These past few weeks, the internet community has been alight with malice over the 45-year-old Mary Bale who was caught on CCTV putting a cat in a wheelie bin. The CCTV video was posted to the internet, the internet community helped to find her and it was the internet community that delivered punishment in the form of hatred and abuse.

Now, as an ardent animal lover, I have absolutely no sympathy at all for animal abusers, in the same way I have zero tolerance for child abusers. As the internet becomes more proliferate in our lives, tolerance for abusers is becoming lower and lower. However, mob mentality is on the rise which is a worrying development.

One YouTube video showing a woman throwing puppies in a river sparked outrage and resulted in a massive internet campaign to find and abuse the woman. Another video of two teenage boys abusing a cat resulted in the internet community tracking them down and having them arrested.

While I applaud the efforts of the internet community and also tentatively applaud their condemnation of offenders who would otherwise be dealt with lightly, mob mentality will escalate – because that’s what it is all about. And herein lies one of the future problems of the internet. Privacy is invaded and mob mentality ensues.

The NHS Direct has come under fire and is to be replaced with a new 111 phone number and service.

At the moment, the NHS Direct phone number terminates to 3,000 professionals and nurses who are experienced and qualified. Now, in the interests of saving money and being more functional, the 111 number has replaced the current service and this terminates at a national call centre.

The call centre staff are not qualified professionals or nurses but they will receive training and will apparently be supported by a few nurses. The new phone number will serve to centralise the services.

The Cedars School of Excellence in Greenock, Scotland has the somewhat dubious title of becoming the first school to become an iSchool…a title that is still better than its current, subtle title.

All of the 105 pupils at the school, aged between five and fifteen, are to receive Apple iPads that are connected to the school internet network.

The iPads were the ‘great’ idea of Fraser Speirs the IT teacher who will of course, extol the virtues of all IT which is precisely why his view should have been taken with a pinch of salt. After all, if an English teacher had said that it would be great to make all children write with a quill and parchment I doubt that the school would now be writing with feather quills. Unfortunately though, this is the technological age and technology rules.

So, all kids at the Cedars School of Excellence now have an iPad. Sure, they can access information without ever opening a book, they can watch exotic experiments on YouTube and spellcheck will make essays a doddle. How can there be a downside!

Oh wait, here it is. Information on the internet isn’t always correct and never using a book for research can only narrow the mind rather than broaden it. Using spellcheck will make children dumb when it comes to spelling words and the iPad calculator will soon get rid of mental arithmetic and sums. Not to mention how unhealthy it’ll be to stare at an iPad screen all day.

Ah, and lest we forget, writing essays and notes on Pages for iPad. If the children of Cedars School of Excellence get an iPad from five years old, that leaves learning to write out in the cold too. As the IT teacher Speirs said, “we’ve found that it solves major problems for us,” – yes, like teaching.

Fibrecity Holdings, a network specialist based in Scotland, is to provide Dundee residents with fibre broadband connections by early 2012.

Fibrecity has already begun laying out the network. So far, it has announced that speeds from 25Mbps to 100Mbps will be available along with burst speeds of up to 1Gbps. Dundee businesses will be amongst the first to benefit from the improved network speeds.

Velocity1 and Fibreband, two Dundee-based internet service providers, have been the first to offer to deliver connections around Dundee, with more to follow.

Fibrecity will be using old waste water infrastructure from Scottish Water for the majority of the network connections.

Mobile phone maker Nokia has decided to close down its Ovi Files service, it has been revealed, after the mobile company emailed users of the service.

Nokia, the top mobile phone maker in the world, introduced the Ovi Files service in 2007. The service allows users to access data on their computers remotely, through any computer.

Unfortunately, the service hasn’t proved as popular as Nokia hoped it would be, so the service is to be discontinued and users have been asked to uninstall the Ovi Files Connector from their computers.

Mobile phone miracle-worker and computer maker Apple didn’t have too much luck with its last set-top box. But you know how the saying goes about the timing being right and all that – well it seems as though the timing is right now and the era of the set-top box is due to arrive.

With the Project Canvas project taking off and all kinds of unified communications products coming on the market, the time for a TV that has video, internet and communications devices, is now.

So, step in Apple. Apple’s new set-top box which includes programming from Netflix and video on demand will be released soon and will be available on the new version of Apple TV released tomorrow. Trust Apple to get a headstart!

India is really cleaning house now as its government officials tell all communications providers that they have just two months to open up their data.

At the minute, this mainly applies to VoIP provider Skype and internet giant Google – RIM’s BlackBerry has already been dealt with and subdued.

All telcos and communications providers need to build a server in India and let the authorities scrutinise private data storage the officials have said. And after seeing a good result from RIM’s capitulation, India is no doubt expecting a swift acquiescence from Google and Skype. I have two words for them – not likely.

VMware Inc. has announced its acquisition of two start-up companies that will help it progress its virtualisation and cloud computing offerings.

VMware is a virtualisation and cloud-computing specialist which lets user’s access data remotely through the internet.

The company has bought Integrien Corp. a company that provides virtualisation management products and TriCipher, a cloud security company.

As virtualisation and cloud computing is currently such big business, VMware will find itself even better placed than usual to becoming one of the top cloud providers.

Local.com, an internet-based search company, has entered into an agreement with Yahoo Inc. the company said this week. The agreement means that all location-based internet search site will make money from Yahoo’s paid search results.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the agreement between Yahoo and Local.com was valid from last Wednesday and will renew itself in 2011 on July 31^st. As a result of the announcement of the partnership, Local.com’s shares jumped 10%.

Everything Everywhere, the oddly named joint venture between Orange and T-Mobile, is apparently considering taking legal action over changes to the Long Term Evolution (LTE) auction in 2011.

The 2011 mobile broadband spectrum will be concentrating on selling the 800MHz and 2.6GHz bands as well as re-farming spectrum in the 900MHz band, which is used for 2G services.

The problem was that Vodafone and O2 exclusively owned the 900MHz spectrum. So, the last government arranged for the mobile phone operators to release some of the 900MHz in return for 800MHz and 2.6GHz slots. Everything was rosy, Everything Everywhere – until the new coalition government scrapped the plans.