The Weekly Round-Up:19.09.03

Apple Computer, which is famous for making cute, funky computers and Apple Corps, which is the company behind the Beatles, who are famous for their cute, funky pop songs, have a long and colourful history of litigation behind them.

It all kicked off back in 1981 when the Beatles sued Apple over the corporate name. The case ended with the tech company paying up and agreeing to only use the name for computer products. Round one to McCartney, Starr, Harrison and Yoko Ono.

Apple Corps successfully sued again in 1991 after the computer maker stuck its multi-coloured apple logo on music-synthesising products. The result: a whopping victory for Apple Corps with the computer maker handing over a reputed $38m as well as a promise not to put their logo on any music-related products.

Now clearly, you'd have thought with the Beatles' lawyers having run roughshod over it twice, Apple would have to be pretty damn careful if it wanted to avoid further legal wranglings - especially when music is involved. Right?

Wrong. What has Steve Jobs gone and done? He's only selling MUSIC online, through the iTunes MUSIC store, allowing users to copy tracks to its best-selling MP3 MUSIC player the iPod.

The Round-up can't help thinking that maybe Apple Computer's legal team, after years of successfully walloping Taiwanese computer makers for producing machines bearing so much as a passing resemblance to an iMac, may want a new, stiffer challenge.

And they may well get it.

One can only postulate that the Apple lawyers have a trick up their sleeves of such unbelievable guile and cunning it would make a John Grisham devotee swoon.

A feat of jurisprudential prestidigitation so staggering that the judge and jury will actually launch into spontaneous applause when it is delivered.

Either that or a small nuclear device, because it seems clear to the Round-Up that given past history Jobs and co are on course for a legal hiding.

So it's gloves off for the next round of legal sparring. And from where the Round-Up sits it looks like the latest fracas between Apple and the Beatles finds the computer maker without a leg to stand on - and you can insert your own Heather Mills joke here...

Three things that modern British politicians have difficulty finding:

1. A way of appealing to the youth of today 2. Weapons of mass destruction 3. Their laptops

To be accurate, it's not just MPs but also civil servants who have been criticised this week for losing their government-issue laptops with gay abandon.

According to a survey, an alarming number of government laptops, many containing unprotected sensitive information, are lost and stolen every year.

Six per cent of government employees have lost or had their laptops stolen, while a staggering 25 per cent write their passwords down. Admittedly, six per cent doesn't sound too alarming until you consider that the civil service employs around 500,000 people.

Since 1996, 594 laptops have been lost or stolen from the Ministry of Defence - which admitted that around 30 per cent of machines lost contained "sensitive" information.

One MI5 employee lost his after he put it on the floor to buy a train ticket. James Bond eat your heart out. (Or was that MI6?)

But it's not just laptops we've been careless with. A recent silicon.com survey found that 54 per cent of respondents confessed to storing sensitive company information on their PDAs, while a worrying 12 per cent of respondents admitted to losing at least one PDA.

The sermon for the day? With portability comes great responsibility. Be careful out there, people.

Still it's not just civil servants who are guilty of techno carelessness: some years ago a long-departed silicon.com executive managed to leave his laptop in the back of a taxi after a night out. As we pondered the news the next morning we realised that somewhere in London was a cabbie in possession of:

1. A top-of-the-range Sony Vaio 2. The company's 12-month strategy 3. The largest collection of Swedish porn this side of Stockholm

Quote of the week comes from the so-called Homeless Hacker, Adrian Lamo, who was finally arrested by the FBI this week after wandering aimlessly around America like the Littlest Hobo.

Referring of his impending prison time, Lamo said: "The experience let me do exactly what I always said that I'd do: take confinement and turn it into a learning experience like anything else."

Which sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing David Blaine might say.

The Round-Up is still giving Dave - as we, his near-neighbours, now know him - a wave each morning and is pretty convinced it's the highlight of his day (yes, the Round-Up accepts the only other competition on that front comes from peeing in a tube and enduring hours of abuse but first is first).

Apparently, after two weeks or so without food Blaine can look forward to experiencing hallucinations.

So before it pops down the fancy dress shop, rents a giant bunny rabbit costume and saunters around Blaine's perspex box pulling Action Men out of a top hat, the Round-Up would like to say a huge thank you to all those kind souls who have pledged money to Byte Night, following the appeal in the Round-Up last week. You are all stars, and your money will go a long way to helping the problem of youth homelessness in the UK.

And finally, silicon.com this week wrote a story detailing the latest bout of digital blunderitis to hit the mailto:editorial@silicon.com inbox.

A man, who for reasons of discretion we will call Mr X, bought a new camcorder.

The first thing he did with it was record himself indulging in marital relations with his wife. The second thing he did was make a tape of his daughter's birthday party. Without changing the tape. You can see what's coming...

The editorial team were rightly incredulous at this particular blunder and posed the question whether people actually did this sort of thing.

His reply came in an email from another reader, who we will call Denny... because that's actually his name.

The email bore the subject header "Some people live the dullest lives..." and Denny's email address bore an intriguing ukfetish.info domain host.

Denny spluttered: "Believe it or not most of the world's digicam owning population really is young enough and interesting enough to consider that a very worthwhile first use for their new technological acquisition. I'm sorry your life isn't quite as much fun as ours."

Well that told us. Though the Round-Up wonders whether Denny - and his ukfetish.info domain name really is the Everyman he imagines. The Round-Up is going out on a limb here to suggest that perhaps he's a little more experimental than most.

But it did get us wondering whether Mr X and Denny's practice was a little more widespread than we first thought... "most of the world's digicam-owning population," he'd said...

And then right on cue a member of silicon.com's editorial team, who hadn't been party to this exchange, entered the office and announced he'd just bought himself a new camcorder. And upon reading this he'll be able to work out why we've been giving him funny looks and making 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink - how's the new camcorder...' type comments.

Until next week the Round-Up will be here, there and everywhere. In the meantime have some headlines, the very best we have to offer...

UK anti-spam laws launched Gates and Ballmer get pay rises There's Phones 4U – but no email Lost PDAs betray company secrets Virus watch: Should we be braced for the return of Sobig?