The Weekly Round-Up: 23.11.07

It's not often the Round-Up gets on its moral high horse but this week is an exception.

So, after struggling to recall which way around the saddle should point, the Round-Up galloped off in the direction of Whitehall (unfortunately this guy took a wrong turn) after Her Majesty's government admitted to a staggering blunder.

How bad? The worst loss of personal information since the Domesday Book author left the newly completed tome in the back of a horse-drawn taxi after a celebratory night on the mead.

The UK government is apoplectic with shame and regret this week after it emerged that HMRC lost two CDs containing 25 million records of agents, alternative recipients, children and customers on the child benefit database in the post.

The discs were sent to the National Audit Office by a junior HMRC official via unrecorded delivery. The catalogue of disasters is too long to cover in the Round-Up but you can read a timeline of the debacle here and silicon.com's commentary on it here.

So what happens next? The Round-Up's got a rough idea and it breaks down like so.

First, the soul searching and hand-wringing from senior ministers will continue for at least two weeks.

The official's identity will probably be revealed in the press soon and he or she will probably end up as a housemate in Celebrity Big Brother.

Speaking of whom, the Prime Minister has already made a very public show of closing the stable door despite the horse having galloped out of sight. Bravo, Gordon.

In the meantime, worry and stress will turn Alistair Darling's eyebrows the same colour as the rest of his hair.

Tories and Liberal Democrats will alternately point and wag fingers with unbridled glee at glowering Gordon as he tries to keep his cool during the hooting and sniggering in Prime Minister's Question Time.

The government will inevitably launch a comprehensive, wide-reaching and very expensive public review of the debacle. The review will probably be headed up by a knight of the realm or stuffy old peer who thinks a compact disc is a lower back problem. The final report will bear his noble name.

The review will spend at least 12 months asking civil servants to outline their data protection processes and procedures while the same civil servants hastily make them up on the spot.

People running training courses offering introductions to data protection and information asset management will become fabulously rich overnight and retire. And good luck to them.

At the end of this, the toothless Information Commissioner will be given a new set of dentures and the review group will publish a weighty, officious tome outlining the responsibilities of government departments in managing personal information, which will be met with wild and rapturous applause by ministers and senior civil servants and then promptly ignored.

From atop its ethical equine the Round-Up would suspect this should probably mean an even further loss of credibility for the government's controversial and much lambasted ID card scheme.

After all, if one of the government's most well-funded departments is incapable of looking after the personal data of 25 million citizens, including children, it's hardly in a position to lecture us on how keeping tabs on our identities will maintain national security.

silcon.com readers would seem to share this view.

But we forget all too easily: the moral high horses tethered in Whitehall are so high that in full gallop their riders' heads are often lost in the clouds...

Seconds before its own moral high horse careered uncontrollably into a tree, the Round-Up somersaulted from the saddle landed on the ground and performed a neat volte-face in time to witness Jeff Bezos revealing the future of reading.

The Amazon chief this week took the wraps off the Kindle e-book reader.

Bezos is hoping the Kindle will do to literature what the iPod has done for music. The features of the hardware are reasonably impressive, the device allows you to store hundreds of novels, buy books from the Amazon site, surf the web and send email wirelessly.

The idea is probably that the Kindle will ape the highly successful iTunes-iPod model by allowing the user to download books wirelessly from Amazon in a proprietary AZW format. New books and bestsellers will cost around $10, while classics from the literary canon such as Bleak House will sell for $1.99.

Alternatively you can brush up on your Dickens for free - since the Kindle supports plain text format and the Gutenberg Project has thousands of books available gratis.

The Round-Up is usually one of the first to succumb to the latest gadgetry - unless it's been designed by Microsoft - but not this time.

The old adage 'if it ain't broke why fix it?' seems appropriate. Has there been a product more enduring than the book? A product containing a feature set that has changed little over hundreds of years, using materials that have been the same more or less since the inception of the Gutenberg Bible - and earlier.

Certainly, the publishing process has revolutionised the mass production of the medium. Sure, the industry has evolved into an ecosystem nourished on swish Soho parties and Sancerre - but the core product has remained the same.

There's a good reason for that: it just works. The thing about books is that they’re easy to use. Turn page, look at words, turn page, look at words etc.

Without having played with a Kindle, the Round-Up's view on the user interface is based on a variety of online reports but mostly on the promotional video on Amazon's website.

To use the Kindle you need you need to operate a number of navigational paradigms: to turn pages back and forth you use little flippers on either side of the screen. You also have a kind of scroll wheel, a strange slider and a keyboard with extra buttons. You've already quadrupled the number of interaction media.

Meanwhile, consider the book: cheap, simple, accessible. What more could you ask for?

Reports state the Kindle sold out in a remarkably short period of time. The device is available for ordering on Amazon.

The Round-Up wishes Amazon and Jeff all the best with the Kindle but it's unlikely to replace a couple of holiday paperbacks on the beach. And you probably shouldn't read it in the bath either.

It's also butt ugly. Did the Round-Up mention that? Oh yes...

By and large the Round-Up is a big fan of the Beatles, except when Ringo is singing.

Steve Jobs is a big fan of the Beatles too, which is ironic considering the long-running legal feud between the band and Mac-maker. Swings and roundabouts, eh?

All that nonsense came to an end when the companies made peace over Apple Inc’s use of a fruity trademark to market music-related products.

Beatles fans celebrated the possibility that the supergroup's music might soon be made available online, even though they probably had all their work already.

Apple's legal team celebrated the end of a long and tedious legal war which was reminiscent of Bleak House's Jarndyce vs Jarndyce - check your Kindle, readers.

Meanwhile, if you remember, the BBC celebrated by forcing a man who'd only come in to be interviewed for a tech support job to go on live TV and give millions of viewers his view of the settlement.

Those were heady times.

Yet, more than a year on, and despite Apple Corps and Apple (Computer no longer) agreeing to settle all their disputes earlier this year, there's still no sign of the Beatles music on iTunes or indeed any other music download service.

Legal music download service, at least. Why is this? The Round-Up has no idea.

Luckily, Sir Paul McCartney has told the world why.

McCartney told Billboard.com: "It's all happening soon. Most of us are all sort of ready. The whole thing is primed, ready to go - there's just maybe one little sticking point left and I think it's being cleared up as we speak, so it shouldn't be too long."

The Round-Up's guessing the "one little sticking point" is money.

Harumph. Our Paul added: "You've got to get these things right. You don't want to do something that's as cool as that and in three years' time you think: 'Oh God, why did we do that?'"

Eh? Cool now equates to coming to the party more than three years late then worrying about being cool in the first place? Anyway, what more evidence does the man need that digital music is the new dawn for media distribution? Apple alone has sold more than three billion tracks since April 2003. What more proof does the Liverpuddlian crooner need the market is mature enough?

Anyway, the Stones have been digital for years and they're much cooler than you, albeit considerably wrinklier. Stop faffing and get on with it. You can work it out...

And finally this week, given the HMRC's colossal blunder the Round-Up has run out of column inches and only has time for a 30-second précis of the rest of the week's news.

Ready? Vamos!

Wireless broadband: Ease up, people. Piggybacking on other people's wireless broadband is OK, apparently. Especially if you like to spread your own around a bit. You little tart.

Would you be able to survive in a Mac-ridden hotel? Tech heaven or tech hell? Check out the pictures and let us know.

Given the colossal blunder by HMRC and the government's warning to citizens to stay alert over possible personal fraud, what percentage of Brits do you think would fail to notice if £1,000 went AWOL from their bank accounts? Find out here.

Here at last: Firefox 3.0. As a silicon.com sub quipped this week - beta late than never.

Until next week, check out the caption competition and ease into the weekend with the Weekly Round-Up podcast.