On the Internet, Bill Gates would like to give you some money, the LHC will create a black hole that will swallow the Earth, and Vernon Kay died in a tragic yachting accident. On the Internet, Russian women are ready and willing to fly to your nearest airport and marry you, and you can increase the size of your penis exponentially if you just hand over your credit card details.

On the Internet, you can write pretty much anything you want. The Internet hands everyone a way to say anything that enters their heads: it takes mere seconds to sign up for a blog, join a forum, create a website, or edit a Wikipedia page. And you don’t have to do any of that with your real name, so you can claim all kinds of expert knowledge or insider information that you don’t really have. Of course, not everything written online is ever read by anyone, let alone by many people - but some things are, and with all that data flying around it’s often difficult to separate truth from fiction.

I remember when I first read about Heath Ledger’s death. I thought it was a prank - enough other celebrities have been the victims of hoaxes claiming that they’ve died that it just seemed really, really unlikely. I apply that same level of cynicism to most things I read online: if something doesn’t seem to be true, I’ll check before believing it. But even so, sometimes a rumour can be picked up and reported as truth in many, many places before anyone corrects it. So how do you check?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee this week suggested that there needed to be a system of rating websites on their trustworthiness. Sounds great in principle, until you start thinking about the logistics of such a project, and even Berners-Lee acknowledges that it would be problematic to implement. Or even impossible. After all, who would you appoint to designate sites reliable or dubious? How much of the web would need to be labelled - and how long would it take to get them all tagged up? Anything with any kind of user-generated aspect would instantly have to be labelled untrustworthy, but then surely that’s where a lot of useful and valuable information comes from in the first place?

Urgh. As full of inaccurate information and outright lies as the Internet is, I think the best solution will just be to use common sense - and a healthy dollop of scepticism.

A Gartner report - which has been picked up by various news outlets - reckons that the computer mouse’s days are numbered. Apparently, the fact that we’re all into new kinds of human-computer interfaces means that we’ll be getting rid of our mice within three to five years. Instead, we’ll all be using motion sensors (like the Nintendo Wiimote) or touchscreens (like the one in Apple’s iPhone) or even devices designed to interpret facial expressions and eye movements. But I have my doubts about this. I don’t think we’re ready to give up our mice just yet - or at least, I don’t think I am.

If you’ve got a laptop, do you use the built-in touchpad for mouse functions? Or, like me, do you just plug in a mouse and use that instead? I’m used to mice; using one is intuitive now, though I’ve re-taught myself to use various designs of trackball mice over the years before eventually reverting back to the tried-and-trusted model. (Though admittedly I have a rather nice ergonomic laser one, which is miles better than the ancient ones I learned to use at school, which had balls in the bottom that kids would routinely steal. That wasn’t just my school, was it?)

Obviously, innovation is great, and I love playing with all the new sci-fi-esque interfaces that seem to get invented on a daily basis, but I don’t think three to five years is long enough for us to change the way we use computers.

Cue an embarrassed blog post in 2011 when we’re all wiggling our fingers at sensors and blinking to scroll down..!

I was all set to write a blog post this morning… and then, in the course of my catching up with the Internet, noticed that Mike Skuse had pretty much done it for me. Actually, I’ve written about something similar before too, but I’m going to add another post to the pile anyway. Last week, I took some time off work - and banned myself from my laptop as well. I set up away messages on Facebook, in my Gmail account and in my work e-mail account, letting people know that if they needed me, they could call my mobile but that I wouldn’t be checking any online messages at all. Then I powered down my laptop, closed the lid, and left it alone.

I did consider locking it in the back of my wardrobe or something, just to put the temptation well and truly away, but didn’t bother in the end. Which is probably why I ended up cheating a couple of times.

Monday felt really odd. Usually, getting up and eating breakfast sitting at my desk is part of my morning routine, but Internet access was banned, so instead of switching on the computer I switched on the TV and watched the news. I had planned to walk into town or do some exploring (shamefully, since I moved house in March I really haven’t explored enough of the local countryside) but the weather had other ideas, so I spent most of Monday curled up on my sofa reading a book with obnoxious pop music playing in the background and rain battering against the windows. Which isn’t all that far away from my idea of the perfect day, actually.

By Tuesday, I’d more or less acquired the knack of not sitting at a computer all day, and since the sun was shining I went out and explored. Wednesday was another rainy day, but I was better prepared this time and spent the day baking cupcakes, and on Thursday… well, I did some backsliding. My boyfriend called from Euston to say that all the trains were cancelled, and I wanted to find an alternate way for him to get home, which naturally meant hopping onto Google. I’m not proud - but how on Earth did people cope before there was Google, anyway?

While I was online, I took the opportunity to clear the 500-odd post backlog on my RSS reader, and to read/delete the 50 e-mails sitting in my inbox. I spent about an hour on the computer before forcibly prying myself away and moving into the kitchen to cook, and then settling down with a book again.

Friday and the weekend were mostly taken up with social engagements, but I did let myself back on the computer to reply to e-mails and to clear my RSS feed again (er, and to look up a recipe. Oops). I didn’t check my work e-mail addresses, though, so this morning has involved yet more ploughing through - it’s odd, because I generally deal with e-mail as and when I recieve it, to see a week’s worth of mail all piled up like that. I use the Internet for absolutely bloody everything, from planning travel arrangements to keeping in touch with friends to planning shopping trips and finding recipes and playing games and generally keeping myself entertained and up to date with the world, and I’m not entirely sure that I even accomplished much in my week away from the ‘net, apart from lots and lots of cooking and ploughing through three novels, but somehow, it felt good to cut the strings for a little while, to liberate myself from the constantly-in-touch world and just … relax.

Still, it’s 11:24 right now and time for a nice big coffee, I think. Lots to do, lots to do…

I’m a great believer in complaining. If something’s not good enough, I’ll generally find a way to make a complaint and try to get it fixed. Working in journalism, I’m well aware that I’m not the only one: if there’s something in the magazine or on the website that people don’t like, I’ll hear about it via the forums, comments field, editorial e-mail address, or whathaveyou.

Somewhere along the line, though, I’d come to believe that making complaints online isn’t very effective; half-memories of e-mailing people about problems only to never, ever hear back until I got on the phone or sent in a physical letter bubbled away in the back of my mind, convincing me that there was no point in complaining electronically.

Until recently.

Obviously, the only time I had an opportunity to complain was when something was actually wrong, but since I’m plagued with preternaturally bad luck, that didn’t really hold me back.

My first e-mail complaint came about after I bought a food item from Sainsbury’s that, despite having been refridgerated carefully and being well within its use-by date, had gone off. Emphatically, stinkily off. Diligently noting down the tracking codes, purchase date, sell-by date, and everything else I thought might be relevant, I used the complaint form on Sainsbury’s website to fire off an account of my displeasure. I got an automated message back, and then, the very next morning, an e-mail from a human being apologising and asking for more details. Since I’d thrown out the offending item (well, would you fancy having rancid meat hanging around your kitchen?) I couldn’t give her the barcode number (… there’s a tip, there, for anyone else who might have cause to similarly complain) and so the incident couldn’t be investigated any further, but I was offered a Sainsbury’s voucher in compensation. It arrived in the post 2 days later. Bravo, Sainsbury’s!

My next complaint was slightly more trivial. I’d ordered some DVDs from Amazon, and when one of them arrived it was packaged, not in Amazon’s usual ultra-thick cardboard packing, but in a thin card envelope, bereft of any bubble-wrap. I actually, stupidly, thought it looked a lot tidier, and would be easier to recycle (plus the Amazon logo was far less apparent, making the package less obviously attractive to thieves), but once I opened it, quickly changed my mind, since the DVD box inside was broken. One end had completely shattered.

Buoyed by my success with Sainsbury’s, I headed to the Amazon website to have a moan, but discovered that Amazon’s complaints process was rather more streamlined than any others I’d come across - perhaps too streamlined, since all the complaint headers were pre-defined and there weren’t any that exactly fitted my problem. I’d received the item, it hadn’t gone missing, it wasn’t the wrong item, it wasn’t irredeemably broken (the DVD itself was fine) but I wanted to moan about the rubbish packaging and the broken box. I ended up using the wrong header, explaining thoroughly in the text of my complaint, and sending it anyway. Again, I got an automated acknowledgement of my e-mail, and then a real person the next day. I declined their offer of a replacement, mostly due to laziness and not wanting to send back the DVD that did, after all, work, so they refunded my postage costs instead. Hurrah!

Less recently, I had to complain to Play.com when they sent me the wrong item. That involved getting a complaint reference, sending back the wrong thing by recorded delivery, and then receiving a refund to my credit card and the correct item in the post the week after. In all three cases, I’ve found that response is quick - instantaneous, actually, since the auto-response is triggered first - and efficient, with customer service types happy to help. It’s actually nicer than having to return things to most bricks-and-mortar shops!

To balance out the relentless tide of negativity, I’ve been making an effort to also contact companies if they’ve done something especially worthy of praise - or, y’know, if I just really liked something they sell. This has been less successful, which is either weird or to be expected; after all, I’m not actually asking anyone to do anything, just e-mailing to say “hi, you’re ace, please keep doing what you do!” Of three e-mails, I received no response whatsoever to the first one (and that’s after I found the correct e-mail address, since the one on the product bounced back!); got a confused and confusing response to another, advising me to ask their in-store staff for help (um…); and got a lovely e-mail from the last, even if I did get the vague feeling they thought I was a bit mad for e-mailing them just to say I was especially happy with one of their products.

In summary, then - complaints via e-mail seem to work wonders, but if you’ve got compliments, might be best to deliver them in person.

It’s funny how far the Internet has come in the last few years. Web 2.0 is now practically old hat, so ubiquitous are its features, and most websites nowdays even seem to look the same, or at least conform to the same styles - clean lines, tabs, slickly integrated advertising and plenty of space for users’ comments (think Amazon’s latest makeover, for example). But while I was researching an article for Micro Mart this week, I came across several corners of the Internet I’d almost forgotten existed.

Like Usenet newsgroups, for one thing. Nowadays, they’re hosted by Google Groups (which has archives dating back to around 1981) so they’ve been slightly updated, but essentially, they’re still out there - and thriving. Since the advent of social networking and, actually, before that, the arrival of cheap and easy-to-use forum software, I’d imagined that newsgroups would have been abandoned; mere ghost-towns now, with tumbleweed whistling through them. But I was wrong. They’re alive and well.

Less alive and less well but nonetheless present and accessible are all sorts of ancient websites, built during the 1990s when services like Homestead, Angelfire and GeoCities let anyone and everyone create their own personal homepages. Imagine the absolute worst MySpace profile layout you’ve ever seen - it’s a delight compared to what most of these sites used to look like. (And I should know; I built several, and they were all embarrassingly terrible.) The templates provided by Homestead et al were pretty awful, but they were nothing compared with the monstrosities that people with the barest knowledge of HTML could come up with. The old adage of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing definitely applies here; we’re talking animated blinking gifs, pop-ups, frames, tinkling wav music files, hit counters and garish background images. The text usually came in colours specifically selected to hurt your eyes most when viewed against the patterned backgrounds, with line breaks in odd places and hyperlinks in yet another contrasting colour.

Shudder.

Say what you like about social media and user generated content, but at least the Internet looks nicer nowadays. And though some of the worst sartorial fashions of the last few decades seem to be making a comeback (neon legwarmers? Really?) we can at least be grateful that Facebook maintains its nice, calming blue template no matter what.

It makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it? In another 10 years, what will still be around, and what will we look back on and cringe?

(Edited: how did I manage to type “days” instead of “years”? Oops!)

Never one to drop a story before I’ve completely chewed the life out of it, I went to check on the Faceparty situation, and found a message from the administrator in my account. After some blather about a new webcam service, it says this:

“There have been rumours and press stories saying we are deleting everyone over 36. This is not true (as you should notice by browsing and seeing people over 36). Nobody has been deleted because of their age, but we have deleted 7 million accounts for hundreds of different reasons… most importantly to get all the spammers, fakers etc out. Our plan has been working really well, and we’ll soon be opening our doors again to those who got deleted by unavoidable accident.

If any of your friends were deleted by accident, you can apply to have them re-instated in the Gossip section, under the thread “Friend Deleted?”.

All for now,

*hugs*

Admin x”

While it’s true that there do still appear to be lots and lots of members over 36 on the site, that’s really not what Faceparty announced about its policies. Is this some rapid backtracking, then?

I’ve written in the past about the impossible demands people have been making of social networking sites, forcing them to somehow make sure that sex offenders and paedophiles can’t contact children on them, and I’ve always said I wasn’t sure how anyone could ever expect to enforce something like that.

Well, it looks like Faceparty has found a way:

In the last 2 months, Faceparty has been deleting a lot of profiles from the website. This has been due either to new legal requirements, violations of our terms of service, the non purchase of your account by the new company who is running Faceparty.com, or any of the following reasons. Information on refunds is also on this page. Please read this page in its entirety.

Over 36 years old?

New government legislation means we need to check older users on the sex offenders list. This legislation is based upon checking email addresses against a government provided list. Faceparty has never insisted on validated email addresses and can therefore not participate in this new scheme. Having discussed the use of our website with the home office and the police, and further some pretty serious crimes caused by older users, we were left with no option but to terminate a huge amount of accounts, and without notice, immediately. We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which - we can only delete all to make the site safe and we apologise for that. However, we are following the law and you cannot think we are wrong for doing that.

Um. Well, I think some people would think they’re wrong for doing that. This part of Faceparty’s announcement is interesting, too:

Unfortunately some of the creators of accounts who were deleted, of an older age group, have been creating new accounts with a younger age (which means that government legislation classifies them as a sex offender by lying about their age on the Internet, even though most who have done this may have done so with good intent and purely to be a part of a site they love and without any intent to manipulate younger users)

Really? Is that actually the law? Anyone know?

I’m baffled. Read their whole justification here.

Apparently, all you need to do to sell things in February - no matter what the product is - is make a pink version. There’s a pink Blackberry Pearl; a pink iPod Nano; a heart-shaped mouse (which, okay, isn’t pink, but it doesn’t look particularly easy to use, either)… the list goes on.

I’ve said before that I actually like the colour pink, but I’m suffering from Valentine’s Day fatigue already. The most mind-boggling thing I’ve come across thus far is the paired t-shirts, pictured above. Available from ThinkGeek.com, the shirts detect their proximity to one another - too far, and the “life force” is depleted, but get up close and personal and the heart bar refills itself.

Can’t quite work out the point of that one, I must say. Valentine’s Day is still two weeks away - it’ll be fun to see what other unromantic products try to give themselves a lovey dovey makeover…

A friend recently decreed that it’s only winter once you’ve heard Do They Know It’s Christmas being played somewhere. Helpfully, he also supplied a YouTube video featuring that very song, so I can safely say that, at least for me, it’s now officially winter, and also officially time to start worrying about Christmas.

And I’m won’t be the only one fretting about what to buy, and where to get it from. The BBC is currently reporting that there will be a shortage of Nintendo Wii consoles this Christmas. So if you, or your kids, have got one of those on the list, you might be out of luck - or, at least, paying over the odds to guarantee getting hold of one.

Another supposedly hot Christmas favourite, the Pleo robot dinosaur (very cute!) seems to have been withdrawn from the websites of most of the stores that were going to be stocking it, and it’s only just gone into production. It’ll be like the Furby all over again, except Pleo costs

Spending a weekend sitting in the dark at a horror movie festival should have been a welcome break from the world of technology, but sadly, mobile phones are totally inescapable now. If it’s not the guy sitting behind you hastily trying to figure out which pocket his phone is in so he can turn it off before it completely ruins the ambience, it’s the daft characters in yet another daft slasher movie complaining that, shockingly, they’ve got no signal out here in the bayou/backwoods/up a tree/in a swamp/in the middle of an Arctic Tundra.

There was actually a film on about what would happen if all the world’s electronics decided to transmit a signal that would send us all crazy. But I digress.

I was actually going to write a list of inventions I wish I had. Because I’m a grumpy old spoilsport. So here they are:

- A device to turn off someone else’s mobile phone - useful not only in cinemas but also on buses

- A device to turn down the sound in the cinema because Sam Rockwell is SHOUTING really LOUDLY again about ABSOLUTELY NOTHING because it’s not scary, but wow, is it LOUD

- A free-paper-giver-outter-repeller

- A non-stop caffeine dispenser that doesn’t break down when you need it most (cinema coffee machine: why must you forsake me?)

I’d also like a fast forward button for when movies really, really suck, but I think my fellow cinemagoers might have something to say about that.

So, the iPhone’s been hacked, huh?