The Weekly Round-Up: 24.04.09

The Round-Up isn't much of a Twitterer. Or should that be tweeter? Or twitteriser? Anyway, the Round-Up doesn't do it - although silicon.com does and you can find it here.

It's not that there wouldn't be lots to tweet about, and it would be easy to keep Round-Up fans on tenterhooks waiting for each 140-character update, ("Sitting at desk", "Drinking tea", "Staring at a pencil", "Thinking about making tea") it's just that the Round-Up ain't the sharing kind. And besides, 140 characters is waaay too small a character count to play with.

Fortunately however there are plenty of more forward-thinking types out there including silicon.com's very own CIO Jury which this week confirmed (by a narrow margin) they are using Twitter for business purposes, for example using it to keep staff up to date and to communicate with customers. Bravo to them.

But not all of them were entirely convinced that this year's white hot industry trend will remain as hot forever. Said one: "Give it a couple of years and it will be as passé as Friends Reunited."

Harsh words indeed. But it's well under 140 characters so it'll go down a tweet with the Twitterati…

From one tech fad to another: virtual world Second Life is putting into effect some new measures to keep, ahem, adult content away from users who would prefer to dodge all the smut and instead just get on with doing whatever it is they do in the virtual world. Flying around in the guise of a fire-breathing dragon, for example, or watching list-compiling comedian Jimmy Carr at work.

Later this year Linden Lab, the parent company of Second Life, will create a standalone "continent" for adult content.

Any members (fnar!) who don't purchase private "land" will be asked to migrate to the new continent if they wish to partake in adult-related activities, presumably involving virtual bits of their virtual bodies.

So many rules: isn't this why people left the real world in the first place?

A Linden Lab spokesperson explained in a fine display of sentence structure: "The people that are on our mainland and in our estate, if they are going to engage with adult content, are being asked to do that in the adult content area."

So what does all this additional red tape mean for the denizens of Second Life?

Well, the idea is that it'll help make it a friendlier environment for some of the new "residents" Linden Lab hopes to woo, like businesses and academic institutions.

This could have two effects: firstly, Second Life could be increasingly used by companies, educational institutions and even governments; secondly, the place should be a bit more peaceful for all the fire-breathing dragons and Jimmy Carr acolytes.

Peaceful, that is apart from one island with pumping music and flashing red lights. A massively over-populated place with one thing on its mind.

Let's get it on...

Phishing emails are more than annoying. They clog up your mailbox and the bad guys use these scam emails to tempt the unwise and the greedy among us into deals as a result of which they might lose a whole bunch of money.

Fortunately most of these scam emails are put together by people with only the loosest grasp of grammar and spelling, which means that most of them are pretty easy to spot. It also means some of them are even inadvertently pretty funny.

Unfortunately, it seems that the days of the Round-Up enjoying some gentle entertainment at the expense of some nasty fraudsters could be at an end.

Phishers have discovered a new and mighty weapon in their battle to wrestle your hard-earned cash out of your bank account.

It's called a dictionary.

"The bad guys have invested in a spell checker," joked one banking exec at the RSA Conference in sunny San Francisco, a reference to the poor spelling in badly designed emails and websites that characterised phishing attempts a few years ago.

These days the phishing emails are much more professional looking and thus a) less amusing and b) more likely to catch you out.

All the fraudsters need to do now is sort out the grammar and the world is theirs.

The conference also heard that these nasty little fraudsters are now building phishing sites with malware embedded in them, which means the unwary risk not only losing their bank details but also getting malware on their PCs if they are tricked into visiting such sites.

Honestly, some people have no more right to live on this good, clean Earth than a weasel. So if you are unlucky enough to click on one of these links your computer gets knackered by some virus and you can't afford to buy a new one because you haven't got any money because some fraudster has pinched the lot. Marvellous.

Amazingly, some people are still opening the fake emails they receive, even ones that claim to come from banks they don't even have accounts with. It's enough to make you throw down your BlackBerry and netbook and make your way back to the caves.

Still, on the bright side, at least the fraudsters aren't fleecing us as much as they were last year. According to the analysts Gartner, the average cost of the average successful phishing scam attached to the average US bank was $351 last year, a drop of 60 per cent on the year before.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, fraudsters...

And finally, the week in quotes:

Who said this of what: "We had a lot of people running around but nobody doing anything!"
Clicky.

Who said this about netbooks: "cramped keyboards, terrible software and junky hardware..."
Gasp!

And who said: "I am frankly not much excited by technology per se?"

That's all until next week, but don't forget to chance your brain at the caption competition.