Downtime

Recent Posts

  • Apologising with Nick Clegg

    Ryan Priest 26 Jul 2019
  • Nick Clegg – Sir Nick to you – continues to flourish as Facebook’s hired appeaser, most recently resurfacing from his Atherton mansion with a sound bite about how his employer was “rocked to its ...

  • Let us troll

    Ryan Priest 11 Jul 2019
  • This month saw the Church of England release its own Digital charter, intended to improve the online community’s “common sense, kindness and sound judgement”. Now, you can sit there and have a go ...

  • Buffer load stance

    Ryan Priest 03 Jul 2019
  • Neneh Cherry’s Glastonbury performance gained some unexpected attention from the tech world at this year’s festival, after the laptop playing the evergreen singer’s backing visuals crashed and ...

  • Toronto adapters

    Ryan Priest 26 Jun 2019
  • Toronto residents are grappling with a quandary posed by the plans of Google sister company Sidewalk Labs to build a smart city on its eastern waterfront. It’s always fun to learn about Google’s ...

  • Puss in briefs

    Ryan Priest 19 Jun 2019
  • A Pakistani politician has played down the embarrassment of one of his briefings being streamed live to Facebook with the cat filter on. “The cat filter was turned on by mistake,” said Shaukat ...

  • Some reflections on Black Mirror

    Ryan Priest 13 Jun 2019
  • The fifth series of Charlie Brooker’s anthology series Black Mirror landed on Netflix this month, and we were surprised to find it’s moved away from making terrifying technology predictions to ...

  • No tunes left to buy

    Ryan Priest 07 Jun 2019
  • The absorption of iTunes as we know it into three new entertainment apps – Apple Music, Apple Podcasts and Apple TV – has sent us down yet another nostalgic rabbit hole. It’s the app we’ve come to ...

  • The Psyduck of sleep

    Ryan Priest 29 May 2019
  • The Pokémon Company has revealed its development of Pokémon Sleep, an app that will track players’ sleeping time and incorporate the data into its gameplay. In his quest to make sleep entertaining, ...

  • Amazon vs Amazon

    Ryan Priest 22 May 2019
  • What happens when the Amazon rainforest, globally cherished as the lungs of the planet, asks a company that named itself after it not to enjoy exclusive use of the .amazon domain extension? Where ...

  • Clout drought

    Ryan Priest 15 May 2019
  • When Anna Wintour failed to extend a single Met Gala invite to anyone from Computer Weekly this year, she sent out a clear message to the entire world: tech is out. We were left to only imagine ...

  • Death of a fireplace salesman

    Ryan Priest 02 May 2019
  • Theresa May has wielded the axe on her notoriously slapdash defence secretary after deeming him responsible for leaking National Security Council confab about the use of Huawei networking ...

  • Sorry Cadwalladr, I misunderstood

    Ryan Priest 23 Apr 2019
  • Carole Cadwalladr has used her TED talk to highlight Facebook’s obfuscation regarding political adverts on its site, calling for Mark Zuckerberg to hold a TED talk of his own or risk finding ...

  • Black holes and ejaculations

    Ryan Priest 11 Apr 2019
  • There’s a bookshop located in Old Street Station near our office where we can sometimes be found nonchalantly perusing the blurbs of various works of literature during our lunch break. The other ...

  • Remembering Google+

    Ryan Priest 04 Apr 2019
  • We remember Google not letting us comment on a YouTube video until we signed up to its barren and now extinct social media platform like it was yesterday, if only in the sense that it’s one of the ...

  • Leave memes leave

    Ryan Priest 28 Mar 2019
  • Everyone knows about the European Union’s famous Article 50 by now, but what do all the other ones do? It’s like being invited into the cockpit of a Boeing 747 and only pressing one random button. ...