15 million Britons are now on the net via BT, Paul Allen is suing everyone (except Microsoft) and in stupid news of the week, Facebook is trying to patent the word “face!” This is John Bullock’s Thoughts on News on a dark Wednesday morning.

BT have announced that they have connected 15 million customers with broadband access as of late August. This is a promising story, considering the recent news that over 9 million British adults have never used the Internet. A story I doubted on technical grounds; almost everything is connected to the Internet, at this point, and it seems like it would be hard to go about a lot of tasks without using the Internet at some point, even if inadvertently.

Still, this is a good story, if only for the fact that it might go some way to proving to the people who run the country – and are no doubt part of the 9 million who don’t use the Internet – who still see the Internet as some kind of toy, rather than the invaluable service that it is, and are happy to pass laws that take away your Internet connection!

The news gets a little depressing from there, however, as Paul Allen, ex-founder of Microsoft (yes, that Microsoft) is suing the Internet! Paul Allen’s company, Interval Licensing, have filed a patent lawsuit against Google, Facebook, Apple, eBay and a number of other companies that, it say, infringe their patents. Said patents would cover things like placing advertisements at the sides of the main content and suggesting “items of interest” to a user, like Amazon’s recommended products feature.

Quick to defend themselves after the understandable outrage over this news, Interval’s spokesman said;

“We are not asserting patents that other companies have filed, nor are we buying patents originally assigned to someone else,” he said. “These are patents developed by and for Interval.”

Patents that were developed for Interval! Over ten years ago! Interval have not developed or used any of the technology that their patents cover. An interesting side note, however, is the fact that there is no law that states that Interval have to sue every patent infringing company out there (there probably aren’t enough lawyers) and missing from the list of sued companies are Microsoft (who Paul Allen co-founded and has shares in) and Amazon (who probably benefit the most from ‘infringing’ Interval’s patents).

That story is ridiculous, but I have one more that tops it;

Facebook (it had to be Facebook) are trying to trademark the word “face.” The word! This would allow them to go after web based companies like FaceCash, a mobile payment app, and FaceParty, a social site. Possibly even Apple’s new FaceTime app on the iPhone.

At this point, with the constant failure to heed privacy concerns to the point where it must be on purpose (do not opt me in to sh*t!), I’m pretty much conceded to the fact that Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is potentially the biggest dick on the Internet… and that takes some doing!

That’s all the news I thought interesting enough write about in today’s ToN. Check back tomorrow for Thursday’s edition when, I imagine, Facebook will be suing its users for having a face.

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