I’ve been all over the Johnny Depp is NOT dead story this weekend like a nasty rash. Seriously, how this could have spread quite so quickly is beyond me. It has run broad as well as deep, which is unusual for a Twitter hoax. However, it does serve to demonstrate not only how important Twitter is becoming as a breaking news source but also how badly things can go wrong if you treat Twitter Trending Topics as gospel instead of Chinese Whispers.

It only took me a few minutes of Googling to dig up the fact that the supposed car crash was actually an old hoax resurrected from 2004, and it wasn’t a very good one back then to be honest. The lazy hoaxer just pasted an image over an existing CNN news story page but couldn’t be arsed to remove the original text. So one minute it was talking about Depp in an alcohol fuelled death crash and the next about some British Navy types having a lucky escape from a caving accident. Sigh.

Sure, I had the advantage of being an online news guy so am blessed with one of those ‘I’ve heard that somewhere before’ kind of memories which comes with the territory. So when my wife woke me up and was all “the man I love is dead” on my ass I knew it was a hoax. Obviously I also knew my marriage was not, perhaps, as secure as I had thought but that’s another story.

What else I knew, once I’d done my investigating and written it up in the forlorn hope it might help stem the tide of misinformed tweets (it didn’t) was that it wouldn’t be long before the RIP Johnny Depp malware hit the web. Another forlorn hope that a security journalist warning the public to be alert might stop link clicking idiots doing just that. Still, the news stories went out yesterday.

Today the inevitable has happened and Graham Cluley over at Sophos has the video evidence of malware scammers using the web to direct people expecting to find video footage and news of the Johnny Depp death crash to something even nastier. Part of me wants to say that look, if you are searching for video footage of a celebrity perishing in a car crash then you deserve everything the malware scumbags throw at you. But then again, I’ve seen how devoted Depp fans react to the news that their idol may be dead (waves at wife across the office) and know that logic can often be thrown out of the window in an attempt to get at the truth.

To save you the trouble, here is the truth:

Depp did not die in a car crash in 2004 or 2010 and there is no video footage as a result.

Twitter should not be treated like News at Ten, but more as a load of people down the pub - and you wouldn’t necessarily believe Bob at eleven when he tells you that Gordon Brown has resigned over a sex scandal and he knows it is true because Fred told him and he heard it from the barman. Would you?

Some might argue that a Swiss Army Knife is difficult enough to get into as it is, especially if you have little fat fingers like me. I have trouble opening the thing to get stuff out of horses hooves, for example, but luckily have never found myself in urgent need of this particular tool. Now Victorinox has added another tool to certain Swiss Army Knife models and is boasting about how difficult it is to open, in fact it recently offered a reward of $100,000 to anyone who could open it and the reward went unclaimed.

Just WTF am I going on about this time, you might be wondering although grateful that I’ve dropped the Swiss Cheese talk by now, so let me explain. The tool in question is a USB data drive and the reason it cannot be opened, at least by those not meant to open it, would be the Elliptical Curve and AES encryption that is employed to keep it shut. At CES in Las Vegas, Victorinox threw down a challenge and was so confident that nobody would be able to crack the encryption that it offered that $100K prize to anyone who did. It wasn’t at all surprised that the money went untouched, nor was it concerned about the adverse publicity if it had been. Apparently this Swiss Army Knife also comes with a self-destruct mechanism that would have detected the tampering and destroyed all the data anyway.

Andy Cordial, managing director of the storage systems integration specialist Origin Storage reckons the $100K reward was just the tip of the financial iceberg if anyone had managed the cracking in the couple of hours allotted to each entrant. “If a hacker manages to crack 128-bit AES technology” he says “governments would pay a lot more than $100,000 for the secret”.

Not, as I have said before, that cracked encryption is always a bad thing but in this case I’m glad that the Swiss Army Knife retained that hard earned reputation for being a great tool that’s hard to get into.

It used to be the case that the word ‘hijack’ immediately drummed up visions of terrorists and airplanes, special service soldiers storming in with machine guns blazing. That sort of thing. The truth today is a lot less exciting, but still rather dangerous. When I hear the word hijack I think of spam.

Either of the sort that scumbags use when latching on to the important story of the day, and hijack that news to spread spam and malware such as has been doing the rounds most recently with the Haiti earthquake.

Alternatively, and proving to be even more problematical, is spam that contains a hijacked IP. Symantec warns that this kind of hijacked spam which is also known as ‘dotted quad’ has risen significantly in the last month.

Indeed, one December attack alone on Christmas Eve at 2pm apparently resulted in a quarter of the world’s spam containing hijacked IPs. Blimey! Symantec reports that this type of spam has increased three fold when compared to rates during November 2009.

This shouldn’t be a problem, to be honest, but unfortunately while the online world continues to be populated by link clicking idiots it will be.

OK, I admit that it doesn’t have quite the same immediate appeal as a fat man eating more sausage rolls in a minute than I could manage in a month, or a bunch of lithe students squeezing into a very small car. However, as record breakers go it’s still a pretty interesting one if you are a network tech professional.

Huawei informs me that it has set a new data record for a downlink dual carrier test for Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution (EDGE) of 564Kb/s. To put that in some kind of sausage roll eating perspective, 564Kb/s is twice as fast as existing EDGE networks and could mean that 2G users could soon see 3G services such as live video over their GSM networks.

The Huawei EDGE+ technology has, I am informed, been able to lower network latency at the same time as increasing data rates and delivering improved quality of service. What does that mean? well, it means that it becomes possible for mobile phones to receive real-time streaming media from the Internet with lower latency. Nice. The fact that network operators are able to migrate from EDGE to EDGE+ by way of relatively straightforward, and therefore very cost effective, software updates is also worthy of note. What does that mean? Well, that means the costs to the user are unlikely to be prohibitive. Nicer!

There’s no mention of how networks will cope with the increased demand that such services would bring, of course. I suspect not very well if the built-for-purpose ones such as the O2 3G network can fail so spectacularly with delivering iPhone data traffic for example.

Huawei spokesperson He Gang says “this milestone demonstrates Huawei’s continued commitment towards driving GSM evolution, the world’s most widely deployed technical standard with the largest mobile subscriber base. Huawei’s advanced EDGE+ technology enhances flexibility for operators building their 3G networks and provides a seamless high-speed data service experience”.

We have already been looking forward to the Nexus Two here at IT Pro, but it seems that the Nexus One hasn’t actually done as well as the Google publicity machine would have us believe.

Despite all the hype and the almost Apple-alike media circus that followed the launch of the Nexus One, sales have not exactly set the world on fire. As Vodafone reports that it delivered an impressive 50,000 iPhones to customers on the first day of sale here in the UK, so we can reveal that market analysts are claiming Google could only shift an estimated 20,000 Nexus One units in the first week.

OK, I appreciate that this is not apples and apples being compared here, if you’ll excuses the pun, but the argumental swing is surely in favour of Google on this occasion. After all, the iPhone is nothing new, and has been available in the UK for an absolute age. All that is new here is that someone other than O2 is selling it. For Vodafone to shift 50,000 units into an already pretty well saturated market in just 24 hours is nothing short of miraculous.

For Google, on the other hand, to launch what was widely expected to be an iPhone killer into an eager market of early tech adopters keen to get their hands on the first ever real Google phone and then only shift 20,000 units in a whole week is dire. In fact it is more than dire, it is a bloody big FAIL.

Flurry, the market analyst making the sales figure claims on the back of monitoring Android app usage, blames a lack of true wow factor as well as the distribution/marketing model. “Google chose to market and sell the device to consumers directly through its own website” Flurry explains, concluding “while this distribution strategy is among the most innovative facets of the Nexus One launch, and a threat to carrier control of the consumer relationship, a series of customer service and other mistakes reveal Google’s lack of retail experience”.

Google has yet to confirm or deny the sales figures.

Eye catching headlines are everything in the world of blogging just as they are in marketing. So imagine my joy when I spotted a press release proclaiming “Online condom sales rise despite stiff competition from retailers”.

It hits so many buttons that it could almost be used as a training aid for online marketers, no matter what line of business you happen to be in. Everyone looks twice when some harmless sexual innuendo is concerned, many look again when that innuendo is actually done intelligently and without causing any obvious offence. I say obvious, as some people will find that offence in pretty much anything to be fair.

But what struck me most about this particular headline was the accuracy as it summed up the fact that online sales of condoms had increased compared to the same period last year, and in the face of aggressive offline retailer promotions.

So well done to the Yorkshire based marketing company behind the campaign, VAC Media, which gets my best press release headline of the year award for 2010. I know it is early days yet, but you know I just cannot see anyone bettering that, can you?

We’ve had the battle of the apps and now it’s the battle of the handset. But after all the hype, it has not been the greatest start for Google and the Nexus One phone - maybe we should be looking forward to the Nexus Two and all that might bring with it?

After all there has been the family of the late author Philip K. Dick apparently talking about suing Goggle for intellectual property infringement over the use of the name Nexus. Dick wrote the book ‘Do Androids’s Dream of Electric Sheep’ upon which the film Bladerunner was based, Any self-respecting geek will know that the replicants in the novel are Nexus 6 model androids. What with the Google Android OS and all, the link seems somewhat coincidental despite claiming it was used in the generic and original sense of the place where things converge. I doubt that Google will have much trouble in making any legal action go away, to be honest. However, it may have more trouble making some of the bad feeling of early adopters vanish.

It would appear that Google is learning the hard way that there is quite a difference between being a new media giant and a mobile phone supplier. Reports are coming in of forums being flooded with unhappy customers looking for support, and unfortunately often finding it. Unlike mobile operators which are well geared up to dealing with customer complaints and queries, Google is discovering that it just doesn’t have the kind of support setup that is required when selling this kind of hardware direct to the public. People are, it seems, unhappy about the email only support especially when it can take between one and two days to reply. People are also unhappy about the confusion over support when they approach their mobile network operator or the handset manufacturer, HTC, which seem to be playing a game of support switcheroo - referring customers to each other for help which isn’t forthcoming.

But some Americans are now getting a little hot under the unhappy collar because it has been rumoured that the European version of the Nexus One will be getting the multitouch support that has been much requested, and much moaned about in its absence. A reviewer in Germany is said to have been given a review model with just such support, in the form of iPhone-alike pinch-zooming, and even though this has been denied by Google on one Google Mobile help page it does point towards what we can expect to see in the Nexus Two.

Indeed, the Next Generation Nexus could also look to take on more than the iPhone if some reports are to be believed. Techwhack suggests that the Nexus Two could be aimed at taking on the Blackberry market by being enterprise ready and even come complete with a physical keyboard to replace the rather criticised virtual version found on the Nexus One.

Whatever shape and form the Nexus Two does take, I would suggest it needs to be a significant step up and offer something much more innovative that the Nexus One which has, to be honest, turned out to be just another Android from HTC albeit one carrying a Google logo on the back. Think of this as being just the first step towards speeding up Android hardware adoption, getting the Google branding out there in the mobile handset market. The Nexus One is no iPhone killer in any shape or form, but given the success in terms of both sales and media coverage I imagine that the Nexus Two and Nexus Three will arrive in fairly quick succession and Google will, as always, learn from its mistakes.

The big question is, of course, what would you like to see in terms of truly innovative functionality for the Nexus Two that might encourage you to actually buy one.

Online news sites rely heavily on incoming traffic from search engines and aggregator sites to attract visitors, so it might seem a little odd that Rupert Murdoch (a mogul in denial) would decide that these are bad for business. Yet that is exactly what appears to have happened in the case of Times Online which has banned leading UK news aggregator service NewsNow from linking to any content it publishes.

The blocking itself would appear to be a simple robots.txt protocol implementation, but the reasoning behind the action is a little more complex. After all, it is not as if NewsNow is scraping content or stealing stories to publish as its own for profit. All NewsNow does, in this case, is grab the headline of the story and link to it. Those links are then presented to anyone, for free, who visits the NewsNow site.

For one thing, such linking is a recognised and effective way to drive traffic to the publishing sites. here at IT Pro our stories, including this one, get linked to by NewsNow and if they are popular enough to get featured in the top ten section, for example, the additional traffic driven in this direction can be quite substantial. To prevent this linking would be the equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I’m also rather concerned that to prevent such linking is actually eroding a rather important freedom that, as a journalist, I do not want to see damaged in any way: the freedom to quote sources in stories, to link to those sources in stories and to comment upon the views of others reporting the news. This action by Murdoch smells bad to me, it stinks of an attempt to further restrict the rights of those reporting the news. Of course, the fact that Times Online journalists quote other stories, and link to them, cannot have escaped the irony detectors of everyone outside of the News International family.

According to a statement from NewsNow Managing Director Struan Bartlett, two million visitors to the NewsNow site each month will now no longer find headlines and links to Times Online content in their news search results. “It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out” Bartlett says, adding “we note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”

Good question, and one can only assume it is in order to test the waters on a relative small fry before tackling the big fish which have some seriously heavyweight legal resources to draw upon. NewsNow had already pulled links to newspaper websites which were covered by the Newspaper Licensing Agency from its subscription based service last month, after a change in policy required permissions to be sought and fees paid for circulating such links. That policy change has been, Bartlett says, to the Copyright Tribunal.

Oddly, News International was not involved in the NLA scheme but it has seemingly taken a similar stance albeit through this selective blocking process. As Bartlett concludes “the question remains whether News International, in arbitrarily blocking individual search engines, is trying to use its muscle to gain unreasonable control over the public’s freedom to choose the way they access information and news online”.

I’d be keen to hear what IT Pro readers think of this move, and in the meantime for more information you can visit the Right2Link campaign.