As the Apple adverts say, you can get an app for everything these days.

The NHS has released an iPhone app to keep track of the amount of alcohol that you are drinking.

Downloading it will allow a user to work out how much alcohol they are consuming, and whether they are drinking too much.

It does sound like a good idea, but I’m not sure how useful this is going to be. For instance, much of the problem that Britain has is over binge drinking, and I’m not totally sure this is going to help this particular issue.

Imagine the scene, Friday night in the pub. You’ve just had a round of drinks - time to get your trusty iPhone app and try to work out how many units you have in your drink.

Can you already see the problem here?

OK - now you’re on your fourth drink. It’s been a pain to do all these calculations - but you’ve just about managed it.

Whoops. You’ve dropped it. It’s logged out of the app before you’ve saved the data from the last drink you’ve had - dammit got to put those details in again - what was it that I was actually drinking?

Hi! What is this you bring me - a shot of sambuca?

Oh crap - I need to put this in my phone. Hang on a second while I work out what this might mean unit size.

Wait a sec! OK, you’ve drunk it. My turn.

One hour later

You what? My iPhone app? What about my iPhone app? Oh that. I can’t be bothered any anymore with it.

Four hours later….

Where’s my iPhone?

So  as an app to measure a night’s drinking for many people - it’s not practical. But if you do remember how much you’ve drunk the night before and manage to type details for every day of the week - yeah it could be useful.

The real solution would be an iPhone breathlyser app

I don’t think this is even possible, but what could be really useful is a way that you can breathe on your iPhone, which can detect how much alcohol you have on your breath.

They’ve got that stupid Carling beer drinking app. Surely this won’t be too much of a stretch?

On a serious note though, I do think that it’s good that public sector healthcare is trying to experiment with the technology to improve things for people.

If used properly, the app could be used to help people, but most people already know what moderate drinking is for them - it’s simply the case of following it. Problem is that the Brits don’t really know moderation.

A simple solution would be to do what the continentals do and go with 24 hour drinking, so that people didn’t drink so fast, but this hasn’t really been the biggest success either, normally because nothing ever stays open 24 hours in this country.

So what do you do?

Solutions aren’t easy. But one thing is that nobody forces alcohol into your mouth. It’s a personal choice how much you drink, and in nannying state days, maybe you just got to face the consequences.

It’s nobody’s fault but your own.

There might be a few happy Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung owners today with the news that one of our favourite music services in Spotify is now available for them.

This is a pretty big and important event for Spotify, which has to look at its mobile service as being key in its goal of making money. It’s already out for iPhone and Android, but Symbian has a much bigger market share and could mean many more will pay the £10 a month fee.

But will they?

A while ago, I was raving about Spotify as a service and was very much looking forward to seeing the music service on my iPhone, and believed that I would potentially pay the fee.

But I haven’t, and this is in common with a lot of people who really like the service, but weren’t prepared to spend money on it.

With me there is one big reason, and that is a failure of my phone rather than the service. I have an iPhone and the problem is that it only runs one application at the time, unless it’s iTunes.

This is a big problem.

Spotify is built towards music, and for me music is something I listen to while doing something else - such as browsing the internet.

Because of sandbox nature of the iPhone, I can’t do this. Which makes the app pointless because I’m always doing something with it, and going to another program cuts the music.

Apple knew it, and was why it allowed the app. 

So it’s not worth the money for me, because I will rarely use it. Sure, the £10 would cut the ads and give me better music quality, but I’m cheap. I won’t pay something regularly that I will rarely use.

Will it being on Nokia be a success?

It’s difficult to say, but as I mentioned many more people have these phones then they have iPhone or Android. What I am really worried about now when it comes to Spotify is its ability to make money, and whether enough people will be willing to pay the monthly charge.

I mean, there are lots of songs on Spotify now and that must mean money for the record companies. If Spotify doesn’t make this back then I don’t know how it’s going to survive, and that would really suck - especially as I use it at home so often!

Last month I talked about how a woman was arrested for poking somebody on Facebook for violating the terms of a protection agreement.

Now, according to an article in the New York Times, a Facebook status message left by 19-year old teenager Rodney Bradford has proved to be his alibi, after being charged with a robbery.

The message of Rodney asking where his pancakes were was left at 11.49am. It was one of those typical Facebook messages that pretty much means nothing to anybody but the poster - but it became crucial when he was arrested for a robbery in Brooklyn.

Facebook was called to confirm that those words were indeed typed from a computer at the home of Rodney father, and  when the social network did that, the charges were dropped.

“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” Dallas lawyer John G. Bowing was quoted as saying. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.”

Although it is funny to think that a status update can be used as an alibi, I don’t think it’s anything anymore to be surprised about. With courts more inclined to take electronic evidence and the fact we carry mobile phones with us everywhere we go, electronic tracking can find out an awful lot about us - not just about where we are.

To some extent, our use of GPS and our relationship with companies like Google and Facebook means that we are always connected up. We’ve seen films like Enemy of the State - electronic devices can make us guilty just as much as they could find us innocent.

Understandably there are privacy concerns - but I guess that’s the price you play for being connected at all times - and maybe like in Rodney’s case it could actually help you.

New research from analytics firm Flurry has revealed that the popularity of book apps for the iPhone has surged in the last month, showing that it could become a threat to the burgeoning market for eBook readers.

The US research said that one out of every five new apps created for the iPhone has been a book, and it seems that many publishers are choosing to port books into the Apps store at record rates.

Flurry claims that Apple is positioned to take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it has already done with the Nintendo DS, and predicts that it will become a significant player for reading books, even if it does have a smaller form factor.

It also suggests that with rumours that Apple are working on a tablet, this could also cut into the market share of other eBook readers.

Being the Facebook junkie that I am, I’ve been playing a lot of the applications as I am generally quite a sad person. However, there was a bit of security news today that perhaps maybe should convince me that I need to be a little bit more careful.

Roger Thompson, chief research officer for security firm AVG, writes in a blog post about an attack which looks more serious than the usual way that social networks can sometimes link to hacked sites.

He says that actual Facebook applications are being hacked - not by the actual developers of the apps but bad guys looking to piggy back on their popularity.

He used an example of an app called CityFireDepartment, an online game where a player is supposed to play a role at being a fireman.

Once you have added the app, instead of playing the game the victim is presented with a fake Adobe licence agreement, followed by spyware downloaded onto the computer if you are unpatched.

At first Thompson and his team believed it was a deliberate hack by the developers, but it was actually caused by a outsider who has an iframe into the source code.

The line of malicious code changes once a day, and calls to a different exploit site.

He said: “Initially, we thought that the applications were deliberately acting as lures, but it now seems to us that they are victims themselves.

“The difficult part for them will be to find and plug the hole that the data snatchers are using to hack the applications.”

He names the other Facebook apps affected as MyGirlySpace, Ferrarifone, Mashpro, Mynameis, Pass-it-on, Filinthe and Aquariumlife.

Many of you reading this will be Twitter users, and so you will already know that the whole microblogging experience can sometimes be spoiled by followers which you really don’t want - spammers.

They could be offering anything, and they usually do - although the majority of the time it seems to be nubile young ladies asking you to click on their link for a dating websites.

Well, Twitter has put in a new feature which will hopefully make a big difference - a one click option to report a questionable profile as being spam.

Under the sidebar at the right of a Twitter profile, you will see a button where you will be able to report the offending profile as being spam - happily named ‘report [user] as spam’.

Twitter says that this will bring the profile to the attention of a ‘Trust and Safety’ team who check out what needs to be done, while the profile will be automatically be blocked from following or replying to you.

Twitter emphasised that this is not an automated response, so it can’t be used to bring the ‘force of Twitter doom’ on an account which you might just not like.

This is an important step by Twitter, as the increasing amount of spam accounts was beginning to spoil the whole user experience. Hopefully people will also use this wisely, and get rid of the spam accounts which really need to be deleted.

Also Twitter apps will also be soon designed with some sort of spam filter in mind too, because this is where many people pick up, read and reply to tweets rather than the Twitter website.

If the compromised accounts were strangled at birth, then we may less see incidents of worms propagating or links to phishing sites after our details.

Some very interesting news from America. A woman has been arrested for poking somebody on Facebook.

You probably need a little more background to the story. According to the Tennessean, 36-year old Sharon Jackson was arrested for violating the terms of a protection order when she gave somebody the poke, which banned Jackson from “telephoning, contacting or otherwise communicating with the petitioner.”

Although police have been called in to stop forms of online harassment, it seems to be one of the first cases where somebody has been taken in simply for poking somebody.

According to the report, police have made copies of the pages where the alleged victim was poked. Because she broke an order of protection by doing it, she can be punished with a jail sentence of up to a year.

Poking is a uniquely Facebook feature and is taken by different people to mean different things. Some people take it to mean flirting -  hence the existence of a group called ’stop with the poking, let’s just have sex’.

Facebook itself says its simply a way for friends to interact with each other, and doesn’t actually have any specific purpose. It’s up to somebody to interpret it any way that they want. But the majority of people take it to mean saying ‘hello’ or nudging somebody for attention.

With the woman who was arrested for the poke, there’s obviously reasons why it happened. She was violating a protection order for one thing - sure it was just an online nudge, but there’s no real difference from calling her up and not saying anything on the phone.

The victim obviously didn’t want attention from the poker, and if you think about it this could be taken to mean something far more sinister - poking, jabbing, knifing?

It is interesting about how social networks are rising up as a form of communication ahead of things like the telephone and email, and is also interesting when it comes to thinking about online privacy, which I have been looking at closely in the last few months.

It was a big day for the FBI as it announced that it had charged 100 people over what FBI director Robert S. Mueller has called the ‘the largest international phishing case ever conducted’.

The criminal gang was successful in getting hundreds, if not thousands of people  to give up the personal information to be used in a million dollar banking fraud.

Yet in a speech in San Francisco yesterday, FBI director Robert S. Mueller revealed that he was almost a victim of a phishing attack.

He said: “Not long ago, the head of one of our nation’s domestic agencies received an email purporting to be from his bank.

“It looked perfectly legitimate, and asked him to verify some information. He started to follow the instructions, and then realised that this might not be a good idea.

“It turned out that he was just a few clicks away from falling into a classic internet ‘phishing’ scam - phishing with a PH. This is someone who spends a good deal of his professional life warning about the perils of cyber crime. Yet he barely caught himself in time.

“He should definitely have known better. I can say this with certainty, because it was me.”

Spotify will allows users to download music for free on PCs, with an offline mode that will allow them to sync songs on to their computer.

Already available on the iPhone but only available to premium subscribers, subscribers are now able to select playlists and set them to be ‘available online’.

The playlists will be synced to the user’s computer so they can listen to music with slow connections, or if they have no connection.

Each computer will be able to store up to 3,333 tracks at a time.

Will this kick-start the paid-for Spotify revolution?

I previously reported on how Microsoft got angry with Google over the creation of the Google Chrome Frame plug-in, which it accused of being a security risk.

At the time Microsoft called the plug-in a ‘a risk that it would not recommend our friends and families take’, while Google hit back saying it was a way to bring Google Chrome’s security features into the Internet Explorer browser.

Now Mozilla vice president Mike Shaver has put his two cents in, by claiming the plug in doesn’t really help in the aim of Internet Explorer developers having the capabilities that they have in the other browsers.

He said: “Running Chrome Frame within IE makes many of the browser application’s features non-functional, or less effective. These include private browsing mode or their other security controls, features like accelerators or add-ons that operate on the content area, or even accessibility support.”

Shaver said that the user’s understanding of the web security model and their browser behaviour is seriously hindered by “delegating the choice of software to the developers of individual sites they visit.”

He’s seen the problem with plug-ins like Flash, Silverlight and Java and did not want it to be repeated under the “HTML 5 banner”.

He says: “It would be better for the web developers who want to use the Chrome Frame snippet simply told users that their site worked better in Chrome, and instructed them on how to install it.”

“The user would be educated about the benefits of an alternate browser, would understand better the choice they were making, and the kudos for Chrome’s performance would accrue to Google rather than Microsoft,” he added.