said Nerdboy. "They're obviously shilling for Apple, Nokia and Microsoft."

The second version of the GNUPhone will run EMACS on the HURD kernel and be operated by writing eLisp macros on the fly. "It's the clearest, most elegant and natural operating environment anyone could conceive of," said Nerdboy. "Really, we're not out to destroy Apple; that will just be a completely unintentional side effect."

Nokia, through Accenture, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS a "community project", putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.

"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."

The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile, which Nokia has replaced Symbian with. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know."

There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the phone through a window and just get an iPhone. "Just think," said Berkin, "now anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"

Accenture issued a press release about how Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."

They understand that 3D is shit.

"3D technology has been the next big thing for only the last sixty years and is readily available on television, movies and video games. It offers amazing improvements over ordinary moving images: darkness, muddier colours, blurriness, headaches from watching for more than twenty minutes and slower action sequences so the viewer doesn’t throw up.

In video games, the Nintendo 3DS has been a huge hit with tens or even hundreds of end users, some of whom have left the 3D on for a whole day before switching it off forever. 3D on a phone has been heralded by manufacturers, mobile operators, the entertainment industry, the technical press, optometrists drumming up business and everyone else except the actual consumer."

Guest post by Mary-Jo Enderle

I have seen the future: Windows $NEXT_VERSION Milestone $MOCKUP.

I tried it on a low-end laptop with four Core 2 Duo chips and only 8 gig of memory, and trust me: $NEXT_VERSION is shaping up to be one heck of a product.

WordPad and Paint have seen major overhauls to their user interfaces. Forget the freetards and their "distros" full of all sorts of useless shovelware like "FireFox" and "OpenOffice" and, haha, "GIMP"! — the bundled software with Windows $NEXT_VERSION is clear, simple, sparse and to-the-point. The much-loved Ribbon user interface from Office $HATED_VERSION is now part of WordPad and Paint!

The controversial Digital Rights Management system in $CURRENT_VERSION has been worked over, with user-downloadable "tilt bits," which you can configure to your own liking. It'll require every user to supply a blood sample for DNA analysis, and the beta nearly took my finger off, but of course that's only if you want to play premium content. The Blu-Ray of Battlefield Earth was unbelievable on this operating system.

A public beta should be released by the end of this year. There's just no way that Steve "Trains Run On Time" Ballmer will miss the Christmas deadline. The final release should leave the midnight queues on $CURRENT_VERSION release day — the street riots, the water cannons, the rubber bullets — in the shade.

I am so excited about $NEXT_VERSION of Windows. It will go beyond just solving all of the problems with $CURRENT_VERSION, it will be an entirely new paradigm. Forget about security problems, those are all fixed in $NEXT_VERSION. And they're finally ridding themselves of $ANCIENT_LEGACY_STUFF.

Also, there'll be $DATABASE_FILESYSTEM. It'll be awesome!

I wonder how $NEXT_VERSION will compare to $NEXT_NEXT_VERSION.

US military officials have condemned the latest document release by Wikileaks as "potentially fatal to our credibility" and leading to 15,000 more officials spending time with their families than previously thought.

"The faltering forces of hacker infidels," said the Pentagon's Minister of Information, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, "cannot just enter an army and lay besiege to them! They are the ones who will find themselves under siege! There are only two Wikileaks tanks in the city!"

General George Casey has denied that the United States "turned a blind eye" to prisoner abuse. "Our policy all along has been to use our military might to encourage the already peace-loving security forces to be agents of cosmic love and beauty. Whenever a prisoner was treated with crystals and aromatherapy in a more robust manner than would be acceptable to our dolphin brethren, we were sure to report it up both the local chain of command and the one that means anything. Then we sat down together and did serious thinking about how we could be more excellent to one another. Toke, dude?"

The festering scoundrel Julian Assange was lambasted last night on CNN for his reprehensible personal life and clearly unbalanced and unAmerican mental state, which are much more newsworthy than the release of more accurate documentation than any war has ever had in history.

"I remain opposed to the warq," said President Barack Obama, "and so too to documentation of the so-called war. We harshly condemn the release of information on this terrible alleged event. We will bring the document leakers to military justice and teach them to love again."

In the UK, Nick Clegg suggested someone might want to possibly look into this matter a little bit, assuming it was all right with Dave of course.

Desperate to stay competitive against iPhone and Android mobile devices, Microsoft has released a two-pound lump of actual cow faeces that they claim constitutes a phone.

Windows Phone 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.

US mobile carriers hailed the turd as the perfect physical complement to their world-famous customer service. "This powerful product will promote our growth!" said John Harrobin of Verizon Wireless. "We're marketing them as edible."

"We think we can really work the brand equity," said Steve Ballmer, modelling the optional shoulder-length rubber gloves. "Everyone works with our stuff all day every day. They know who Microsoft is and what we do."

"How about making our customers actually swallow our bullshit physically?" said John Harrobin. "Windows Phone 7 was my idea."

Photo: Steve Ballmer ecstatic at Windows Phone 7 sales.

Virgin Media will shortly trial 1.5Gbps cable Internet, but only to festering dot-com media cocks who live actually around Shoreditch itself.

"As the pace of technological change increases," said the ISP in the press release all the papers copied word for word, "it is vitally important to public health that these people have as absolutely much incentive as possible never to leave their homes. Wanking themselves silly over gigabytes of high-definition porn also reduces their likelihood of reproducing."

With the warmer weather, the Hoxton toxic waste pool has been growing and spreading, with reports of hipster infestations washing up as far afield as Hackney.

If the creative industries cannot be kept under control, by 2015 the entire population of Britain may be beret-wearing latte-sipping surrender monkeys telling you how much they just can't stand hipsters. Virgin Media is currently rolling out 100Mbps broadband to two million of the most endangered residential premises in the hope of effective quarantine.

In the wider world, high speed Internet will apparently let consumers access all manner of as yet nonexistent socially-redeeming services made of magic beans and pink unicorns, which actually means BitTorrenting a pirated movie in under five minutes. And hitting your download cap in another ten.

Virgin Media also announced that its overall revenue for the first quarter was up 5.7 percent to £982m, as a result of the utter lack of any connection between making money on a service and actually being able to provide it in a manner even slightly resembling reliability or competence.

HEY HEY 16K, What Does That Get You Today, Thursday (NNGadget) — As well as attempting to give the major record and television companies whatever they want until the end of time, Lord Carter's Digital Britain report includes tax breaks for "culturally British" computer game development.

Planned games include Lard Warrior (“the goal is to sit playing a game. The graphics are truly horrifying and needed us to go to 3.5-dimensional to fit the player's avatar on the screen. Rated 18+ for explicit neck beards"), CCTV Panopticon (“take pictures of the CCTV cameras in your high street until arrested under the Terrorism Act for having your own camera in public, defeat final boss with Doctorow Attack"), Bottled Tan Snorter (“get into celebrity magazines and shag footballers, lose points for any sign of intelligence, insufficient nipple slips or words of two syllables") and Cynical Apathist (“write outraged blog posts and comments with amusing satires of events of the day while working a job directly keeping the hideous machinery alive and running, avoid removal by the Guardian moderator"). A committee will also form a group to do a study concerning a team to write a ZX Spectrum emulator for the iPhone, with a cassette interface emulator that sends Apple 99p every time you get an "R: Tape Loading Error."

The games industry has warned in the past that developers are being lured away to other countries by the prospect of being paid more than shit. Conservative Shadow Arts Minister Ed Vaizey has leapt upon the opportunity, with promises of incentives for talented developers to stay in Britain and not be lured away by better pay in America. "We'll keep their passports from them until they reach 'Achievement Unlocked.'"

Having finally released Digital Britain, Lord Carter has resigned from the government and is returning to private industry. "Of course, Digital Britain remains a completely objective assessment of the way forward for the nation in the twenty-first century, and should in no way be thought of as my CV for a series of lucrative consultancies with the large media companies I've just given everything they've ever asked for. And a pony."

HEY HEY 16K, Need To Know, Thursday (Big K) — Nokia, through the Symbian Foundation, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS open source, putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight.

"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."

The Foundation hopes to pit Symbian against Windows Mobile. "There's no way it can compete against our superior features, like WAP browsing, infrared connect to your laptop and, of course, the serial port." It also hopes to set the stage for a march on the USA. "The Americans will fall before our superior engineering! Psion worked on the ZX81, you know."

There are currently about 330 million Symbian devices in the world, at least fifteen of whose owners can actually use the web browser without wanting to throw the damned thing through a window and just get an iPhone. "Just think," said Berkin, "now anyone can improve their phone! Well, they could if Nokia made phones the user could flash. But still!"

The Foundation issued a press release about how the open-sourcing of Symbian was welcomed by free software advocates and other aging hippies. "Developers everywhere will want to study Symbian," said Eben Moglen, "to hack on it, and to write applications for it. This could be even bigger than the Amiga."

ASSCAP, Asscrap, Monday (NNN) — After its recent successes suing girl scouts over singing copyrighted songs around campfires, the American Super-Society of Composers, Authors and Performers has filed a brief in a lawsuit against AT&T arguing that its members deserve payment every time a mobile phone rings.

The owners of the musical compositions are already paid for each ringtone download, but this does not cover ASCAP public performance royalties.

"The musicians and songwriters are the true creators of objective value in society," said ASCAP spokesdroid Ayn Rand. "They deserve your support. How would civilisation survive without Crazy Frog or the Nokia Tune? Which changes one note from the 1902 'Gran Vals' by Francisco Tárrega, so is completely original and deserving of royalties.

"To this end, we are bringing suits against those individuals who, having purchased RIAA-licensed ringtones, do not then silence them when in public. Statutory damages of $80,000 should have a salutary effect on our coffers and, of course, our public image."

Further lawsuits will then be brought against those who silence their mobile phones. "4'33' by John Cage is a copyrighted work. Without the money going to his estate, he may never write another measured piece of silence again." This will be followed by suits against those whistling or humming music in public, then those thinking about music in any form without a licence.

In support of their position, ASCAP pointed to vast public outpourings of sympathy from millions of people who never wanted to hear a tinny thirty-second burst of cheesy synthetic R&B coming from a phone ever again in their lives.

Microsoft today announced the release of version 5 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform. As a replacement for Adobe's Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.

"We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight," announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. "NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My options are underwater, my resumé's a car crash, Google won't call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I'm the walking dead, man. The walking dead."

Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.

"But it's got DRM!" cried Guthrie. "Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We'll put porn on it! Free porn! "

Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.

In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie's own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.

Desperate to stay competitive against iPhone and Android mobile devices, Microsoft has released a two-pound lump of actual cow faeces that they claim constitutes a phone.

Windows Mobile 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.

US mobile carriers hailed the turd as the perfect physical complement to their world-famous customer service. "This powerful product will promote our growth!" said John Harrobin of Verizon Wireless. "We're marketing them as edible."

"We think we can really work the brand equity," said Steve Ballmer, modelling the optional shoulder-length rubber gloves. "Everyone works with our stuff all day every day. They know who Microsoft is and what we do."

"How about making our customers actually swallow our bullshit physically?" said John Harrobin. "Windows Mobile 7 was my idea."

Picture: Steve Ballmer overjoyed at Windows phone sales figures.

Beleaguered Internet advertising phirm Phorm is hitting back at critics with StopPhoulPlay.com, in an attempt to lure Internet activists into herniating from laughter.

"It is clear that the campaign against Phorm originates in the sinister manipulations of Alex Hanff and Marcus Williamson," said Kent Ertegun, CEO of Phorm, "who have used mind control lasers and the killer robot armies of the Open Rights Group and FIPR to deceive millions of Britons into a Communistic fervor of hatred against the engines of the free market and customer demand, the salesmen and marketers, the true creators and enablers of objective value."

The website, designed in Microsoft Word, uses the infallible public relations format so successfully put into play by the ReligiousFreedomWatch.org site of the Church of Scientology, an upstanding community institution of similarly flawless repute. StopPhoulPlay.com reveals how:

• At the age of five, Hanff REFUSED to share his crayons with the little girl next to him, saying she was "poopy" and would only draw a picture to be used against him.
• At age twelve, Williamson accepted MONEY from his mother to buy sweets, but not to tell schoolmates in case they wanted some.
• Hanff and Williamson may have attempted to access POTENTIALLY ILLEGAL images blocked by the Internet Watch Foundation.
• Hanff and Williamson have used WIKIPEDIA at least once in their lives.
• Hanff and Williamson INVADED POLAND in 1939.

"Given the persistence with which they propagate incorrect information, we cannot rule out the possibility that a competitor is involved," he said. "The competitor goes under the name 'reality.' Needless to say, we have no tolerance for an entity of such limited possibilities.

"These people are privacy pirates — people who steal privacy online, off the coast of Somalia. With Internet guns! And drugs! And child pornography!"

Mr Hanff and Mr Williamson said they were unsure whether to sue Phorm into atomic dust for gross defamation or just to let them continue with their infallible public relations work. Phorm shares have dropped from 405p to being rated a "serious infection risk" by the World Health Organization.

Picture: Targeted just for you.

In the wake of Transport Security Administration staff forcing a "full pat-down" on a three-year-old child, Catholic priests have been clamouring to work for the government department.

The TSA, which has apprehended only slightly less than one terrorist in its nine years of operation, welcomed the new recruits to the fold. "We need people with experience in dealing with young people," said TSA head John Pistole, "in telling people what to do and in making the innocent feel guilty. And the enthusiasm! They're not your typical bored minimum-wager, no way! Also, they have better uniforms."

Mr Pistole reiterated the patriotic duty that drives the TSA in their work. "Fondling little girls' genitals is vital to protecting America from TERRORISTS. Remember: if TSA staff can't finger your daughter, the TERRORISTS have won!" He then strangled a kitten for our photographer.

Cardinal Bernard Law returned to America from the Vatican especially for the opportunity to create government-funded child pornography with the new "naked" scanners. "It's top quality stuff, too. The tears, the pain — the things that make this sort of thing really worthwhile."

"They were nasty men," said three-year-old TSA molestee Mandy Simon. "But it clearly demonstrates the iron necessity of the holy Jihadic destruction of the West. Allahu akbar! Daddy? I done a boo-boo."

SECURITY BROADWAY, Iron Curtain, Wednesday — In the wake of Transport Security Administration staff forcing a "full pat-down" on a three-year-old child, Catholic priests have been clamouring to work for the government department.

The TSA, which has apprehended only slightly less than one terrorist in its nine years of operation, welcomed the new recruits to the fold. "We need people with experience in dealing with young people," said TSA head John Pistole, "in telling people what to do and in making the innocent feel guilty. And the enthusiasm! They're not your typical bored minimum-wager, no way! Also, they have better uniforms."

Mr Pistole reiterated the patriotic duty that drives the TSA in their work. "Fondling little girls' genitals is vital to protecting America from TERRORISTS. Remember: if TSA staff can't finger your daughter, the TERRORISTS have won!" He then strangled a kitten for our photographer.

Cardinal Bernard Law returned to America from the Vatican especially for the opportunity to create government-funded child pornography with the new "naked" scanners. "It's top quality stuff, too. The tears, the pain — the things that make this sort of thing really worthwhile."

"They were nasty men," said three-year-old TSA molestee Mandy Simon. "But it clearly demonstrates the iron necessity of the holy Jihadic destruction of the West. Allahu akbar! Daddy? I done a boo-boo."

Microsoft has unveiled its new Zune One and Zune Two mobile phones for unusually stupid social-networking enthusiasts in their late teens and early twenties with a higher income than their IQ.

Team leader Roz Ho said the company had tried to create a Microsoft gadget that people actually wanted to have, like the XBox 360, but that actually worked properly.

"Get your Friendster and your MySpace!" said Ms Ho. "We studied consumer habits and built the perfect phone for the, uh, 'social generation,'" she air-quoted, "to make it 'fab' and 'bling' — I mean, of course, 'Bing!' — for people too dumb to work an iPhone to share their lives moment to moment."

The handset is of simple design for simple people. The keyboard engages caps lock at random and interjects common "chat" acronyms like "LOL" and "OMG" and "RTFM" should too many words in a row be spelt correctly. A breathalyzer automatically switches on the video camera in the event of excessive alcohol consumption. As well as the usual daily crashes, the Blue Screen of Death can be invoked by the user so as to have a suitable excuse not to answer a text. Later revisions of the phone may include making voice calls.

"We are excited to be the exclusive carrier for this exciting new Microsoft phone in the exciting US," said John Harrobin, Senior Vice President of Paperclip Filing, Morning Drunkenness and Excited Press Release Quotes at Verizon Wireless. "Because we fucking hate you people. We really do."

Roz Ho was previously leader of the Microsoft team that lost all the data on everyone's T-Mobile Sidekick phones last year when the systems team was told not to bother with backups.

Desperate to stay competitive against iPhone and Android mobile devices, Microsoft has released a two-pound lump of actual cow faeces that they claim constitutes a phone.

Windows Mobile 7, in development for several years, strips the mobile telephone down to its fundamental essence: futility, annoyance, malfunction, inconvenience and a socially unacceptable odour. Confounding analyst expectations, the turd is in fact shined.

US mobile carriers hailed the turd as the perfect physical complement to their world-famous customer service. "This powerful product will promote our growth!" said John Harrobin of Verizon Wireless. "We're marketing them as edible."

"We think we can really work the brand equity," said Steve Ballmer, modelling the optional shoulder-length rubber gloves. "Everyone works with our stuff all day every day. They know who Microsoft is and what we do."

"How about making our customers actually swallow our bullshit physically?" said John Harrobin. "Windows Mobile 7 was my idea."

Illustration: Steve Ballmer overjoyed at Windows Mobile 7 sales figures.

WEB 0.1, Cyberspice, Saturday (NTN) — The European Union has run a simulated "cyber attack," in which simulated outsourcing companies strike mortal blows upon national budgets for consulting fees for "cyber security" while still using Windows.

The simulation steadily reduced access to critical services to gauge how nations react, removing access to working email, letting loose old viruses and charging €300 callout fees to look at why you can't log in.

Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for the digital agenda, said the exercise was intended to help expose short-comings in existing procedures for combating attacks on funding. "It is an important first step towards working together to combat potential online threats to essential infrastructure and the consulting fees therefrom."

The exercise also tested how nations work together to avoid a complete shut-down of international links when internet service providers charge £50/month for a "super-fast" connection with a 20GB bandwidth cap.

The exercise was overseen by bouncing new baby quango the European Network Security Agency. "We considered just bombing Redmond, Washington from orbit, which simulations showed would have pretty much solved all attacks over the network itself," said Dr Udo Helmbrecht, most recently of outsourcing firm EDS Capita Goatse. "But we're not so silly as to put ourselves out of a job."

Terry Jones has called off his plans to burn a copy of The Times at Ground Zero tomorrow, after the paywall caught alight for half an hour on Friday afternoon.

Jones had planned to burn The Times because, he claimed, Rupert Murdoch would not rest until he had paywalled all of Google, including the remarkably lucrative Monty Python channel on YouTube.......

Thank God he called it off. There would have been Hooraah Henry's rioting in the streets, shouting "Death to Britain" and all sorts of chaos. Of course it would have all been Terry's fault because you can't expect the upper crust (the class of Peace) keep self control.

Terry Jones has called off his plans to burn a copy of The Times at Ground Zero tomorrow, after the paywall caught alight for half an hour on Friday afternoon.

Jones had planned to burn The Times because, he claimed, Rupert Murdoch would not rest until he had paywalled all of Google, including the remarkably lucrative Monty Python channel on YouTube. However, he was "rethinking" his plans after approximately everyone in the whole world suggested that just because it was legal might not actually make it a very good idea.

"We have made a deal with the thirty-three journalists still trapped down in the newspaper," he said. "They will come out and Caitlin Moran will publicly recant her idiot piece from a few months ago about what an excellent idea the paywall was and how enormously pleased she was to be stuck behind it. Oh, didn't you read that?"

The journalists have been trapped down the shaft since the first of July, and are being dribbled readers through a straw to keep them alive and focused and make them think there's a point to being there.

"Of course, failing a recantation there will be a paywall conflagration that reaches the skies. All those lovely theoretical readers disappearing in a cloud of soot and cement dust! But I'm sure it'll hardly be noticed and no-one will be upset."

The "newspaper" was an ancient form of information distribution using cellulose pulp from crunched-up trees. It was popular in the early days of Google, when users would send written requests to the company enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope and receive a reading list to take to their library, with an advertising flyer also enclosed.

Facebook staff have been amazed to discover that when Facebook passes users' complete details to application developers and advertisers, some of the partner companies might accidentally let slip the information in some manner.

"We are appalled at this information leak," said Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as he took a break from his personal RSS feed of drunk women's tits posted to his service. "But I can assure you that we have sternly suggested to everyone involved that they take somewhat greater care not to get caught, and maintain a serious demeanor when rolling around in the great big pit filled with money in their basement."

"I'm horrified and outraged," said office worker Brenda Busybody, 43 (IQ), "that stuff I put on the Internet is on the Internet. It violates everything I expect. I want privacy when I'm calling my boss a useless fuckstick to the entire world, all my coworkers and my boss himself. And when I'm playing a bit of FarmVille before we nick off down the pub."

Privacy advocates are working on Diaspora, a security-enhanced social network so far populated by Linux users who cryptographically sign every update about which episode of Babylon 5 they just finished watching alone in their parents' basement. "BEGIN PGP KEY BLOCK!" said open source software advocate Hiram Nerdboy, 17. "WE WILL PROTECT YOUR FREEDOMS!" The next version of Diaspora will allow users to list more than three friends, should there be any demand whatsoever for such a feature.

Facebook works on the now-standard "Web 2.0" business model: 1. Brutally sodomise the personal privacy of anyone who comes within a mile of your service and say "hey baby, I'm sorry" every time you're busted. 2. Sell ads.

An "internet troll" who posted offensive messages on the World Wide Web has been revealed to be the Daily Mail.

The Mail "preyed on bereaved families" for its "own pleasure", the Press Complaints Council heard.

The paper was charged with sending malicious communications that were grossly offensive. The posts included comments claiming the victims had brought it upon themselves by being asylum-seeking homosexual Poles who caused EU cancer.

it was only caught when it sent residents copies of itself saying "FREE DVD FOR EVERY READER."

The term "troll" was described in court as someone who creates numerous identities, called "columnists," and then posts offensive bollocks to upset or provoke a reaction from others and gain page hits and advertising revenue.

"You preyed on bereaved families who were suffering trauma and anxiety," said chairwoman of the bench Pauline Salisbury. "We know you gained pleasure and you aren't sorry for what you did."

The paper has been convicted of sending "malicious communications" and the editor has been given a knighthood and a rôle as official advisor on government policy.

The defence raised possible mental health issues, but this was dismissed by the bench.