Sending SMS while on the toilet is ok, says Intel

But what is indecent is sending SMS, or even surfing the web, at the dinner table. True, Americans are of a similar opinion, so it is difficult to determine what the opinions of Europeans will be. Nonetheless, this is a serious survey assigned by Intel to well-known market research company Harris Interactive. And they found the above mentioned. They also found that 80% of Americans believe that “unwritten rules of ethics” do exist.

And also, if you have company, you should not send SMS nor call (69%). Even more people are convinced (87%) that a mobile phone does not belong in church. Practically the contrary is so in airport queues, 64% has nothing against that.

In any case, a survey was necessary in order to find that 75% of respondents do not have anything against mobile phones, laptops or netbooks being used while on the toilet.

Nothing new. The toilet is one place where I use the phone most often. But not for sending SMS. That is most probably the difference between Europe and America.

I’ll hack any Facebook account for USD 100. Maybe.

The security and anti-virus company Panda Labs has come across a truly odd service. For USD 100, you can hack into any account on the Facebook social networking website. A tempting offer – who wouldn’t want to get the best of some famous person who just happens to have a Facebook account? Or expose your wife’s or husband’s secret admirers (or discover your boss’s secret pleasures).

In reality, however, all you will end up doing is to lighten your wallet by 100 dollars, with no access to any Facebook account. Panda Labs points out that this “fun idea” was probably invented by someone in Moscow, with the real aim being nothing more than to swindle some gullible individuals out of a hundred dollars. Whoever it is, he is benefiting from the fact that people who would like to hack into somebody’s account almost certainly won’t go complaining to the police that someone cheated them out of a hundred dollars.

John Jay Daly, inventor of the opt-out concept, has passed away

In 1970 the American Congress was considering legislation that would have required companies to obtain the consent of households in order to send them advertising materials. John Daly, chairman of the Direct Marketing Association at the time, devised a controversial plan that allowed consumers to send postcards to a central address to have their names placed on a list of those that did not wish to receive direct-mail advertising.

The battle that ensued over this proposal predicted that similar restrictions would mean the end of direct-mail activity and the end of this industry. But the truth of the situation was different: many people actually wanted to receive the information, and later campaigns could therefore focus on the people who were truly interested in the relevant products.

This concept later became the basis for do-not-call lists for people who do not wish to be “bothered” by calls; it was likewise applied to e-mail.

John Jay Daly died of heart disease on 27 August at the age of 80. The opt-out alternative is not available for this direct-mailing.

They were promised 8 mbps, but their Internet access speed is only 2 mbps. Regulators are annoyed.

The nine largest Internet providers in England have quite antiquated habits. Each fifth customer has only 2 mbps “highspeed” access, despite having an “8 mbps” connection.

Things aren’t any different here: Czech Telefónica O2 is doing the very same. The recently introduced 8 mbps connection offers only half that speed. And since we’re here in the Czech Republic, there’s not a thing you can do about it. At least British regulatory authorities are monitoring and assessing this trend. It seems the regulators here have other things to worry about.

The world is changing: after digital natives come digital nomads

I run into them sometimes – in restaurants, cafés, fast food joints, shopping centres. They sit working with a notebook or some other device in places where they can take advantage of an accessible WiFi connection. They don't need an office – they don't have to work at home. They work wherever they feel like working at any given moment. The most courageous find a WiFi connection near the water and enjoy their freedom. These people are known as digital nomads; you can add them to the list of groups in your lexicon, next to digital natives.

When you come across one, try to learn a thing or two. They know all the tricks for using Facebook, Twitter, Skype, email and Web 2.0. You can pick up something useful from these nomads for your staid and settled office life. Or you could just pack it in and become a digital nomad yourself.

To criticize customers on Facebook or not, that is the question

Social networks can be a double-edged sword. Especially when an employee of British Primark writes on Facebook that customers could stand to “lose some f******** weight”. And this wasn’t the only employee of this particular company to use Facebook to comment on customers with an indelicate choice of words. The language was so cheeky that Primark began to investigate – just like Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and Waitrose at the beginning of the year.

Primark is no novice on Facemark – Primark Appreciation Society has over 100 000 members. This isn’t a “company” group, so if you want to see how “fan” communication works, you’ll have a pretty good chance of learning a thing or two. Including the “love and hate” mix you find everywhere else.

The results of Primark’s internal investigation are unknown. What is clear, however, is that while Facebook may be personal, that doesn’t mean it’s a great place to air out one’s workplace frustrations.

What are your employee's up to? They don’t by chance have an account on Facebook, do they?

Apple changed in its opinion on porn, but in the end it turned out otherwise

Wednesday, 24 June, brought about a revolution in the world of applications for the iPhone. And in the end, even in the world as Apple had recently defined it. The world where no vulgar words exist. And no naughty pictures either. The “Hottest Girls” application, limited to 17 years and over, brought what men hanker after to each iPhone. Naughty pictures.

Nothing is ever that simple, however; a moment later “Hottest Girls” was lost from AppStore and the blogosphere was governed by panic. Was Apple censoring again? Did it really not know what it had permitted? Naughty pictures are simply naughty pictures. And finally the authors themselves withdrew them from AppStore – their servers couldn’t deal with the requests of all the desperate users.

It was all different in the end, however. You will definitely no longer find “Hottest Girls” at AppStore. Apple stands behind the end of the first naughty pictures for iPhone. And as the press release says: “Apple will not distribute an application which contains unsuitable content. The author of this application added unsuitable content directly from the server after the application had been approved and distributed.”

Full stop. There is no revolution taking place. iPhone will remain well-behaved. And if you want to know what “Hottest Girls” looked like, try And then there was porn. They have a screenshot there.