BBC to ITV and C4: fancy some iPlayer action?

Blimey.

The BBC is planning to offer Channel 4 and ITV the free and open use of its iPlayer online video technology, according to sources close to the corporation.

So what was good this year, folks?

December means reviews of the year, so as ever – what was good and bad this year in movies, music and the ever so glamorous world of technology? Did anyone else find Gears of War 2 strangely boring? Am I the only person who likes the new Lily Allen single? Did The Dark Knight have eleventy-two unnecessary endings? Is InstaPaper the best iPhone application? Is The Wire really the best TV programme ever made? That sort of thing.

What were your highlights?

Columnists on the Shannon Matthews case: fun with selective statistics

Suzanne Moore in the Daily Mail:

Twenty-five years ago almost three-quarters of those who lived in council housing worked full-time.

Now fewer than a third do.

This is something that’s come up again and again in regard to this case, and it’s been used to prove that there’s a growing problem of child-abducting maniacs living on benefits, or something.

The problem is that the stats Moore’s quoted are only part of a bigger picture. The stats she missed: twenty-five years ago 42% of the population lived in council housing. Now, it’s 12%.

For the sake of simplicity, let’s say the population is 50 million and hasn’t changed. That means 25 years ago, 21 million people lived in council housing, so  5.2 million of them didn’t have full time jobs. Today we’ve got 6 million people in council housing; assuming Moore’s right, that’s 1.9m people not working full time. Even assuming that not working full time is bad – those part-time bastards! – the stats show a massive decrease in the number of people who don’t have full-time jobs. Which proves that we’re going to hell in a handcart, or something.

I don’t have a particular agenda here; it just bugs me when stats are used to prove a point when they do no such thing.

A different kind of chip technology

I love chips, but more often than not I can’t be bothered going to the chippy – and because the downstairs of Bigmouth Towers is open plan, doing proper chips at home isn’t an option either (because of the smell, the risk of burning the house down, the way it takes deep fat fryers about ten million years to cool down).

That leaves oven chips, which are quite possibly the worst invention since vegetables. So hurrah, then, for McCain’s ridiculously expensive (£2-something for 500g) but absolutely bloody brilliant Simply Gorgeous Chips.  The formula is simple enough – spuds, sunflower oil, salt and beef dripping – but by crikey, it works.

Mobile Flickr brings video to the iPhone

Flickr has updated the excellent m.flickr.com, and you can now view video on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The quality’s superb – the clips play as stand-alone videos, presumably via Quicktime – but for now the changes only apply to videos uploaded in the last day or so. Previously uploaded videos will be “supported at a later date”, Flickr says.

WordPress 2.7 hits WordPress.com tomorrow, reaches .org next week

It’s a really big update, and while it won’t make much difference to blog readers it’s a vast improvement for blog writers. If you’re on WordPress.com the update arrives 1am tomorrow morning UK time; the standalone version from WordPress.org is due next week.

From the archives: The Seven Deadly Sins of Apple Ownership

Another old MacFormat one – this one predates not just Leopard, but Vista too – but I’m amused by the intro, which is a load of old bollocks. Fun bollocks, I hope.

Mac ownership is often described in religious terms, but the link between Macs and the heavens goes back further than you might think. In the Garden of Eden, Eve took an Apple from the Tree of Knowledge (pedants say it was an Apricot, but what do they know? They’d probably argue that the serpent was a Dragon 32) – and of course her partner was the proud owner of Adam’s Apple. The links continue to this very day: every time you buy a Mac an angel gets its wings – but whenever a Mac runs Windows, an angel is twanged into a tree.

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From the archives: The Phantom Menace – are wireless networks really killing us?

[Originally published in PC Plus. Shortly after publication I had a perfectly pleasant chat with the Powerwatch people. We agreed to disagree on this one - Gary]

Fast facts:

• Powerwatch claims that up to 35% of the population suffers ill-effects from electromagnetic fields, and that 5% of people are severely affected.
• A possible link between low frequency EMFs – such as from electricity pylons – and childhood leukaemia was first suggested in 1979. Despite many major scientific studies, the evidence is still inconclusive. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classes electromagnetic fields as a category 3 risk – the same as a cup of tea.
• In 2005, Dr James Rubin analysed the results of 31 studies into electrosensitivity and found no evidence of a link between electrosensitivity symptoms and EMF exposure.

Wireless networks are the latest high tech health scare, but are they really dangerous? Gary Marshall investigates.

We’ve panicked about power lines, had concerns over cell phones and now, it seems, we should be worried about Wi-Fi. According to campaigners the convenience of cable-free computing comes with a heavy price – your health.

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From the archives: Has Privacy Croaked?

[Originally published in PC Plus. Some of the privacy options mentioned in this article, particularly for Facebook, have changed since this piece was originally published - Gary]

Never mind ID cards: social networking sites are creating a data mine governments would kill for. As Gary Marshall discovers, the devil’s in the details.

In July, US security services’ plans to harvest massive amounts of information about air travellers caused an outcry. “That’s terrible,” everybody cried, before handing over their most sensitive personal data to a plastic frog.

The frog was on Facebook, the social networking site where more than 30 million people share all kinds of information from their educational and career histories to their sexual orientation. As security firm Sophos discovered, while many of us worry about ID cards, government databases and anti-terror watch lists, 41% of Facebook users will happily share their secrets with Freddi the Frog – and thanks to social search engines and database diggers, privacy is increasingly looking like a thing of the past.
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Screenwipe: writers on writing

This week’s episode of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe was fascinating. Instead of pouring bile on the usual deserving targets, Brooker sat down with the writers of Doctor Who, Peep Show, Hustle, Shameless and the IT Crowd and asked them to talk about writing. Which they did. Russell T Davies was a particular delight, but I found the whole thing fascinating.

In particular, I was surprised just how universal some things are: impostor syndrome, the feeling that writing is the easy bit (it’s the thinking that’s difficult), the importance of editing, editing, editing and then doing a bit more editing, the problems of drinking too much (booze at night, coffee by day) and writers’ complete inability to even start writing until the voices in their head tell them to get working.

If you’re interested in writing, not just for the telly but in general, it’s well worth your time. The clip I’ve embedded is the first part; the whole thing’s currently on iPlayer.