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The Weekly Round-Up: 07.10.05
Is there anything mankind might one day require that you can't find to buy online?

By silicon.com

Published: Friday 07 October 2005

Students - don't you just love them and their lay-about ways. But one enterprising young soul isn't content with sitting on his backside watching daytime TV and running up vast debts while studying for a media studies degree.

No, for Alex Tew the idle distractions of higher education, such as moaning about capitalism, making half a pint of cheap flat lager last four hours and stealing road signs, hold little appeal. He has set about an ingenious plan to make half a million pounds to pay off his debts (... leaving the Round-Up to ask, what are these debts Alex? Surely £500,000 is a bit of an overestimate, even in this day and age - that's a lot of Xbox games and Pot Noodle).

Tew is a business management first-year at Nottingham University and has designed the 'million dollar homepage', which is a website divided up into hundreds of little squares.

Each square can be bought for $100 and the new proud owner of the 10 pixels by 10 pixels web real-estate can use the space to display whatever they like. Take a look.

If all the pixels are bought Tew will make $1m - hence the name of the site though it seems a little unfair that some of the pixels are clearly 'below the fold' and as a result the site is filling up from the top down.

A number of predictable sponsors such as online casinos and pornographers have already bought in to Tew's plan and the squares are selling at a rate of knots - presumably snowballing as the hype and interest around this masterstroke grows. Golden Palace Casino, which famously owns the Virgin Mary cheese toastie and recently paid somebody to tattoo the company name on their forehead, has certainly embraced this latest phenomenon/cheap publicity stunt and is among the largest advertisers on the page.

Tew was apparently inspired to act after one of his brothers accrued £30,000 of debt during his studies and after he noticed his own finances weren't in the rudest of health.

"The response has been incredible," Tew said. "The idea just seems to have caught people's imagination."

Of the name he said: "I decided it had to be the million dollar home page - million pound didn't quite have the same ring to it."

He's got a point. Could you really imagine Lee Majors in the 'Three Million Pound Man'? (Which actually creates an image of it having been a programme about somebody fighting record-breaking levels of obesity.)

Among Alex's first customers was his brother who bought $400 worth of pixels (the Round-Up is starting to realise how those £30,000 debts were accrued now).

Still, it's nice to know he didn't cut his own brother a deal - he'll go far in the cut-throat world of business.

"I'm hoping someone might buy $50,000 worth," added Tew, who is clearly majoring in 'stating the blinking obvious'.

(The Round-Up hates to over-promise and under-deliver... though that doesn't stop it doing it week in, week out - but stay tuned this week for the '... and finally', as we've been blessed with something truly impressive - by which we mean rubbish - to share this week.)

Back to the subject of students, one member of the silicon.com team was over in Dublin this week for the Virus Bulletin 2005 conference where a PhD student from the University of Calgary caused a bit of a stir.

Andreas Hirt walked delegates through a method of obscuring malicious traffic and leaving it undetected in order to create a far greater window of opportunity to carry out a malicious attack and "covert propagation".

When asked at the end of his presentation which elements of the technique he had already shared with the security industry he began shuffling from foot to foot during an awkward pause which made it quite clear he'd not really thought about that.

Cue accusations from the floor about "irresponsible disclosure".

And sticking with the controversy a little longer, BT has given the hornets' nest marked 'offshoring' a poke with a big stick this week, hitting out at people it calls "bigots" who give call centre staff a hard time because of their race.

Meryl Bushell, chief procurement officer at BT, said some customers have never managed to move on from the fact BT has sent some call centre work to India and said the irrational minority who abuse staff are a disgrace to the UK.

"International boundaries do not determine whether customer service is good or bad," said Bushell. "Our level of customer service is at least as good and sometimes better than in the UK."

However, she added: "There are some bigots who are very rude. There are times I have been ashamed to be British."

It's sad to say but a number of unpublished reader comments we've received on this issue would suggest she's right.

And onto another controversial subject... It's been a while since the whole 'mobile phone driving ban' kicked off on the pages of silicon.com but we're back to that old chestnut again this week after roads minister Stephen Ladyman revealed, shock horror, a lot of people are flouting the ban.

Never!

As ever the argument has boiled down to a rift between those who realise driving while speaking on a mobile phone must - and there can be no argument here - be more dangerous than driving while giving the road and conditions their undivided attention and those who, for want of a better word, are selfish and value their social lives above and beyond the lives of others.

Those in the latter camp tend to argue along the lines of 'I know I'm safe, I know I'm responsible', which the Round-Up presumes means those people unfortunate enough to be involved in accidents had every intention of crashing their car when they headed out that day... unless that's why they're called accidents.

Laws being passed currently will make culprits liable to a £60 fine and three points on their licence, which may perhaps prove more of a deterrent.

But if that fails perhaps life imprisonment might be the way forward. Just a thought, which the Round-Up mentions more because it provides a tenuous segue into the next story.

A quirky tale from the web this week addressed the lives of long term prisoners who take a wife from the outside world.

One enterprising company, called Friends Beyond the Wall, is putting its Photoshop skills to use creating wedding albums for brides and their banged-up hubbies.

The premise is simple - send some photos and for just $10 the company will cut out the background (or the bars and orange boiler suits) and will manipulate the image to make it appear as though the happy couple enjoyed a wedding in the setting of their choice.

It's genius and means the happy couple, should they ever be reunited, can conjure up a more wholesome story about their big day.

"Were you in the Visiting Room?... On Vacation? With Composite Magic Photos you Could NEVER Tell The Difference!" boasts the company's website.

The Round-Up says why not go the whole hog and have some celebrities dropped in for good measure. It's a blank canvas really, so have some fun. Get Brad and Angelina along, have Destiny's Child singing at the reception and what the hey, why not have the Pope conducting the ceremony... if a Catholic church service isn't a stretch too far for a prison lag and his bride.

And finally, question of the week, is there anything mankind might one day require that you can't find to buy online?

Take for example this slightly embellished event from the past week.

The Round-Up being a secretive soul was put in a bit of a bind this week. An invite came in to a fancy dress party at which the Round-Up's presence was explicitly requested.

Now, a lesser weekly newsletter writer, keen on maintaining a modicum of anonymity, would have turned down the offer but the Round-Up hatched a plan and fired up its browser... the clue is in the requirement for a costume.

Perhaps inspired by Channel 5's moving documentary It's not easy being a wolf boy which aired on Monday night, or perhaps by a childhood (ok, it continues to this day) love of Star Wars, the Round-Up decided to go dressed as a wookie - a species made famous by Han Solo's co-pilot Chewbacca (which the Round-Up has just been pleasantly surprised to discover is a word which resides in Microsoft's Word spellchecker - who'd have thought?!).

The thinking behind this choice was 'they'll never uncover the Round-Up's identity beneath several layers of fake fur'. (No wookies were injured in the making of this costume, by the way.)

Incredibly, not only did the Round-Up find a wookie outfit with little hassle but was actually spoilt for choice. So which costume to choose?

First the Round-Up found this one, which we're sure you'll agree is OK. But then it stumbled upon this one on the same website.

Despite the difference in price, the Round-Up was genuinely left speechless by this second effort, which makes the cost of the first costume seem an absolute steal.

At this point the Round-Up fired off the following email to the site's owners:

"Dear sirs,
Imagine my surprise while seeking for a wookie outfit on your website to discover that you are mistakenly advertising Bungle from Rainbow as Chewbacca."

The Round-Up is still waiting for a response (being US-based, the Rainbow reference may well be lost on them), while being left wondering why, when they must have realised their Chewy costume was a bit substandard, did they think it might wrestle back some credibility to ask the model to give it some camp 'jazz hands' and wear a rather lame man-bag?

So no prizes for guessing which costume the Round-Up went for. And imagine the pride when the winner of the best costume award was announced...

"So, if Bungle would like to come up here and collect his prize..."
"Thank you very much... though it's actually meant to be Chewbacca..."
"... give us back that prize."

Oh, for-shame.

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