Take Google Chrome, for six years the browser of choice for your correspondent. It’s clean, fast and simple, yet increasingly it tries to second guess how I want to browse the web.

Now, fair’s fair, I may not have a typical browsing history: I spend one week a month in the UK offices of PC Pro, and the rest of the month in our French outpost.

Yet, it’s hard to see what business that is of Google. Or why it should decide to interfere and start presenting a host of content and features in French and refuse to switch back to English with the vigour of an agricultural blockade.

After a recent upgrade, Chrome on a main desktop PC in the office switched from driving on the left to driving on the right without a shrug in the way of explanation. It turned the URL search bar from useful feature to irritating deviation.

Chrome on a main desktop PC in the office switched from driving on the left to driving on the right without a shrug in the way of explanation

Instead of using the generic google.com as a default search engine, it switched to Google.fr, meaning all search results were skewed heavily towards sites from France and in French. Fine if you’re looking for information on the Cathar uprising or the perfect tarte tatin recipe, but France hasn’t made the greatest contributions to technology and the web.

After poking around in the browser’s help screen, there are options for forcing the browser bar search to revert to English results by default, but why would Google overide my original settings, when it knows, what with me being signed into Gmail, that by choice I use English?

If that’s as bewildering as a French supermarket’s opening hours, it gets worse. Chrome, apparently with no hint of irony, points out that the page delivering the results is in French and asks if I’d like to translate them into English. Genius.

Google knows I speak English. It’s there in Chrome’s language settings and over the years it’s developed a pretty good understanding of my browsing habits – how else would it know exactly which adverts to show me? — yet it insists on trying to push me into French options based on where I am browsing from. If Google knows where I buy my pants or go on holiday then it ought to know that I habitually surf UK websites.

Still, at least I speak French. Back in the UK for a week’s shift in PC Pro Towers, I performed a search at my parents’ home while signed into Gmail, and shortly after signing out realised that my parents’ edition of Chrome had now switched to French — and mother finds it hard enough to cope with technology without Google sabotaging her computer with foreign languages.

Google is by no means the only offender here, with an increasing number of companies defaulting from .com to the local suffix and language without obvious recourse  – but in a world that’s more mobile and more travelled than ever before, do we really need our technology telling us where we are?

It’s Safer Internet Day! The day on which we’re meant “to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology”, according to the official website. Instead, it seems many companies are using it to peddle irresponsible nonsense. Here’s just a few of those we’ve found – let us know if you find any more on comments below, and we’ll update the blog.

FREE AV WILL RIDDLE YOUR PCs WITH VIRUSES!

“You may think you’re safe surfing the web but there are any number of internet nasties that can creep up and harm your computer,” warns the video on Virgin Media’s Parental Controls site. “If you have no internet security installed, or just other basic free solutions, viruses and malware can take over.”

Really? Running something such as Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG Free will leave you with a virus-riddled heap of silicon, will it? Even with detection rates that are not much worse than the Trend Micro-supplied software offered by Virgin? That’s scaremongering of the highest order. As our forthcoming Labs on internet security software will prove…

BRITAIN’S “SAFEST BROADBAND CONNECTION”

You may recall the ever-fearsome Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently took exception to TalkTalk describing its service as the “UK’s safest broadband”, just because it provides network-level content filtering.

Luckily, TalkTalk found a way around that ban – by adding the word “connection” to the end of that phrase – as we can see from the company’s Facebook page, which is of course promoting Safer Internet Day.

We’ll remind you what the ASA said about TalkTalk’s adverts last month. “Customers could interpret ‘safest’ as referring to a number of features, such as virus protection or protection from hacking, and that HomeSafe only offered a basic range of security features”.

A “basic range of security features” or “the UK’s safest broadband connection”? Which sounds more plausible to you?

POLICE VIDEO NASTY

As we pointed out yesterday, why bother spending taxpayers’ money educating the public about internet safety, when you can knock out a nauseating fifties-style public information video that is so bereft of information and entertainment value, even ITV4 wouldn’t touch it?

Step forward the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP) – funded by the taxpayer to the tune of £6.4m per year – with this enormous waste of time and money.

Nowhere, in a world full of vacuous guff, are grown adults treated with such unbridled contempt as when it comes to “advice” for keeping your children safe online.

Exhibit A: the latest video from the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP), a staggeringly insulting four minutes of patronising, big-budget twaddle, that’s about as informative and entertaining as getting an enema from Charles Bronson. I challenge you to watch all three minutes and 59 seconds of it, without wishing to punch someone in the face, primarily yourself.

The video has been launched to coincide with Safer Internet Day, historically an opportunity for overpaid and under-qualified “child safety experts” to get five minutes on the This Morning sofa, trotting out the same bland sound bites they’ve been issuing since Netscape Navigator was de rigeur: don’t let kids sneak off to their bedroom with a laptop, talk to your kids about their internet habits, set boundaries on net access – advice any parent with a working frontal lobe will have figured out for themselves.

Yet, when it comes to actually delivering practical advice, these “experts” fall pathetically short. Take the following advice on implementing parental controls on the CEOP website (CEOP’s emphasis in bold, not mine):

Use parental controls on devices that link to the internet, such as the TV, laptops, computers, games consoles and mobile phones. Parental controls are not just about locking and blocking, they are a tool to help you set appropriate boundaries as your child grows and develops. They are not the answer to your child’s online safety, but they are a good start and they are not as difficult to install as you might think. Service providers are working hard to make them simple, effective and user friendly. Find your service provider and learn how to set your controls.

In other words – work it out for yourself.

Instead of paying a media agency £50,000 to knock out that appalling piece of faux-fifties codswallop, how about paying someone a tenth of that to write a set of concise instructions for Windows 7 parental controls, for example? You never know, it might actually protect some children.

But I’ve got terrible news for all those companies: there is only one Apple. Tempting as it may be to start up your own ecosystem of apps and content, you need something truly compelling to make people sign up to it in the same way that tens of millions of people have signed their lives away to Apple.

Apple customers sign up to a brand with values they believe in, to a name that they will be happy to associate themselves with.

For a start, you need trust. Apple customers sign up to a brand with values they believe in, to a name that they will be happy to associate themselves with. You also need staggering amounts of content: from apps to movies to TV shows to music, Apple has this sewn up.

You need sexiness: if I’m going to buy your phone, it needs to look damn good. Finally, you need phenomenal ease of use. If you have to spend a minute explaining what your service does, or how you connect to it using your devices, then you’ve lost three-quarters of your potential customers.

Like them or loathe them, no other company can match Apple in these areas.

So when I look back at CES, despite all the excellent technology on show, I do so with a mix of fear and despondency.

The issue is typified by the likes of Samsung and Sony. Both made big plays at CES that suggest they think they could be an all-encompassing rival to Apple, whether it’s Samsung talking about the fact you can play Angry Birds on their TVs or Sony pointing out that its customers can watch movies a month earlier on their movie-download service. Sorry Sony, sorry Samsung: but it’s not enough.

Instead, we need either open standards or a compelling play by a company that can work with different partners. Obvious examples of the latter are Microsoft and Google, but even this has hints of idealism: think how difficult Microsoft has found it to make anyone else sign up to services such as Passport.

Nevertheless, I can’t see any alternative. Sony and Samsung both produce great hardware, and Sony – through its subsidiaries such as Sony Entertainment – own some phenomenal content. But they are light years away from the position where a critical mass of consumers sign up to the Sony or Samsung ecosystem in the same way that Apple customers do.

So, please, stop trying and start working with Google, Microsoft and Amazon to ensure that the products we buy from you work with all the different content providers. Focus on what your company is good at, not what Apple is good at.

I spent last week in Las Vegas, which is always a bit strange for women, surrounded as you are by very pretty ladies, in very little — and often very sparkly — “clothes”. I’m speaking, of course, not of the casinos or bars, but of CES and its numerous “booth babes”.

The BBC did an excellent piece on the subject — if you haven’t seen it yet, the video is here, and it’s well worth watching — interviewing female tech journalists, marketing staff, booth babes and CES head honcho Gary Shapiro.

There’s one line in the video that stuck with me. One of the so-called babes suggested that female journalists wouldn’t be dissuaded from visiting a company’s booth because scantily clad models were present. That’s patently wrong; I avoided stands because of such marketing tactics.

On what felt like day 497 of CES, I was looking at robots. One stand had some rather silly looking robots, one of which danced and the other drew pictures with a pen and paper.

Why or how that was, I don’t know, as the only obvious staff on hand were hired models. I actually attempted — optimistically, I know — to ask one of the pretty ladies a bit about the robot she was smilingly demonstrating, and she merely shrugged, probably ruining the dozen photos snapped of her and her stupid robot that second.

To me, the use of such women to run a stand smacks of desperation. If I walk up to a booth manned by models, I know I won’t be able to find out anything worthwhile about the product. I’ll have to dodge the bikini-clad, stomach-baring ladies, push past their ardent admirers, and then attempt to have an actual conversation with whoever is actually in charge of the stand, which is inevitably marketing a product so bad that it needs cleavage and naked legs to gain attention.  This is a massive waste of my time.

Do I also find it uncomfortable? Of course. To me, it’s gross and it’s insulting. The constant reminder of the objectification of women isn’t ideal when I’m already hideously grumpy from trekking through the crowded, massive halls at the Las Vegas Convention Center, either. It’s also rather confusing: why would anyone choose to do this as work? Do men not find this insulting to their intelligence? And how the heck does she stand in those shoes all day?

I’m no prude (ask my co-workers if you don’t believe me) and at a certain level, booth babes are inevitable: some stands require a few pairs of hired hands to help show off kit.

If you insist they dress in bikinis, low-cut shirts, or short skirts, you will certainly get more eyeballs on your stand — but such punters aren’t looking at your laptop, gadget or headphones. And if that’s the only way you can sell your device, it sure as heck doesn’t entice this journalist into taking a second look at the products you have on display — the tech, I mean, not the women.

My late uncle and I were very different people. Despite being the two ‘fixers’ in the family, the ones who got the busted kettles and the snapped gear cables from the rest of the clan, we were poles apart in one area: our approach to warranties. Even though he would keep his cars going for 20 years, he had a very sharp understanding of what should be his responsibility, and what was down to the vendor.

Actually, that’s an understatement. Woe betide the firm whose slipshod customer handling captured his attention. Once the horn-rimmed specs and the Brylcreemed bonce were aimed in their direction, he would pursue them relentlessly, his measured drawl torturing their receptionists until they actually did put him through to the MD or the Company Secretary (which incidentally is still quite a good one to try, since chancers seldom know enough about company law and structure to try that route).

I am the opposite. I fix (where I can), and like him I take great pleasure in diagnosis. However, I have a low opinion and equally low expectations of what happens when one tries to make a warranty’s promises stick. This is largely because my career in computing has spanned the period during which price of equipment has fallen so spectacularly as to leave me groping for metaphors.

I have a low opinion and equally low expectations of what happens when one tries to make a warranty’s promises stick

I can remember a DEC engineer turning up to put a memory upgrade in our VAX. He marched through the door and waved a plastic briefcase. “I’ve got a Testarossa in here!” he declared – meaning that the contents were worth the £60,000 of a then-hot Ferrari. This last month I’ve received 32 times that much RAM, shipped (and dropped) by the US Postal Service, for £250.

It’s difficult to run a perfect warranty upkeep process when prices are low and margins are tight. Unlike my Uncle, I have a “time is money” attitude (if he was the Obi-Wan Kenobi of our family then I’m more like Iggy Pop). When I start to see signs of undermanning or deliberate sandbagging during a server warranty claim and engineering visit, I will occasionally take the view that throwing money at the problem is worth it to keep the project on track or the service level up to scratch. Those who always take the opposite view are surprised when I sympathise, out of character, because I remember my Uncle and his completely different way of doing things.

However, I don’t think either of us would get very far pursuing warranty or fitness-for-purpose claims in the smartphone and app store business. App stores are supposed to be great, easy gateways for developers to reach new markets, and for users to benefit from an intermediary’s validation and quality control processes. However, there are plenty of opportunities for gaps between the promise and the reality.

One early example from last summer was a first generation Windows Mobile 7 phone. These could lock themselves completely as part of the ActiveSync system update, with a message of “take me to your dealer” for a complete factory reset and retry. I had one on test that duly bricked itself; it had a Vodafone PAYG SIM in it so I went to a Vodafone shop to get it sent away and reset. “Sorry,” they said, “not sold through us. Not our problem”. Despite asking around, I couldn’t find anyone who would actually do the necessary reset.

That was irritating, but not as irritating as Navigon’s Android satnav app. It costs a relatively whopping £60, and with Europe-wide maps it also demands at least an 8GB data card. Nevertheless, it seemed like an excellent deal for me, since I could sell my single-purpose satnav unit (also from Navigon) and come out of the overall deal about £20 in profit.

And a good deal it proved to be for the rest of the year, but then I didn’t travel for a bit so the Android phone got a rest. Next time I got it out, several apps (including Wyse’s excellent Pocket Cloud RDP client) had pending updates. Leaving it on charge and updating, I went to pack, and threw the travel kit in a lightweight laptop bag (pre-checked to remove sharp implements, tools and network cable testers – airport security people simply interpret them as Semtex, so far as I can tell).

So when I sat down in the hire car at Zurich airport, I got a nasty shock: “Activation failure,” said Navigon for Android. “There has been a connectivity failure.” While waiting in the queue to change to a more expensive car with included “Navi”, I proved there jolly well wasn’t a connectivity failure, by surfing the net and looking up the address to fire off a complaint, via the Android Market, to Navigon. I might as well have tucked my complaint in the Schnapps barrel of a passing St Bernard – it vanished.

I could go back to the credit card company and invoke the Sale of Goods Act – except it was an update, several months after the purchase, which interfered with the functionality of my property. I can’t even find a rollback button, which is the kind of thing one might expect after we’ve been through 40 years user interfaces and software delivery.

A truly international marketplace also means there’s little likelihood of a consistent approach to regulation. My Motorola DEFY picks up the central Android Market and the transaction is in sterling, so the actual relevant legal domicile for calling these people to account could be California (for Google), or the UK, or Germany (for Navigon) – except that the app store makes no provision for escalating this kind of failure.

So while app stores show every sign of being the way forward, my experience shows that the current invocations leave much to be desired when it comes to the traditional balance between the rights of the vendor and the rights of the customer. In fact, I’m thinking of proposing a new PC Pro award. I’ll call it the Customer Responsiveness APP Award – or CRAPPA for short.

On to the not-so-positives. The tweet box now pops up and steals the focus until you close it. A small change, you might think, but I regularly half-write tweets while I keep reading those of others, then react as I go. Sometimes I leave a tweet for ten minutes to decide whether it should really be sent (it usually shouldn’t). This prevents that, and it’s totally unnecessary. You also can’t send a tweet using Enter, and if you think you can go to Settings and change that, you can’t – it’s been pared back to the idiot-proof basics.

Tweets are now labelled with the number of days ago they were sent, rather than the actual time. That might not sound much, but I can think of many occasions when seeing a tweet was sent at 12pm or 12am made a big difference to the way I interpreted it. Every tweet now gives pride of place to the username of the sender, rather than the tweet itself. And unsurprisingly, the range of URL shorteners and photo services is cut right down, with Twitter’s own now the default.

It’s that oversimplification that constantly jars. When I first installed it and synced it up with my TweetDeck account, I was presented with a Home column of tweets, a Me column of mentions, and a Messages column for those all-important DMs.

But something wasn’t right. There were DMs I hadn’t sent or received. There were people in my Home feed I didn’t follow.

Now, I don’t just tweet from one account; I have three. I’m sure many people do the same, be it personal and work accounts, websites they run, or just a desire for different accounts for different needs.

New TweetDeck had taken it upon itself to make assumptions about my three accounts. The Home feed was taken solely from the team’s @pcpro account, which it had randomly assigned as my default despite there being seemingly no option to set an account as default. I’ve tried deleting all three accounts and adding them in a different order, but it always becomes the default. This also means every time I type a tweet, it assumes I’m sending it from that account, which I rarely do; if you see @pcpro tweet about its hangover on Saturday morning, blame TweetDeck, not me.

The Me feed and Messages column, on the other hand, automatically roll all three accounts into one, with no proper indication of which tweet came from which account. I don’t want to read my editor’s correspondence with our lovely readers mixed in with my own private messages; it’s confusing, a little bit scary and raises the potential for embarrassing blunders. I have three separate accounts for a reason; the decision to bundle them together should be mine, not TweetDeck’s.

Most of this can be fixed by simply deleting all of the default columns and creating new Timelines and Messages columns for each individual account, but to a long-term user like me it seems a perverse way of doing things. Don’t get me started on the way every link and photo now sends you to the browser, or clicking a tweet opens it over that column in the style of the Twitter web interface.

It’s not terrible, and I’m sure I’ll get used to some of its quirks. But for me the new client takes away much of what made TweetDeck so useful – namely the flexibility and control – and replaces it with much of what makes the Twitter web client so annoying. I don’t like the Twitter web interface, that’s why I use TweetDeck. Or at least it was until now. The former buying the latter means that distinction is only going to get narrower from here on in.

While the text is basic, it’s accurate enough for beginners. Instead, it’s the image that contains a dangerous chunk of misinformation.

The monitor on the left, labelled as a PC that uses a “standard graphics card”, is displaying a Windows desktop that’s washed out and blurry. The seemingly identical Dell TFT on the right, powered by a “high-end graphics card”, is showing the same desktop – but this time it’s much sharper and more vivid. They’re both outputting at the same resolution.

It’s true that using different screens can alter how a desktop looks, but that’s not the case here: Dell’s page uses two identical monitors that display two identical desktops, with the dramatic change in its appearance apparently caused by the different classes of discrete graphics card being used.

It is, quite simply, rubbish. Any modern discrete graphics card, whether a mid-range model or a more powerful part, is more than capable of displaying a Windows desktop. There’s no chance that by choosing two of the different graphics options available with the Optiplex 790 – let’s say the £86 inc VAT AMD Radeon HD 6350 and the £256 inc VAT dual Radeon HD 6450 option – a desktop will look any different on the cheaper card.

Dell’s page says that its picture is for “demonstrative purposes only”, but it’s not demonstrating anything that’s remotely accurate. Instead, this misleading page appears to suggest that a more expensive graphics card will mean even the Windows desktop will be made brighter and sharper.

That’s especially unfair on a page that’s clearly aimed at novice users – the exact people who will trust this information from a well-known brand, and who’ll fork out extra cash for a graphics card that’s simply unnecessary.

Dell has issued a statement regarding this issue, which we’ve posted in full below. The full story can be read here.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Dell endeavours to help customers to make the best decisions regarding their purchases. It was never our intention to mislead customers, and we apologise for any confusion caused. We have now removed the image from our Global sites. Dell remains committed to delivering the best possible experience to all our customers.”

Apple’s already tried, and failed, to have the Galaxy Tab 10.1 banned, and new documents reveal that Apple’s now gone through the Dutch courts to get the rest of Samsung’s Galaxy family pulled from the shelves.

The problem? Patents. Apple already has one that seemingly prohibits competitors from producing rectangular computers, and its latest IP claim is just as vague, concerning the mere act of scrolling through pictures on touchscreens. It’s so vague, in fact, that Apple has been accused of manipulating images to make Samsung’s devices appear more like Cupertino’s kit than they really are.

It’s telling that Apple isn’t going after other Android-toting manufacturers with the same vigour; HTC and the rest appear to have been left comparatively untouched by Apple’s lawyers. Instead, it’s trying to take down Samsung – arguably its biggest potential competitor across the smartphone and tablet space, and certainly the one that poses the biggest threat in terms of quality and sales figures, thanks to products such as the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 10.1.

It’s a clear statement of intent from a company that’s obviously worried about the competition. It’s also, potentially, a sign that Apple thinks this is the most effective way to compete: dragging Samsung through the courts rather than duking it out in a market where it’s still the clear leader.

On the other hand, you could argue Apple has done nothing wrong. Arguably, the problem isn’t with Apple’s cynical and paranoid actions – it’s with granted patents that look more like satire than genuine legal documents.

The patents issue is complex. Some companies own thousands – Google’s new toy Motorola, for instance – and most big tech companies routinely infringe each other’s IP . In some cases, one company will pay a fee to licence the technology of a patent holder, with HTC confirming that it pays Microsoft $5 for every phone it produces. It’s thought this situation will only get worse, too, as companies seek to gain advantages in an increasingly competitive area. Even so Apple’s approach is, to put it mildly, unusual.

It also seems anti-competitive if Apple’s actions result in a monopolistic market that harms customers and rival companies. It’s one thing to push for this sort of legislation in the smartphone market, which is divided up between iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry OS. It’s quite another to try and force rivals out of the tablet market, where the iPad is much more dominant.

Apple’s justification is flimsy, and it’s not as if it’s the first time Apple has let its guard slip with regards to Android. Who remembers Steve Jobs’ attack on Android during an Apple investor call, or his alleged rebuttals over email during the location tracking scandal earlier this year?

It’s a shame. Apple used to be famed for the quality of its products, its innovation and its liberal approach – now, it seems, only the high standard of its various computers and iDevices remains.

Steve Jobs has — as you’ve heard, no doubt — stepped down as CEO of Apple. He hasn’t retired; he’s now chairman of the board. And, despite many publications clearly running their pre-prepared obituaries as “profiles”, he hasn’t died.

His departure as CEO is clearly big news, the end of an era, and, given that it’s inevitably down to his poor health, quite sad. No matter what you think of Apple, its products and how it operates, Jobs at the head of that company was a powerful combination.

What’s… shall we say, intriguing, is the responses some people have had to the news. Newswire service Reuters has rounded up a few comments, and the unintentional comedy is incredible (there are also some funny-in-a-good-way stories emerging; check out this one from Google’s Vic Gundtora about Jobs’ attention to detail – and colours – here).

Here are the best/worst ones – keep in mind these are from this morning alone; we can only assume people were still in shock. If you see any other howlers, share them in the comments below.

“Steve Jobs is my hero, a legend in global industry and a true Willy Wonka-esque deliverer of joy and happiness through product and experiences,” Jason Hirschhorn, co-president of MySpace. Do you think Jobs has an iPhone fountain running through his mansion? If we find a golden iPad, do we get an invite to his house? That would be cool.

“It’s really sad,” said an anonymous Silicon Valley CEO. “No one is looking at this as a business thing, but as a human thing. No one thinks that Steve is just stepping aside because he just doesn’t want to be CEO of Apple anymore.” That’s all very true. However, this anonymous person decided to keep speaking: “It feels like another shoe is going to drop.” Which is a horrible, unthinking euphemism for: oh my God, he’s going to die soon, very soon.

“Frankly it removes an overhang,” said portfolio manager Michael Walker, being rather frank indeed. He also said: “I don’t know if anyone knows how his health is.” Jobs is a smart man, we’re pretty sure he knows how is health is, actually. If you don’t know about his health, stop talking about it.

“The battle is moving to the cloud and connective services,” said analyst Scott Sutherland. “It’s a chance to hire some people with those capabilities.” Yes, because Apple has a salary cap; it’s one in, one out at Cupertino.

“The timing is quite strategic, considering Apple is expected to announce the new iPhone soon,” said analyst Hendi Susanto, clearly aware of a new breed of strategic cancer. Jobs is a superb CEO, but no-one can manipulate diseases to correspond with product launches.

“The foregone conclusion was that we wouldn’t have Steve as CEO forever,” noted analyst Daniel Ernst, who perhaps needs to look up “immortal” in a medical dictionary.