We're much more @ home with stupidity

For your information I'm writing this piece as I sit on Wandsworth Common. The very fact that you are reading it suggests that I not only managed to complete the column, but also got off with my notebook PC and most of my limbs still attached.

I take this as proof of a coming of age; a while ago the less law-abiding elements in the area would probably have taken a less enlightened view of a fat bloke tapping into a portable computer in the middle of the common.

Probably seeing it as a potential financial upswing, they were likely to have taken the view that relieving the said fat bloke of the burden of his PC would have made them rich.

They know better these days. And it isn't only criminals and notebooks that have grown up. The internet seems to have also moved into another, more grown up phase. Two stories have intrigued me: first was the recent Hotmail fiasco.

A bunch of hackers managed to break into Microsoft's Hotmail system and clobber the password system. Not a nice thing. Not something that one should cheer about, but hardly anything to get upset over. It was only Hotmail, a free email service that allows any Tom, Dick or Michael Mouse to get an account and spam the world.

While it's a bad thing that it was hacked, I was pleased to see the world taking it so seriously. It shows a willingness to take the internet and email seriously and not talk about pornography - that has to be a good start. Although it has to be said, the sooner we start laughing at the people who use Hotmail as their number one email account, the better.

The other story that caught my attention was Intel pushing its Web Outfitter Toolkit (the toolkit is a bunch of add-ons that soup up your PIII).

Nice idea ... except. Except for the enormous stupidity of the way the Outfitter Toolkit is handled. I tried loading it and it looked great, until it demanded I go onto the internet and register my name and my PIII unique identifier code.

I don't want to give them my code, thanks. I want to be able to use the extras on my PIII and not have my details on an Intel computer somewhere.

As I have a fast line in the office, I tried downloading them from the Intel site too, but it wouldn't let me because my office machine was a PII, not a PIII.

Nowhere was there a box to tick that said: "Download now so I can take it home later and load it onto my personal PC." (Anyone who has ever tried to grab Windows 98 upgrades on a Windows 95 machine will know about that as well).

This shows that the internet is being used for very, very poor marketing ideas by people you thought would know better - just like the real world. And both these stories suggest the internet is now being seen as something more than a free collection of illegal photographs, and both are stupid.

This is more like the world we know and trust, less of the misinformation and lies, more stupidity. We know where we are with stupidity.