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Ransoming fish for charity
A man-sized fish has gone missing in action. The slippery little fella was happily circulating at fish4.co.uk's party in Soho last week when he absconded.

By Graham Hayday

Published: Friday 16 March 2001

The fish (which was actually a large costume used by Fish4 as a PR tool, if you hadn't already guessed) had proved a real hit during the evening. A silicon.com reporter was even seen strutting his funky (if malco-ordinated) stuff wearing said fish on his head.

So imagine our dismay when we heard he'd gone missing in action.

But then the plot thickened: a ransom note arrived at Fish4's offices the following day. He'd been fishnapped! An unnamed individual with a piscine bent owned up to the heinous crime, and is demanding £250 to secure its release. All we know is that he or she works at Traffic Interactive.

But fear not: the money will go to Comic Relief. And if anyone out there knows who the fishnapper was, email fishfinger@traffic.co.uk - Traffic, concerned about the crime perpetrated by one of its staff, wants to know who's responsible. It will pay £1 per correct identification to Comic Relief (up to £250).

It's been a while since we tip-toed down the corridors of government, but as the election draws near and the tax year nears its end, the time seems ripe for a return.

Her Majesty's Customs and Excise is offering small businesses in the UK a sweetner if they file their tax returns online. Any company with a turnover of under £600,000 is eligible to do so from 1 April, and will receive a generous £50 kick-back for their troubles. Big businesses can also complete the forms online, but won't get any financial recompense. (Isn't that a sizeist policy?)

There is a catch of course. Companies wishing to join the great e-revolution in this way will have to purchase a digital certificate from the Government Gateway portal.

Guess how much that costs? Yep: £50.

The government giveth, the government taketh away... See http://www.hmce.gov.uk/bus/evs/howtovat.htm if you are tempted.

Over in the kingdom of the e-envoy, things are equally strange. One plucky silicon.com reader set out to email the man in question, Andrew Pinder, early this week. He logged on to http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk to find the email address of said e-envoy. Sounds straight forward, right? Over to our intrepid reader: "I thought this would be an easy task, occupying just a few minutes. But after an hour I've still had no luck."

And curiouser and curiouser, said the Round-Up. According to the information about the e-envoy and his team on http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk/2000/team/team.htm , Pinder's predecessor Alex Allan is still the man in charge.

'Ahhh,' I hear you cry. 'That's the 2000 team. What about 2001?'

We thought that too. But a search for this year's team pages reveals... nothing.

The front page of the site does carry a one line notice of Pinder's appointment, but a search for the full press release returned a charming 'page cannot be displayed' message.

Do you think they're trying to hide something? Maybe the e-envoy doesn't really exist. Maybe he's a virtual civil servant in a virtual world.

To be fair, an extensive rummage around the site will finally lead you to Pinder's biography, but even that still refers to him as 'acting e-envoy', a temporary post he held until his official appointment in January.

On his first day in office, Pinder (or, if we're right, a stooge masquerading as the e-envoy) told silicon.com that he wanted to "get interactive services which are interesting and joined-up".

If his own web pages are anything to go by, he hasn't even managed the online equivalent of joined-up hand-writing yet.

Those Canadians are clever, aren't they? A Toronto University-based enterprise claims to be making a mockery of Napster's attempts to remove illegal mp3 files from its servers through a very simple encryption trick.

PulseNewMedia has launched NapCameBack.com, a service that takes the names of the mp3s in the Napster directory and renames them by taking the last letter of each file and moving it to the front. Thus, Eminem becomes Memine (somewhat appropriate for someone who keeps talking about himself all the time); Abba would become Aabb, etc.

This means the files names won't match those provided by the record companies, making it even more difficult for Napster to remove copyrighted material. By Wednesday of this week, 135,000 should - in theory - have been taken down.

We at silicon.com reckon that's damn-nigh impossible (with or without PulseNewMedia's cleverness), and we are prepared to go to great lengths to prove it. We've hand-picked a few of the major record labels' best-selling artistes and will keep an ear on Napster to find out if they are still available.

One of these artistes (if that's the right word) is Celine Dion. Told you we were prepared to go to great lengths... So keep logging on to silicon.com for more on this: after all, if we're right, there's only one possible outcome here - Napster will be forced to close altogether.

Here's a question: Where do all those newly redundant dot-com workers end up?

Answer: waiting tables in New York, apparently.

According to a report in the FT, Manhattan-based recruiters and restaurant trade groups say as many as 15 per cent of applications for waiting jobs are from people whose Silicon Alley employers have scaled down, or shut down.

The chief exec of Metroforce, which hires staff for New York restaurants, rather incongruously told the paper: "It was trendy to work for a dot-com, and it's trendy to work in a Union Square café."

So that's why I took this job: fashion. Thought there must be some reason...

We reckon there must be better employment opportunities for out of work dot-commers. Use our reader comments feature at the bottom of the column to let us (and the world) know your suggestions.

Also in the bumper bonus online version of the Round-Up, you can find out what happened to the man-sized fish that went missing from a trendy Soho bar last week having last been seen on the head of a silicon.com journalist - and in so doing you may be able to help Comic Relief. Seriously.

You might also like to know silicon.com is launching a Fantasy Formula 1 competition next week: watch the site for more details.

The Round-Up will be slightly wet behind the gills again next Friday.