Meet up with the “property whisperer”. That is what Australian inside designer and stylist Megan Morton has been called she has a way with areas and an eye for detail which, the natural way, is mirrored in her personal household in Sydney.

Hers was just one particular of a lot of classy houses that the 42-12 months-aged featured in her current book, Points I Like. As you may well expect from a espresso-desk tome with a name like that, it’s an idiosyncratic, hugely particular compendium.

The 1st 50 percent the reserve is entire of glossy way of life shots of the swooningly beautiful houses of her friends and colleagues, whilst the 2nd 50 percent whimsically mixes a directory of associates and collaborators (“people today I like”), pull-out postcards with images of knick-knacks or quirky, pithy aphorisms on them (“Men’s collars. They just scent very good,” reads a person), moreover a lot and loads of sensible suggestions and diagrams for styling and organising your residence.

It is like Mrs Beeton for the Pinterest generation.
Morton writes with an intimate tone, but there is a great deal of cutesy discuss about “supernice” people and “thoroughly inspiring” spaces and properties that “just sing” her book’s opening salvo is: “As an interiors stylist I perform just about every day with a large amount of gorgeous issues, matters so beautiful that some days my eyes hurt from the sheer extra of what I’ve viewed.” No, actually.

But when it arrives to conversing about her personal dwelling, Morton is a little much more down-to-earth. She lives in a leafy suburb in Sydney, in an “un-legendary nineteen fifties [dwelling] that demands likely a bulldozer rather of a styling wand” regardless of this, she enjoys the dwelling she’s shared with her partner and a few kids for the earlier 8 several years.

Her hubbie is “an Englishman, and would probably prefer a thing a lot more ‘trad’ and ‘English’,” she confesses, although three little ones suggest that by natural means, when your residence just isn’t staying showcased in a photoshoot, matters are a minimal chaotic. Requested how she maintains a chic property with very little ones managing around, she says ,”Like all people – not with fantastic achievement. Ours are [aged] 13, twelve and three so we are constantly in the poo…”

It scrubs up perfectly, however the photographs of their house show a awesome, pale, chic place, enlivened with splashes of azure-blue and emerald-environmentally friendly, more than-sized curios, and classic finds. “Our home is north-facing and in Sydney this is top quality orientation, so I like to douse it in cooler tones to match its orientation,” she says of the chilled-out palette.

Those pale-mauve chairs and sofas are from an Australian structure company named Pierre and Charlotte and are, she swears, “divine, deep, dangerously at ease”.
But it can be barely icy minimalism – that would not be the Morton way. “I like stuff. Constantly have, constantly will. It’s truly a white room for my by no means-ending like affair with things!” That stuff could be shiny latest purchases or second-hand antiques – she’s not a classic obsessive, but she likes a dialogue.

“New and outdated engage in so properly together – combining them, in my impression, tends to make each individual other better,” describe Morton. Just observe the selection of photograph frames in just one corner together with a blue hand and a sweet little mouse. “It is really just a French hang of blended sources from charity thrift retailers and Herm籠porcelain, whose colors and tones I admired.”

She also likes to play with scale – “In a largely white, non-deliberate area, scale is a essential and responsible instrument” verify out that outsized vital following to a mirror (which is fairly sizeable as well, supplied you would most probably be lounging on a day-bed beneath it). “I use mirrors strategically to make gentle sources, and this house is just for that. It also permits massive items like that essential to get a appear in.”

Morton has remarked that, in her operate as a stylist, she needs to create rooms that make people today “obscenely content”. This relatively dreamy sounding position arrived about by next her intuition, many thanks to “a lifestyle-long curiosity and love of all factors massive and modest”. She is absolutely enthusiastic – and it is good to see that put centre-phase of household-creating the environment of inside layout can get a small too po-faced and critical in some cases.

Normally, Morton has a crystal-crystal clear line on this: “There must only be joy in decorating.”
‘Things I Love’ by Megan Morton is released by Conran Octopus, priced £25

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If you’re going to hold an exhibition of leftist politics and art, where better than in Liverpool, where the red flags keep flying although getting more pinkish with the years.

It doesn’t make the task of Tate Liverpool in its new show Art Changing Left any the less challenging. Socialism, as communism, has long since dropped out of intellectual favour, for all the disparities of wealth and the sins of banker capitalism which you might have thought would revive them.

In art terms they have become associated with the suppression of individual expression in favour of a populist propaganda as empty as it is heroic.
It was the French Revolution which started it all off, which always made an awkward subject in Britain given the Napoleonic wars which followed. Before then popular art, and indeed radical ideas, were expressed through religion. You could argue, indeed, that many of the values that the left took up of equality and communal effort, and indeed the promotion of local craft, found their voice in the church paintings and sculpture of mediaeval times and the printed tracts of the seventeenth century.

But then religion is even less in vogue today than socialism. What the French revolution did on the Continent, and threatened to do here, was a complete overthrow of old hierarchies and traditional ideas. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” as the poet Wordsworth declared adding, “But to be young was very heaven.” The sentiment may seem hollow in the light of what was to come after, but at the time, and in every revolutionary movement since, the joy of comradeship and release remain wonderful in their energy and their youth.

The Tate’s show starts off with a panel of declarations from the 1968 Paris riots, when the students of the “ȣole des Beaux Arts” turned their hands to painted slogans and printed posters. “Leur Campagne est Finie. Notre Lutte Continue” as one particularly dramatic bill has it while another has the conjugation: “Je participe/Tu participes/Il Participe/Nous participons/Vous participez/Ils profitent.”

What the French Revolution also brought into play, however, was the concept of the masses. It was all very well for the painter Jacques-Louis David, and his successors in the Mexican and Russian revolutions, to put his art to the service of monumentalising the movers and martyrs of the moment, but the logic of empowering the working classes and peasantry was the suppression of individual expression in favour of making a communal art in the service of progressive ideals.

Interestingly it is this aspect which the Tate has chosen to pursue rather than the more obvious course of displaying revolutionary art in all its propagandist glory (although it has some of this). What interests it is less the passions of the left in art than how, as the show’s subtitle puts it, left “Values Changed Making from 1789-2013”.

It makes for a more cerebral show but in some ways a more interesting one.
One way in which socialist ideals of making the common man part of artistic endeavour was William Morris’ efforts to integrate craft and art. By making the worker a party to the process of creation, he argued, he could break down the capitalist division of labour and the hierarchy of fine art.

It may have been fearfully idealistic – although his strictures over the alienation of workers from their product are as valid for the call centres of today as the factories of his time – but it did produce fine textiles, furniture and other objects.
So did his successors in the Bauhaus movement in Germany during the interwar years. The “Arbeitsrat f�st” (Workers Council for Art) founded by the architect Walter Gropius and a group of arts in 1919 was, in one sense, opposite to William Morris in that it embraced modern means of production.

But it had the same ideal of destroying the old divisions between fine and applied arts and embracing all media in a single whole dedicated to producing products for all people.
At bottom, however, both the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain and Bauhaus were top-down enterprises, in which the artist gave the lead and attempted to enrol the labourer into their ideals. More revolutionary were the programmes to do away the personal signature in art altogether and produce an art which was completely egalitarian and uniform.

Russia provided the most exciting testing ground and the Tate has gathered some particularly optimistic examples of the works produced in the heady days when artists joined the revolution in an eruption of new hope and idealism. Out went the signed work, in came the aesthetic based on firm scientific principles.
Adopting the “collectivist” creed of the Communist Party, which saw the individual as only a part of the greater community interest, artists such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and Kazimir Malevich deliberately espoused geometric patterns and organic forms that broke free of individual creativity.

It may sound oppressive – and indeed it soon became so as the bureaucrats determined to root out modernist notions of art and music in favour of popular culture – but Varvara Stepanova’s designs for gymnast uniforms, the photomontages of Gustav Klucis and El Lissitzsky’s “typographic kino-show” remain surprisingly vivacious and forward-looking for all their attempt to create a structured art that did away with the individual voice.

Youth will out and, as the show gathers pace, it becomes something of a roll-call of collectives and groups penning passionate manifestos denouncing all that had gone before and championing an art that was free of elitist concepts of culture and available to the seething masses eager for the clarion call for change.
The “Gruppe Progressiver K�r K������, founded in Germany in the 1920s, attempted to develop a visual language that broke the bonds of nationalist linguistics and could reach out to everyone. The British Mass Observation Movement established in 1937 saw in the new mode for social surveys a way of testing what was genuinely popular.

The Situationist International was founded to manufacture and distribute works in direct contradiction to the capitalist market in artefacts.
A Stitch in Time by David Medella in 1968 took the form of a bolt of cloth on which the onlooker was invited to stitch their dreams and thought – art made by the onlooker. Goldin and Senneby in the installation Money Will Be Like Dross offered to sell copies of an original alchemy furnace with the proviso that the item would go up in price as each new one was sold, thus reversing the process of the market.

The pomposity of some of the pronouncements may raise a wry smile among the gallery curators and collectors buying the works in the market manner which these groups intended to destroy. They are not easy to display in a gallery setting and the Tate struggles at times to make the works, rather than their captions, tell what they are all about.

The nearer you get to the contemporary, the more this kind of art spread into film and performance and away from simple objects. The Tate tries to give some sense of this with a few videos but it’s range is too limited to capture the sense of involvement and passion which modern multimedia happenings and actions on the left take place today, for all that the gallery has introduced an office and education centre, “The Office of Useful Art”, as part of a citywide project to make art part of life rather than solely an object of view.

But then Tate Liverpool is trying to do something different and less obviously pleasing than show the manifestations of the left. Its aim in these thematically organised spaces is to show how the left’s aesthetics, in its rejection of the concepts of fine art and signed works and its embrace of multi-media, modern materials and viewer participation, were part and parcel of modern and post-modernist art.

In that Liverpool has refreshingly proved its point.
Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789-2013, Tate Liverpool (0151 702 7400) to 2 February

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Online retailers are poised for a record $43.4 billion holiday sales season as shoppers increasingly rely on social networks and mobile devices to find and buy merchandise.

Internet sales will grow 17 percent from a year earlier and make up more than 10 percent of U.S. retail spending, excluding gas, food and cars in the last two months of the year, said Andrew Lipsman, vice president of industry analysis at ComScore. That compares with $29.2 billion spent online during the same period in 2007, when electronic commerce made up 7.4 percent of total spending.

The growth of smartphones and tablets gives buyers the ability to shop anytime and anywhere, an opportunity that Web retailers have been eager to exploit by offering sales to coincide with traditional storefront deals. They’re also offering applications to make mobile retailing more seamless while tapping into social media, where shoppers increasingly find and share information on merchandise.

“People are shopping on their mobile devices between 7 p.m. and midnight – that’s an occasion that just didn’t exist in the past, and now we’re seeing it happening in a big way,” Lipsman said.
EBay Inc. began offering mobile-only deals starting at 5:23 p.m. New York time on Thanksgiving – the exact moment when it expected diners to push away from their pie plates and start scouring the Web. Four days earlier, Amazon.com debuted a holiday deal site promising bargains to shoppers who used the company’s mobile app or signed up for alerts on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Online sales already gained 17 percent on Thanksgiving day and 21 percent on Black Friday, according to research by IBM, signaling shoppers are no longer waiting for the so-called Cyber Monday that follows Black Friday discounts by brick-and-mortar retailers.
Apple’s iPad was used for almost 10 percent of online shopping, followed by the iPhone at 8.7 percent, IBM said.

On Black Friday, online sales, excluding eBay and auction sites, surged to over $1 billion for the first time, according to ComScore. Amazon was the top retailer that day, with more than 57.3 million U.S. visitors, the researcher said.
That growth has been driven, in part, by mobile shopping, thanks to the growth of smartphones and tablets, along with faster networks, that can deliver a richer Web shopping experience even when away from personal computers and laptops.

“Mobile is a game changer,” said Steve Yankovich, head of mobile business at EBay, the biggest online marketplace. “Consumers expect to shop on their own terms, and tablets and smartphones make every moment instantly shoppable.”
Emarketer estimates that Web-based sales completed on phones will rise 53 percent in the U.S. this November and December and make up 5.2 percent of Internet buying. By 2015, mobile purchases will contribute 9.5 percent.

Photo-sharing sites such as Pinterest that invite users to “like” and share products from dress shoes to iron bed frames are fueling growth in online sales, Lipsman said. The company has about 25 million users, four times what it had heading into the holiday season last year.

While shoppers still have to leave some social sites to buy items, services like Pinterest – and more recent copycats such as Svpply and Thing Daemon’s thefancy.com – can turn visitors into buyers by letting them see what their friends and style idols are buying.

“For a long time, we kind of talked about social commerce,” Lipsman said. “People would be making product recommendations on Facebook and Twitter, but what really is starting to hit this theme on the head is Pinterest.”
Almost a quarter of online shoppers take advantage of offers delivered via social media, according to a holiday retail report by American Express, the biggest U.S. credit-card issuer by purchases.

CafePress, which sells customized items such as T- shirts and coffee mugs, keeps a close eye on what images, buzzwords and products wax and wane in popularity on social- media websites to decide what to sell.
“All of our content is socially curated, so we have to really watch for what is emerging,” CafePress Chief Executive Officer Bob Marino said in an interview.

Shoppers have also developed a habit known as showrooming: inspecting an item in a physical store and then searching online for a lower price. About one third of shoppers do this, according to ComScore.
Showrooming has been made possible by smartphones and tablets, as more people browse the aisles at stores such as Target and Macy’s and instantly look up competing online prices.

Compared with last year, holiday shoppers this year are seeking more deals on smartphones, using more applications that scan bar codes for price comparisons and accessing more discounts through mobile apps, according to American Express.
Amazon.com’s “Price Check” app lets users scan a bar code with a smartphone camera, which then calls up the online retailer’s price. Users can then move the item to a shopping cart or order it on the spot.

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Andrew Hagger Friday 20 September 2013
Interest rates are at rock bottom if you’re in the market for a five-figure personal loan from your bank.
But if you apply to borrow a smaller sum you’ll be in for a nasty surprise.
The battle for personal loan business is as fierce as it’s ever been, but the issue for consumers is that many lenders are cherry picking and concentrating on the higher value end of the market.
Rates are very attractive if you want to borrow £10,000, for example, with lenders currently battling it out at the top of the best buys, enticing customers with interest rates of 4.8 per cent APR from Sainsbury’s Bank and 5 per cent APR from Yorkshire Bank and Derbyshire Building Society.

For lower value loans it is a very different story, with the majority of lenders charging double-digit rates on a £3,000 advance, with NatWest and Halifax among the most expensive at 19.9 per cent APR and 24.9 per cent APR, respectively.
There are cheaper options available, but my research shows you would do well to steer clear of the established providers if you want the best deals.
There are a handful of borrowing options that stand out, if you want to borrow a smaller sum of money, as follows:

Zopa, the biggest peer-to-peer lender in the UK, and RateSetter, one of the fastest-growing lenders in the same market, offer some of the best deals at 6.5 per cent APR and 8.2 per cent APR, respectively, for a £3,000 loan over three years.
Just because you’re not familiar with the names, it doesn’t mean you should discount them. The peer-to-peer sector has quickly established itself as a credible alternative to the big banks, and the low interest rates are much better than you’ll find on the high street.

Zopa has already lent more than £375m and RateSetter more than £108m to personal customers since launch, but you’ll need a good credit record if you want to borrow from these firms.
Another option to consider is the Rate for Life card from MBNA. Although this isn’t strictly a personal loan, there’s nothing to stop you using this long-term fixed-rate credit card in the same way you would a loan. If you make your purchase with the card and set up a monthly standing order from your current account, it works exactly the same as a personal loan.

The interest rate is 6.9 per cent APR for as long as it takes you to clear the balance, and unlike many deals there is no balance transfer fee to pay. It remains one of the cheapest ways to borrow a smaller sum over three or five years. There is a similar deal on offer from AA, with its Transfer Plus Credit Card charging 6.9 per cent APR for life, subject to a one-off balance transfer fee of 2 per cent.

The potential cost savings on a loan of £3,000 with the low-rate options mentioned here could be as much as £23 a month or £830 in total over a three-year term when compared with the personal loan with Halifax, charging 24.9 per cent APR

For £3,000 over five years the financial benefits are even greater at up to £25 a month and more than £1,478 over the full term.
Don’t just sign up with your own bank without checking out some of the less obvious alternatives, as there’s a good chance that you’ll be paying over the odds.
You wouldn’t buy a new car or a replacement kitchen without comparing prices from various retailers, so why take the shine off your cut-price deal by paying for it with expensive finance.

Shop around for the lowest rate you can get. By simply avoiding the major banks and taking advantage of deals from new lenders you can save a packet in interest charges.
Andrew Hagger is an independent personal finance analyst at moneycomms.co.uk

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Interest payments on fixed-rate mortgages are tumbling to record levels for those fortunate enough to have a decent-sized stake to put down, while borrowers with smaller deposits are being ignored.

This week, NatWest became the third major lender in the last fortnight to launch a five-year, fixed mortgage with a rate below 3 per cent, but only if you have a 40 per cent deposit. There is a massive fee of £2,495 payable, but despite this, if you’re looking to borrow £100,000-plus it offers good value and the chance to fix your repayments at an unprecedented low level until the summer of 2017.

The NatWest deal follows similar launches from HSBC at 2.99 per cent with a £1,499 fee and Santander at 2.99 per cent and a £1,495 fee, although the latter is only available to existing customers. On Wednesday, Nationwide rushed out an ever lower rate – 2.89 per cent – but only for four years.
Again, you’ll need a 40 per centr deposit and the arrangement fee is £900.
The reasons we’re seeing these record low rates starting to appear are down to a combination of lower swap rates, a fall in Libor and the imminent introduction of the Government’s new Funding for Lending Scheme.

This latest, multi-billion initiative from Whitehall is designed to offer low-cost funding to banks and building societies to be passed on to businesses and individual borrowers. It’s good to see lenders offering previously unheard of longer-term, fixed-rate mortgages, but we need to see rate cuts for those with a smaller deposit.

The housing and mortgage markets have been in the doldrums for over four years and need a boost from the bottom rung upwards. The NewBuy scheme was introduced by the Government earlier this year, but is restricted to specific, new-build properties.

If there’s going to be any upsurge in the number of mortgage transactions, lenders need to apportion some of the new Funding for Lending cash towards the first-time buyer market.
The difference in interest rates between the haves and have-nots as far as equity goes is massive, and although additional risk and capital requirements have to be factored in by lenders, there needs to be a greater focus on the first-time buyer segment of the market.

While a borrower with a 40 per cent stake borrowing £120,000 at 2.95 per cent (assuming an overall, 25-year term) will enjoy repayments of £566 per month, the monthly commitment for those with a smaller stake, and frequently a tighter budget, is far more onerous.

For example, with a 20 per cent deposit, the leading, five-year rate is 3.99 per cent (with £195 fee) from Monmouthshire Building Society. The same £120,000 will cost £633 per month and if your equity is limited to 10 per cent, even the most competitive rate of 4.99 per cent from First Direct will mean paying £701 per month.

Admittedly the cost differential is not quite so stark once you take into account the £2,495 fee on the NatWest mortgage which works out at just over £41 per month over the five-year deal, but the gap still needs to be narrowed.

It appears some lenders are competing for “low-risk” customers with headline rates, while leaving the wider market under-serviced.
Hopefully, as more providers make use of the Funding for Lending scheme we’ll see better deals across the full spectrum of mortgages, otherwise there will be little positive impact on the mortgage market and a wasted opportunity to boost the wider economy.

Free mobile broadband initiative from Samba
The mobile broadband market is dominated by a few major players, however, increased competition and advances in technology have seen costs fall sharply in the last few years.

Earlier this month, a new entrant, Samba, launched a service offering free on-the-go broadband for laptops, netbooks and iPads. Sounds too good to be true? Well, you’re not going to get something for nothing, there is a trade-off, but one that should go down well with cost-conscious mobile web users.
You pay a one-off, £5 fee for a SIM or £25 for a Dongle and SIM, and earn credit for watching video advertisements.
Watching 2.5 minutes of adverts per day earns almost 520mb of data per month, which could save £8-£10 compared with a conventional, mobile broadband contract. Samba uses the mobile-data network from Three and works on all popular browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer.

You choose when and what to watch, and while this service won’t suit everyone, with around 7m adults using broadband on-the-go, there’s unlikely to be a shortage of new customers.

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There are three ways to accumulate followers on Twitter.

One is to achieve sufficient real-life fame that we all want to read your brainfarts, regardless of their quantity or quality. The second is to knuckle down, for years if necessary, slowly accumulating connections one by one due to your wisdom, your searing wit, your sycophancy or all three.

The third way is to give £100 to a company selling fake followers and obtain 25,000 of them overnight. Boom. Problem solved.
There’s no question that having legions of followers on Twitter is worth something, however nebulous that something might be. Why else would companies devote the resources they do in order to “engage” us online? But having lots of fake followers would seem to be worth nothing at all.

After all, they’re not going to pay any attention; they’re just a statistic. Last summer an eagle-eyed politics buff noticed that the number of Twitter accounts following US presidential hopeful Mitt Romney (pictured) surged unnaturally – by about 117,000 – on one particular day; it turned out that 80 per cent of these new followers had only joined Twitter in the preceding few weeks, and many hadn’t even posted anything.

They were almost certainly fake. As someone pointed out at the time, that’s like filling a stadium with mannequins, giving a speech, then boasting about how you gave a speech to a packed stadium.
But large numbers of followers or Facebook “likes” do look superficially impressive. It gives people the impression that you’re doing social media “right”. As one company selling fake followers puts it: “Would you rather try a restaurant that looks busy, or one that’s empty?” Followers breed followers, and likes breed likes.

But with a burgeoning black market in social- media enthusiasm now worth millions of dollars, why should we believe the numbers any more?
Twitter’s policy of allowing us to have multiple accounts puts it at particular risk. Some companies control hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts, and can have them spring into action with a click of a button. Analyst Gartner estimates that, by next year, between 10 and 15 per cent of social-media endorsements will be fake, with retweets, likes and follows all purchasable entities, creating a bizarre landscape of pseudo-enthusiasm where the distinction between real and fake is increasingly difficult to discern.

And it’ll happen whether we “like” it or not.
Forget the smartphone, 2013 is the year of the phablet
Back in 2003, Nokia launched the N-Gage (pictured). Part gaming console, part phone, it achieved notoriety because of the preposterous way you had to hold it to your head in order to make calls – as if you had “one very large ear”, as Wikipedia puts it. The derision heaped upon it caused consumers to consider whether or not they’d look stupid when they called someone, and they made their choices accordingly.

But over the last few months, phoneshave reached eyebrow-raising proportions. The other day a friend of mine fished a Sony Xperia Z out of her bag and I giggled at it in the same way as I giggle at the sight of a 1980s’ brick phone.
And they’re getting larger. Samsung in particular is sticking to the maxim that bigger is better, with the imminent Galaxy Mega coming in two sizes – one with a 5.8in screen, another measuring 6.3 inches. With many mini-tablets only a fingernail larger at 7in, the two are now butting up against each other, creating a class of device known as the “phablet”.

Indeed, Reuters proclaimed that 2013 would be the year of the phablet – and while we might snort with derision, ridicule the convergence and quietly assert the ergonomic “truth” that phones should be iPhone-sized and tablets should be iPad-sized, the figures say otherwise.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note, with its 5.3in screen, has sold millions; we’ve been seduced by big, glossy screens, regardless of how much they cane the battery. Many of us like huge phones in a way we would never have done a couple of years ago. You’d have thought that, by now, the tech industry would have worked out the optimum size for a smartphone – but, perhaps surprisingly, there is no answer to that question; it’s as subjective an issue as the ideal length of a piece of string.

Will Facebook Home feel like a second skin?
Tomorrow sees the official launch of Facebook Home. Not quite a mobile operating system, not quite an app and not quite the Facebook Phone that some predicted. It’s probably best described as a “skin” for the Android operating system, bringing everything Facebook-related to the front and centre of your phone, and shoving everything else out of the way.

No longer will you need a Facebook app, because Facebook will be in your face pretty much constantly. Of course, those who despise everything Facebook stands for will give this product an exceptionally wide berth – but its launch raises interesting questions about the way our smartphones operate, and indeed the entire direction of the mobile ecosystem.

Facebook Home’s very existence is down to the open source nature of Google’s mobile operating system, Android; the code is available for any developer to use under a free software licence. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gleefully pointed out, this meant that Facebook didn’t need to work with Google.
They just got on with it. From next week, you can use Facebook Home by either buying an HTC First (coming to the EE network in the UK later this year) or by downloading it from the Google Play store and installing it on your Android phone – although initially it’ll only work with a select number of high-end sets, including the HTC One and Galaxy S3.

Thereafter, your phone becomes a Facebook delivery machine, gently guiding messages, music, video, news and games through a Facebook portal.
It’s easy to see how Facebook will benefit if Home catches on. It will effectively become the gatekeeper to your mobile existence, gathering data and using it to target advertising back at you. Also, at a stroke, Facebook’s competitors (such as Google) will be demoted to a secondary screen – which, of course, requires effort to call up.

And, as we know, we’re pretty lazy creatures. By blinkering customers to the myriad capabilities of an Android handset, Facebook gains more control, while publicly self-congratulating over the way it’s enabling humans to “connect”. Apple, of course, would never allow such desecration to its precious operating system.
But it’s distinctly possible that kids in particular will be seduced by Facebook Home. And if other companies follow suit, using Android to create Twitter Home, Pinterest Home and who knows what else, who’s to say that other Apple customers won’t be seduced to Android too?

A very cunning fox with a dirty old secret
The web browser Firefox reached version 20 last week. One of the exciting new features trumpeted by its maker, Mozilla, was the introduction of “Private Browsing” to individual windows; anything you get up to in that window won’t be recorded in your browsing or search history, while other windows operate as normal.

Google Chrome and Internet Explorer already have this feature – but what tickles me is the way descriptions of the benefits of private browsing inevitably skirt around their primary purpose.
The feature has been known as “porn mode” ever since it was introduced in the Safari browser back in 2005 – but even if you spurn online pornography, Privacy Mode’s main function is to keep your various nefarious activities secret from anyone who shares your computer.

Mozilla’s announcement last week was a masterpiece of the genre: “You can shop for a birthday gift in a private window with your existing browsing session uninterrupted.” Ah, yes. Birthday gift. That’s what you were up to. Your secret’s safe with me.

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