So I get a call late last night. It’s automated, from my bank, and from an 0845 number I’ve never heard of. It’s about possible fraud and I’m a little suspicious.

I go online to check the number. All I find are blazing arguments in threads stating that either this number is my bank’s genuine fraud department, or it’s a massive scam. People claim they’ve called the bank and been treated well; others argue that these people answering are scammers themselves. The end result is a thread where it appears that the number is a fake.

Despite being sceptical, I’m not stupid, and so I phoned my bank this morning (via its standard call centre number), only to discover from their automated read-out of my statement that a British web hosting company that I’ve never dealt with (www.webfusion.co.uk) tried to take a payment for over £2500 yesterday. Clearly, my card is compromised, and although I do often shop online, I’m absurdly careful about doing so. (In fact, of those people I know who’ve ended up in similar situations, almost all of them have been victims of card cloning, not online fraud.)

This all just goes to show that although the internet is great for many things, it’s not particularly wonderful when it comes to accuracy—nor people actually being helpful when it comes to important things like bank fraud, instead choosing to mislead through ignorance or wilful malice.

While watching the latest Chuck last night (‘Chuck Versus Tom Sawyer’, which, knowing UK TV, aired sometime last year in the USA), Missile Command became a major plot point. Chuck (the show) is harmless fun, but it did highlight a problem in taking history and messing with the truth with merry abandon.

The episode was mostly quite well-written and the revisions not nearly as irksome as, say, Titanic taking First Officer William Murdoch and turning a guy who saved lives into a murderer, but I was nonetheless decidedly uncomfortable at times. The reason? Missile Command is essentially a pacifist game. As ex-Atari guy Greg Rivera mentioned to me in a recent interview: “One of the goals [of the Missile Command team] was to teach the futility of war. No-one ever won Missile Command,” adding that there’s no ‘game over’ in the production, just an ominous ‘THE END’ when all your cities are destroyed. In Chuck, however, Dave Theurer is turned into Atari’s Japanese chief engineer, with terrorist ties.

All shows take liberties with history, and I’m sure no malice was intended by the scriptwriters. But in an increasingly hostile age, it’s a shame to see a fantastic satirical, pacifist statement by a true giant of classic videogames misrepresented in such major fashion. Then again, the concept of a living, breathing, vibrant and bustling Atari HQ in the USA almost makes up for it.

OK, geek alert (and for the return of this blog—for shame!), but I just saw Transformers 2 and an odd thought struck me*: it has an evil Volkswagen. And this made me think: what a difference a huge pile of cash makes to a company’s morals.

If you’re thinking “er, what?”, Volkswagen somewhat recently nixed a major redesign of the Transformer Bumblebee, who was due to join an absurdly detailed toy line (the decidedly ‘not for kids’ Alternators) as a new Volkswagen Beetle. Volkswagen said no, reasoning that the company didn’t want to associate its vehicles with war-themed media. Fair enough—after all, a quick peek into VW’s history shows a somewhat… murky past.

Fast-forward four short years and evil Decepticon Sideways is on Earth in Transformers 2, presumably having fun killing various things. He changes into a silver Audi R8. Audi, of course, is owned by Volkswagen.

Like I said, what a difference a huge pile of cash makes to a company’s morals. Sadly, this isn’t in the slightest a shock.

* And, no, not “why on Earth did I go and see this?”—it’s actually quite fun, if not as fun nor nearly as coherent as the first film. And Bay and co. should really cut down on the racist Autobots, which even give Jar Jar Binks a run for his money.

Marvellous. Finally, the EU has had the bottle to give Microsoft a slap, and reports now state Windows 7 will ship without Internet Explorer 8. Good news, everyone!

Expect that it isn’t. Now the internet is practically ubiquitous and so important in many people’s lives, the prospect of an operating system lacking a browser in the default install is an appalling notion that will only cause a world of pain. What’s worse is that we now appear to be in an age where a weakening Microsoft is being beaten by all and sundry, several years after such actions might have actually had some benefit.

To clarify, I’m no Internet Explorer fan, nor a particularly huge Microsoft fan. The company as a whole has engaged in truly shocking business practices over the years (the nadir perhaps being the ‘knife the baby‘ incident with Apple’s QuickTime), and the company’s browser is a joke. Eight versions in and it’s still stuffed full of bugs, and it now has a confusing and misleadingly named ‘compatibility mode’ welded on. Since I spend about half my working life designing websites, I’d like nothing better in the browser space than for Trident—the engine powering Internet Explorer—to be taken round the back of the shed and shot, and for IE9 to be driven by WebKit. (Alternatively, IE9 could be WebKit and the ‘compatibility mode’ could switch the IE engine to Trident for a couple of versions.)

But—and this is a big ‘but’—the EU’s decision, if it comes to pass, will ultimately hurt users and benefit no-one. At best, a user with a new PC will have to install a browser from a standalone disc, or they’ll have to launch a utility to download and install a browser. This shouldn’t be necessary.

Arguments rage that this might at least offer users a choice—a multi-browser installer of some sort. Thing is, most people stick with what they know, and the typical home user will only have heard of IE. Corporates will also stick with Microsoft. IE’s market-share won’t significantly change due to the EU, but PC users in the area will have to do a little more work to get a system with a piece of software that almost everyone needs in the modern age.

This decision (assuming it’s more than a rumour) could have been an effective means of giving Microsoft the slap it needed years ago. But the browser wars are over and they have been for a long time. IE’s hold is slipping, slowly but surely, like the browser equivalent of the British Empire after the war. With savvy users, Firefox is gaining ground, as are Safari and Opera, and it’s only a matter of time before Chrome claims a large chunk of the market, driven by Google’s massive marketing clout. So quite what benefit the EU thinks depriving new PC users of a default browser is, especially now that Microsoft’s largely knocked on the head trying to warp web standards to its own ends, I really don’t know.

TechRadar just put an opinion piece online sure to grate with the Apple faithful. Rob Mead asserts that Snow Leopard is “little more than a service pack” and that “Windows 7 has raised the bar—and OS X 10.6 can’t reach it”.

The article goes on to lambaste Apple for having the audacity to release a system upgrade that doesn’t have any huge new features, and suggests that because of this it will “inevitably be crushed under the wheels of the mighty Windows 7 juggernaut”. I find that viewpoint perverse in the extreme.

First and foremost, criticising Apple for Snow Leopard being all about architecture rather than new features is rather like having a go at the driver in front of you for turning left after they’ve had their left-hand indicator flashing for the last quarter mile. Apple has been upfront about Snow Leopard from the start, saying that it’s about next-generation technologies and not new features.

Mead claims that this will make it a tough sale, and there at least I agree. But the fact that Snow Leopard looks much the same as Leopard isn’t something we should complain about. While I’d love to see a unified UI, I’m glad Apple—with the exception of QuickTime X—has avoided yet more pointless ‘make it look different in screen grabs to make people think it’s new’ gimmicky UI changes (see: the hideous Leopard ‘glass’ Dock and the semi-transparent menu bar, the latter of which subsequently caused much back-peddling).

Also, I’d sooner see Apple plugging the gaps for once, rather than losing focus by concentrating on the next big thing. It’s done the same with OS X iPhone 3.0, largely making important tweaks rather than wowing the audience. Likewise, Mac OS X 10.6 improves Stacks, Finder and Mail. AI for ‘intelligent’ PDF text selection in Preview might not be a show-stopping feature like Time Machine, but it’ll certainly provide the “real world benefits these changes will bring” that Mead thinks is missing from this release. The same is true for the 6GB you’ll claw back on your hard drive, the video-editing and sharing now built directly into QuickTime X, out-of-process Safari plug-ins, and the Exposé/Dock mash-up that obliterates one of the consumer-oriented Windows 7 features that had stolen the limelight—its revised taskbar.

Mead also complains about PowerPC support being ditched, and here I just say: tough. Technology moves on, and we’re three years past the Intel switch. It’s not like you have to bin a PPC Mac if the latest operating system won’t run on it (in fact, my sole PPC Mac quite happily waddles along on Tiger and is still regularly used), and to attack Apple by claiming people who splashed out on powerful Macs three or more years ago will lose out is risable.

Apple is a company that has always moved forward far more quickly than the likes of Microsoft, and it doesn’t look back. Apple shouldn’t compromise its important ‘overhaul’ upgrade, which sets the foundations for its future, just to cater for products that were end-of-lifed three years ago.