It’s official. BitTorrent is not dangerous. In fact it is jolly useful in oh so many ways. Thank you for clarifying things John Dvorak. No thanks to you, Microsoft.  Simple Lies, Told as Fact. There is no spyware in BitTorrent. There is no way BitTorrent is being tricked into delivering spyware. We hear that BitTorrent files are “infected.” What specific to BitTorrent is infected? Is it the BitTorrent initiation files? Or is it the payload? If it’s the payload (the media…

Welcome to the Red Ferret Journal – tantalisingly tasteful, tacky and taut tech trivia. Is the email system breaking down under the load? I ask because I’m starting to receive an increasing number of reader letters complaining about issues with their email service. Messages not arriving, being bounced, not being sent from one addresss but OK from another, text stripped out and so on.

Welcome to the Red Ferret Journal – tantalisingly tasteful, tacky and taut tech trivia. So, what’s all the fuss about Flickr? I mean it works as advertised and provides a bunch of neat tools, but is it really worth $60.00 a year for a bit of a one dimensional photo organiser tool? I don’t really get it.

Exporting Harm is a rather disquieting report on how we in the West are exporting e-waste (the remnants of our consumer tech obsession) to the developing world, often under the guise of ‘recycling’. Not pleasant reading, especially for a weblog like the Ferret which must take some responsibility for encouraging the proliferation of the problem. Maybe those of us involved should start asking more penetrating questions of the manufacturers and governments before this becomes an even more serious issue?  Electronic waste or…

You:   What’s that?Me:     It’s a web browser.Y:       Ahh, I see. Looks different somehow. M:      Yep, it’s Mozilla’s Firefox, I’m now using it full time as a replacement for Internet Explorer. Y:       Really? Fascinating but strange. Why would you want to switch from the world’s favourite browser?M:      Simple really, IE is getting a bit old in the tooth and a little too vulnerable security-wise for my liking. So I thought it might be time for a change. Not an easy decision, but I’ll give you 10 reasons why…

The Ferret respects John Davison, editorial supremo from Ziff Davis games. Not just because he’s a Brit, but because he ‘gets it’. So when he says that he thinks Sony’s new games console is  – quote – ‘the start of something really big’ (his emphasis), then we sit up and take notice. Hey, and he says he’ll eat his son’s trainers if he’s wrong, so that can’t be bad can it?  I have this little flutter of excitement in the pit of my stomach…

Arriving at Amsterdam airport can be quite confusing. A Welcome to Heathrow sign right outside the arrivals terminal? Only in Holland eh? So it’s 3.40pm on a brilliantly sunny day in The Hague, Holland and I’m watching the new Bourne Supremacy movie trailer on apple.com. What’s unusual though, is that I’m doing this while travelling at 120 kilometres an hour in the outside lane of a Dutch highway, with nothing more than an IBM Thinkpad, a connection to the Flarion…

Being an account of a startling conversion on the subject of smartphone usefulness. Subtitled Sony Ericsson P800 vs Nokia 7250.