The Jeffrey Archer angle

Twenty four hours is a long time in politics. Too right: it took us nearly that long to find an IT angle on the unfortunate incarceration of Lord Jeffrey Archer.

But we got there. A UK start-up unveiled an online politics game just before the election. Players have the chance to lie and cheat their way to the top of the greasy political pole.

But the scale of dear old Jeffrey's duplicity dwarfs anything written into the game.

Jamie Driscoll, MD of floppidog.com, the company responsible for it, told us: "We wanted the game to be believable. We never imagined such a catalogue of corruption would be possible."

The game's creators are now looking at adding some extra features, including room for "more corruption and possibly even perjury".

And presumably the online equivalent of a 'go direct to jail' card.

The game can be found at http://www.honourablemember.co.uk

And don't worry about spending hours online, because now it's official: playing computer games is good for you.

A couple of academics have discovered that games players share similar levels of concentration, involvement and enjoyment in their hobby of choice as top athletes do in their line of work.

In terms of abilities such as "balancing skill with challenge, transformation of time and clarity of goals, computer gaming requires similar psychological qualities to that of other leisure activities", their report states.

(What's transformation of time though? Is that when you mean to go to bed at midnight and suddenly find it's 5am and you're still playing Doom?)

Gamers spend about 18 hours a week twitching in front of a screen, and devote similar amounts of time to reading, doing sport and socialising.

The boffins reckon the notion that gaming leads to reduced participation in other leisure activities, particularly those with significant social or psychological aspects, is nonsense.

Certainly true in my case. When I was a lad, my parents bought me a Dragon 32. The games were rubbish, so I had to walk round to my mate Dave's house and play on his Spectrum. See: physical activity, socialising and gaming, all in one. Magic.

Then we got bored and went outside instead...

See http://www.elspa.com if you want more pro-gaming rhetoric.

Over 70 per cent of IT support staff think they're heroes fighting against the evils of downtime. Apparently.

Asked whether they saw themselves as a Bruce Willis figure or more of a Jim Carey, a huge majority of helpdesk workers said Brucey boy.

Helpdesk software company Royalblue spoke to 50 of these chaps (at least I assume these people with a Bruce Willis complex were all men - if not, there are some slightly odd women working on helpdesks these days) and found that, furthermore, 80 per cent would rather go on safari than lie on the beach, apparently scuppering any foolish notions that IT folk are a bit nerdy.

More than half prefer a gin and tonic to beer, and over 40 per cent favour shopping at Habitat over Ikea.

Lee Chadwick, sales and marketing director at Royalblue, said: "This survey has shown that the old image of an IT anorak is out of date. IT support professionals are now just the same as any other executive."

Yes, if all other execs are men who like Habitat cushions, nip over the road for a quick G&T at lunchtime, and dream of being a balding, middle-aged divorcee with a fondness for wearing grubby white vests and shooting guns.

The Tamagotchi is so last year: the new virtual pet could soon be living inside your mobile phone.

The UK's Intelliplus Group has just signed a deal with Lumo, the Finnish makers of these things.

They have the same needs as real pets - you have to feed and water them (and give them a virtual pat from time to time) if they're to survive and thrive.

One weird thing though: Intelliplus says the pets will have a lifespan of up to 150 days, with one day being equal to one pet year...

Somehow, the idea of tending to a virtual tortoise isn't overly appealing.

It's been a good week for worms and scams. Over 1,000 UK companies have now been plagued by the SirCam worm, which is competing for the 'fastest spreading malicious program of the year' award (see 'Virus shields 'useless' against SirCam' -http://www.silicon.com/a46043 ).

The latest SMS scam, in which text messages were sent out urging people to call a premium rate number, was one of the more successful high-tech pranks of recent times (see http://www.silicon.com/a46007 )

Last week's Code Red worm also did the rounds, which, while fairly nasty, wasn't quite as damaging as originally feared (see 'Pentagon shakes off Code Red threat, for now' - http://www.silicon.com/a45998 )

But one very high-profile company was hit by it: Microsoft.

A "small number" of MSN's servers were infected. Somewhat ironically, Microsoft's virus update site was also affected.

The Code Red worm exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Information Server software, a product which Microsoft (unsurprisingly) uses to run its own websites.

A patch for this hole has been available on Microsoft's virus update site - wait for it - since 18 June.

That'll be over a month ago then. And Microsoft hadn't patched all of its own servers. Ooops.

A rather embarrassed Microsoft said that "operational procedures were being reviewed in the light of a full investigation".

Which we think is management speak for: "Someone here's gonna get their behind kicked. Very hard indeed."