And Sexy Photo Gate, which is especially hilarious for not even bothering to hyphenate. Oh, Hong Kong, how I loves ya.

So, “Antennagate”. If you don’t already know – and of course you do, but I’m probably going to describe it in some entertaining manner – the iPhone 4 loses signal when you hold it the wrong way (which is to say, the way you’ve always held every mobile phone you’ve ever used). The problem is not insoluble, if you’ve got some duct tape handy, but due to the impending threat of lawsuits and of people not liking him, Steve Jobs has announced the inevitable: free cases for everyone.

What I like about the whole thing is that the problem somehow didn’t come up in testing, and in my cartoonish imagination, that’s because no one testing the iPhone 4 thought to actually use it as a phone. “How’s the testing going?” “Just tried out an app that gives me live updates of the salinity of Wil Wheaton’s sweat: works fine.”

Anyway, this is all going to blow over soon enough. If that’s the biggest complaint about the iPhone 4, it sounds pretty damned sweet.  And these scandals never last. Remember Toallagate? Yeah, me neither.

We shall conclude with a song.

You know those animations where a kid in a movie opens a book and the ink spread out and displays the page in a kind of spreading creeper of art? I want to see the Light Touch hovering over a book that is blank except for a few small points of reference for the computer, and have an interactive book that knows when you’ve turned pages.

That’s possible now. You know why? Because we’re living in the future.

Naturally, Engadget’s title image is of the optimal use of Flash – watching Homestar Runner cartoons.

Internet Explorer 9 will support the Canvas graphics technology and the video and audio tags specified as part of the still-developing HTML5 standard, said Ryan Gavin, senior director for Internet Explorer, at a media event in San Francisco. The company demonstrated the performance of the third platform preview as compared to other browsers, taking specific jabs at Firefox and Chrome as it made its demonstration.

As part of its bid to overhaul Internet Explorer–which is still the world’s leading Web browser but has been losing share and cachet–Microsoft has chosen a new strategy for rolling out code to developers and browser enthusiasts. It released the first “platform preview” of IE9 at the Mix conference in March, and has now released new versions every eight weeks, Gavin said.

So says CNet.

Particularly amusing is Microsoft speed-testing IE9 with a game that’s apparently parodying the Google Chrome speed tests mentioned on this blog some time ago.

Meanwhile, the iPad is also upsetting the usurpers of the common handheld book, with e-book reader readers catching on to the fact that they are increasingly obsolete.

But as the iPad release date draws nearer in New Zealand, I get a feeling that I haven’t had since swine flu (or was it bird flu?) For months, I’d mind my own business, occasionally hearing about the flu on the news, and basically ignored it. But then I realised that this is exactly what people do in zombie movies in the lead-up to the night when everyone turns into a zombie. These little hints that you ignore, until it’s too late and the world is never the same again.

Of course, most people consider world zombie domination to be a bad thing, and that’s not what I’m saying about iPads. What I’m saying is that I have this growing sensation that Apple’s redefining people’s experience of technology, dragging us (some kicking and screaming) into the 21st century.

Consider this little gem. Japanese scientists (yes, them again) are playing around with touchable holography.

Touchable holography. Apple’s pioneering interface philosophy. Velcro.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking?

So wait till your mum isn’t behind you before you open it.

I remember when CD-ROMs first came out and someone told me they could carry 500MB of data. It sounded insane to me – who could use that much data? Then the CD version of Monkey Island came out, and we all had a good laugh.

From the nation that brought us karaoke, Final Fantasy games and ninjas, a research team has worked out a cheap alternative to current DVD technology that could store 25 terabytes of data. That’s more than it sounds, so you might want to click here and put it in perspective. No one can dispute that we are now that much closer to storing Christopher Walken’s brain on DVD.

Actually, that’s not very new. That’s what lots of people do every day.

But what if that wasn’t actually Gmail? A clever new kind of phishing is out, called tabnabbing. Aza has the details. Looks like we’ll have to be more vigilant than ever about where we enter our passwords and usernames.

And if you’re a bit tired of Facebook and privacy and all that jazz, how about an open-source video format? Google has announced the WebM project, supported by a bunch of big publishers. They’re implementing a royalty-free high-quality video codec, cutting through the HTML5 Ogg/H.264 conundrum like Alexander cutting through the Gordian knot.

That’s right, here at Get IT Here, we read the classics.

Youtube is already letting you join in the experiment if you want to, and it turns out that Microsoft will be supporting WebM with IE9. Now the ball’s in Apple’s court to get behind it, in the iPad, for example.

Mr Stevie Jobs, tear down this wall!