Wires Crossed #127 – August 12
By Mike Wheeler
Catch Me If You Can – Ok Then…
Nobody likes a smartarse, least of all the police. Sam Greenwood found out the hard way after the Bury burglar taunted the police on his Facebook to “Catch me if you can”. A challenge that they took up and had immediate results. He was caught within hours, and not only admitted to the offences he was wanted on, but also confessed to another 32. Those confession cost him 10 months in prison, and a lesson that when on the run form the police, it’s not wise to taunt them publically on social networking sites.
Sick Of Bad Service? Try Twitter
When American woman Sharon Roberts was a little miffed at the treatment being dealt to her by health provider Aetna, she let them know how she felt via Twitter. What she wasn’t expecting was as quick response to her tweet by the insurance company. Not only did they tell her that she didn’t need a costly test that she was tweeting about, but that her hospital had overcharged her. Yet another example of how social media is slowly, but surely, meandering into our every day lives – and in this case, in a good way.
Nintendo Sues Pirates In Florida
Nintendo is suing the stupidly named HackYourConsole.com website alleging that those running the URL “blatantly promotes and sells unauthorized Nintendo games along with devices and services that circumvent the security in the Nintendo DS system and the Wii console.” Having not perused the site, we can’t comment on that or not. What we do know, is that if you name the site as these people have done, then you’re just asking for trouble. And trouble they have received.
Brin Gets Into the Fast Food Market
As well as creating arguably the biggest search engine the world, Google co-founder Sergey Brin likes dishing out money to cutting edge science projects that might benefit human kind. You might have read recently that scientists managed to ‘grow’ a beef pattie in a lab using muscle fibres from a cow’s stem cells. It turns out that it was Brin who provided the finance for the experiment to go ahead. Not too sure how the anti-genetically modified food brigade would feel about it, but we’re guessing they won’t be too happy and would rather Brin stick to IT.
