Like most media organisations, we receive a steady stream of press releases here at PC Pro. On an average day I’d estimate we receive around 30 emails and letters from manufacturers, developers and PR agencies, all earnestly drawing our attention to something or other.

Sometimes these releases are useful, and even interesting: a press release might, for example, contain advance warning of a forthcoming product launch, or an important announcement from a major industry figure.

If I’m honest, though, I’d have to say only a minority of press releases are so worthy. Many of them are what I call downright optimistic – in other words, the people sending them are being rather hopeful if they imagine that we will have any use for the information.

Here, for your entertainment – but with some names removed to protect the innocent who are, let’s be honest, only doing their jobs – are ten of the most optimistic press releases we’ve received in 2011.

10. “Security software market to hit $23 billion”

According to a release we received in September, an industry analyst had calculated that “the global security software market will reach revenues of $23.3 billion in 2015, a compound annual growth rate of 6.8% from the $16.8 billion it hit in 2010.” What a headline! “Mathematical assumption sees market sector reach arbitrary value in three and a half years’ time.”

9. “Are UK Businesses Prepared for the Olympics?”

This was an invitation to a talk in November on “how businesses in the UK can remain productive and run their operations seamlessly during the Olympics in 2012”. It’s possible that these chaps had come up with some great ideas; but the press release was suspiciously silent on the rather key question of how exactly the Olympics was supposed make businesses in the UK unproductive in the first place.

8. “30 most anticipated games releases!”

Who exactly gets to decide what’s “most anticipated” anyway?

These days we don’t write about games in PC Pro – we leave that to our colleagues over at Custom PC and bit-tech.net. Even if we did cover games, I’m not sure what we’d do with a list of “the 30 most anticipated games due for release in the UK over the next 12 months”. I suppose the idea is just to glance down it and go “yep, I’m looking forward to that.” Or not, as it might be – who exactly gets to decide what’s “most anticipated” anyway?

7. “Nine in ten Brits don’t trust the internet”

The text of this release, which refers to a survey carried out in April and May, makes no reference to “nine in ten” Brits doing or saying anything. We do, however, learn that “one in ten feels unsafe using the internet at least every other day”, while at the other extreme, one in six uses no online security measures. Only six in ten are “cautious of logging onto websites which require email and passwords” and half of respondents are concerned about the safety of banking online and opening email attachments. So the story appears to be “some Brits trust the internet, others don’t”.

6. “New SATA III Cable”

As you probably know, SATA III – also known as SATA 6Gbits/sec – uses the same physical connectors as the older 3Gbits/sec standard. But manufacturers don’t like to miss an opportunity to create new accessories. “With SATA Revision 3.0 compliant devices now more popular than ever, we have created two suitable cables … unlike traditional SATA cables with metal clips that loose [sic] effectiveness with repeated usage due to scratching, these cables achieve secure connection by utilising precision designed and manufactured connector. Wrapped in attractive black sleeve and metallic layer for EMI protection, these new cables are great companions for running SATA 6Gbits/sec capable devices with optimum stability and style.” I do hate it when my old, unstylish SATA cables loose effectiveness due to scratching.

5. “iPhone App to Reinvent Today”

I read it all, and I still don’t really understand what it was trying to tell me

This was a long release, but I read it all, and I still don’t really understand what it was trying to tell me. “Well if you like stories – stories like you are there – you are living it – you exist for it – you exist because of it – you need to get to the iTunes store NOW … Although anyone of us can change the future – it already exists. Recent experiments into time have lead the test scientist to realise that the future exists – what is more it leaks through: if you care to test it. It appears that emotion is the driving force in ‘life’ and by maximizing emotion, as much as it is possible in controlled conditions inside a science laboratory, it proves to be possible to drag the future back into the now.” Got that? The product is a series of iPhone-based story apps, by the way, in case it wasn’t clear.

4. “You may now kiss the bride (or groom)”

There are several reasons why PC Pro was never going to cover this release

There are several reasons why PC Pro was never going to cover this remarkable release from last May, but we have to admit it deserved a wider audience. “Host your own royal wedding,” it promised, “and kiss Kate or William, with balcony scene for Xbox 360. It was the moment the world cheered … and now Xbox 360 owners can make their own royal wedding dreams come true – by placing themselves, their friends and family, at the heart of one of the most watched television events in history.” Yes, it is – we believe – the world’s first royal wedding sim. Rumours that a second player can play as Pippa are sadly unconfirmed.

3. “Cookery books soon to be a thing of the past as technology takes over the kitchen”

According to research commissioned by a major laptop manufacturer, over a third of Brits are using their laptops to search for recipes online, with 37% describing themselves as “experimental cooks who like to try new things”. Case closed: the cookery book is dead.

2. “Temmingh, Gubanov and Whitfield added to 2011 European Digital Forensics and Incident Response Summit ”

Now, I certainly don’t mean to insult these gentlemen, who are all very well respected in their fields. And I’m sure the event, which took place in September, was a very worthwhile venture. Perhaps in the not too distant future, we’ll all have reason to be grateful for the security practices and principles that emerge from events such as this.

But just to recapitulate, the story here is that three people you’ve never heard of are going to a thing you’ve never heard of.

1. “Penalty charge notice enclosed”

Presumably working on the principle that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, in mid-December the creators of an iOS app aimed at helping motorists avoid parking tickets hit upon the bright idea sending out press releases disguised as parking fine notices, in official-looking envelopes, to journalists up and down the country. While some reportedly took the prank in good humour, others (myself included) were baffled at the idea that this legally dubious stunt would dispose us favourably toward the app.

The real problem, though, wasn’t the medium but the app itself. “Let’s say that you are a registered user and I am a registered user,” explains the text of the release. “You don’t know me, but you see my car being booked, you punch my licence plate into the app, and within seconds I get an alert saying that my car’s being booked. So does every other registered user within 50 metres. We then run back to our cars and move them before a ticket is issued.” In other words, with just a few taps you can send motorists scurrying to their vehicles. We can’t help but notice a certain scope for mischief here, especially in light of the example set by the app publishers themselves…

How clued up are you on the world of computing? We’ve put together a fun quiz – well, let’s say a quiz, anyway – to test your knowledge of recent events, and not so recent technological lore. There are sixty questions: hover over each question with your mouse to check your answers. If you’re on a mobile platform and can’t hover, scroll down to the end for a complete list of answers.

Round 1: 2011, part one

1. Which country temporarily shut down all internet access for citizens for five days in late January?

2. Hard disk prices were sent soaring by flooding in which country this year?

3. How did “Sabu” and “Topiary” gain notoriety this spring?

4. What sort of digital resource was officially issued for the last time in February?

5. Which communications service suffered a major loss of service, affecting millions of users, for several days in October?

Round 2: Whose CEO?

6. Tim Cook

7. Jeff Bezos

8. Rory Reid

9. Meg Whitman

10. Dick Costolo

Round 3: Identify the hardware from key specs

11. A 3.5MHz Zilog Z80 processor and either 16KB or 48KB of RAM

12. A 233MHz PPC 750 processor and a 4GB hard disk – but, controversially, no floppy drive

13. A 532MHz ARM processor, 256MB of RAM, an 600 x 800 greyscale display and 802.11g wireless

14. A 5GB hard disk, a monochrome LCD display and a FireWire connector

15. 128 first-generation stream processors, a 90nm manufacturing process and 768MB of GDDR3

Round 4: The Name of the Game

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Round 5: 2011, part two

21. Nvidia’s Tegra 3 platform became the first mainstream mobile chipset to feature what?

22. What did Microsoft agree to buy for $8.5bn in May?

23. Google unveiled the “Chromebook” concept this year, but which manufacturer did it partner with to produce the first hardware?

24. 2011 saw a slew of tablets released, but what made the Asus Eee Transformer distinctive?

25. Canonical split opinions this year by creating its own default graphical interface for Ubuntu. What is it called?

Round 6: Complete the Quote

26. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is…”

27. “I think there is a world market for maybe…”

28. “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in…”

29. “Computers are useless. They can only give you…”

30. “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll… “

Round 7: Identify the Language

(Programming constructs being what they are, there may be more than one valid answer. And don’t complain about the lack of indenting.)

Round 8: Codenames

36. Blackcomb

37. Nehalem

38. Gutsy Gibbon

39. FroYo

40. Barcelona

Round 9: The Wacky World of Networking Abbreviations

41. MAC

42. ISDN

43. HSDPA

44. UDP

45. SSL

Round 10: Name the decade

46. Dennis Ritchie creates C at Bell Laboratories

47. Alan Turing sets out the “Turing Test” for artificial intelligence

48. Douglas Engelbart invents the mouse

49. IBM releases the IBM PC

50. Intel produces its first microchip, the Intel 4004

Round 11: 2011, part three

51. This year saw the first major outbreak of Mac malware, in the shape of a fake antivirus package. What was it called?

52. Which popular cross-platform application went from version 3.6 to version 8.0.1 over the course of 2011?

53. Amazon unveiled its Android-based tablet this year (though as yet it’s not available in the UK). What’s it called?

54. What is the name of Microsoft’s tile-based interface, revealed this year as the front-end of Windows 8?

55. After launching Google+ this year, Google closed its earlier, unsuccessful social networking platform. What was it called?

Round 12: And now, your hosts…

56. In what year was PC Pro first published?

57. Who edits the Real World Computing section and writes the monthly Idealog column?

58. What is the average age of a PC Pro reader (± three years)?

59. What proportion of PC Pro readers, as a percentage, are male (± 3%)?

60. What is the official title of Jon Honeyball’s column which closes each issue of PC Pro?

1. Egypt; 2. Thailand; 3. As members of hacking group LulzSec; 4. An IPv4 address block; 5. BlackBerry; 6. Apple; 7. Amazon; 8. AMD; 9. HP; 10. Twitter; 11. ZX Spectrum (1982); 12. Apple iMac G3 (1998; 13. Amazon Kindle (2007; 14. Apple iPod (2001); 15. Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX (2007) ; 16. Sonic the Hedgehog; 17. Portal; 18. Super Mario 64; 19. L.A. Noire; 20. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time; 21. Five cores (four regular cores and a low-power ‘companion core’; 22. Skype; 23. Samsung; 24. An attachable Qwerty keyboard; 25. Unity; 26. “… indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke, 1973; 27. “… five computers.” Attributed to Tom Watson (IBM), 1943; 28. “… creating the internet.” Al Gore, 1999; 29. “… answers.” Pablo Picasso, 1968; 30. “… want to lick them.” Steve Jobs, 2000; 31. C; 32. COBOL; 33. Ruby; 34. Visual Basic .NET; 35. Lisp; 36. Windows 7; 37. Intel Core i7 (first generation); 38. Ubuntu 7.10; 39. Android 2.2; 40. AMD Phenom; 41. Media Access Control; 42. Integrated Services Digital Network; 43. High-Speed Downlink Packet Access; 44. User Datagram Protocol; 45. Secure Sockets Layer; 46. 1970s; 47. 1950s; 48. 1960s; 49. 1980s; 50. 1970s; 51. Mac Defender (half a point for Mac Guard, a later variant); 52. Firefox; 53. Kindle Fire; 54. Metro; 55. Buzz; 56. 1994; 57. Dick Pountain; 58. 38; 59. 96%; 60. Epilog

Screenshots from Wikimedia. Thanks to the “Hello World Collection” for the code samples.

Today, a decade and a half later, I’ve taken delivery of a Samsung Galaxy S II. If ever you wanted an illustration of the phenomenal pace at which technology advances, here it is. In what seems like an alarmingly short time, we’ve progressed from that rudimentary brick to a slim, slate-style affair with a vibrant full-colour touchscreen, a feature list as long as your arm, 16GB of internal storage and, well, slightly better battery life.

Consider that voice calls are now just a small part of a smartphone’s job and you could question whether the two phones are even really the same sort of device.

The change that’s really struck me, though, is the pricing. Back in 1996 I paid £30 for my old mr20, then signed up to Orange’s popular “Talk 15” plan. At £17.50 a month, this gave me a generous 15 minutes of voice calls a month, after which calls cost 10p a minute to Orange phones and, presumably, more to other sorts of phone. Hey, it was a long time ago.

As I mentioned, I couldn’t send SMS messages from my phone, and as for data services, forget it. This was 1996: most of us didn’t have the internet on our landlines, let alone our mobiles.

Now compare my new O2 contract, which starts today. Once more I’ve paid £30 up-front for the phone, and from here on I’ll be paying £21.50 a month. Accounting for inflation, that makes my new contract about 20% cheaper than my old Talk 15 tariff. Yet for that money I get vastly more than before: 200 minutes of talk time, unlimited text messages and 500MB of internet usage.

To be fair, the contract’s longer (two years, rather than one), but still, this represents an incredible increase in value. It’s easy to grumble about mobile phone providers, and often they deserve it: I’m sure we’ve all had frustrating experiences where providers switch around contracts in unwelcome ways, demand exorbitant fees for bog-standard services, screw up your credit rating or point-blank refuse to help with technical problems.

But when I reflect that, compared to my undergraduate self, I’m getting around 15 times as many minutes for my money – plus text messages – plus internet access – plus a phone that is itself, quite simply, gorgeous – it’s hard to feel too hard done by.

And I have to admit, I get a little excited trying to imagine what sort of phone I could possibly have in 15 years to make the S II look as ridiculously antiquated as the mr20 does now.

What terrible tariffs have you been on in the past? What chunky phones are you now ashamed to admit you once proudly carried around in an unseemly bulging pocket? While my positive mood lasts I’m declaring an amnesty, so share your worst!

The small amount of text accompanying the picture emphasises the care that’s gone into the design. In particular, it mentions that, despite its thinness, the Z830 has “all the ports you’ll need.”

Looking a little more closely at the picture, however, I’m not quite so certain that’s true:

So, that’s all the ports you’ll need… so long as you can fit your Kensington lock into a round socket – and cram your USB devices into a card slot.

None of them has so far become a real product (though there are definite similarities between the 48-core Rock Creek CPU and the 50-core Knights Corner architecture). But it’s always fascinating to see what the chip giant’s boffins are working on. This week’s event – held at the company’s offices in Leixlip, near Dublin, and opened by Irish business minister Richard Bruton (above) – showcased several intriguing new ideas – as well as one eerily familiar one. Below the cut are some of the highlights.

The Personal Energy Cloud

The Personal Energy Cloud is Intel’s jargon for the halo of power consumption that follows you around – the wattage of the light bulbs you use, for example, and the intermittent drain of the television.

It’s a concept that neatly expresses what CEO Paul Otellini has described as Intel’s “long-standing obsession” with power consumption; but as yet it’s ill defined. Officially the aim is to help individuals “navigate the sea of energy data”; Eve Schooler from Intel Labs demonstrated how this might be accomplished using a sort of “Marauder’s Map” of electronic devices, which could be centrally managed, to help reduce power wastage and determine which individuals could access which resources when. For now though the energy cloud appears to be more a notion than a focused project.

The Personal Office Energy Monitor

Next to the airy energy cloud concept, the POEM system, demonstrated by Intel Labs’ Sylvain Sauty and Milan Milenkovic, seems almost prosaically practical. Designed primarily for large workplaces, it works by equipping every PC with a simple USB sensor unit which measures ambient temperature, light, pressure and humidity levels, as well as recording the power consumption of the computer itself.

By feeding this information back to a environmental management system, it becomes possible to minutely manage electrical services such as air conditioning and lighting, to ensure that each employee has what they need without any wastage. A friendly PC-based interface also allows employees to monitor their own power usage, and to send feedback via simple buttons with labels such as “I’m too cold”. Though Intel didn’t explicitly suggest it, one imagines that feedback like this could even permit a building to “learn” the perfect settings for each section of a building throughout a day.

Simple Energy Sensing

Simple Energy Sensing is a neat idea – a home energy monitor that can identify individual appliances from their characteristic electrical signatures – but there’s no escaping the fact that the demonstration system on display at Leixlip was the very same one I had already seen 16 months ago in California.

Intel’s James Song had the good grace to look slightly sheepish when I pointed this out, but directed me to research manager Charlie Sheridan, who assured me that the project is moving forward through domestic testing.

“We’re trialling the system in 15 employee homes in the US,” he told me, “and we’re preparing for our first aggressive push, into 200 homes in Texas. We’re also partnering with local utilities, in Ireland and the US.”

Did this mean Intel would be relying on electricity suppliers to monitor power consumption, after the manner of the now-defunct Google PowerMeter service?

“The involvement of the utility companies is purely to validate the technology,” Sheridan explained. “We’ll try to keep as much data within the consumer’s home as possible.”

Crowd & Sensor Sourced Services

Like the POEM system, Intel’s experiments in crowd-sourcing are unapologetically down-to-earth, but they could open up as yet unimagined possibilities. Simply put, the idea is to maintain a vast, anonymised database of sensor and GPS data, to “gather, process and share data securely” – and make it available to real-time applications.

One obvious use for the technology is for collating GPS data into real-time traffic reports, as already seen in services such as Vodafone Sat Nav. A prototype system, offering both laptop- and tablet-style interfaces, was on display (see photo).

But as Intel’s Ahmed Mohamed explained, by incorporating additional sensor data, more sophisticated services could be implemented within the same framework. For example, if large numbers of cars started sharing shock absorber data, it would be easy for councils to locate potholes in roads. The potential applications would be limited only by people’s willingness and ability to share data – and by the imagination of the developers.

The Dependable Cloud

Many businesses operate as hosted services, but there’s currently no simple framework for ensuring a particular set of legal obligations or policies is met by the host.

The Dependable Cloud – the brainchild of Intel’s Michael Nolan – is a framework which makes it easy for hosting customers to specify various policies, and for hosts to provide them. For example, for legal reasons a company might wish its virtual machines to run only on servers in certain geographical locations. Or, for reasons of security, it might want them to run only on hardware capable of enforcing trusted execution. The system can also help hosts manage SLAs in cases of reduced capacity, by automatically allocating resources according to service-level policies.

The Dependable Cloud concept hasn’t yet reached the likes of Amazon, but it’s already attracted support and funding from the EU’s SLA@SOI consortium.

DDR3 and Hyper Graphics

Intel engineers are always talking about optimising performance, so it’s no surprise to see some of their research projects focus on hardware metrics. The DDR3 analysis project, demonstrated by Matthias Grees, uses an interposer card that sits between the motherboard and DIMMs in a standard PC and measures bandwidth and power consumption in real time while applications are running. The data enables software engineers to keep track of how hard their programs hit memory, and helps hardware engineers develop better performing, more efficient memory controllers.

“Right now we use this internally,” commented Grees, “but if we wanted to we could productise this in about a year.”

The Hyper Graphics project has a similar aim, namely to monitor the use of L1, L2 and L3 cache in a running system. But rather than using hardware, this research, headed by Qiong Cai of Intel Labs Barcelona, runs applications and games inside a virtual machine that’s been modified to monitor cache requests. At present the project focuses specifically on the cache usage of integrated GPU, and has accordingly been dubbed “Hyper Graphics”.

The system is particularly useful for its ability to track “cache misses” – requests for data that isn’t in the local cache, which can cause significant performance degradation. With this information, developers can see exactly which parts of their software could be optimised to make better use of caching. And, since the system can simulate caches of arbitrary sizes, engineers can experiment with different cache arrangements to see precisely how larger or smaller caches would affect the performance of real applications.

Multi-Reality Interfaces

The name may sound like science-fiction, but the Multi-Reality Interface is another project with a solid real-world purpose. The idea is simple: the interface shows both a live video feed and a real-time digital representation of the same environment.

Though it wasn’t immediately obvious to me why this would be useful, Jochen Grün from the Universität des Saarlandes explained: the manufacturing industry is moving to a modular factory model, where a single building can be rapidly retooled to make different items with different equipment. This means onsite personnel may be unfamiliar with the machinery they’re using, and unqualified to carry out repairs in the case of a problem.

A multi-reality view allows a remote expert to give immediate guidance. The live video view (which can optionally be presented in stereoscopic 3D) shows the situation on the ground, while the digital representation can show sensor data and other necessary details. With this information, one expert can provide instant instructions and advice to staff across multiple sites, keeping maintenance costs to a minimum. And because the system is built on web standards, the onsite staff can follow along on any portable device.

Lego Digital Box

Intel’s joint venture with Metaio Software and Lego was demonstrated at IDF last month, but for most Research Day attendees today was their first encounter with the Digital Box system – and it’s safe to say this playful take on augmented reality stole the show.

Though nominally a research project, the system’s already being rolled out to toy shops worldwide. You activate it by simply holding a box of Lego up to a camera. As soon as the software recognises the box, it superimposes a 3D representation of the assembled kit onto the top of it, so you can see what it looks like. If you want to see from the other side, simply rotate the box: the 3D image is anchored to the box and follows its motion in real time. And just to liven things up, the generated image is populated with animated Lego characters.

The system relies on nothing more than a simple webcam, a standard mobile Sandy Bridge platform and custom software. But the impression is something special – as you can see for yourselves in this demonstration video provided by Metaio:

No one enjoys receiving angry emails. But in this case it’s probably my own fault.

For the latest issue of PC Pro (with subscribers  now, on sale Thursday) I carried out a Labs group test of 15 USB 3 hard drives in a range of capacities going right up to 3TB. And in my column I questioned whether the typical customer has any legitimate need for this much space.

Now, one of our readers has written to put the very valid point that an eager videographer or photographer can easily fill several terabytes of storage in a few years, or even months. Developers too may need to work with – and back up – huge data sets. My (admittedly slightly mischievous) suggestion that large drives were mostly useful for storing downloaded porn and illegal Blu-ray rips did not amuse, and I can see why.

Here’s what I should have made clearer in my column: when I referred to “the typical customer”, I didn’t mean the many enthusiasts and professionals we’re proud to count among our readers. It’s understood that PC Pro readers are, overall, a demanding lot when it comes to IT resources. I dare say Jon Honeyball generates more than 3TB of data before breakfast.

My comments were aimed more at the man in the street – what we might call the PC World customer, if that’s not an unfair stereotype. This, after all, is the target market for this new wave of huge yet cheap USB drives, and this is the context in which I was questioning the need for so much storage.

Of course, cheap storage is valuable to power users too, but that’s a different market – one where multi-terabyte storage devices have been common for years. Perhaps I should have made that distinction explicit.

So please don’t be offended if it looks like I’m dismissing your computing needs. If you’re in the market for a 3TB hard disk then I say more power to you, and I hope you find our Labs helpful – no matter what your plans might be for the drive.

Everyone, that is, except for Mr Matthew Brock of Swiss Cottage. I have it on good authority that the gentleman in question, an old friend of mine, is giving Google+ a miss.

It’s not that he dislikes social networking as such. He long ago signed up to Facebook with only a cursory grumble, and he’s frequently to be found sharing photographs on Twitter (@_mattbrock, if you’d like to be friends). But he tells me he’s uneasy about Google’s continued expansion into ever more online markets – and, in this case, about its acquisition of a huge amount of personal information to add to its already vast database. He has therefore decided to be a conscientious objector.

As podcast listeners will know, when it comes to issues like this, my personal privacy policy is “get over yourself”. If Google’s gurus reckon they can make money from me uploading pictures of Mike Jennings in a daft hat then I say good luck to them. Even as I nodded sympathetically along with Brock’s explanation, I admit I felt he was being perhaps a little paranoid. Did he really suppose Google had some evil master-plan?

Little did I imagine that within 24 hours I’d be eating those, er, thoughts.

Changing details

My epiphany began innocently enough that evening, when I decided to change my email address. This isn’t something I do very often, but there comes a point when a mailbox receives so much spam there’s nothing to do but abandon it and move on.

There comes a point when a mailbox receives so much spam there’s nothing to do but abandon it and move on

I should have realised I was opening a can of worms when I discovered there’s actually no way to change a Gmail address. To move to a new address, you must open a new account. That only takes a minute, but I was piqued to find I was unable to migrate my contacts, and to transfer my mail across I had to set up a rather roundabout POP3 transfer.

That wasn’t the only problem, as I realised when I tried to move my Google+ account to my new address. It turns out this isn’t possible either: each profile is permanently linked to the Google account it was created under. Since my Google+ profile was only a few weeks old, it wasn’t exactly stuffed with memories, but it was still irritating to have to ditch it and start afresh.

At that point my phone chirped to tell me I had a new email, and it hit me: my phone too was tied to my old Google account. A quick web search revealed that the only way to set my new address as my primary account would be to perform a factory reset and set the phone up again from scratch.

In the end, moving to a new email address meant losing access not only to my archives and my Google+ account, but also to my Android Market purchases, my Google Docs, my Google Calendar and my Google Checkout history. I also ended up losing all my stars on Angry Birds. (It may have been this realisation that really made me question the wisdom of allowing Google to control so many different services.)

Big mistake

To be fair, the root of the problem isn’t Google’s size as such, but the way it ties its services together. A well-designed database should use some sort of anonymous internal value, such as a serial number, as the key field, so that personal information can be freely modified without breaking the links between tables. Google appears to have ignored this fundamental principle, instead using the email address as the key field. That’s quite literally a schoolboy error – I learnt about key fields way back in GCSE Computer Studies – and Google should be ashamed.

But it wouldn’t be a problem if Google weren’t tying everything together in the first place. Facebook, Twitter and even PayPal accepted my new address without a murmur. If only Android were similarly decoupled from the main Google database, I’d still have my golden eggs right now.

So – to my admitted surprise – I find myself in sympathy with Brock’s position. I’ve never really believed that a big company must necessarily have a malicious agenda; but now I realise you don’t need a plan to cause havoc. With the best will in the world, people – and hence companies – make stupid decisions from time to time. The bigger we allow Google, or any company, to grow, the more scope those stupid decisions have to screw us all.

Update: I’m most grateful to Alan Robertson, in the comments below, for pointing out workarounds for some of the problems mentioned above. The latest version of the Android Market application (which, oddly, doesn’t appear to be available from the Android Market itself) does indeed allow you to install purchased applications from multiple accounts – although this of course means you have to keep your old Google account active alongside your new one, which is a pain.

More usefully, as Alan also mentions, if you have an Android phone or tablet you can configure it to sync your contacts and calendars from your old account – then switch over and resync them to your new account. I’m not sure how you’d do this without an Android device though, as importing contacts directly across Gmail accounts isn’t supported. And it’s still the case that to switch your primary account you must perform a factory reset.

In all, it seems Google is gradually addressing the problems involved in using multiple or changing identities, but there’s some way to go. And, as I mentioned above, the problems are largely ones that in a more diverse market would never have arisen in the first place!

Not everyone has been so lucky, though. As I write this, unscrupulous voyeurs around the globe are sifting through these compromised email accounts looking for… well, whatever they can find. We’ve heard of people finding login details for social-networking sites, online-dating services and even porn sites.

Here at PC Pro we can’t condone such behaviour, fascinating though it would doubtless be to gain such an insight into a stranger’s private life. Happily, the email addresses and passwords themselves are quite revealing.

Where the passwords came from

LulzSec hasn’t said where these credentials came from – in fact, it’s explicitly said they’re “random assortments from a collection.” But the email domains to which the passwords grant access break down as follows:

Nothing too shocking there, except an unexpected skew towards Brazil. More revealing, perhaps, are the usernames and passwords that people have chosen for themselves.

Email usernames

Email accounts must be unique within their domain, so there’s not much repetition. And, unsurprisingly, many people seem to use some variation of their real name: the addresses contain hundreds of Johns, Roberts and Marys (and just as many Diegos and Felipes).

But many more fanciful terms also come up repeatedly in the LulzSec archive. Of 62,000 leaked leaked addresses, 29 include the word “goddess”, while 37 users identify as some sort of “vamp” or “vampire”. Sixty two call themselves either a prince or princess, while 68 call themselves king and a whopping 85 go by queens.

77 users have the word “dragon” in their email address, while 127 go with “bear”

On a similar theme, 77 users have the word “dragon” in their email address, while 127 go with “bear”. Closer to home, 135 of the email addresses include the term “sex”, and 204 of them refer to “love”. Over 300 referred, in some way or other, to “lady”.

Surprisingly, though, the most popular term I could find was “book”, featuring in 326 different usernames.

Why is that? Mikko Hyppönen of F-Secure theorised on his Twitter feed that many of these credentials must have come from a community for aspiring authors. And when we look at the passwords that people have chosen for themselves, that seems a very plausible surmise.

Bookish passwords

Of the 62,000 passwords released by LulzSec, the most-used is “123456”, which comes up 568 times. The next most common password is “123456789”, with 184 occurrences. So far so predictable, and the next hit – “password”, at 133 occurrences – is no more surprising.

The next most common password, however, is “romance”, at 88 occurrences (tying with the rather more prosaic “102030”). After that, with 67 occurrences, is “mystery”.

The theme continues: skipping over some more variations on the numeric theme, other popular passwords include “shadow” (62), “bookworm” (54), “reader” (52), “reading” (47), “booklover” (33) and “library” (26). It all points in a clear direction; and if you’re still doubtful, perhaps the smoking gun is the fact that 30 people have chosen “writerspace” as their password.

What have we learnt?

Clearly, this is a back-of-an-envelope breakdown of a mixed mass of unverified data. But for all that, it gives a fascinating glimpse of some other people’s lives. And it gives an interesting insight into the way people choose their passwords: in this case, apparently, on a theme that reflects the nature of the site they’re visiting.

If you’d like to study the leaked information further – but don’t want to get involved in dodgy downloads – I’ve put together a stripped list of the passwords. I’ve removed the usernames and domains so this data can’t be used for nefarious purposes, but you can still carry out whatever analysis you like, and I’m sure there are plenty more interesting patterns to tease out (I’ve noticed a distinct Disney theme, for example). I’d be delighted to hear your findings.

Also, I’d be very happy to hear if anyone can explain why the seventh most common password in the data file – apparently shared by 62 users – is “ajcuivd289”.

Click here to read our full Apple OS X 10.7 Lion review.

Happily, Lion brings plenty more significant changes too.

You got the touch

Apple’s “top features” list begins with greater support for multi-touch gesturing than before, enabling you to scroll, zoom, switch between apps and navigate the web with a swipe of one or more fingers. It brings more of the flavour of the swipeable iOS interface to MacBook users, and the gestures also work with Apple’s Magic Mouse and Magic TrackPad.

The next big enhancement is a full-screen application view. To us Windows users it seems odd that OS X didn’t have this basic feature years ago – presumably it was originally deemed incompatible with OS X interface principles. Now, though, compatible applications can be switched into a full-screen view by clicking a new maximise button at the top right of the window. And full-screen means full-screen: to create a truly distraction-free environment, Lion even auto-hides the menu bar, something that’s never previously been permitted.

The last of the major new features is Launchpad. This application acts as an alternative to the Dock, presenting your installed and downloaded applications in the familiar iPad grid format, complete with jiggling icons that can be switched around and dragged into folders.

It’s a curiously useless feature. Launchpad does nothing that the Dock doesn’t – in fact, it does less, as there’s no equivalent to Stacks, no indication of which programs are running and zero configurability. It’s also harder to use, as the icons are more spaced out, so it takes a lot more work with the mouse or trackpad to get to the icon you want. The situation could perhaps have been rescued with some clever keyboard shortcuts, but frustratingly all you can do is navigate between screens with the cursor keys, not select or launch apps.

In fact, with all of these big changes, the prime motivation appears not to have been to enhance the everyday usability of OS X – but simply to bring the experience closer to iOS.

Save me from myself

The iOS influence shows itself in smaller ways too. Some of these are genuine advances over Snow Leopard. Just as iPad apps remember their state when not in use, Lion’s new Auto Save technology lets you quit a desktop application while you’re half-way through editing a document – then reopen it and immediately carry on from where you left off, without having to think about saving or loading data.

It’s not quite a perfect solution to the agony of forgetting to save a file. The application itself must be Auto Save-aware, and if you double-click on a different document, both it and the original one will open. But the system’s easy enough to grasp, and intelligently implemented. With a simple menu option you can always revert to the last version of a file you manually saved, or to the last version you opened, and lock, duplicate or browse older file versions.

Lion can also optionally reopen the windows and applications from your last session when you log on – a simulation of the “always on” state of a handheld device, albeit at a comparatively glacial pace.

A new feature called AirDrop lets you effortlessly transfer data between Lion-equipped Macs over a local, ad-hoc wireless connection

When it comes to file storage, the new iCloud service forms a direct connection between OS X and iOS, but Lion also sees a more general move away from physical media in favour of a networked approach. The operating system itself will only be available as a digital download from the Mac App store; and when it comes to moving your own files around, a new feature called AirDrop lets you effortlessly transfer data between Lion-equipped Macs over a local, ad-hoc wireless connection. That’s the sort of simple yet brilliant idea for which Apple is feted, and one we very much hope Windows will emulate.

Evolutionary changes

Not everything in Lion is about iOS. Some improvements are still squarely focused on the desktop. The new Mission Control view acts as a sophisticated successor to Exposé, showing a clean, single-screen view of the dashboard, all your Spaces and a clustered view of open windows and applications. You can add and delete Spaces from here too – a thoughtful touch.

And there are some improvements we’ve been waiting for for a long time. Time Machine can at last write backups to local storage instead of an external drive. File Vault can now encrypt entire disks, including external volumes. After years of being deliberately hobbled, the latest QuickTime Player natively supports a full-screen view. And it’s finally possible to create a recovery partition for emergency OS reinstallation.

There’s even a built-in migration tool to help Windows users move their data across to a new Mac. And – resolving perhaps the number one gripe of Windows users who’ve made the switch – it’s at last possible to resize Finder and application windows from any edge, not just from the bottom right corner.

These enhancements are accompanied by dozens of small but practical improvements to the Finder, the Screen Sharing tool and the many applications bundled with OS X. Though the individual changes are small, the overall effect is that – cynics might say for the first time – OS X feels like a truly grown-up operating system.

Split personality

Lion is a paradoxical beast. It finally brings to the OS X desktop a raft of features it’s been crying out for for years; but simultaneously it seems designed to de-prioritise that entire way of doing things and push iOS ideas instead.

If Apple is preparing for the end of the mainstream desktop, it will naturally want to prepare Mac users for a gradual switch to iOS devices.

That may indeed be the intention. As Barry Collins noted in a recent blog post, iOS is a bigger business for Apple than OS X, and Steve Jobs is already talking openly of a “post-PC” world. If Apple is preparing for the end of the mainstream desktop, it will naturally want to prepare Mac users for a gradual switch to iOS devices. It’s no stretch to imagine that the next MacBook might shuffle the transition along further by including a touchscreen – something that would make sense of Launchpad and Lion’s multi-touch gestures.

On current hardware, though, it just feels like Apple is dogmatically bolting iOS interface elements onto a system where they don’t fit. Though Launchpad is the most conspicuous example of this, it’s not the only one. The much-ridiculed Auto Correct feature from the iPhone and iPad is here too – despite the availability of enough screen space and processing power for a much more sophisticated approach. More pointedly, the default action of the mouse scroll wheel has been reversed, so the action more closely resembles a swipe – an ergonomic disaster.

A worthwhile upgrade?

All the iPad-wannabe stuff can at least be switched off or ignored if you don’t like it; and what you’re then left with is a version of OS X that brings many genuine usability benefits over its predecessor, including several features we’ve been clamouring for for years. On that basis, we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Lion to anyone currently running Snow Leopard (a prerequisite for upgrading), especially since the low $30 price (around £19) entitles you to install it on all your authorised Macs.

Yet while Lion brings many welcome refinements to OS X, it also brings a clear message that, after 27 years, Apple no longer sees the Mac as its flagship. It’s not yet clear what exactly that will mean for the Mac’s tens of millions of users; but with Microsoft also bringing a new touchy-feely approach to Windows 8, it seems the days of the desktop OS as a discrete entity may be at an end.

So I was interested to read today of the launch of Google Docs for Android. Though it runs on both smartphones and tablets, it sounded like a newly ticked box for tablets in particular, since their screens and keyboards are better suited to casual document editing.

In fairness, Android devices already have support for creating, viewing and editing documents, through applications such as Documents To Go and Zoho Office. But Google Docs has the advantage of being a household name, not to mention that – unlike some rivals – it comes with full editing capabilities for free.

Google Docs for Android even has one feature that isn’t in the regular web service: an OCR module that you can use to photograph a document and convert it to editable text. It’s questionable how often you’ll really use this, but it’s a fun idea, and after installing the app on the Acer Iconia Tab A500 it was the first thing I tried. Shooting a full A4 page of printed text proved optimistic – the OCR skipped over almost all the text – but moving in to capture just the top half of the page yielded pretty good results, with only minor corrections required.

Sadly, I looked in vain for any straightforward way to scan in and append the text from the lower half of the page. Pressing the “Help” button did no good: there’s no online documentation for the OCR feature, nor indeed much for the mobile application as a whole.

More disappointment was in store when I set out to correct what text I had. The mobile interface feels empty and rudimentary, and you have to switch to the distinctly finger-hostile “Desktop” view to access most of the editing functions. Though it looks all but identical to the in-browser experience, the icons and menus are too small to use comfortably and accurately without a mouse.

Honeycomb also lacks cursor keys, so if you want to move around a document you must do it by swiping and prodding, or dragging the cursor into place with the text selection pointer – a niggly process. Arguably the weakness here lies with the platform, rather than the app, but again it makes Google Docs on Android a considerably less fluid experience than on a PC.

A further platform issue bites as soon as you carry your tablet out of range of your wireless router. Since Google Docs is completely cloud-based, you can only access your documents when you have an internet connection. If you’re not running it on a 3G tablet or a smartphone, you’ll need to be tethered or connected to a wireless hotspot to access your files.

Again, it’s a limitation that really lies with the platform (or at least with Wi-Fi-only hardware); but it makes Google Docs feel distinctly limited, and raises the question of whether it even makes sense as a standalone application – there is, after all, a rich web-based interface already available for mobile devices.

This is the first release of Google Docs for Android, so I’m optimistic that these issues could all be addressed in future updates. In principle, I’m still excited by the prospect of being able to seamlessly switch between desktop and tablet while working on a document. What we have here, though, feels half-baked.

I’ll carry on working with Google Docs for Android over the weekend, and hopefully I’ll find some more positive aspects to share with you. Look out for a full review next week.