Sneak has discovered a new best friend. He’ll help you find out if you’re visiting dodgy e-commerce web sites by telling you useful information like the registration date of the site, what others think of it and how long you’ve got to return goods if you’re not satisfied with them on delivery. And his name is, erm, Howard.

Yes this new web tool has been designed by the European Commission to bolster user confidence in the interweb as a channel for commerce, and it decided that the most appropriate, trustworthy name in the Engligh language was Howard. Sorry all you Brian, Kevin and Barrys out there – just not good enough. Expect to see Howard the Shopping Assistant, as his full name goes, coming to a web page near you from 3 December. And don’t pick on him – he got bullied a bit at school, as you can appreciate with a name like that.

November 26, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak has no idea what Korean for scandal is, but it might as well be "Samsung" after the latest news from the Far East. Hot on the heels of the last bribery scandal in which Samsung Electronics officials were accused of doing naughty things with large brown envelopes, it seems former presidential anti-corruption advisor (oh the irony) Lee Yong Chul has been on the end of some less than above-the-board practices.

He has accused a Samsung executive of giving him a five million won "holiday gift". Oh dear, Sneak thinks that this isn't going to do Samsung any good as it tries to repair its somewhat tarnished image. There's even a pressure group called, rather snappily, the National Movement to Unveil Illegal Activities by Samsung and its Chairman. Maybe they should just stick to making chipsets.

November 23, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because of his sidelines in wall-rendering, roofing, spam emailing, tarmacing, and wholesale "staff" importing, Sneak always likes to keep an eye on what is being covered on BBC1's Watchdog television programme.

Last night he was shocked to see that ITV, that fine purveyor of all that is high quality, had angered some of its viewers with an online game linked to its "All Star Family Fortunes" show. Apparently the webbed Family Fortunes contains some rather rude survey results, rude enough to wrankle the type of people that would play Family Fortunes online. And Sneak assumes that these are a pretty hardy bunch.

Sneak was watching Watchdog with just one eye, but is pretty sure that there were references to people being kicked in the balls, and much worse. Now, unfortunately the page just displays an error message, specifically a "page not found".

What a shame ITV didn't think to keep its fans a little happier, and replace the 404 with one of those "Er Ar" sounds. That would have kept the w***ers happy.

November 20, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Apparently the entire Beatles back catalogue is being digitised as we speak and will be available from an interweb outlet near you sometime next year. The last remaining Beatle Paul McCartney – sorry Ringo, but you don’t really count – said as much last week, with the final hurdle of the Apple versus Apple trademark dispute now well and truly out of the way.

As much fun as it will be listening and downloading the Fab Four’s toons over the internet however, Sneak would rather search the world wide web for those priceless tracks penned and performed by the band the Beatles could have been, had they just stuck at it and thought outside the box a bit more. I am of course, ladies and gentlemen, talking about the mighty Wings.

November 19, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneak reckons he's down with the kids….he's even got a t-shirt with Crowded House printed on the front of it. But sometimes he feels uncomfortably old. Like the other day when he had to sit through the launch of social networking site Bebo's latest and greatest initiative – Open Media. The scheme will give media companies like the BBC and CBS "free and open access" to the network to place content and advertising on their own media players.

But that's not what made Sneak a little icky. It was the dawning realisation, as all we lucky few journalists sat in the auditorium of the Bafta theatre on seats donated by Scorcese, Copolla and, um, the cast of Casualty, that the target audience for all this is actually just a bunch of kids.

We watched them on the big screen extole the virtues of the site; some eloquently – obviously those at the higher end of the 13-24 year old demographic – and some less so. And we witnessed the panel debate to end all panel debates. Actually all it did was to end Sneak's will to live – sadly in the process missing a "tour de force" performance by Jamie Cullum. Phew, just in time then.

November 14, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some people say Sneak has an unhealthy obsession with Bits and Bytes and should really get out more. Well, to be perfectly honest, these people obviously didn't bear witness to the horrifyingly vivid sight of several hundred uber-geeks queueing down Regent Street last week, to get their filthy little mits on an iPhone. Yes, for the low, low price of £269 plus a compulsory 18 month O2 contract which will rack up another £600 +, you too could own the most over-hyped piece of technology since the Sinclair C5 … oh, alright, since just about ever.

Between you and Sneak though, however beautiful it looks, Sneak's advice is to hang tight to your filthy lucre and, unless you’re the hardest of die hard iPhiles, wait until Apple rivals bring out their own versions of this new design classic. Just like the iPod, the market will soon be saturated with a multitude of imitators – some may even, shock horror, be better than the original…

November 12, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sneak has seen many articles about the so-called "Generation Y" of young adults now entering the workplace, mainly lecturing businesses that they had better be ready for this tech-savvy lot who have grown up with the internet, text messaging, and Facebook. Sneak's advice, however, is this; don't hire them for customer-facing roles, as many seem to have the social skills of a Klingon.

As an example, one of Sneak's colleagues was recently on the receiving end of a call from a youth working for cable operator Virgin Media.

"Did you know you can save money on your bill if you have broadband as well as TV and phone?" he asked.

Sneak's colleague responded that he already had broadband.

"Ah, but is it Virgin Broadband?" the youth asked, to which the reply was "yes".

"Errm, ahh, I see," the youth said, whereupon the line promptly went dead.

Sneak has hung up on annoying cold callers himself many times in the past, but this is the first time he's heard of companies doing it to their own customers.

November 9, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Oh dear. A few weeks ago, Sneak reported how UK depresso-rockers Radiohead are offering their latest album In Rainbows for download for as much or as little as you fans think it's worth. "Fantastic!", "The future of music downloads!" and "Utter madness" were just three comments overheard by yours truly about this laudable endeavour. "A cynical marketing gimmick" was another, perhaps closer to the truth.

Well, whatever you think about the reasoning, it doesn't seem to have worked for Thom Yorke and co. Figures just released show that of the 1 million plus people that downloaded the album since its release, nearly two-thirds didn't pay a sausage for it. How rude. Maybe it's a sign that the Great British Public thinks anything available for download should be free … or maybe they just didn't think much of the album.

November 7, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

For those readers who missed Visions of the Future - The Intelligence Revolution on BBC4 on Monday, Sneak thought he’d offer his own summary. In the programme, futurist Dr Michio Kaku set out to explore the ways in which artificial intelligence was set to change our lifestyles.

Tele-immersion and virtual worlds were demonstrated as the future of social interaction. Kaku outlined an important family gathering – say, Christmas dinner – in years to come, where instead of people having to travel hundreds of miles to sit around a table and argue over Monopoly, they could simply transmit 3D images of themselves into a virtual meeting space, all the while from the comfort of their own sofa.

Viewers were also introduced to a pair of newly-weds, who had met through Second Life after taking a fancy to each other’s avatars (which needless to say bore very little resemblance to the real thing). The wife explained how creating her virtual self had led to a whole life change – she had met her husband, moved from the US to the UK and had even given up her old career to concentrate full-time on her Second Life jewellery store business. The fact that she made more money selling virtual bracelets and necklaces to decorate computer-generated images is either an indicator of how poorly paid she was before, or of how many people there are out there willing to shell out real money for unreal goods – Sneak fears it’s the latter.

Sneak’s initial reaction to the visions outlined in the programme was that this shift towards virtual living is just another sad step towards the disappearance of human interaction. However, he was more positive about one aspect of this future scenario –glasses that can download information and images onto the inside of the lens.

Sneak could definitely be won round by the prospect of sitting through yet another company strategy meeting, all the while entertained by the latest blockbuster movie transmitted via his spectacles rather than having to view the usual round of PowerPoint slides.

November 7, 2007 Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bebo, MySpace, Piczo, Facebook: they all betray that desperate attempt to corner the yoof market that can only have come from the brain of a middle-aged Silicon Valley marketing executive. They all scream “we’re young, we’re hip, join us, you won’t regret it”, with all the honesty of a retired politician who has decided to take up a career as a used car salesman.

So Sneak was glad to read the other day that old people are getting their own social networking sites to, um, network with the rest of society. SagaZone was set up by the eponymous travel and insurance firm and offers users the usual tools – live chat, photo uploads, blogging and so on. When Sneak had a look at the site it was refreshingly simple to navigate, with text about the size of a human fist. No flash gimmicks, no absurd applications. And online forum topics along the lines of “Countdown – what went wrong?”, “20 things we hate about hoodies”, “why young people are wrong about everything” and “hands up if you fancy Thora Hird’s starlift?”.

November 5, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneak has come to the conclusion that technology journalists can be a miserable bunch of haters sometimes. He discovered this with the launch of new technology-related website Byte Me TV, which features a series of regular podcasts where IT expert Gary Schwartz chats to page 3 stunna Keeley Hazell about life, the universe and IT.

Now, the acting might not be troubling Bafta judges anytime soon, but its aims are pretty laudable – to demystify an industry which creates more acronyms than the civil service. It certainly doesn’t deserve all of the comments pinging around the blogosphere. Although Sneak noticed that the same socially inept bedroom-dwellers who snigger behind their laptops as they diss make sure they put in as many hyperlinks to Ms Hazell's homepage in their articles as possible – well, they are prodigious rankers.

Byte Me will no doubt get the youth vote, well, the male youth vote – sorry Gary. But Sneak wonders whether the intended audience of silver surfers will actually be able to find out how to connect to the interweb to watch the dang thing. Well, if anyone can rouse an elderly male relative into action, it's probably Keeley...

November 3, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)