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The sharing (and selling) of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

Once they've made a movie about you, can you ever be you again?

Perhaps that depends on whether you were you in the first place. Or rather, whether the you that people saw had very much to do with the real human being that lived inside your body.

This has been the dilemma of Mark Zuckerberg for some time.

As his ambitions (and Facebook) got bigger and bigger, as his contempt for any norms of privacy exceeded those of your most nosy grandmother, he suddenly had to appear in the public eye.

Yes, the man who peddled sharing as … Read more

Facebook actually sorry for banning breastfeeding pic

Facebook's relationship with breastfeeding mothers has some Oedipal tinges.

It seems that ever since the site became populated by people who weren't university students desperate to find a warm body, Facebook has shivered at the site of anything that resembled a naked breast.

Even when it was actually an elbow.

Though breastfeeding mothers have always railed against Facebook's anti-breast policies, the company has always claimed that it is a medium, and therefore abides by the same standards as other media.

This is odd, because at the launch of Facebook Home, Mark Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook was actually … Read more

EA the worst company in America? Again?

It's that time of the year again.

The one where companies vie to be worse than Comcast.

That used to be the plot, at least, to the point at which Comcast tried to get its own staff to help prevent it winning the Consumerist's Worst Company in America award.

Last year, though, Electronic Arts walked off with the prize, and this year things aren't looking too good.

It's already in the Final Four, where it must face the might of Ticketmaster. So EA's COO, Peter Moore, thought it best not to attempt ballot stuffing.

Instead, … Read more

The new Facebook Home ad, complete with drag queen

The lovely thing about Facebook Home is that it allows Facebook to follow you, everywhere you go. You've always wanted that, haven't you?

You've always wanted Facebook to follow you onto your flight to Chicago, for example. Yes, even when you're flying coach.

So here's the launch TV spot for Facebook's new app-less Windows Phone-inspired creation.

A very nice-looking man is on a plane and he wants one last look at everything that's happening to and with his closest humans, before the airplane doors shut and the flight attendants start being passionately rude. … Read more

Google's Brin in a pink Batmobile, wearing Google Glass

When you work at one of the world's most successful -- and occasionally silliest -- companies, it's hard to create wonderful April Fool's pranks.

After all, you're supposed to contribute your best ideas to the company, so that they might be selected as one of the 15 or so that are used to fool the world on April 1.

It's astonishing that any Googlies have time left over for personal japes. You know, like punking the boss, for example.

And yet, evidence has emerged that members of the Google(x) team -- which I believe … Read more

Microsoft: Facebook Home? Wait, that's Windows Phone

You may have been one of those who felt enthralled and delighted at Mark Zuckerberg's launch of Facebook Home yesterday.

You also may have felt appalled and slighted. Especially if you worked at Microsoft in 2011.

The morning after the morning before, Microsoft's forthright head of PR, Frank X. Shaw, offered words to suggest he'd have liked to X-out most of Zuckerberg's wide-eyed unveiling.

On the company's own blog, he wrote: "I tuned into the coverage of the Facebook Home event yesterday and actually had to check my calendar a few times. Not to … Read more

Rush Limbaugh: iPad great tool in fighting global warming 'hoax'

If you're 13 years old, live in Wilmington, Ind., and it's cold outside, it surely makes you wonder about this global warming thing.

How can there be global warming when your personal globe is freezing?

How can you find out whether all this scientific mumbo-jumbo is just a giant gumbo of mumbling nonsense?

You do it the old-fashioned way: You go to the library.

Once you've found the evidence, you call Rush Limbaugh and tell him. This is extreme wisdom, as Limbaugh has -- at least in the past -- been very skillful at raising issues and … Read more

NFL star tweets North Korea should bomb New England

North Korea appears currently to be banging the (conun)drum for world instability.

Its apparent enmity to all things American has recently been pierced by such luminaries as Google's Eric Schmidt and the slightly noodly Dennis Rodman.

You might be tickled or troubled by the fact that today, North Korea's Twitter and Flickr accounts were mercilessly invaded by Anonymous.

My emotions, on the other hand, have been moved by the fact that an NFL star is encouraging Kim Jong-un's missiles to be targeted at New England.

There is no known additional antipathy on behalf of North Korea'… Read more

Google's engineers aren't the highest paid (but make more than Apple's)

It's in the nature of humanity to keep up with the Jones family.

It's in the nature of capitalist humanity to get ahead of the Jones family so that the Jones family looks askance and defeated.

With this in mind, I have accidentally landed upon a survey which purports to reveal which software engineers are the highest paid.

I thank Business Insider for poring over the figures collated by Glassdoor, figures that might surprise some.

I had imagined, along with most of the world, that Google's engineers were the very best and therefore the highest paid.

These … Read more

Could this yellow blinking eye be Zuckerberg's first Web site?

Some religions worship relics.

Bones of saints and artifacts of old emerge seemingly from nowhere, with no one ever truly knowing how real they might be.

I therefore bare my skepticism with moves not dissimilar to those in a Haka dance on hearing that Mark Zuckerberg's first ever Web site might have been unearthed.

My inconsistent reading of Motherboard today offered the startling information that Zuckerberg's first site might have included a blinking yellow dinosaur eye.

It seems that someone posted to Hacker News that the Facebook CEO's first masterwork was still available on Angelfire.

It's … Read more