Will other technological milestones be celebrated in similar ways, I wonder?

Will the 40th anniversary of the internet’s creation be honoured by people bouncing emails off of Tim Berners-Lee’s laptop? Will we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the GSM network by routing SMS messages through Friedhelm Hillebrand’s mobile?

No, probably not.

It’s extremely newsworthy, but coverage of the kidnapping would have made Rhode a more valuable hostage. The higher profile the captive, the more attention the captors and their demands get – and the lower the chance of a happy ending.

In situations like this, news organisations often agree to hold off on reporting certain events. They lose a story in the short term, but a reporter gets a better chance at coming home.

In any case, for better or worse, everyone gets their story eventually.

This mutual cooperation used to be relatively straightforward to organise – journalists, especially war correspondents, are a pretty cliquey bunch – but it is one of the long list of things that have received a thorough shaking-up in the internet revolution.

Wikipedia, in particular, was a major problem.

Just three days after the kidnapping, despite a total blackout in the traditional media, the first Wikipedia user made reference to it on Rhode’s article – the first of a dozen attempts.

The NYT got in touch with Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, to arrange the removal of any trace of the story. Wales oversaw the effort himself, and spoke about it to the NYT.

We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source. I would have had a really hard time with it if it had.

But the general public were not the only ones who’d be looking at Wikipedia. The next concern was what Rhode’s captors would see when they began researching him online.

A colleague of his, Michael Moss, began altering Rhode’s entry. He highlighted that many pieces of Rhode’s work were sympathetic to Muslims, and removed all trace of his work with the Christian Science Monitor, fearing that the religious associations of the name wouldn’t sit well with the Taliban.

The idea was to convince them that Rhode was on-side, worth keeping around.

I knew from my jihad reporting that the captors would be very quick to get online and assess who he was and what he’d done, what his value to them might be. I’d never edited a Wikipedia page before.

So, not only was the NYT suppressing information on a supposedly free, collaborative encyclopedia, but it was actively distorting it. An organisation devoted to shining a light on the facts was hiding them away, and even spinning them for Taliban approval.

Not so many years ago, newspaper editors decided what was and wasn’t worth column inches, and could hold off on stories to protect a group or an individual. It doesn’t happen that way anymore. A stray Facebook update, Tweet or blog post, and a story can explode whether mainstream media are involved or not.

The Iranian elections were covered extensively , despite strong efforts to stop any information leaks. Well, the door swings both ways.

In Rhode’s case the cat was kept mostly in the bag, but it required a massive and sustained effort. The help of Wikipedia’s founder, no less. That won’t happen every time.

Whether the NYT was right or wrong to do what they did is academic. If I was being held captive my idealist viewpoint on free information and open knowledge would be quickly distorted. In fact, it would be stretched to breaking point pretty much instantly.

PC Pro very rarely sends correspondents to war zones, but if it ever does I hope we’ll be dusting off those old Wikipedia accounts.

Habitat is in the middle of a disapproval-a-thon on Twitter right now, after the company, or someone acting on its behalf, added Iranian election hashtags to tweets about its “totally desirable Spring collection”.

Well, the idea was to attract attention, so it worked. In a way.

To its credit, the company’s already made a pretty frank apology:

We have been reading everyone’s comments carefully and would like to make a very sincere apology to any Twitter users who were offended. The top ten trending topics were pasted into hashtags without checking with us and apparently without verifying what all of the tags referred to.

With new tools like Twitter there will always be mistakes made and decisions taken that, in retrospect, look absolutely, completely bonkers.

Everyone will get better at it. Either that, or they will be bombarded by waves of furious, succinct abuse until they leave, tail between their legs.

Every man and his dog is on Twitter now, blabbing away about the most mundane aspects of their lives without a care in the world (and, before you track me down and ridicule me in a comment, I include myself in that), but companies have to be more careful.

They cannot afford to hand over control of an official Twitter account to someone who doesn’t understand their brand, ethics and customers perfectly.

Google does it very well, throwing in a blend of news, tips and links, and has grabbed the attention of almost a million followers because of it.

Associated Press has also made some effort to avoid controversy (even if it doesn’t have a large social media presence) by releasing a set of guidelines for its staff to follow when online. It includes this little gem, complete with spelling errors:

When tweeting, remember that’s there a big difference between providing an observation (”I nearly bumped into Chris Matthews outside Penn Station”) and an opinion (”I nearly bumped into the loudmouthed and obnoxious Chris Matthews”).

Exactly what the right marketing formula is online will vary from firm to firm, but from this day on it’s pretty clear that leaping on to a distributed, grassroots attempt to help an oppressed and struggling people in order to flog sofas won’t be it.

The problem is one of scale; they’re on the end of every lead attached to every gadget, and built into every room across the country.

It would take so much effort and money to upgrade the standard that any politician would be mad to go anywhere near the idea of suggesting that maybe we think about upgrading. Wars and bank bailouts are much less contentious.

The result is that we have a plug which first appeared in 1946 – 63 long years ago – and shows no sign of retiring. (Strangely, considering this, I had to change over all the plugs in my great-grandmother’s house – which shows what an early adopter she was.)

Well, if we can’t have an upgrade, maybe we could have an update?

I’ve come across a concept design by “MrMinKyuChoi” on YouTube, which looks perfect. The two lower pins swivel 90 degrees, allowing the size in one axis to be chopped down from around 4 to less than 1cm.

When you’re desperately trying to cram gadgets and clothes into a weekend bag, that could make all the difference.

It’s a nice design, but what are the chances of it actually being put into production?

Maybe higher than you think. I messaged the YouTube user, but got no reply. Then I put the username into Google. Did you mean Mr Min Kyu Choi?, it asked. On the first page of results came this site from the British Standards Institute, listing a Mr Min Kyu Choi as a new member. If they are one and the same, then that would be super news, wouldn’t it?

You may think that an invention like this has a rather limited market, but the same type of plug is also used in Ireland, Sri Lanka, Bahrain, the UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Oman, Cyprus, Malta, Gibraltar, Botswana, Ghana, Hong Kong, Macau, Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Mauritius, Iraq, Kuwait, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Belize, Dominica, St. Lucia, Saint Vincent, the Grenadines and Grenada.

So that’s quite a big market, really.

Let’s hope it starts to appear on gadgets in the near future – because consumers aren’t to be trusted to change plugs anymore, so selling them individually would be illegal.

Image thanks to James Dyson Award website

Porn/Private Browsing

Most other browsers already had this feature, and now Firefox does too. With nothing more than a quick Ctrl+Shift+P your tabs will be whisked away and stored safely, leaving you with a fresh window for your… personal research.

When you’re all finished up, the same shortcut will bring back all your previous tabs and send all trace of your secret session into oblivion (it does not erase feelings of guilt).

It works perfectly well, but has a slightly annoying habit of clearing any half-filled forms – like the previous, unsaved incarnation of this blog post. Still, Mozilla has to leave room for improvement, or there would be nothing for them to do between now and version 4.0.

Video/Audio tags

One of the biggest features is support for the video and audio tags from HTML 5. The video tag is the one that will change your browsing experience most of all, because the web is littered with moving images.

It allows clips to be embedded straight into a site, with none of this flash-player nonsense. It’s a very powerful tag; rotating video, adding effects and even green-screen graphics can all be done on-the-fly. Try it out here, if you have a compatible browser. Firefox 3.5, for example.

Speedy JavaScript

The new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine at the core of 3.5 is supposed to give other current browsers a run for their money. I ran the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark twice on each of the common browsers, and took an average.

The chart above shows that Safari, Firefox and Chrome are all roughly on a par – although, if you want to get picky, Safari is the quickest of the bunch. Opera is sadly left behind, and IE is, well, consistent.

Final update

The last update of note is up there, in the top left of this post. The new logo. The same as the old logo, but a little shinier. Which pretty much sums up the whole browser, really.

If this is the first you’ve heard of it, bad luck. Get used to being facebook.com/827430mvmhd9mdleek3.

I briefly considered waking up at the crack of dawn to snag matthew.sparkes, but I opted instead for a few hours more sleep.

To the man with the well-trimmed beard who got there first, enjoy. I certainly enjoyed my lay-in.

“Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it,” warned Facebook.

Well, people did think carefuly. And the results were chaotic, stupid and entertaining in equal measure. Here are some of the high/lowlights.

Religion – Facebook had the foresight to block a few potentially controversial registrations; “God” and “Allah” were off limits, for example, although “Buddah” went to a chap named Mike Surmanian. Atheist deity-equivalent, “Richard Dawkins“, was also snapped up by a bloke in a mortarboard named Steven Tyrell Stasek.

Technology – Rather brilliantly, Christine Shipley registered “default.aspx“. Some others that Facebook didn’t see coming were “logout” and “resetpassword“.

Swear Words – Not big, not clever, but an obvious first choice for many. Most of the worst I could think of were gone, but some of the more anglicized ones slipped through Facebook’s US-orientated censorship net. Well done to Michael Whittaker for grabbing “bo**ocks“. There’s no way you’ll regret that in a few year’s time, no way.

Politics – Barack’s people, tech-savvy bunch that they are, registered his name nice and early. George Bush was less organised, seamlessly continuing the same lack of planning and foresight he displayed during his presidency into his retirement and letting Dusty Sayer walk off with it.

Facesquatting – Coined on rival website, Twitter, this term refers to registering a name that you think could be worth something to someone else in the future. Stupid for two reasons; it makes people very angry, and usernames are non-transferable. Epic Fail, as they say on the Internet.

Pedantry – My favourite by far belongs to Nick Alexander. If you attempted to register a username that was not long enough you were shown the error message; “usernames must be at least 5 letters long”. Here’s Nick’s username.

Sure, there have been some backward steps, too – such as the outrageous display of bigotry that was California’s Proposition 8 – but on the whole, things are getting better. Personally, the prospect of marriage in any form is terrifying, but if it’s available at all, then it should be available to all.

Besides narrow-minded folk, there is another group of people that may have a problem with the whole thing: database designers. I don’t mean to imply that they’re homophobic (although I can’t guarantee that some aren’t), but only that gay marriage is going to cause them a lot of headaches.

Across the world there are millions of databases, programs and online forms that cannot even comprehend the possibility that a man could marry a man, or that a woman could marry a woman. It simply does not compute, and it’s being called the Y2Gay bug.

“To be blunt, the systems aren’t set up to handle it,” says database engineer Sam Hughes in a wonderfully insightful blog post.

“The paper forms have a space for the husband’s name and a space for the wife’s name. Married people carefully enter their details in block capitals and post the forms off to depressed paper-pushers who then type that information into software front-ends whose forms are laid out and named in precisely the same fashion. And then they hit “submit” and the information is filed away electronically in databases which simply keel over or belch integrity errors when presented with something so profound as a man and another man who love each other enough to want to file joint tax returns.”

Hughes goes on to suggest a number of possible fixes, many of which come with their own, unique problems. The field is a young one, and there a lot of unsolved problems – or, at least, ones that are awaiting a sensible solution.

“Perhaps the simplest solution would be to ban marriage outright. Or, better yet, to declare everybody as married to everybody else. But then what would the database engineers do all day?”

Scientists and mathematicians are more likely than the average to be atheists, or at least to choose evolution over creationism to explain what they see around them. This is for a very good reason. Excluding evolutionary biologists, for obvious reasons, scientists are used to seeing complex behaviour emerge from simple systems.

Take Conway’s Game of Life as a perfect example. With just four simple rules this cellular automaton throws up all sorts of complex, emergent behaviour, including several repeating patterns. If you regularly deal with such impressive output from simple rules, then it’s not much of a stretch to imagine monkeys turning into humans.

Simple rules minutely affect each and every iteration of a system, which over time creates huge, directed change. It’s a hard concept to grasp, but once you do, it’s easy to see its impact everywhere you look.

Computer scientists are more likely than most to come across this sort of behaviour, thanks to the field of artificial intelligence. In particular, those in one specific area of AI: the study of genetic algorithms. These algorithms solve incredibly difficult problems by mimicking natural evolution.

The way they work is incredibly simple; define a problem and the characteristics of an ideal solution, then set it running. That’s it.

The algorithm will take a set of randomly created solutions, compare them to the optimum, kill the poor performers and breed the better ones with each other. Throw in a little random mutation, and you’re all set. Within a few generations some staggering designs can emerge, sometimes so strange that no human engineer could ever have dreamed them up.

It sounds too good to be true, but it is. Demonstrably, reproducibly so. If at this point you’re sceptical, good, that’s a perfectly scientific attitude. Take a look at chapter 10 of this document, which runs through an extremely simple example.

It doesn’t just work for word games, though; so far it’s been used to design fusion reactors, create better load-balancing strategies in communications networks and NASA has even used it to develop more efficient antennae than was ever thought possible for a satellite. These things work, and are in use now, all around you.

Still, though, some people don’t believe it works. That’s understandable – if you’re an ardent believer in creationism, and a sceptic of evolution, then the field of genetic algorithms presents some interesting problems. You can throw the occasional spanner in the works of natural evolution, and the vast timescales involved make it easy to cast doubt on the theory for some, but seeing a computer evolve a perfect design in a matter of minutes is far harder to dismiss – even though it’s working in exactly the same way.

This brings me to the blog post that irritated me so much, written by Casey Luskin at Evolution News and Views. It criticises another article which details NASA’s fantastic work on the previously mentioned antennae.

“The presumption of evolutionary biologists, of course, is that these “brilliant designs” evolved by natural selection preserving random, but beneficial mutations. Engineers operating under such presumptions have thus tried to mimic not only the “brilliant designs,” but also the evolutionary processes that allegedly produced the designs,” says Luskin. “Did they use truly Darwinian “evolutionary computing?” The article goes on to discuss how design parameters were smuggled into the simulation, such that it really wasn’t a truly unguided Darwinian evolutionary scenario.”

Nothing was smuggled. The only things that the algorithm requires are details of the set of current solutions – analogous to a population of animals – and details of what an optimum solution will be like; low power use, highest efficiency, etc – which is analogous to the environment, weeding out poor solutions.

I had always hoped that genetic algorithms would help to convince evolution-sceptics to take a more thorough look at the evidence, but it seems that it’s just being added to the list of “incorrect” scientific theories. The problem is that the evidence is right there, routing your emails and phone calls, and whizzing above your head in orbit.

It weighed an absolute ton, and virtually no desk could support it. Inside were 4 or 5 hard disks, of random size and origin, a bizarre selection of scrounged components and enough fans to build a quite effective hovercraft, all linked to a controller that I’d built myself.

Needless to say, it wasn’t the most stable PC ever created. It fell over, a lot – very often because a screw had been worked loose by the vibration from all those fans and landed on a circuit board. In the halls of residence we used to hold regular movie nights, with media streamed all over the super-fast campus network. If the film stopped, I would have to run back to my room to find the offending screw, remove it and reboot.

The reason I mention this is that I was reading the Wikipedia entry for the International Space Station this morning (on the bus, on my iPhone – the wonders of technology), and I couldn’t help but notice some similarities between the multi-billion pound international project and my old PC.

The first ISS section was launched ten years ago, almost to the day; a Russian module called Zarya. Next came the Unity module launched by the US, then Zvezda, then some joining trusses, then the Pirs docking compartment, a lab, an airlock and a robotic arm. After this there was a brief delay while everyone caught their breath (and recovered from the Colombia disaster), then a new European lab, a Japanese lab, another robotic arm and some solar panels.

In the WIkipedia entry you can see images of it at every stage, gradually sprawling into space over a decade, its spindly and intricate shape unencumbered by any of that pesky gravity that keeps Earth-based construction all squat and dull (before you make a comment – I know, there is gravity in orbit, but not really – sort of).

The point is that it wasn’t designed, so much as scraped together from bits – just like my old machine. OK, maybe that’s a slight stretch, but to look at it you’d find it hard to believe that its shape is what would have been drawn up by a single, consolidated design team. A camel is a horse designed by committee, after all.

That’s not to take away from the achievement: I’m all for space exploration. In fact, I’ve even been to a Mars Society conference, so there. The complexity of the ISS is incredibly impressive – it’s just that it’s slightly worrying, too. On a recent space-walk astronauts noticed a loose screw floating by, but couldn’t quite reach it. That screw obviously came from the station itself, but nobody is quite sure from what part.

“I have no idea where it came from,” said Stefanyshyn-Piper, one of the space-walkers who spotted it, sounding not even close to as worried as I would be in her position.

It’s just like my old desktop – I never found out where those system-crashing screws came from, either. They normally just ended up in the bin. Eventually, the continual repairs and constant crashes drove me to get an iBook; which worked consistently for several years with no mishaps.

I’m not sure what my point is, to be honest. It would be hard for Apple to develop a competing product to the ISS, and I’m sure it would come with a hefty mark-up if they ever did.

Maybe I mean to say that space exploration will be the eventual saviour of mankind, and that we should pool our resources in the most effective way possible, without care for the political or financial implications. Maybe I mean that all complex systems will have inherent flaws, or that maintenance is an important but draining part of any large mechanical project. Perhaps I mean that you need to keep track of screws when building something; they’ll only end up getting stood on when you’re just wearing socks, which really hurts, or ripping through a space station at 17,000mph, which probably hurts even more.

Maybe this whole post is an excuse to show you this video of the tool bag that Stefanyshyn-Piper dropped on a recent space-walk streaking across the sky like a comet. Who knows?

Unfortunately, these offices do seem to exist, though. In fact, several companies in the US have been sued by employees in the last year over claims that they lose hours a week to startup and shutdowns, for which they aren’t paid a penny.

It would be easy for me to criticise here the US’s litigious culture, the stinginess of companies that don’t pay people to prepare the tools of their trade, the sluggishness of Windows or employees who can’t think of anything better to do while they wait for their PC to boot. Buy a newspaper, make a coffee, read a book – hell, write a book, but don’t sit there plotting a lawsuit against your employer.

The problem is that I can’t tell who is more deserving of a good mocking; the whole situation is patently ridiculous.

I will suggest, though, that if you happen to be a manager who makes employees come in to work early, unpaid, and boot their machine, that you stop it. Stop it now. It’s very tight, and it’s counter-productive.

Casting my mind back to my university days, I had several friends who worked in the same bar. I can remember that at the end of the night they stopped getting paid when the last customer was served – then had to clean the whole bar from top to bottom. I remember being told that the staff took, shall we say, a somewhat less than thorough approach to this task. It’s the same thing.

Computers are a ubiquitous tool, and there’s virtually no trade that can escape having to use them. They are a tool, though, and preparing them for work is part of work, it’s as simple as that.

As a side note, the article suggested that it takes between 15 and 30 minutes to boot a computer. A quick test here (booting a machine and loading Word, Outlook and a browser window of choice) showed that this is complete nonsense;

< 1:00 – David Fearon’s Windows 7 installation
2:30 – My trusty Shuttle desktop
6:45 – Bayon’s laptop
7:30 – David Fearon’s XP installation