The Weekly Round-Up: 17.02.06

Turning a little bit Crimewatch for a minute, the Round-Up would like to begin by asking: "Were you in the City of London on Tuesday 14 February?"

"Did you see individuals acting strangely? Perhaps you saw them handing out CDs to commuters?"

Well, if you did, and you took said CD and put it in your PC at work then you were taking part in a social experiment to see whether employees, working in some of the capital's most (you'd hope) security-conscious industries - such as banking, finance and insurance - would accept a CD from a stranger and explore its contents on their work PC.

And of course, you guessed it, a lot of them did.

Thankfully all the CDs actually contained was some code which would inform the organisers of this stunt, IT skills specialists The Training Camp, just how many people had been duped.

No personal or corporate data was transferred - the CEO of The Training Camp was very quick to point out - but there was enough information to indicate that employees within a major retail bank and two global insurance giants had fallen for it. And they were just the tip of iceberg.

Rob Chapman, that very same CEO, told silicon.com "this could have been someone wanting to cause havoc in the City".

And of course it could indeed. Fortunately this time though it was an experiment.

Even now some of you may be reading this and performing the classic full-palm-slap to a slightly moist forehead... the universal sign language for 'I've been an idiot' (though we like to think Round-Up readers are a cut above the kind of dolt who'd have been suckered in by this).

So what does this prove? It illustrates just how out of touch employees and companies are with the human threat posed to their network. After all, why would criminals bother trying to come up with clever and sophisticated ways of breaching firewalls and perimeter security in order to infect a company with malicious code when they could just put it on a CD and tell commuters arriving in the City that it contains a competition?

Let them do all the hard work.

Bob's your uncle, the employee takes the bait and for the cost of a few hundred CDs malicious code could be onto the corporate network before a witless employee's first Starbucks coffee of the day is even cool enough to drink. (Starbucks hot beverages - hotter than the sun or not hot enough? Discuss.)

Speaking of The Sun, one of the tabloid newspaper's employees is conducting an experiment of his own this week, planning to live on nothing but his wits and a laptop computer plugged into a broadband connection.

The paper has dubbed Harry MacAdam, its features editor, 'The Internut'.

Do you see what they've done there?

Do you?

MacAdam intends to spend seven days in the Sun's car park, starting off with nothing - not even his mobile phone, clothes or companionship... or even a roof over his head.

... Oh, but before we forget, he will also have £2,000 to help him along.

Which should help keep the wolf from the door.

Assuming he can get something to keep the laptop dry - which we'd suggest is a priority that shouldn't prove too difficult to meet given he also has email access to contact others - we don't really see where the challenge lies or what this is intended to prove.

Don't misunderstand, the Round-Up's not offering to perform a similar task - but more because we don't see the point in one person doing this, let alone two.

Are they looking to prove that a man can live on just £2,000 per week?

If so they must pay them well over at Murdoch Towers.

This may have been a bit more of an eye-opener six years ago when the majority of people were unaware of just what you could get access to online. But given £2,000, a laptop and a broadband connection, surely anyone could succeed.

We'd be far more impressed if it was the features editor of the Chipping Sodbury Gazette getting online over dial-up, miles from anywhere that companies might deliver from.

Speaking of deliveries, hopefully you all remembered Valentine's Day this past week and hopefully nothing came up (Liverpool v Arsenal was a very important match) to keep you from any plans you'd made with 'the other half'.

Sadly it seems very likely there were those out there who were kept at the office late and forced to cancel their romantic dinner - not least of all some of the UK's leading IT bosses, if this CIO Jury article is anything to go by.

We asked our pool of leading tech head honchos whether they would cancel a Valentine's dinner if something important came up at the office... and sadly (for them, and their fitful night's sleep on the sofa,) three-quarters answered 'yes'.

And they didn't just leave it there - some even suggested what punishment might await them for putting work before romance.

Take Phil Young for example, head of IT at Amtrak Express Parcels. He told us: "Yes, although I would probably find my best shirts and suits cut-up lying in a pile on the lawn on my return from work."

Ouch! And if that's not bad enough he suggested he'd probably also find "the locks changed to my house".

Frank Coyle meanwhile, IT director at John Menzies Distribution, replied: "Absolutely."

Is it just the Round-Up or does that sound more keen than was strictly necessary?

"I've cancelled more important personal things than that," Frank added, before pointing out that the job must come first, because without a job he wouldn't be able to pay for dinner anyway.

A classic catch 22.

And then there was Nick Masterson-Jones, IT programmes director at Voca, who really put the boot in to the whole occasion. "In fact, to get out of an over-priced Hallmark holiday 'celebration', I might be tempted to invent an excuse," he said.

That's the spirit. How would that go down we wonder?

Like the proverbial concrete kestrel we imagine.

But just when you thought romance was dying a long drawn out death, along comes Luke Mellors, IT director at The Dorchester Hotel, with some silver-tongued words of wisdom.

He said: "Significant others - in my case my wife - are like IT problems."

That's the way to woo them!

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
You're like an IT problem,
So I'll put in place a series of project lead objectives, starting with an assessment of our needs, a budget analysis and the presentation of a business case for addressing this issue within a to-be-agreed timescale.

In fact, Mr Mellors' whole statement, the wily Casanova, was: "Significant others - in my case my wife - are like IT problems in that there are times when they require more attention, often are hard to figure out, break down now and again, need huge bandwidth in order to communicate and aren't nearly as redundant as you would like them to be."

You smoothy, you had me at 'Significant others'.

No such verboseness from Nicholas Bellenberg, IT director at Hachette Filipacchi UK. He simply stated: "Dedication to duty is one thing. The cost of divorce is another entirely."

Almost certainly. (And you can catch pearls of wisdom from these chaps and other top calibre UK IT heads in silicon.com's CIO Jury section every week.)

Moving on, from 'hearts' to fingers and irises... This week saw another crucial milestone passed in the government's attempts to get us all into biometrics when we start requiring ID cards.

Even Gordon Brown (et tu Gordus?) is now on message with these controversial cards and the sense that it's really going to happen is creeping into most people's minds.

But in the course of its research into this issue, the Round-Up stumbled upon a question in Viz magazine which raised a very valid point - albeit not really in the kind of forum you expect to find incisive political discussion.

How is fingerprinting, or even iris scanning for that matter, going to help keep tabs on, ooh, let's say... somebody like Abu Hamza.

OK, so it's a pretty strange exception.

You may remember the Round-Up mentioning last week that two of the silicon.com team were heading out to the 3GSM show in Barcelona. Between them they came up with an absolute wealth of content, which we've rather helpfully now pulled together in one place. Have a look.

And finally, last week the Round-Up asked for suggestions for a word which could be applied to the problem of bidding for unusual lots on eBay while under the influence of too much booze.

And you didn't disappoint.

There were lots of good suggestions but the best by far - which actually had us laughing out loud in the office - was 'ineBayated'.

Genius!

Take a bow Round-Up reader Terry Marston who was the first with that suggestion. (There were others - you know who you are.)

However, among the feedback we also received was another story of serious ineBayation.

Reader Nick Lansley wrote: "I had some old betamax tapes in my loft and always wondered what I had recorded on them some 20 years before."

You can probably see what's coming and sure enough Nick confirmed: "A couple of ciders later my desire to uncover the tapes' recorded secrets became overwhelming - and the next thing I knew I was on eBay. A further cider later I had put bid in on a nice but ancient portable pro betacam recorder for what I thought was a max of £41."

It was something about the wording of "what I thought was a max of £41" that got the Round-Up's attention... somehow we could already see where this was heading.

Nick continues: "A good night's sleep and alcohol-free day followed until I received an email saying I had won the betacam recorder... for £401!"

Yup, that's pretty much what we thought might be coming.

"After my initial shock and promises to myself to lay off the booze (like you do in such moments - it passes), I paid my debt and received by courier the betacam recorder. Alarmingly, it would not play the betamax tapes properly - all I got was some horizontally torn picture that I could not correct, and a soundtrack that seemed to be playing back at double speed.

"I resolved to put it back on eBay and amazingly it sold for £421 - a twenty quid profit! I suspect someone had a pile of betamax tapes and too much cider… "

Alright Nick, step down, we'll do the funnies if it's alright with you.

The Round-Up presumes somebody had a pile of old betamax tapes and too much cider!... boom boom!

Until next week, stay classy and have a great weekend.

• Tory MP says online petitions must count

• Ballmer: Microsoft's future is mobile

• Nasa hacker's extradition hearing begins

• Surfers still too careless with ID, says BT

• Beware the 'pod-slurping' employee

• Fraudsters ready with "a scam for everyone"