S8n 4eva
Has Lucifer got a smartphone? Is your home safe when you go away? What's OkCupid up to? Dave gets the answers
It's been noted before that the Devil has all the best tunes. But recent evidence suggests that Lucifer may also be more tech-savvy than his heavenly counterpart.
Following an attempted exorcism of a teenage girl, Polish priest Marian Rajchel claims Satan himself has been sending him goading text messages. After conducting the procedure(?), the man of the cloth received an SMS telling him: "She will not come out of this hell. She's mine. Anyone who prays for her will die."
After replying to the Prince of Darkness (as you do), the taunts turned more personal. "Shut up, preacher," warned Beelzebub. "You cannot save yourself. Idiot. You pathetic old preacher."
Oo-er. Father Rajchel warned cellphone users to be on their guard for Satanic possession.
"Often the owners of mobile phones are not even aware that they are being used like this," he told The Austrian Times.
Phew! It must be the Devil that's been using my wife's phone to send reminders of how many of her old boyfriends are thinner, more successful and nicer than I am.
What, me, worry?
"Are you worried about the security of your home while away on holiday?," began a marketing communiqué which landed in my inbox this week.
Before I'd had a chance to reply "not massively and, by the way, who are you?", the email thundered on, claiming that "85 per cent of [UK] adults" are indeed concerned, citing a recent YouGov survey. Though I dare say the reputable pollsters of YouGov might wish to know that the figure quoted here includes the 46 per cent of their respondents who said they were not very worried, and the 32 per cent who were fairly worried, in addition to the whopping seven per cent who are very worried.
But you can prove anything with made-up statistics. The fact remains that Piper (who sent the missive) claims to have launched "the first home security device with Z-Wave automation, panoramic video and environmental sensors integration for the home".
Wowsers trousers! Z-Wave automation and environmental sensors integration?! They said it couldn't be done!
The device uses an app to alert users of any movements of note at their home, which Piper claims will "give them peace of mind while they are away".
And definitely won't serve only to ruin their holiday every time next door's cat falls asleep on their windowsill.
Cupid is as Cupid does
With every tech firm and his dog seeking to distance themselves from any suggestion of spying on users and their data, it was almost refreshing to see the leader of one web outfit proclaim "We experiment on human beings!".
This was the title a recent blog post from Christian Rudder, co-founder of OkCupid, which explained that the company has fed users not-entirely-accurate information in the name of furthering its learnings in the complex world of internet romance.
"Guess what, everybody: if you use the internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work," he boomed.
Rudder went on to detail a few ways in which his site has conducted experiments on its lovelorn patrons - including inverting people's compatibility rankings so those who were a 30 per cent match were told the figure was 90 per cent and vice versa. Lo and behold, when users were informed they were well or poorly matched with someone, they more often acted as if that were the case.
Almost as if they trusted a provider of a service to do so honestly and to the best of its ability.
Undercovergraduate
Speaking of people who definitely aren't spying on your every Lolcat and ‘which character from Mrs Brown's Boys are you?' quiz, I read that GCHQ is launching new academic certifications for the next generation of cyber spies.
The intelligence agency has unveiled Master's degrees in cyber security at six UK universities. The accompanying press bumf seems to offer little in the way of detail as to what pupils will actually study. Possibly because they'll be asked to discover their coursework assignments (should they choose to accept them) by hacking into their lecturers' email.