The Weekly Round-Up: 03.10.08

The name's Round-Up. Weekly Round-Up...

In the past, the MI6 used to recruit spies by tracking students with the right 'qualifications' as they made their way through the country's top universities: Oxford, Cambridge or Hull (as Blackadder would have it).

The right qualifications (if the Bond movies are to be believed) were courage, guile, a flair for foreign languages, scant regard for human life and an enthusiasm for brief, exotic romantic entanglements that end badly.

In these heady Web 2.0 days, this is all too tiresome and thankfully for the spy masters of our sceptred isle, social networking is a far more efficient ways of recruiting agents.

MI6 this month has launched a series of online adverts in an attempt to attract people into its top secret ranks.

"A number of public channels are used to promote job opportunities in the organisation and Facebook is a recent example of this," said a Foreign Office spokesperson from the shadowy corner of a multi-storey car park.

MI6 said agents working in foreign countries should "reflect the society" they serve - shortly before luring half of that country into bed and embarking on a high speed car chase with the rest.

The latest recruitment campaign by MI6 sees it moving further away from its traditional recruitment channels. In 2005, the organisation launched its very own job seekers website and tempted techies with an advert in The Times the following year.

It's also run radio adverts, which presumably ended with a rapidly spoken disclaimer about terms and conditions and a warning that if you get captured and fed alive to ill-tempered mutant sea bass the government will pretend you never existed.

The Facebook campaign has already proved a hit, apparently. "There has been a very good response so far," confirmed the spokesperson before throwing a smoke grenade at the feet of startled reporters and jumping off the car park balcony and releasing a Union Jack parachute.

The three adverts pop-up as Facebook users contact each other. The first, aimed at those with a university background, reads (assuming they can reach their keyboards that is): "Graduates of all ages can develop long-term careers as operational officers, collecting and analysing global intelligence." Nothing about a free rail card.

Another targets people who are bored with their jobs. "Time for a career change? MI6 can use your skills. Join us as an operational officer collecting and analysing global intelligence to protect the UK."

The last one offers potential applicants an influential place in world history. It says: "A career in world events? Help influence world events, protect the UK. Operational officer roles collecting and analysing global intelligence." No, really.

In anti-climactic fashion, Facebook then sadly and resolutely fails to self destruct. Ba! There's simply no respect for the old traditions anymore.

Still, if you don't fancy being James Bond, how would you like to turn into a giant purple dragon?

Of course you would and, thanks to the Weekly Round-Up, you can. Don't worry, you don't have to ingest large quantities of 'special' mushrooms you just need to follow a URL.

Unilever has become the latest company to fling itself at the virtual bandwagon of Second Life. The company is turning to virtual worlds and the aforementioned giant mythical lizards to get the message across to staff that keeping corporate data safe is an important thing to do.

Sometimes a stern email from the CEO just won't do - it simply has to be a purple dragon. A giant one.

The move is an attempt to woo the "digital natives" - the under-35s who make up the bulk of Unilever's 165,000 staff worldwide. Unilever has launched its security drive on its own private complex in the virtual world, a gleaming glass office on a sun-drenched leafy island, looking out on a glistening sea.

In a video of the launch Unilever CEO Patrick Cescau speaks to a gathering of tanned, smiling staff about the importance of security. At this point, one woman finds her avatar transformed into a giant, purple dragon by an impostor after she leaves her password on display.

Apparently the Second Life campaign has been a hit so far with 99.5 per cent of its 2,500 staff completing a security test after watching the fun, and the company reckons it is a step away from simply throwing a lot of money at expensive technology to directly tackling the security problems posed by staff.

The Second Life programme will cost about £300,000 over five years to implement.

Yes, that may sound like a lot but giant, purple dragons don't come cheap, recession or no recession...

And then to Microsoft. News that business users are more interested in XP than Vista isn't new. The bad news for the company is that the corporate set are also more interested in Windows 7 than Vista, even though the next-generation-next-generation OS isn't due for release until, if you believe some reports, 2010.

Microsoft fans will hope that scant regard for launch dates is the only thing that Windows 7 shares with Vista.

More than half (58 per cent) of businesses using Microsoft technology are "exploiting" Windows XP compared to just four per cent for Vista, according to the 'reality checkers' research by the Corporate IT Forum (Tif), seen exclusively by silicon.com.

Tif's reality checker acts as a tech barometer for its members by checking the IT procurement moves of other members. According to their figures, just four per cent are currently "exploiting" Vista in the workplace.

Meanwhile, the number of people more interested in Windows 7 than its predecessor is startling - 30 per cent said they were investigating Windows 7 compared to just 14 per cent for Vista.

The OS most people appear to be developing or piloting is XP, with 12 per cent of businesses saying they were doing so compared to five per cent for Vista.

In other bad news for the Seattle giant, the proud nation of Wales is turning its back on Vista. Or at least its governing body is. No, not the Welsh Rugby Union it's the Welsh Assembly Government, which is three-quarters of the way through an upgrade to Windows XP that will only be complete in 2009.

The authority, which began upgrading from the Windows NT4 operating system in 2004, did not feel ready to make the leap to Vista. Let's face it: at that pace they'll be ready to consider upgrading from XP to the as yet unannounced Windows 8. Or 9. Seriously though, NT?

Meanwhile, you may have seen the Microsoft marketing extravaganza. You may well have seen the first two adverts featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, in which the two mismatched comics (though for different reasons) try to connect with consumers with about as much success that Vista has trying to connect with digital cameras.

While the ads (check out YouTube) were widely panned they were pretty damn funny although probably for the wrong reasons. Watching a mega-rich, respected man in his fifties who really should know better trying to do slapstick is pretty painful to watch - and Bill Gates should know better, too...

Wait, there's more. There's the caption competition and there's the best of the rest, which are just down there, see?

"I take my hat off to the iPhone," said Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo this week. Has he spent so long in the industry he's started greeting mobile phones in a formal, anachronistic fashion or is he just speaking figuratively? The rather surprising answer is here.

Of a certain age? Prepare to get dewy-eyed.

"Stupid" Cloud computing thing gets slammed while a smooth-headed Microsoft executive thinks it's spiffing, if you're wondering what the hell is cloud computing there's another link coming right here.

And if that’s not enough, check out these links too…