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“A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.” – Groucho Marx

Gareth’s holiday in the Windy city started off our chat this week. Then, though it started optimistically enough, it all got a little bit political.

And then promptly degenerated into this…

Time Warner broadband usage caps spreading, consumers revolt! – I’m sure Time Warner thinks that the lowly consumers are always revolting, which is why they treat them like crap.

Austrialians to get 100Mb broadband – While Britain dribbles out a fibre network, and America ponders how, or if, they dare spend Obama’s stimulus money on nationwide broadband. The Aussie’s have looked around at their Asian neighbours, and decided to just ‘bloody’ do it.

New iPhone could have video chat – And not just video chat, but a new ‘gesture’ controlled interface. With a front facing camera, revealed in a patent application by Apple. Repeat after me. “Put your hands up in the air, wave them around like you just don’t care.”

Pirate Bay four found guilty – A resounding victory for the copyright holders, as they valiantly continue their struggle to push water uphill.

AT&T wants the iPhone until 2011 – The exclusive deal with Apple is coming to an end soon. AT&T, fearing the loss of their (cash cow) industry leading phone, get ready to bend over the negotiating table and squeal like a fax machine, when Jobs and Co. come to talk a new deal.

First Mac ‘botnet’ activated – After unwittingly downloading and installing a trojan into their machines, in pirated software. A botnet of Mac machines was created, and switched on this week, looking for instructions from its nefarious creators. Proving, conclusively that the biggest security risk on any platform, is the one between the keyboard and chair.

Wikipedia and Amazon dump Phorm – At last, someone sees sense! In the version of Orwell’s 1984 that the UK has become, everybody is spying on everybody else. Phorm, the latest Big Brother to emerge, want to trawl through our browsing records, and feed ‘relevant’ ads, based on past behaviour, to our browsers. All perfectly confidentially of course, yeah right, its just a warrant away from the governments sticky hands. But at last some companies are asking to be left out, good old Jimmy Wales is even encouraging Google MS and others to do the same. If we’re willing to put up a fight, we might even win this round.

Ohh, ohh, bit of politics there….my names Ben Elton. Goodnight.

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“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” – Albert Einstein

Again this week we started with a chat about various things. From our runs at Skype on the iPhone to Gareth’s prognostications on the future. And a lot more in between.

Before we got down to these stories….

President Obama gives the Queen of England an iPod – “One hopes that the nice colonial doesn’t get his arse nailed by the Feds.” The Queen was quoted as saying, not knowing if the copyrights in the material given on the iPod, had been cleared by the President. “You don’t mess with the DCMA.”

China accused of cyberspying – A report commissioned by the Dalai Lama’s office has found evidence of state sponsored cyberspying by the Chinese. It was an accusation strongly denied by the Chinese government. The Chinese spokesman that we contacted also denied any involvement, he then asked us if we wanted pancake roll or prawn cracker with our meal.

Hulu starts encrypting its HTML content – In it’s ongoing war with Boxee and others, the TV streaming service resorts to more and more desperate measures. But we all know that the content wants to be free.

Conficker, disaster or damp squib? – After the media hype. With the virus ‘just’ updating. We ponder what the virus writers are planning for enormous botnet they have created.

Attack of the qwerty phones – Texting with a numeric keypad just sucks. It seems that mobile makers agree, with more and more phones coming with qwerty keyboards. At last no more texters thumb, so if you can still raise them, put them way way up.

New piracy laws nearly halves internet traffic in Sweden – With prosecutors already trying to put the operators of the Pirate Bay behind bars. New laws scare the users of P2P off the internet in Sweden. The only upside is the amount of bandwidth freed for access to Sweden’s greatest export. And I’m not talking about ABBA.

And so you have Episode 6 of Killing pixels…