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The Weekly Round-Up: 30.04.04
We really, really don't hate Apple... Honest...

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 30 April 2004

Google has filed for an initial public offering. A tad unconventional but a flotation nonetheless.

It's enough to make even the most hard-hearted new media veteran giddy with excitement and nostalgic of the dot-com halcyon days. Back then of course, every man and his dog were filing for an IPO and the fallout from the failures was spectacular: Boo and WebVan anyone?

Meanwhile, these days the survivors are going from strength-to-strength with Lastminute and Amazon both reporting profits and rising revenues.

Google could prove to be the bellwether of the next generation of internet firms that are moving tentatively towards the IPO Holy Grail. But such plaudits don't worry one rival of the search giant.

Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel laughed off the possibility that a Google IPO would hurt his company.

"Yahoo! is a company that has always had good competitors and Google will be a good competitor.

"There is plenty of room for Yahoo! to thrive and for Google to thrive," he told reporters in Los Angeles while possibly tugging at his shirt collar and sweating profusely.

Meanwhile, while many Google employees clutch their stock options in anticipation of the big bucks rolling in - and this is bringing back some extremely painful personal memories for the Round-Up - they might pay heed to an article by Wired.

According to the magazine, things at the company might be about to take a turn, and not necessarily for the better.

The corporate culture of Google is renowned as being quirky and idiosyncratic, with toys and gadgets, games of roller hockey and meals cooked by the Grateful Dead's former chef all part of life at the happy-hippy internet company.

Famously, employees are encouraged to devote one working day per week to their own projects -the recent much-publicised Gmail initiative allegedly came from one of these 'free-time projects' (see here)

However, a public offering has a habit of transforming business culture, warns the mag.

The company's executives will be under pressure to deliver consistent quarterly profits and not just funky products.

Google may be forced to move away from the groovy 'start-up' culture and towards more conservative corporate accountability and respectability.

You can just imagine the terse conversations between software engineers and their line managers:

"What the hell's that?"
"It's a suit and tie."
"What do you want me to do with it?"
"Wear it."
"What, under my Batman outfit?"

So be warned free-spirited Google people: the suits are coming and they'll multiply, assimilating all before them like the Matrix's Agent Smith - except without all the ludicrous kung fu shenanigans.

Although the corporate-speak could be just as mystifying as the Wachowski brothers' script-writing...

Consider the following scenario from the computer room of a modern university.

Hundreds of monitors are partly obscured by the hunched forms of students desperately finishing off their end-of-term essays.

Lingering in the centre of the monitor-filled room, a scruffy undergraduate casts anxious, furtive glances at the object of his affection. It's the end of term, the last chance to make contact.

Sweat gathers on his brow as he waits to make his move. When the opportunity arises he moves swiftly towards his beloved. Carpe diem!

But what's this? Bah! The rugger bugger with the chiselled jaw and posh car has got there first - and he's in.

Empty-handed our desperate hero surveys the rest of the room for an alternative target before trudging home and resignedly making do with his own means - the ageing Pentium 1 his parents bought for him in his grubby digs.

We have enough problems with computers as it is without falling in love with them.

According to research from Pennsylvania State University, people can develop such strong ties to specific computers they're prepared to queue to use them.

The researchers were trying to understand how far people were prepared to go to maintain a "relationship" with their favoured computer and analysed the behaviour of students using 800 computer terminals.

Students displayed a preference for one or two machines, even when others were free.

The study claims that people are drawn to computers because they eventually start to anthropomorphise them.

Professor Shyam Sundar of the research team told the BBC: "We attribute social characteristics and treat them as autonomous."

Sundar added that the findings could have massive implications for computer manufacturers and their marketing departments.

He said: "A better advertising strategy might be to portray computers as something durable and reliable, something that grows with you."

So let's see, what advertising messages are conveyed by the professor's statement?

"You don't need the fastest processors and swishest graphics cards."

"Forget 'Moore's Law', think 'More-is-less law'."

"There's no real need to upgrade to a new machine at all."

In fact: "A computer is for life."

The Round-Up is no psychologist but it’s guessing these are the kind of messages that will send computer manufacturers and their marketing teams screaming into the hills...

Not content with damaging our beloved, darling, sweetheart computers, the pesky malware writers are bringing yet more unpleasantness to the e-security table.

It transpires the latest worm carries a payload far deadlier than just clogged inboxes and deleted hard drives: teenage poetry.

The author of the Bagle.Z worm has included a short poem in the document attachment on which the worm piggybacks (see here).

The attachment also contains the following four lines of text, which appear in capital letters (clear indication of a desperate cry for attention):

"Unique people make unique things / That things stay beyond the normal life and common understanding / The problem is that people don't understand such wild things / Like a man did never understand the wild life."

Ha! It doesn't even rhyme.

Security company McAfee's Vincent Gullotto thinks there's little to fear from the latest incarnation of the Bagel malware.

"I don't anticipate this one to last long," he told silicon.com this week.

The worm attaches itself to email in a control panel file - an executable not previously exploited by virus writers.

Gullotto added: "It is not a file that most people would typically block, so it may penetrate into some environments."

Bagle.Z is the latest worm to be produced in the increasingly tedious contest between its author and the NetSky worm writers.

A contest which thankfully seems to be abating, despite the two factions' recent ubiquity in recent times (see here).

Which is good news, primarily for security, but also for literary reasons.

After all, it's painful enough to consider the cost of malware to individuals and business.

It's adding insult to injury to expect us to suffer worms delivering odes and sonnets bemoaning how no-one understands the needs of malware writers and why do all the nice girls go for the rough boys with tattoos anyway?

Bloody teenagers...

And finally this week, a spirited defence against allegations of being anti-Apple.

A couple of reader comments suggested the site's editorial coverage of all things Apple was negative.

(As Withnail's Uncle Monty might say, see here, hare, here.)

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the editorial team has a high ratio of Mini iPods per member (even if one stopped working within about a fortnight and is crippled with static interference - referring to the iPod, not the journalist in question).

(Furthermore, it wasn't all that long ago we named Steve Jobs the Agenda Setter of 2003 - if you don't believe us see here)

We are not anti-Apple, neither are we anti-Microsoft, anti-Sun or anti-anyone for that matter. We are a news service and our journalists take a judgement call on what is the strongest angle and headline on any given story.

Our mission has always been to inform and entertain and to write engaging and provoking copy.

For the record, the pro-Wintel lobby accuse us of being anti-Microsoft and too pro-Apple. You just can't win.

And Lordy, don't get the Round-Up started on the geek anger some of our articles have ignited in the open source community.

One story, which raised question marks over Linux's suitability as a corporate OS, led one Portuguese reader to suggest our reporter's mother did some quite unhygienic things with farmyard animals in hell.

Still, many thanks for all the comments we receive. Learning what interests you and what you believe in (often passionately) has helped guide the editorial direction of the site and it's nice to know you care, one way or another.

So please keep those reader comments rolling in. Happy, critical, sarcastic or otherwise.

But please, just keep our mothers out of it, OK?

Until next week, so long from the Round-Up. (Just for the record: written on a Mac.)

The best of the rest of the week:

Big question of the week: Which does your organisation take more seriously - computer or physical security?
Vote in our latest poll (and the first for a while with no mention of beer. Sorry.)

Security horror story of the week: Does 'dawn of the dead' spell the end for the web?
Who ya' gonna call? Graham Cluley or Bruce Campbell?

Corporate paranoia of the week: Learn to spot the fraudsters on your network
Hello, security? I think I've identified the Post-it notes thief...

UK broadband - alive and kicking
Are we mad? Read on to find out... Wibble.

Mac-baiting story of the week: iTunes loses 95 million songs
See? We just wouldn't let it lie...