All William Warner wanted to do was watch a DVD. What he ended up doing was being shot in the hand by his Toshiba laptop after a fault in the disk loading tray somehow catapulted part of the steel tray out of the DVD drive and through his hand. He never did get to watch the film, thetitle of which remains a mystery.

The painful remnants of when laptops attack!

According to the New Zealand Herald, 52-year old New Zealander William Warner was attempting to put a DVD into the disk drive of his Toshiba laptop when the machine suffered a bout of ineptitude and shot Mr. Warner through the hand. As you can see from the picture it was no surface wound but a full-on gaping cavity that pierced his entire hand. Just what type of spring loading DVD drives do they have down-under?

“I looked at my palm and I was wondering, God what just happened? Then the pain … became excruciating and I had to be rushed to hospital”

Toshiba, bless them, offered Mr. Warner a brand new laptop for his pain. Mr Warner probably wants a new hand.

“I’ve been told I can no longer fish or play golf, and even writing for me now is a struggle. I can’t believe that trying to play a DVD on the laptop would land me with injuries that ended the use of my right hand as I know it.”

Although being offered another opportunity to chop his hands off, Mr. Warner is still seeking financial compensation from Toshiba. The case continues.

The Japanese blame the Chinese for a recent outbreak of computer hacking and espionage

Ah China. They must have the worst Internet hackers ever to write code. They just cannot seem to hack without being caught. Not a week goes idly past without a mega-corporation or Sovereign state bemoaning some Internet intrusion by the Worlds biggest toy manufacturer. If it is not China itself complaining of cyber espionage by the Chinese, then it is America. If not America then it is South Korea and if not Google then Yahoo. Twitter is hacked, Facebook is sent into privacy setting meltdown and confusion and little old Myspace is left enjoying the traffic that a bit of Chinese covert hacking can bring. Next up to the cyber intrusion plate is Japan.

Never the best of friends, China and Japan sit within Internet throwing code of each other geographically and historically they share a treasure trove of minefields, war, invasion, battles and that most eastern of doctrines, feuding. Suffice to say, they don’t always see eye to eye. And in this year 2011, the 80th anniversary of the Japanese invasion of northern China, things have taken to the cyber playground – Attacking your neighbours 80 years ago only to see them rise to the top of the Sovereign food chain and sit on the brink of world domination must be akin to bullying the wimpy kid at school, only to see him become a cage fighter with blood lust and get a job working alongside you in your twenties. Now China is the bully and Japan are not best pleased.

The land of the rising sun has pointed the finger squarely at China for a plethora of denial of service (DOL) attacks on both government and Mitsubishi - the largest of the Japanese defence contractors – websites. The bombardment saw major security breaches in the military web-space of Japan. Mitsubishi admitted that its computers and servers had been affected with viruses and tracking bugs, allowing information to be stolen from the network. Perhaps worse than this was the discovery that computers connected to the Japanese submarine fleets were hacked allowing the hackers to remotely control computers (whether remote control submarines were on the menu is unknown, but what fun that would be) and even use the built in microphones of the computers  as listening devices.

According to pro-hackin tricks.com, Mistubishi had “experienced hacking across 10 of its sites in Japan, including its submarine manufacturing plant in Kobe and a facility in Nagoya which makes engine parts for missiles. In total 45 network servers and 38 PCs became infected with eight strains of malware, including Trojan horse programs.”

According to Japanese Police Agency(NPA) 90% of the attacks were born in China, thus, in their eyes, making it the likeliest point of origin.

Take the blame would like to point to the ineptitude of the Chinese hacking department who can’t seem to do their cyber spying in anything approaching secrecy and to the Japanese. Buy a goddamn firewall. Even Norton.

Skynet will be happy. John Connor will be making an appearance any day now. The machines are coming; the robot wars will soon be upon us and the future for mankind is a bleak, ravaged, post-apocalyptic one. Automation is everywhere and people are becoming obsolete as the machines take the jobs. Well, at least as far as US president Barack Obama is concerned. In his latest interview with NBC news, the under-fire president blames ATM machines for ransacking the jobs of bank tellers and kiosks at airports for plundering the jobs of check-in employees. Unemployment is rising and the machines are to blame.

Setting out his stall early (after a brief message on the Weiner affair. Obama thinks he should quit.) with a clear overview of the 2 million jobs the economy has created in the past 15 months, President Obama then goes on to highlight some “structural issues” with the faltering US economy. Apparently a lot more businesses are becoming a lot more efficient with a lot fewer workers. Now, normally this would be praised as being really rather good business sense. Less spending; more profit. The perfect business model. But alas no. In today’s world, increased efficiency means more automation. Machines are not slack, they get the job done and that is one of the reasons the US economy is not going forward at the rate is should, according to Mr. Obama. The President puts it bluntly. There are no jobs because the machines have them all. Hmmmm..

According to Obama, this thing is responsible for taking all the jobs. Evil ATM

Economic policies are not to blame then? Obviously the President, as some would have you believe, is not blaming the 14 million unemployment figures solely on ATM bank machines, but he is highlighting something which every Sovereign leader has had to deal with since the goddamn stone-age monks invented the wheel. Humans are lazy, apathetic, plodding, rude and look for any excuse to cut a corner. They need lunch breaks and cigarette breaks and holidays and sick days and weekends and sleep. They need to be paid and fed and tolerated and nurtured and managed. It’s why Henry Ford invented the assembly line to get the best out of his ailing workforce and its why the Japanese took this one step further and invented assembly line robots to bolster their automobile output and hasten their meteoric rise to economic power.  To blame automation now is a fruitless, inept affair which lacks imagination. Come on Barack, you can do better than that. Can’t you?

Like love struck teenagers, Google and China are at it again.

In a very unsurprising piece of news, Google has blamed The Chinese for the hacking of online email accounts belonging to US officials. China, never one to admit to their wrong doings, has remained quiet and is perhaps considering kidnapping in retaliation to the blame.

That the Chinese are involved in underhand Internet espionage is about as surprising as a French politician being involved in a under the table extra marital affair, that is, not surprising in the slightest. What is surprising, or at least marginally more interesting, is that high level US official are using their online Gmail to store and send what, one assumes, is pretty important information. Next they will be posting photos of the Christmas party on their Facebook accounts. It’s inept, careless and downright ridiculous. Do these people not have a special, secure system for transmitting information? or at least someone upstairs to say, “you know what, online email isn’t the best way to send top secret information linked to national security.”

Obviously China are not the most open when it comes to discussing the Internet and Google have been known to partake in their own version of affairs over time, so getting accurate information about what has actually been hacked is as easy as obtaining a tourist Visa for North Korea. And about as welcome. What is known is that the accounts involved were connected to US political and military officials. Arnie and The Big Man perhaps? Arnie.gov@gmail.com anyone?

Google have said that there is no immediate problem with Gmail itself and that the accounts would have had their passwords and user names taken by the guilty hacking party. In reality, hacking is probably an over elaborate word for this affair and all the Chinese really did was guess a few passwords.

“Google detected and has disrupted this campaign to take users’ passwords and monitor their emails. We have notified victims and secured their accounts. In addition, we have notified relevant government authorities.”

Well that’s alright then.

“Hacking. It’s like a Berlinda Carlisle song. You know you shouldn’t like it but for some reason you do.”

So we have proved that hacking is cool. Along with driving Ferrari’s and sleeping with super models it is one of the few ambitions of almost all teenagers; the ability to hack into, what would turn out to be, completely pointless government and non-governmental websites. Yes you could hack into NASA. And do what? Ferris Bueller would hack into the school records and change his grades to A*. Surely the teachers would notice? The bank? Yes, you could hack into the bank and award a bank error in your favour. K’ching. $5 million please. You could hack an online poker room and see the cards. K’ching. You could access the criminal records and give people you don’t like imaginary criminal records and have them sent to prison.

World hacking champion hacks 10 at a time.

In reality, all of these things would quickly lead to frozen assets and prison-time. In the films green text scrolls down the screen, loading bars do crazy things, loud maniacal music intensifies the stress and something important is on the line. Usually the end of the world. In reality it is probably nothing like this. In reality, people are after telephone numbers and bank details. yawn.

Which is what happened with Sony recently. The story has received media overkill but essentially what happened is that on the 19th April 2011 unusual and unauthorized activity was noticed on Sony’s mega servers for PlayStation Online – a gargantuan online virtual playground where gamers go to kill and mame each other over vast, online battle fields, tennis courts, football pitches, alien plains, oceans and sky-scapes. Hacking was a-foot. Oh la la. The thing about the PlayStation Online Network is that you can’t just play, you have to register. (Ah ha. Register. One of the most time-consuming, repulsive and annoying words in the English lexicon.) As you can imagine, a lot of people registered. They gave their name, address, daytime telephone number, email address, and… drum roll please…..credit card details. You know what is coming? Yep. The hackers stole it all. All that juicy, precious, expensive information. Gone. Like Kaiser Soze.

100 million online users can't be wrong. But they can be seriously pissed off.

Rumours and blame and accusation abound. Sony is even considering offering Bobba Fett style bounties for information on who is to blame. But who is to blame? Fuck knows. People say the activist hacker group Anonymous. They are annonymous, nobody knows who they are but they deny it. So who could it be? Probably a 7-year old Ukranian computer genius. Or maybe Sony? Probably not this time, but they have done it before. Via ineptitude. Cold, hard, calculating ineptitude.

In 2001 Sony held a sweepstakes competition. In computer terms 2001 is like Le Mans in 1955 in car racing terms. Slow, dangerous and liable to crash at any moment. Suffice to say, not many people entered the competition. Luckily for them as 2500 people had their data spewed on to the Internet as the information was left on public servers for all and sundry to see.

“In the latest Sony hack, hackers did NOT publish customer confidential information on a website. Instead, Sony did,” as F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen explained at the time.