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It's LUNACY, you SWINE! Er, what, security? Moonpig DOT GONE

Plus: Brit MP demands end to email footer HELL

CES – Gadget Is My Hot Hot Zed

It being the first week in January – when those of us living in the Northern hemisphere have to wake up and then trundle to work in the post-Xmas-ocalypse dark – we were greeted with the annual slappy-happy-crappy-appy gadgets shindig CES in Las Vegas.

We had a, oooooh, Wi-Fi enabled lightbulb, a, wahhhhh, 3D candy printer for swing bellies, a little bit of hot chip action, schwing, and a whole new heap of security headaches around weakables (sorry, wearables), OH!

See you in the fuuuuu-ture-ture-ture, CES folk.

Back in Blighty, the arrival of 2015 reminded Brits that we are mere months away from the next General Election. Will this lead to yet another Coalition Government being formed? And, if so, could there be a big, barmy UKIP hole drilled into Westminster?

If Nigel Farage and his loony chums do secure any seats in Parliament on 7 May, his party might want to have a little bit of a think about the interwebulator, given that the UKIP website went titsup for roughly five hours on Tuesday.

It was claimed that the site went down faster than Farage could neck a pint of warm beer, after UKIP had supposedly failed to pay its domain name renewal fees with 123-reg.

However, a quick probe from El Reg found that the domain name reg company was apparently not to blame for the cockup. Indeed, UKIP's domain name registration was not set to expire until March 2016. We were told by 123-reg:

UKIP did not fail to renew its domain name and in fact has a long term registration with 123-reg. This morning we have helped UKIP to restore its website to normal service.

As UKIP has stated, there was a technical problem overnight and this is no fault of 123-reg.

People across the nation naturally breathed a sigh of relief when they were once again able to get their hands on Farage's purple masthead.

The Palace of Westminster, meanwhile, was this week asked by a Tory MP to grapple with the purple prose found at the bottom of emails.

Sir Alan Duncan pleaded with Parliament to act against the legal disclaimers added to the end of digital missives, so he can help save ink and paper when he prints the emails out.

He told MPs:

We have all been there. A short email comes in from a friend, colleague or company and we hit print. Then we look in horror as page after page spews out.

NHS litters our doormats with junk mail in early 2014

So much for the government's much trumpeted digital-by-default policy, eh?

And, on the topic of wasting paper, that utterly bewildering care.data leaflet that was dropped onto the doormats of 26.5 million households this time last year was, it turns out, delivered after NHS England refused to recall the damn thing from the printers. Which is nice.

A report from the Independent Information Governance Oversight Panel concluded this week that Whitehall "must try harder" with its handling of the care.data programme.

And finally, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates got his year off to a good start by powering it with liquid poo poured directly into his mouth.

The world's richest man was not holed up on some reality programme being challenged to drink human faeces. Hell no. Instead, he trialled a machine that turns turds into water. He explained in a TMI blog post:

I watched the piles of faeces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin.

They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.

Yes! Scoop that poop, Bill. Humanity will love you for it. ®

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