The Weekly Round-Up: 13.11.09

Warning to iPhone users: you may find the contents of this first part of the Round-Up upsetting. If you are of a nervous disposition skip to the second part of the Round-Up. Thank you.

For the rest of you, here's what's been putting the wind up iPhone users this week: a piece of malware that can infect jailbroken iPhones.

The first reports of the worm, called ikee, surfaced in Australia. While ikee doesn't put your personal data at risk, it could certainly damage your street cred: it replaces infected iPhones' default wallpaper with a picture of Rick Astley - the pop star whose 'Never Gonna Give You Up' song is the subject of the Rickrolling prank craze that struck the web last year.

Ironically, it proved very difficult for users to 'give up' Rick's image from their beloved touchscreen gadgets as the 1980s pop sensation simply reappeared with his trademark padded shoulders and cheeky grin once the phone was rebooted.

The ikee worm is a double hammer blow for owners of jailbroken iPhones: firstly because it proves under certain conditions that their much-loved smartphones are vulnerable to malware.

Secondly and, more importantly, for image-conscious iPhone users - having your oh-so-glossy device sporting a picture of Rick Astley? Ouch. John Cale or Brian Eno possibly, but the coiffured 1980s pop idol of 'Never Going to Give You Up' fame?

Blasphemy.

Incidentally, if you're looking for something more useful to put on your iPhone than an anodyne pop crooner, silicon.com has several suggestions to keep you going here.

But back to the worm: luckily for the majority of iPhone users, ikee has proved to be less catchy than one of Astley's songs.

Firstly, only jailbroken iPhones are at risk. In other words, iPhones that have been hacked by their owners using unofficial code permitting the customisation of the operating system and the loading of unapproved apps.

Furthermore, only iPhones with the SSH Unix application installed are affected and even then only if the user has failed to change the root password from the default.

The moral of this story? Secure your iPhone or risk making a complete Astley out of yourself.

Tech problems come in many forms but where do you go when you need help with the latest gadget? The manual? Of course not.

If new research is to be believed, most of the men out there reading the Round-Up are more unlikely to be reading a manual than Boris Johnson is to be using a hairbrush.

Tech support service Gadget Helpline surveyed 75,000 callers to gain a better insight into how the sexes go about dealing with tech problems differently. It found that 64 per cent of men don't bother consulting the manual before ringing technical support lines, compared to a mere 24 per cent of women.

The survey also detected that women are far more likely to approach problems in a logical manner (such as taking the logical step of reading the manual, the Round-Up presumes); are less likely to have made a basic error (such as not reading the manual, for example) and are more patient when they do ask for help (necessary when someone suggests "have you tried reading the manual?").

The bad news for those with less than two X chromosomes continues: contact centre staff also said that women are more pleasant to talk to. A whopping 66 per cent of contact centre staff said they preferred speaking to women callers rather than grumpy old men.

More damning still is the news that for 12 per cent of men (versus seven per cent of women), the 'problem' was simply that the appliance in question wasn't plugged in or switched on. The Round-Up can only presume none of these helpline callers have ever worked as frontline tech support, or the very first thing they would have done is turn it off and turn it on again.

But what do all these stats really tell us? Two things: that the Round-Up's father-in-law has been repeatedly calling the same contact centre and if you're planning to give a new gadget as a Christmas present, make sure you switch it on first.

Such lack of understanding between man and machine is a two-way street, with news this week that a proposed computerised system for marking exam papers was seriously unimpressed with the work of some of the world's literary greats.

A passage from Ernest Hemingway's The End of Something was deemed to be sloppily written by the marking system, which also gave an extract from William Golding's Lord of the Flies a verdict of 'could do better' on its grammar and sentence structure.

It also branded Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange incomprehensible. Well, one out of three isn't bad.

"While the program can recognise sentence structure," according to the The Times, "it is not able to understand style or purpose".

Or, in other words, it's already a step up from Microsoft Word.

The Round-Up suggests that the Redmond behemoth might consider integrating the marking system into its venerable word processing program - it could be a good excuse to get Clippy out of retirement.

'It looks like you're writing a literary masterpiece. Would you like some help with that?'

The Round-Up will leave you with that thought and these links:

Which could you least afford to give up for a day: your MP3 player, the web, email or your mobile? Find out what silicon.com's readership could least stand to go cold turkey on here.

HOW MANY iPhones did Orange manage to sell in one day? Good grief.

Want to see pictures of the latest friendly robot sat-nav device?