If you listen to the latest Tech Digest podcast you’ll hear some new jingles at the beginning and end.

Every podcast needs intros and outros, right?

It’s my composition that’s sitting there. Well, I say composition, but that’s probably a little generous. More like “stringing together some GarageBand sound effects and ‘stringy’ chords”.

Anyway, it’s there. Hopefully it adds something to Dan and Duncan’s tech talk. Give it a listen.

The BBC bought and used a botnet which hijacked a number of vulnerable PCs to send email to several test accounts, with the blessing of security firm PrevX, in order to make an edition of BBC Click (the fact that the Beeb calls this their flagship technology programme yet it’s only available on BBC News or at stupidly early times, in highlight form, on BBC1 is another issue).

A technology lawyer believes the BBC broke the law even thought the Corporation (which we law-abiding Brits fund to the tune of £140 each per year and rising) didn’t do it with any malicious intent.

Straun Robertson claims, “It does not matter that the emails were sent to the BBC’s own accounts and criminal intent is not necessary to establish an offence of unauthorised access to a computer,” he adds.

“The Act requires that a computer has been made to perform a function with intent to secure access to any program or data on the computer.

“Using the botnet to send an email is likely to satisfy that requirement. It also requires that the access is unauthorised – which the BBC appears to acknowledge.”

It’s interesting that security firm PrevX gave their blessing to the experiments, even though (reportedly) most security software companies won’t mess around with computers even if they are infected.

I doubt anything will happen, but remember if you live in Britain you’ve helped to fund this little experiment.

@billt tweeted an interesting thought about using Lynx as a Twitter client.

Lynx is a text-only web browser that can be easily run from a command line. There’s a version installed on a web hosting account I used so I tried it out and… disaster.

Admittedly, there’s something a little odd going on with my version of Lynx, but even so, I couldn’t log in and the actual display was hard to use. You’d think that a text-based browser for a primarily text-based service would be great, but I didn’t think so.

I tried to access the mobile version of Twitter, too, but that just tried to get me to download something, which was most odd.

No, it’s desktop clients, iPhone clients or the plain old web site in Firefox or Safari for me.

If you’re over in Chicago, take a look at this working model of a Samsung Messenger. It’s 15 feet long, 13 feet high and 3 feet deep and has been used to make free voice calls and send text messages since Wednesday.

Totally impractical, of course, but it is an official Guinness world record. It’s around until Sunday. At least no-one’s going to steal this one.

The BBC has announced that it’s created a new mobile-friendly, customisable version of its home page for a variety of devices including the iPhone and iPod touch, Android phones, any handset running Opera, N Series and other high-end Nokias, Sony Ericsson and Samsungs and some Blackberrys.

The home page can be arranged as desired and there’s localisation for such things as news, weather and TV schedules. iPlayer also fits into the mix.

While the iPhone and other handsets with larger screens and decent browsers could access the standard BBC home page, this is useful as a cut down version in areas where there’s only a 3G (or lower bandwidth) signal and no Wi-Fi.

Tried it? What do you think of it?

According to this report in the Media Guardian, Platte Media’s UK operation is no more.

Two years ago, Micro Bill Systems appeared on the scene and started causing trouble. So much, in fact, that I helped set up a forum and got myself in the Guardian as a result.

A company name change (to Platte Media), some legal threats and hassles later, it does appear as if the infamous pay-for-porn company has ceased trading in the UK.

Hiwat said in an email to Michael Pollitt, the reporter who has uncovered story after story about Platte, that “Our reasons for this decision and our further intentions are simply related to our original marketing and business model.” He added: “Obviously, and just like any other business should and would do, I am making sure that stopping our marketing to the UK Market, is done in such a sensible and orderly manner, that will best preserve the interests of our customers and of our own.”

It could, however, be something to do with the Office of Fair Trading, or HM Revenue and Customs, both of whom have expressed interest in the company’s activities.

Is it too soon for celebration?

We still don’t know what Oriel, Platte’s appointed debt collection agency, will do with the “debts” it has had passed to it. We also don’t know whether Platte International will continue to run its rather dubious sites (Get Films Now, for example) in other countries. The global reach of the Internet means that access by UK computer users and minors could still be just a mouse click away.

It will also be interesting to see what Platte UK’s directors move on to. I find it hard to believe that they won’t set up another business in due course – one that could have very similar properties (and problems) as Platte and MBS had.

Watch this space.

Given the vocal nature of bloggers, the snub I received today from Sony is a little strange. Perhaps Sony doesn’t fully understand the outspoken immediacy of many blogs, or perhaps they really don’t care.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to attend Sony’s latest BRAVIA ad photo shoot in Miami. I must admit, I was a little bemused to have been “chosen”, given that — at that time — only a handful of bloggers had been invited, but given my work on Tech Digest and HDTV UK, it was justified enough.

For an expenses-paid to trip to Miami, I’d be able to report to close-on half-a-million monthly visitors to both sites about the photo shoot, and some of Sony’s latest camcorders.

However, today I was informed — most apologetically — by one of Sony’s PR companies that I’d been dropped from the trip, due to a change in filming dates, “logistical issues”, and… because “Sony is only keen to get US based bloggers”.

OUCH!

It seems that, despite Sony being happy enough to use a tower block in Scotland for their exploding paint ad (perhaps an exploding high rise in America wouldn’t have gone down so well?), when it comes to filming an ad in the US, and despite the likelihood that it will be used worldwide, Sony only wants US bloggers to cover it.

Now, I must make it clear that I’m not particularly bothered about the trip. Yes, it would have been an interesting thing to do, and I’ll happily accept the offer of free travel and accommodation, but the “logistics” of planning a trip away when there are still the same number of targets and deadlines to achieve is no small task.

It wouldn’t have been a holiday.

However, the supposed snub is rather unfortunate. As a freelancer and a blogger — even for a relatively large UK new media company — I would never expect to be invited on these kinds of trips.

So, to be invited — I thought — showed some forward thinking on behalf of a company that should already be forward thinking — technology, after all, is nothing less than shaping the future.

What should have happened? Sony should have been more organised, and decided exactly what they wanted before trying to entice bloggers out to their PR event.

Filming dates rearranged? Flights do that too.

Apparently, I’m on the list for “next time” — whatever and whenever that might be. Thing is, I’m not sure I’m particularly interested now.

Companies, listen up — bloggers tend not to like being used as pawns in your PR games. Actually, I reckon most media professionals don’t, either, though I’d imagine (perhaps wrongly) that the most established media gets slightly better treatment.

Wow, it’s been nearly two weeks since I last wrote about Justin.tv (or indeed anything!). In that time I’ve not been broadcasting at all, partially because of a week-long illness, and also because of “stage fright”. I don’t particularly feel that there’s much of interest to broadcast at present.

I do have a few ideas, including musical ones, of how to make my broadcasts a little more interesting, but I won’t be implementing them until at least Tuesday next week.

Also, sadly, one of the people who I had built up quite a friendship with on Justin.tv, on their channel, has stopped broadcasting, effectively deleted everything from their home page, and left. That’s quite sad, as I now don’t have an easy way of contacting her.

That’s one of the perils of online friendships, I guess. They’re quite fragile. It’s all too easy for people to leave one service or another, and effectively disappear. When they’re several thousand miles away, that makes it very difficult to maintain contact.

Oh well, I suppose I ought to get used to it. Sad, though.

Following my problems with EyeTV refusing to quit, I’ve now discovered a similar problem with both CamTwist and Safari.

A few times, CamTwist (a freeware piece of software which manipulates live video from a connected camera, including the built-in iSight) has crashed, and then refused to quit.

Today, Safari quit while streaming video from the iSight into a Flash-based video encoder.

The link does appear to be either misbehaving hardware, or misbehaving software which is reliant on a piece of hardware.

EyeTV uses the USB interface for digital TV tuner stick. The other applications use the iSight, which is a USB device (albeit internal)

When each application crashes, I wonder if it doesn’t properly “give up” control of the relevant USB interface. It gets stuck in the endless “Process Ending” sequence, which can’t be killed by any method I know of.

What I’d love to be able to do is execute whatever kernel-level command is run whenever a user logs out, because then every application quits. It’s really annoying.

The call for ideas continues.

I really hope this issue is fixed in Leopard.