What a sad, sad past few days. Twitter has officially screwed Canadians where it hurts the most: in the Twitter. No more SMS Tweet updates. Should Michael, the lone Canadian staff member at BGR hang himself now or merely trudge forward in what is now a very bleak life? Is he seriously expected to sit at his computer and hit refresh or wait one minute for TwitterBerry to retrieve updates and tell him what his friends are up to? How else is he going to know that BG has put out an APB for his driver who was on a mission to get him a Starbucks Iced Caramel Macchiato and took a bit longer than usual? If the rest of the staff knows this then he should, too. This sort of stuff needs to be known in real time, damn it! Anyway, here’s Twitter’s lame excuse:

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want … regardless of where they live.

There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.

Fix this now, Twitter, for you have angered us!

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Microsoft is a company that takes a lot of heat from the public. Sure the Northwest giant may have made some tiny mistakes in the past, but it really does have its customers’ best interest at heart! Take the security update Microsoft issued earlier this week. If you think about it, Tuesday’s KB951748 security update is the most secure patch Microsoft has ever issued in its long and storied history. What’s the best way to ensure that Windows 2000 / XP users don’t come across any malicious code on the web or in their email? Kill their internet connection. Brilliant! Of course there is the slight chance that this end result wasn’t Microsoft’s intention. Perhaps they were merely trying to address the DNS issue discovered a few months ago and reported at length, and they screwed the pooch. The problem might just be that Microsoft has never heard of a little software firewall called ZoneAlarm. We can’t blame them though; it is after all, the most popular software firewall in the world. Countless Windows 2000 and XP users ran into quite a problem between Tuesday and today when a conflict between Microsoft’s security update and the popular firewall software resulted in the inability to access the internet. Mmm. Greatest line ever:

A spokesman for Microsoft said PC owners were not contacting it about any problems the update caused.

Hmm, perhaps that’s because they can’t get on the internet to contact you! After all, no one is dumb enough to try to call Microsoft Support anymore. Luckily CheckPoint has issued an update for ZoneAlarm already so Microsoft need not worry about cleaning up its mess. Note that PC users with the free version of ZoneAlarm may have to download and install the latest build manually. So what’s the deal Microsoft? Bill retires and the whole place goes to, umm, poop?

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