Little known fact for you all to mull over. Sneak has spent approximately 58 per cent of his working week this last fortnight attending IT conferences. Not that it doesn't come with some compensations – Sneak has spent many a happy hour on trade show floors observing the spandex clad beauties IT vendor X has hired for the day in the vain hope of attracting some sexually excitable potential customer to its stand.

But one of the common complaints Sneak has about these events, beyond the depressing sandwiches and the lack of a ready supply of tasers to get through the bovine crowd, is the press centre facilities. Um, Internet World, for example – judging from the title, you would expect a little internet access perhaps? Wrong. Expect no WiFi, no fixed broadband, and just a single 3G dongle which wouldn't work on Sneak's laptop. Nice biscuits though...

April 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seems like the London mayoral election is the latest big name event to have been hijacked by cybersquatters – those pesky critters who buy up lucrative domains or near misspellings of them in the hope of monetising the site somehow, or just causing mischief. Yet, according to domain name management firm NetNames, Ken seems to be getting a rather rough ride on the world wide web.

Apparently domains such as ihatekenlivingston.org, and kenlivingstone.org are doing the rounds. The latter boasts a picture of the man himself dressed as a cowboy with the headline “Do you really want to pay for Ken Livingstone and his cronies?”. Sneak isn't sure why Boris has escaped relatively unscathed but imagines it must be something to do with the vigorous defensive registration activities his camp has been involved in. A total of ten other domains point back to his site backboris.com.

April 25, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sneak as been pondering the IT infrastructure at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and is warning PR firms whose clients have kit installed there to get those press releases in quick, before the avalanche that is bound to occur just before the apparatus fires up in July occurs.

The reason being that there are prophets of doom out there predicting that when LHC fires up, it will create a ‘strangelet’ – a mini-black hole if you will – that will quickly devour all human life forms on earth – and Boris Johnson. Ironic really, considering all those stories about black holes in UK science funding – who’d have thought that we were actually funding black hole creation – literally. Still, it might answer the age old question of whether there are other intelligent life forms in the universe. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) project may be drawing a blank because when the unknowing extraterrestrials get to the evolutionary stage where they can transmit their presence to the rest of the universe, firing up their LHC equivalents quickly turns off their broadcasts.

One can imagine the Omnipresent Being responsible for the creation of the universe chalking off the civilisations firing up LHCs, on his/her/its map of the universe – with the dulcet tones of Freddie Mercury hammering out Queen’s ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ in the background.

April 25, 2008 Science | Permalink | Comments (6)

Pixmania, which is one of those online tings, brud, innit, erm…, Let's start that again.

Digital equipment e-tailer Pixmania has released some research that claims that more and more l337 speak (that's what geeks do) is being added to the english language every year. 200 new words, the firm says, will be added to our language over the next 365 days, which seems rather precise a number – does Pixmania has a nonsense word generating machine? Or legions of propeller hat wearing geeks ready to spread its radical new language?

Anyway, announcing the news, Ulric Jerome, the managing director of pixmania.com, said: "Technology has infiltrated our lives in many ways and at such a pace it is natural that it has developed a language of its own."

Which is rather disappointing. You think he could have at least chucked a smiley in there.

April 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

No, it isn't a still of Doctor Who taken from an episode where Dalek creator Davros returns. This photo shows Sol Squire of data archive company Data Íslandia, with The Data Scooter, a ruggedised container for physically shipping terabytes of data out to the firm's Iceland-based datacentre.

What Sneak would like to know is whether the Data Scooter is very large, or whether Squire is particularly diminutive. And why does he appear to be sitting in it?

Whatever the answer, it certainly looks tough enough to survive even an air accident, so Sneak would also like to know whether the container can be obtained to carry luggage on ordinary passenger flights. Let's see the ham-fisted baggage handlers at Heathrow try to mangle that up.

April 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are few things Sneak dislikes more than the Infosecurity Europe show. Maybe being eaten alive or being strapped down and forced to watch endless episodes of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria, in a scene reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, come close. But that said, their pre-show surveys are always good for a laugh.

In what has become an annual obsession, those crazy kids from Infosec Europe go out on the streets of London and try and get people to divulge their online credentials in return for a small gift. This year the survey found that, shock horror, 45 per cent of women would swap their passwords for a bar of chocolate, as opposed to just ten per cent of men. What's that you say? Women in chocolate-liking shocker? Um, not really – it's far more likely women are just canny enough to give out a false password in return for a bite of a Walnut Whip. Fellas, you've got to think this one through more carefully!

April 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Technology can be a wonderful thing, but it can also get you into a bit of trouble if you literally let it do everything for you. For example, it would be best not to rely on that GPS navigator that often leads your car down a one-way street, the wrong way, before advising you take a right off the nearest pier.

Spell-checkers too can be a veritable minefield for the time-deprived hack. Sneak is often falling foul of Microsoft's constant and pedantic urge to correct all his words into the incorrect (aka the American) spelling. And just recently, the very same tool advised him to change the term "ruggedised" to "buggerised". A buggerised laptop? One can only imagine what that looks like.

April 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new Banking Code has been launched by the British Bankers' Association, warning that if you don't protect your PCs, you could be held liable for any losses incurred through online fraud. It had to happen. Sneak's colleagues have been predicting for a while that the natural conclusion of the banks rolling out two factor authentication and free AV for their customers is that they would begin to shift liability away from themselves.

The Code also helpfully suggests tips to protect oneself when venturing into the wild west of the web. One hint is to type any banking urls directly into the toolbar rather than click through to sites via potentially dodgy links. Um, which is fine, unless you suffer from that common male affliction known as sausage fingers. The surest way to end up at a phishing site is by trying to using ones porky digits to try and type an address in manually, Sneak reckons.

April 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Stop. Hold the front page everyone, Gartner's gone off on one again. According to Michael Silver and Neil Macdonald, two of the analyst giant's VPs, Windows is in danger of collapsing like an elderly relative after a particularly energetic game of gin rummy. The Gartner guys believe that Softie's place at the head of the IT captain's table may be at risk due to firms’ unwillingness to upgrade to Vista. They also said that Microsoft is neglecting developing markets, where buyers are more likely to be keen on low-cost than high functionality.

And then there is the web-based computing model, which old MS has reluctantly entered with all the relish of an epileptic walking into a nightclub. Yup, Seattle better be looking for a new favourite son, because Redmond's days are definitely numbered. Definitely. I mean, analysts are never wrong are they?

April 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you feel ever so slightly uneasy about Google Maps' ability to zoom down to within a restraining order's distance away from your rooftops? Well, you ain't seen nothing yet. The internet behemoth is now setting its sights on your front door, with reports suggesting it may soon expand its Street View mapping service beyond the 24 cities already clocked up in the States.

So if you see a Google van bombing down your street with photographers at the ready to capture an image of your property, better get the air rifle, the boiling fat, sack of gravel and the rotten eggs ready.

April 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The mobile web is widely touted as the future, according to the experts. With the advent of near field communications and cheap, flat rate tariffs from the operators, there's no end to the services firms could offer via this exciting new channel. Or so the marketing spiel goes. As usual, technology hounds look to the Far East to provide them with an idea of what the future might look like, and in the mobile sphere it's certainly no different.

Well, Sneak has learned that a tombstone manufacturer in the land of the rising sun has patented new technology which can allow visitors to a grave to download images to their phones of their dead relatives. A symbol engraved on the front of the tomb stone can be scanned by a mobile and in seconds you'll find a whole load of pics and interesting info. If the future looks like this, it's gonna be pretty weird.

April 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is all for productivity enhancing technologies. After all, where would we be without email, IM, web search and so on? But Sneak is also a fan of being able to enjoy a quiet nap on the train before he is awoken by twenty Tennents-swigging Glaswegian footie fans. And now this; Vodafone has just announced it will improving the coverage it offers inside Virgin trains. Apparently new so-called "repeater" technology, which retransmits 2G and 3G within carriages, will be installed on all of the firm's Pendolino trains. Right, where's the quiet coach?

April 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sneak is a big fan of futurologists, especially when their ideas read like the ramblings of a pot-smoking loon. So it was quite apt that this week at an IT security conference in Amsterdam, crystal ball-gazer extraordinaire Ian Pearson put a smile on the humourless European lips of the assembled CISO audience with his bonkers predictions.

Pearson explained how in the future we're likely to use wireless USB sticks – believable enough – and that we may one day holiday in virtual worlds – again just about possible. And then he told us about "smart bacteria" which could be engineered by criminals to harvest personal information. The details escape Sneak – actually, come to think of it, there were no real details, that's the beauty of being a futurologist – but our soothsayer predicted a nightmarish future when opening the lid of an "infected" pot of your favourite yoghurt could lead to all sorts of trouble. You see, as you breathe in the microscopic, specially engineered organisms, they could travel up your nose and steal all the passwords etc stored in your brain. Don't laugh, this is our future, people. Be very afraid.

April 4, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Anti-climax", "waste of time", "better of out of it". No, it's not another Friday night out for Sneak, but the unequivocal berating that BA's brand spanking new Terminal 5 building has received from all and sundry. Not one to gloat, often, Sneak remembers the enthusiasm with which IT journalists up and down the land were invited in, to be given special sneak preview insights into this exemplar of modern technology, during its construction.

How they ooh'd and ah'd over the magnificence of its construction, the wonder of its integrated IT infrastructure etc etc. Well, maybe now firms will be slightly more circumspect about floating their respective boats before big technology projects have actually been shown to work for real. Apparently it’s mainly down to a people and process problem, old T5. Not that this makes it any less painful for the parties involved. And for the record, Sneak would love to say he had a chance to see first hand the wonderous workings of the new terminal, but he couldn't find the car park.

April 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a radical plan British scientists are using dolphins to assess the damage caused by carbon emissions, and other green issues on the planet.

The dolphins, which have been specially bred for the purpose are to be dropped in the desert along with a lot of technical equipment. Once there they will be studied and assessed, with the aim of discovering whether the poor conditions would effect their development should the worst happen and the human race be wiped out.

"We believe that dolphins are our future," said Ben Finch, chief scientist, "and this is the only way that we can see how they would function and survive in a post apocalyptic environment."

The dolphins declined to comment

April 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

A businessman has admitted failure in his plan to farm wind, as part of a very mis-guided attempt to produce cheaper power.

The entrepreneur, Alan Gump, said, "We use an old diesel generator to power the turbines, which spin around producing wind, which we then try to collect using large, recycled bin bags. It's not as easy as it sounds."

According to energy experts, the amount of energy used to power the generator and the turbines, not to mention the excessive neon sign used to illustrate the endeavour, far outweighs the amount of power that the wind harvest would produce – should collecting wind in bin bags have any ecological use whatsoever, "Which it does not" he added.

April 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Due to an administrative error involving a large GPS systems provider, a mis-typed domain name, and a cross channel ferry opportunity, a riot had closed down both of Calais' greengrocers.

Hordes, well, tens, of Apple-mad brits hit the glamorous port town looking to stock up on bargain unlocked Apple iPhones, only to discover that they had spent approximately £59 for a four person car pass on a ferry to buy what one described as "low-rent grannie smiths. The kind that old people make a lot of noise eating."

Finding nowhere to spend the Euros they had with them, the iPhone tourists decided to start walking around making huffing noises and speaking under their breath. After a while one tripped, knocking over a display of "legumes", and, according to an eye witness, "the whole place went mental."

"At first we thought that they wanted a particular kind of apple, but we later realised that it was the Apple iPhone that the stupid British were after. Idiots" said, Mnsr Paradi – the owner of the 'No horse Veg shop' through a translator and a barrage of shoulder shrugs.

After refusing access to his toilet, and pretending to understand even simple English phrases, Paradi's shop was razed to the ground and then rebuilt three miles around the corner, "Just, I suspect, to annoy me" he said.

Apple UK wasn't asked to comment on the story, since actually it had nothing to do with it.

April 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)