The US military is in the process of developing software that will enable them to create fake online personas to sway online conversations via social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. 

 

This according to the Guardian who reports that a Californian company, Ntrepid, has been awarded the contract to create this “online persona management service”. Although it is currently possible for anyone to create a fake Facebook or Twitter account, the American military is after a package that will help soldiers control up to 10 different identities based all over the world.

 

These fake online personas, referred to as sock puppets, will look to respond and disrupt foreign language conversation with “co-ordinated Facebook messages, blogposts, tweets, retweets, chatroom posts and other interventions.”

 

The Guardian did not report whether the US military will be recruiting well-known Nigerian 419-scammers to help with the project.

 

 

Just like The Times in the UK, The New York Times is planning to introduce a paywall to their website. People reading 20 articles or less per month should still be able to do so for free, but more frequent users will have to dosh up $15 for a four-week period, for information they were privy to for free in the past. Visits to the website generated from Facebook, Twitter and Google will not count towards the 20 articles limit, although only five visits a day from Google will be allowed. That said, The Times estimates that 85% of its readers will not cross the 20 article limit.  

 

The move will come into effect on March 28, a day we’re sure that The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal will look forward to.

 

 

 

The world’s first computer virus turned 40 this week. According to PhysOrg.com the Creeper virus was created in 1971 with the nasty symptom of displaying the message "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" on infected machines. This experimental program was written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies and made its contained appearance on ARPANET, the network that eventually gave birth to the internet. The Reaper program was created to do the “catching”, effectively giving birth to anti-virus software.

 

From the Creeper’s humble creation we’ve seen viruses (and anti-virus packages) rise at an incredible rate, with more than 200 million computer viruses currently floating around on the world wide web.

 

 

 

Western Digital has effectively created the world’s first six terabyte external hard drive. Built for “creative pros” who work with large HD video and photo files, the My Book Studio Edition II dual-drive basically combines two 3 TB disks and comes with quicker data transfer via FireWire800 and eSATA ports, but it shows no love for Intel’s lightning fast Thunderbolt technology nor USB 3.0. It’s available through Western Digital’s online site, with no local release dates or prices known.

 

 

 

Nokia might have gone with Windows Mobile on their future mobile devices, but it does not mean that they’ve stopped innovating for the Symbian platform. The Shoot and Tag application, currently released as a beta version, helps to make it dead easy to find footage on video recordings. It automatically creates a different chapter when the software detects that you’re recording a new scene. Shoot and Tag displays the different chapters in playback, meaning you can quickly find the correct moment you want your pals to see, instead of them having to wait through minutes’ worth of that badly recorded concert footage.

 

Nokia users can download it from Nokia Beta Labs here, while a video follows of this innovated technology.