And the official release date for Apple's forthcoming Snow Leopard operating system is now, erm, we're not entirely sure.

The new OS X 10.6, to give it its official name, has been hotly anticipated, as all Apple products are, with an originally slated release date for some time in September.

Then the rumour mill began. First Apple "accidentally" listed a Mac Box Set version of the operating system on its Apple store yesterday, which promised to ship within 24 hours. The Box Set bundles Mac OS X with iLife '09 and iWork '09, and will retail at $169 incidentally.

And now the reports are that the OS has been listed on Apple's UK site as shipping "by 28 August", at a price of £7.95. Except it isn't.

When we looked on the site it said the shipping date was still due for September, despite screen shots from various news sites asserting the August date.

Whether Apple's paranoid PR machine is deliberately spreading misinformation in this way to mask the real launch date, or the firm is so inept that it has jumped the gun twice in a couple of days, we're all getting a bit tired of this.

To be honest, life is becoming a little too short to be worrying about OS release dates. Sorry Steve.

August 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Simon Cowell is a very nice man and probably has very nice lawyers, so it is with great sadness that we discover that computers belonging to his company Syco (geddit? It's an acronym that sounds like psycho) have been hacked.

But why hack Syco? Was it to lay grubby hands on Cowell's bank account details? He is worth more money than God after all. Or to find his tailor's name and address to arrange a hit (and we don't mean a top 10)? Or to try and get Paula Abdul's phone number?

No, none of the above. Unbelievably people apparently are hacking into Cowell's computers to get their hands on early cuts of the odious ear bile he calls music.

Tone-deaf thieves have already got their mitts on tracks from X Factor winners Leona Lewis and Alexandra Burke and are selling them to file sharing sites - according to The Sun.

Cowell is responsible for such wonder acts as Shayne Ward and Journey South - the latter of which could have been named after the career arc of both - so his back catalogue is ripe for further picking.

A spokesman for Syco told the Current Bun, "[We] are working alongside the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the British Phonographic Industry, the police and investigators in this and they are making fast progress. We will certainly look to bring charges against those who are responsible. We cannot give any more details at this stage for operational reasons."

We can't help wondering whether this case will be investigated a bit more thoroughly than Monday's Facebook burglar incident.

August 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)

News came out late yesterday that the wife of Evan Williams, chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, has been tweeting whilst giving birth. Now this immediately seemed to be wrong on so many levels Sneak could not even marshal his thoughts.

But then in a moment of clarity Sneak realised that, whilst standing for all that is bad with the world, it is utterly right and natural that it happened. In the land where there's an app for everything, where egg white omelettes, juice bars, roller blading, frozen yoghurt, and Gwen Stefani came from, it is entirely natural that a woman should inform the world via a web-based micro-blogging service that her nether regions are slowly dilating. It should be a warning lesson to us all in fact - there is such a thing as TOO MUCH INFORMATION.

There is a future not too far away, where everyone is talking about everything all the time. Not listening, you understand, just updating their profiles; sending out their tweets, posting their ill-informed claptrap on blogs not dissimilar to this one - pushing out endless streams of pointless information.

In what is surely the perfect vignette of San Francisco life in the Noughties, Williams' wife, after informing the world that her waters had indeed broken, said she was timing contractions on an iPhone app. Lord have mercy on all our souls. An iPhone app for that? In this regard Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker surely has the best idea on what to do to followers of the sinister iPhone cult:

"An app that makes the iPhone scream 'I'VE GOT AN IPHONE!' each time the user pulls it out of their pocket. Once activated, it would be impossible to switch off. The only way to stop the constant embarrassment would be to repeatedly crack the device against a wall, or preferably your own face, until it shattered."

Can we make Brooker the next chief information officer of the world please?

August 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are many wonderful things about Twitter, but giving a platform to publish old Bob Monkhouse jokes is not one of them.

Yes, Sneak has discovered that the dead comic, star of such classic TV shows as Celebrity Squares, Wipeout and The National Lottery Live, has been reincarnated on the micro-blogging site.

Joking aside, Monkhouse's reappearance is courtesy of the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation (PCRF), which is hoping to raise awareness of the disease, which kills a man an hour in the UK apparently, and a few laughs.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll ... probably want to immediately click through to a different page when you read such gems as: "My wife's cooking was so bad, when I gave leftovers to the dog, he licked his backside to get rid of the taste."

Yup, the PCRF has somehow managed to dig up Monkhouse's old jokes so we can all laugh at classics such as: "I went out with a really sexy girl once. She put something behind her ears that drove me wild ... Her knees."

As we all know, the micro-blogging phenomenon was recently taken down in a denial of service attack which saw it outed for several hours. Russian hackers were to blame, it emerged, as they were targeting the Twitter account of a pro Georgian blogger.

At least, that's what the reports seem to suggest. A far more plausible reason is that Twitter was taken out to prevent these abominably bad jokes from being circulated.

August 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apple tried to prevent a father from publicising that his daughter's iPod MP3 player blew up last month, according to new reports today.

The Times said that 47 year old Ken Stanborough from Liverpool reported to Apple that his daughter's device had begun to hiss and overheat, so he threw it into the garden where it exploded in a puff of smoke.

However, the hardware giant apparently sent Stanborough a letter offering a refund only if he kept the settlement confidential.

In what appears to be an attempt by Cupertino to hush up any incidents where its devices are seen to have overheated, the firm warned Stanborough that any breach of this confidentiality "may result in Apple seeking injunctive relief, damages and legal costs against the defaulting persons or parties".

Apple has since told Sky News that it is "standard practice to have a letter of settlement" in these cases, and that it wasn't an attempt to gag the family.

You know how they say that there's no such thing as bad publicity? Er, that might not strictly speaking be true.

August 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (8)