How scary is Carol Vorderman?

Admittedly there was some concern a while back that her presence in the country's media was reaching saturation point, but it would be difficult to describe that as frightening.

However, to the management bods at Thus - owner of Demon Internet - the TV presenter took on the appearance of the Angel of Death, prompting them to commit one of the most absurd PR blunders in recent history.

As the Round-up reported last week, the ISP had publicly stated that it would not tolerate paedophilic content on its servers and vowed to shut them down. Highly commendable, but a little digging by one of silicon's hacks led us to report on Tuesday (http://www.silicon.com/a42963 ) that the whole thing was a sham and that the ISP was continuing to host and regularly update offending newsgroups.

As it turns out, Thus's stand was just a pre-emptive PR strike to avoid the embarrassment of being exposed on a programme about online paedophilia researched by the Tonight with Trevor McDonald team and hosted by Ms Vorderman.

As a press cutting from the Observer hosted on Thus' website claims, the ISP caught wind of the programme and issued a statement claiming it was declaring war on the web perverts. The cutting reads: "Despite the fact that they were well known, Demon had no problem carrying them [newsgroups]. For seven years. But the threat of Carol..."

Xerox has been the home of computing's most innovative ideas. The mouse, the graphical user interface and the photocopier to name but a few. But all is not well with the firm - staff layoffs have reached the thousands after it failed to capitalise on its ingenuity, letting companies like Apple and Microsoft steal in the back door and get away with all its goodies.

This week, the company took a further body blow with the news that one of its key staff motivational practices is being axed in the interests of cost cutting.

Xerox has announced that as part of its massive restructuring it's scrapping its Vision Quest programmes which are based on a soul-baring Native American ritual. Basically Xerox used to drive its employees into remote areas and dump them there to fend for themselves and gain insights into their life's work.

Apparently, vision quests were originally used to guide a young brave's ascent into manhood and help him find his role within the tribe. Xerox used them to motivate a team of engineers to create an environmentally friendly digital photocopier.

As for team building and soul baring exercises at silicon.com, the Round up prefers a few pints down The Blenheim with the rest of the team...

Napster rival and file-sharing service Gnutella has been hit by hefty legal action, not from the cash-strapped music companies mind you, but from confectionary giant Ferrero.

Ferrero, which produces the Nutella chocolate spread, has won a temporary injunction in the Cologne superior court after claiming that its trademarked brand will be "inextricably and detrimentally linked" by name to the file-sharing site.

Under the injunction, a fine of up to $235,000 will be levied at the rather surprised Gnutella.de domain owner. I doubt he'll be serving any more Ferrero Rocher chocolates at his dinner parties in the future.

"But ambassador, with this controversial file-swapping service you are really spoiling us..."

There's nothing a mother wouldn't do for the well being of her children. Not least gain unauthorised access to the police's national computer network to check on the criminal record of her 13-year-old daughter's 19-year-old boyfriend.

Civilian police clerk Mary Allingham was fined £3,000 but spared a jail sentence after magistrates in Llanelli, Wales, heard that she feared her love-struck girl was about to run away with factory worker Marcus Paulson.

Allingham admitted she gained illegal access to the database and said she expects to lose her job as well as face financial ruin. Ironically the relationship has now ended. Teenagers!

It seems nothing can stop the Microsoft marketing juggernaut. An earthquake brought the roof down on Microsoft supremo Bill Gates on Wednesday as he extolled the virtues of the much-hyped Windows XP operating system to an audience of educators in downtown Seattle.

Gates was ushered off the stage as windows broke (nothing new there then) and pieces of the ceiling began to rain down onto the heads of the 500 or so attendees sitting below. Thankfully, nobody attending the speech suffered any serious injuries, but inevitably Bill returned to the stage to finish his sales spiel, although understandably, large sections of the crowd decided enough was enough.

Microsoft would have us believe that the launch of Windows XP will have an earth-shattering effect on the computing world. Nature, it seems, is not without a sense of irony...

And finally the IT world this week bid a sad farewell to the creator of the bit. Claude Elwood Shannon, whose pioneering work on the binary coding of information laid the foundations for modern computer science and triggered the digital revolution, has died at the age of 84 in Medford, Massachusetts USA.

Shannon first introduced the term 'bit' as the smallest unit of information in the 1940s. His contributions to the fields of technology, cryptography, investment theories and the mathematics of probability are immense.

The Round up leaves you this week with these few words from silicon reader Jonah Joseph:

So goodbye Claude,
Creator of the 'bit',
It's you we have to thank,
For all this IT sh*t