“

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

       ”

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Pepsi is being sued by a Madison County, Illinois man who claims he found a mouse in his Mountain Dew. Ho-hum, right? But wait, Pepsi came up with the greatest defense ever: you’ll never know you’re drinking mouse!

A little back story. In 2009, Ronald Ball says he bought a can of Mountain Dew from a vending machine at work. The soda made him violently ill, and he began throwing up he claims. He poured the soda in a styrofoam cup, and, well, there was a mouse. Or so he says. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me tell you a story…

I wrote a little app for the iPhone last Christmas called “Send a text from Santa”. I had been doing some work for a client which involved sending emails and texts to users and re-used some of the acquired knowledge to put up this little app to send a jolly Christmas message from “Santa” or “Rudolph”. I sent it off to the Apple people to be approved and got back a very sniffy rejection saying that it could be used for sending anonymous messages (“sometimes called spoofing”) and implying that I was opening the gates of iPhonedom to hatemail and general digital anarchy.

Now any kid in his bedroom who has read a programming manual knows you can send an email from any email address to any other – it takes only one line of code. To try to pretend that they can save the world from this kind of abuse by stopping kids getting a text message from Father Christmas is about as bright as saying that we will ban handguns in the UK – it just means that the criminals know they are the only ones with a gun in their pocket.

So (and you may glean from this I was annoyed) I decided to take back the power for the people. And here is it – Ghostwriter (www.ghostwriterapp.com) allows you , dear reader, to send an email or text message from anyone to anyone.  There are no rules and no limits – if you want to send a message from your boss to your co-worker or your headmaster to your form teacher you can, and nobody can distinguish it from the real thing.  Surely if this kind of thing is possible we should understand it and be on the lookout for it, not banned from seeing it so just the bad guys and Nigerian lottery agents can use it…