Jackie Chan has made some mistakes in his life - the Tuxedo anyone? - but his collaboration with Russian anti-virus vendor Kaspersky Lab is one of the strangest things that Sneak has ever seen.

If you wanted to educate people about the capabilities of your internet security tools would you employ a kung-fu movie star, stick him on a Segway and ask him to roll around punching virtual viruses? You would?! Well Sneak would not. However, you are not alone because apparently Russian tech firm Kaspersky Lab would also.

What's next? Steven Seagal doing a roundhouse kick to the face of phishing attacks? Jean Claude Van Damme leaping over a line of cars to punch a malicous web site in the grill? Ross Kemp (okay we admit that that is a bit of a reach) grasping a spoofed URL by the throat and smashing it repeatedly against a dustbin? Maybe - but we doubt it.

The ad - which features both Chan and company founder Eugene Kaspersky himself - will have kept some graphic designers and translators in business for a few hours on an otherwise quiet afternoon - but will it sell any security systems?

Don't ask Sneak - he's too busy trying to fix his keyboard by karate chopping the space bar.

July 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Cameron has labelled incessant tweeters "twats" in an interview on breakfast radio.

During the interview with Absolute Radio breakfast host Christian O'Connell, the leader of the Conservative Party also said the British public were "rightly pi**ed off with politicians". Cameron then quickly apologised for his bad language at such an early hour, but failed to say sorry for such an appalling understatement.

The twats comment occurred when O'Connell asked Cameron why he didn't use micro-blogging site Twitter to spread his party's message. "Too many twits might make a twat," replied Cameron.

Cameron's spinners later pointed out that twat is not considered profanity according to the arcane rules of public broadcasting in the UK.

But somewhere in deeply conservative middle England, such language is probably thought of as unbecoming of a man widely expected to be the next prime minister.

However, Sneak is sure that such 'slips' are merely cynical efforts by the Old Etonian to endear himself with the British public by camouflaging his inherent elitist roots.

July 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to a survey from a company that apparently specialises in confusing press releases and email management, one in three British workers get offended by the content of emails - 'by mistake'.
 
According to GMX - which sounds like a runner up in Britain's Got Talent - people in offices skim read work emails - no! you don't say - and as a result mis-judge the 'tone' and assume that the person at the other end of the keyboard is "havin' a pop at them!" or something.

The survey found that skim reading a mail can cause upset, and urged users to treat the medium in a much more responsible manner. Eva Heil, managing director at GMX, said, "Whilst keeping on top of a bulging inbox is a common pressure for many workers, the research shows that unnecessary stress and upset caused by misinterpreting emails can be just as problematic. As well as managing our email efficiently, it can pay dividends to learn to interpret our work emails more closely."

Graham Jones, internet psychologist, added, "The problem with email, compared with face to face communication or telephone calls, is that we have no tone of voice or body language to help us interpret the message. Take time to think about a message just received, rather than just bashing out a reply which you later regret once you've had time to interpret what the sender was trying to say".

He then flicked us the Vs, spilled our pint, called us fat, and said something bad about our mothers...

We think.

July 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

According to an investigation by Sky News, PC repair shops are guilty of over-stating costs and snooping on personal data.

In an investigation, Sky tampered with a notebook, adding a slight hardware issue to the machine as well as a web cam and screen viewing software.

Although the issue would be simple to fix, the reporters found that one shop - YEP JUST ONE! - was decent and honest, while the majority ran riot on the laptop.

Sky captured incidents of technicians stealing personal banking information, over-stating the cost and level of necessary repair work, and browsing through the My Documents folder. These are precisely the sorts of things that make Sneak glad that he still hasn't bothered to get the keyboard on his NC10 fixed.

Sky said that one shop, Revival Computers in Hammersmith, West London, was the worst offender and showed photos of one worker gleefully copying photos of a researcher in a bikini to his memory stick, along with a number of other files marked private. The firm also tried to invoice Sky for a £130 motherboard - despite this not being necessary.

Interestingly, Sky is run by Rupert Murdoch whose newspaper group is accused of snooping on private phone calls for the purpose of printing salacious news stories.

Still, what's good for the goose eh?

July 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6)

Days after the announcement that Jack Duckworth was leaving the road but not the show, Google has announced that it is taking its Street View cameras down Coronation Street.

We can hardly wait. After all it is not as though the Street is shown in glorious colour on television screens every other night of the bloody week is it? What we really need is the ability to clunk through a pre-arranged look at some characters bobbling about doing things that are not very important on our computers as well.

An ITV spokesperson said: "Thanks to Street View, fans will be able to have a good nose around the set in a way that would have been unimaginable almost 50 years ago when the show first aired".

Yes, it is hard to picture anyone in the 1950s imagining that a car from a web company would drive down a television programme set, photograph it, and then spend six months painstakingly putting the photos back together in order to give yet another look at what you can see on the television anyway. Fifty years ago people had more important things to worry about. Like 'the bomb'.

As everyone knows, Google strips out all of the interesting photos from Street View anyway, so even if someone called 'our kid' was caught doing something outrageous with the she/he from the cafe, we'd still all be none the wiser.

July 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)

What do you get if you cross Big Brother, an art installation, and Speaker's Corner? It's Antony Gormley's radical idea for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square of course. The so-called One & Other project, which began today, will see a total of 2,400 people occupy the plinth for an hour each, 24 hours a day, until 14 October.

If you're wondering why, artist Gormley has described the project as "a form in which our freedom of self-expression and freedom of speech is celebrated and extended". So there. More interestingly, from a technology perspective, the entire thing is being streamed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on a web site specially created in partnership with Sky Arts. And the plinthers are microphoned-up, so you can even hear their words of wisdom.

Sneak isn't sure how many people are actually watching it over the web, but it must be more than are standing in Trafalgar Square seeing the real thing. So far it seems a man in a giant panda suit, and another in a straw hat reciting William Blake and, erm, Jamie T poetry are not a big enough draw. However, the whole event has not been without incident. After a protester invaded the opening ceremony, several visitors to the web site have left messages complaining the live web feed is not working.

"Many people from around the world on Twitter are having problems watching it. The lag is terrible," wrote one. Another wrote, "Completely depressed, having just wasted 20 minutes of my life watching two people, seemingly bereft of any idea what to do... A jerk on the street is still a jerk on the plinth." Wise words. Sneak is now looking forward to logging on after pub closing time to see if it gets a bit more interesting.

July 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a move that will not be a massive surprise to many, middle England's favourite tabloid hate-peddler the Daily Mail has decided to back Nasa hacker Gary McKinnon's bid to avoid extradition to the US.

In a front page lead yesterday, the holier-than-thou Mail dispensed with its usual immigrant-bashing and Princess Di fascination, instead focussing all of its not insignificant vitriol on the American administration and the "craven politicians" of the UK who have allowed this "affront to British justice".

McKinnon, as we all know, hacked into pentagon and Nasa computer systems with surprising ease, back in 2001, allegedly looking for evidence of little green men. And ever since his arrest, the US authorities have been after him. The arguments against McKinnon's extradition are well-versed and focus mainly around his suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, a type of autism, which would render him wholly incapable of coping with prison life. Another argument in the "no way USA" camp is that the authorities there are planning to use his case as an example to others, and so if tried there any sentence handed out could be harsher than the crime deserves.

So far the McKinnon case has garnered much publicity and he has even won public backing from influential figures such as London mayor Boris Johnson. Whether the Daily Mail will succeed where the others have so far failed remains to be seen.

July 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (11)

The heat wave may have broken in the UK, but that hasn't stopped the world from noticing that Apple has released some support information concerned with overheating iPhones and using the devices in hot weather. We know, the words 'support information' chill us too (if you'll excuse the pun) so we'll summarise it for you - don't let your iPhone get too hot or it will stop working.

Although designed to work in temperatures that range from chilly to "will someone please let me out of this oven" (between 0ºC and 35ºC) trying to use one outside of these parameters could cause it to stop working, Apple has warned. The firm makes a number of recommendations, including telling people not to leave their iPhone in a hot car. Instead it recommends that you turn off the phone and move to somewhere cooler - like indoors maybe, or Iceland?

Although Sneak usually adjusts to the hot weather by making small changes to his daily routine - for example, storing his underpants in the office fridge - he can't help but wonder what this sort of announcement will mean to those holidaymakers planning on using their iPhones in St Tropez, St Lucia or some other summer hotspot. It's hard to imagine them stuffing the oh-so-trendy item anywhere but on permanent display. Besides, beach outfits tend to be low on pockets.

NB: The Apple support page was updated on 25 June. We would like to apologise for our lateness in bringing it to your attention, but Sneak works remotely and like the iPhone was struggling to work in the heat.

July 3, 2009 Travel, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (6)

Sneak was intrigued to read reports that the BBC is to screen a 'comedy drama' about the early days of the home computer industry in the UK, when men were men, computers were knocked up from kits that had to be soldered together at home, and software was almost invariably loaded from audio cassette tape.

The show is apparently to be called [bad pun alert] "Syntax Era", and will star comedians Alexander Armstrong as Clive Sinclair and Martin Freeman as Chris Curry, one of the founders of Acorn Computers.

Many of the reports Sneak has seen indicate the show's plot will centre on the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn Computers for "home computer supremacy".

This isn't how Sneak recalls this period of IT history, it has to be said. Sinclair's ZX Spectrum and Acorn's BBC Micro computers were aimed at very different ends of the computer market.

The 'Beeb' was regarded as the Rolls-Royce of home computers, as it had a full typewriter keyboard, video outputs for a TV and monitor, and an array of ports, including analogue-to-digital converter, disk drive interface, and even a set of chip sockets for plugging in add-on ROM chips that expanded its built-in software. It was a hobbyists' dream.

By contrast, the 'Speccy' was cheap and cheerful, with a rubbery keyboard and a single expansion port that simply brought out the processor bus signals to a connector at the back of the case. It was great for learning to program, playing games, and an introduction to the world of computers.

It would be difficult to decide which of the two was best, however. While the Beeb was clearly technically superior, the Spectrum was far more affordable and had many more software titles created for it. Which would you choose?

As to the "Syntax Era", don't you think that it's great that the BBC went out of its way to find so obvious a look-alike for Clive Sinclair?

July 1, 2009 Television, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (9)