Some press releases are so simply, staggeringly indescribable, we print them without comment. These are most often related to corporate makeovers or rebranding exercises, which is quite appropriate in this case.

We’ve tried to be faithful to the original’s unique typographical qualities where possible.

And we’d better warn you: there’s a lot of SHOUTING at the start, and odd emphasis throughout – but that’s very much its charm.

So sit tight – and here goes:

“eBay looks less fearsome when you’re upside down,” says the young CEO behind the online auction house’s great Chinese rival Jack Ma. To encourage new hires at his Alibaba.com, Ma asks them to perform handstands. Maybe that won’t be necessary for much longer, as eBay is a lot less fearsome – and a lot poorer – after splurging $2.6bn on Skype (and $4bn in total if Skype hits the numbers).

Couldn’t eBay have done something more sensible with $4 billion – like give the money back to its shareholders – or to the Katrina relief fund?

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A Microsoft employee has won the Oscar of bad prose – and no, he isn’t even a weblogger.

Every year the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest honors the best attempts to parody bad fiction. It’s judged by Professor Scott Rice at San Jose State University in California, and is now in its 22nd year.

It’s an impressive achievement, as the bar has been pushed ever higher over the years. For example, it’s hard to imagine anyone topping 2002′s winning submission from Rephah Berg:

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

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The return of the irony tag

After ten years of the net, few amongst us have yet to realize that computer networks can be a lousy communication medium. Against all the good things that we’ve gained – such as the disappearance of physical distance, traversed by very slow moving postal workers – we must stack up the losses. And top of that list is the fact that most of the delicious ambiguities of language that we enjoy in everyday life simply aren’t conveyed online.

While today’s hive-minded tech evangelists view their digital exchanges as a kind of telepathy, it’s more like a stuttering Morse Code tapped out on a keyboard where the dash key isn’t working.

So all kinds of hilarious misunderstandings ensue. Factor in the frightful earnestness and literalism of some participants, who seem to be disproportionately represented online, and huge swathes of meaning are guaranteed to go undetected.

This is one of our favorite examples.
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MIT has taken the unfriendly computer interface to its natural conclusion: and created a computer that runs away from you.

We’ve all had experiences with user interface elements that run away from us: toolbars in Windows, or the drive icons on the Mac OS X desktop, for example. But “Clocky” goes all the way – it’s an alarm clock that has wheels. If you hit the snooze button, “Clocky” rolls away and hides. To make life doubly difficult, it will try and hide in a new place every day. And if you live in a 1970s sitcom, it poses a third challenge. Since it’s covered in thick brown nylon shagpile carpet, Clocky might never be found. For now, it’s simply described as an “academic” exercise, but a fully-blown fugitive PC can’t be too far away.

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A year ago Intel demonstrated a small contraption that allows people to talk to each other – even if they’re not in the same room, without using wires or string. At the time we saw no possible use for such a device. Dogs, as we know, love fetching sticks – but this seemed to be much too fragile for robust outdoor activity. Intel called this the portable ‘tele-phone’.

But now we must mend our ways, shift our gears, and adjust our paradigms once again – for the concept has received a powerful endorsement from one of the dot.com era’s most lauded “thinkers”.
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What a night out that was. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time…

On Friday morning CNET woke up to find it was sharing a bed with MP3.com, and couldn’t quite recollect how the pair of them had got there. We’ve all had nights like this, but yesterday CNET staffers were puzzling over how the mothership found itself tweaked into an improbable and very hastily arranged relationship between two hugely unlikely partners, both apparently lured to sin by the glamor of latest Silicon Valley goldrush: copy-protected music downloads.

Some poor, unwitting business development executive at CNET must be rubbing his forehead this morning, asking himself “what did I do?”

CNET has decided to buy some “specific assets” of the company that Michael Robertson founded in 1998 with the intention of forming a marketplace for the exchange of music. CNET won’t inherit the sprawling archive of music that has accreted there, however. MP3.com has never been less than a mess, but it does represent a hefty social archive. And at some point (and we shall endeavour to find out who, and where) two drunken business executives decided to flush the chain on the whole lot, and strike a deal. CNET has acquired the mp3.com domain name, to add to its existing treasures, such as “com.com” and – stop laughing, you folks – “news.com”. The music archive, however, gets it in the neck.

Musicians received this announcement on Friday.

“Your personal information, music, images, related content or other information will not be transferred to CNET Networks, Inc. or any other third party… Please note, however, that promptly following the removal of the MP3.com website, all content will be deleted from our servers and all previously submitted tapes, CD-ROMs and other media in our possession will be destroyed. We recommend that you make alternative content hosting arrangements as soon as practicable.”

A verbose way of saying, “piss off”…

“It has been a privilege to host one of the largest and most diverse collections of music in the world. MP3.com wishes to express its sincere thanks to each of you for making our website an important part of your musical journey. We wish you continued success.”

… and, goodbye.

Whoops Acquisition

Not since the Great Leap Forward has there been such a destruction of the commons. Back then, for political reasons, millions of books were burned. Now, for very sensible commercial reasons that we must not question, millions of MP3s will be lost to the commons. You have precisely seventeen days to grab the good stuff (and, Steb Sly – we hope you have a backup)

Punters and musicians alike will have until December 2 to retrieve the goods. After that, the future isn’t too difficult to predict.

CNET will follow Wal-Mart, Real Inc. and Apple Computer into the DRM business, infecting as many computers as they can with restrictive software controls that close what for a brief period has been an open computer platform. They all hope that this tentative business model, the terms of which are set by the entertainment “industry”, will somehow turn them a profit. Or at least give the illusion of doing so, until a better idea comes along.

One such idea is the tremendously popular notion of ‘compulsory licenses’ – a flat rate fee to be levied by some rich nitwit, somewhere (as a society we can choose who and where at our leisure) – but which potentially provides us with free music private sharing and a way of ensuring the creators are recompensed. It’s handicapped with a Stalinist name, right now, but even the libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation has thrown its weight behind the idea.

And with this war of the ideas imminent, we expect no less than to see some creative disclaimers appear at the end of CNET news stories. Back when Intel invested in the advertiser-friendly portal, CNET used to run disclaimers detailing INTC’s stake (six per cent, if you must know).

Can we expect to see a news stories about music downloads tagged with similar conflict-of-interest disclaimers? There’s something indecent about this prospect and we hope Register readers can formulate it more stylishly and succulently than we can.

Meanwhile, CNET’s acquisition of the mp3.com domain leaves it with all sorts of delicious headaches, best encapsulated by the great American one-man band Hasil Adkins – familiar to you Cramps fans – who pondered:

I went out last night
And I got hitched up
When I woke up this morning
Shoulda seen what I had in the bed with me.

Google’s News service is remarkable: and the most astonishing thing about it is that it is generated automatically.

” The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program,” says a note at the foot of each page.

But why stop there? Why not use Perl scripts to generate the copy, too? You don’t need messy human wetware – foul drunken journalists – and it’s much more of an “end-to-end” solution, whatever that may be. It could revolutionize the industry, because once you’ve done away with journalists, there’s no need to employ expensive PRs to buy them drinks (or in Apple’s case, “decline to comment”.)

We’ve been secretly testing our own story generator, and here we shall reveal exactly how it works. Google keeps its algorithms and weighting secret – but we’re delighted to share them with the world. But be patient: it’s a work in progress.
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The physics establishment appears to be unable to decide whether papers submitted by two former French TV presenters are a scientific breakthrough or an elaborate hoax. The debunking to date has been done on Usenet groups and informally, over the Internet.

The pranksters evaded the rigorous peer review process employed by scientific journals, and have succeeded in publishing four physics papers. The pair even won themselves PhDs into the bargain.

Grichka and Igor Bogdanov succeeded in having Topological field theory of the initial singularity of spacetime published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity 18, Spacetime Metric and the KMS Condition at the Planck Scale in the Annals of Physics, and a Russian journal, and Igor – this time flying solo – persuaded the Czechoslovak Journal of Physics to publish the Topological origin of inertia.

But curiously, so arcane and abstract is the world of theoretical physics, that the work has yet to be repudiated.

Usenet posters describe the papers as “laughably incoherent”. A fascinating thread on Usenet begun by John Baez brought the hoax to light, and persistent questioning by Arkadiusz Jadczyk on his website has done much to expose the pair.

The Bogdanovs apparently foxed a New York Times reporter curious about the case, who after an angry denial from one of the hoaxers – denying that he was a hoaxer – dropped his investigation.

“Does no one have the courage of his convictions to stand up and declare an opinion one way or the other, or is it simply that no one has bothered to actually spend the time to acquire an informed opinion (i.e. more than just skimming the papers for a few choice sentences)?”, asks Kevin Scaldeferri from the California Institute of Technology.

So, the only respectable branch of physics in which the Bogdanov’s operate appears to be, umm … pataphysics.

The terrible, terrible conclusion some might draw from the episode is that string physics is no more a “science” than a social science. Several years ago physics professor Alan Sokhal hoaxed the cultural theories establishment with a delightful pastiche that suggested recent quantum theory work proved aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as he explained in his paper A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies:-

“While my method was satirical, my motivation is utterly serious. What concerns me is the proliferation, not just of nonsense and sloppy thinking per se, but of a particular kind of nonsense and sloppy thinking: one that denies the existence of objective realities, or (when challenged) admits their existence but downplays their practical relevance,” he wrote.

But if the establishment is so reluctant to expose the prank, is it the fault of hoaxers or the scientific method? The work of many of our most important scientists has been conducted in the margins, contrary to orthodox scientific opinion. Occam’s Razor is not only a wonderful thing for debunking junk science, but a terrific way to cut your own arms and legs off. And scientists must eat, so grant-funded research necessarily follows the orthodoxy.