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On Tech Brief today: Welcome the table overlords, how to exploit the vanity of New York ad men, and playing with Twitter.

• Vanity! Thou gaudy bauble. To everyone but Alec Brownstein, that is. The enterprising copywriter bought adverts based around the names of the creative directors at advertising firms that he wanted to work for. :

"It worked: Everyone but one of his targets called him, and today Brownstein works for Young & Rubicam, a fancy New York ad agency."

• At almost nine years old, is getting on a bit. Perhaps this explains why the Redmond software giant is pensioning off some of the older bits. It has announced that versions only patched with Service Pack 2 will have support cut on 13 July. because so many PCs inside large firms are just such XP machines:

"And as anyone paying attention knows, infected PCs in corporate settings are in high demand by cyber gangs controlling the botnets driving all forms of cybercrime. Botnets are used to spread spam, steal data, hijack online bank accounts, commit click fraud and conduct denial-of-service attacks for extortion or political reasons."

• Twitter: good for microblogging; bad for gaming. Until now. Thanks to coders Tom Scott and Dom Hodgson, you can use your followers and those of friends to play . :

"Basically, it looks at any given username and works out who is mutually following who, and then presents the statistics about those accounts in the Top Trump format. I'm pleased with my ability to work out which of my friends are actually sweariest."

• Beware the tables. They have found a way to reproduce without the aid of humans. Designers have found a way to make tables that resemble each other like siblings do. Alike but not identical. :

"They'll fire up the algorithm, laser-cut one of those babies, powder-coat it, and it'll look like and yet unlike all others. They've made seven years' worth of 'em. Imagine the joy of doing something on this solid, generative table... dunno what, planning nonlinear world domination maybe... a table supported by stout iron legs created with minimal human intervention!"

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