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Byte-sized news and gossip

Oh those wacky Microsoft developers. At the opening keynote of the company's Tech-Ed conference in Amsterdam yesterday, the 5,000 attendees were each handed a bongo, as part of a cunning plan not only to dominate the world of software but also to break the world record for a "drum circle". We're glad we weren't there to hear it. The effort was in vain anyway: despite having organised this event ages ago, Microsoft had nobody there from the book of
Guinness World Records to verify the claim. So the official record still stands at 2,208 people, set in 2002 in Turkey.

Oh those wacky Microsoft developers. At the opening keynote of the company's Tech-Ed conference in Amsterdam yesterday, the 5,000 attendees were each handed a bongo, as part of a cunning plan not only to dominate the world of software but also to break the world record for a "drum circle". We're glad we weren't there to hear it. The effort was in vain anyway: despite having organised this event ages ago, Microsoft had nobody there from the book of Guinness World Records to verify the claim. So the official record still stands at 2,208 people, set in 2002 in Turkey.

Still, it does give us the chance to retell one of our favourite music jokes. Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians? A: A drummer.

¿ For those of you inexplicably using Internet Explorer on Windows (which according to Google is a mere 90+ per cent), we'll pass on the advice of an authority better informed than even we are: the Computer Emergency Response Team, or Cert. Its latest suggestion: stop using IE. Its site says (at www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/713878): "There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX." Translation: pretty much everything in IE is pear-shaped apart from the edges of the windows, and even those are a bit dodgy.

"It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites." And if you don't want to be sensible, then Cert recommends that you "set security settings to high and disable JavaScript".

Alternatively, you could turn the computer off altogether...

¿ OK! Enough whingeing about the price of online music! We'd like to suggest our own competition: best-value song online. Wippit is proud of its 29p downloads, but we may have found a better one. On the iTunes Music Store, Talking Heads' Popular Favourites costs £9.48 for a 33-track double album - a grand total of 28.72p each. Can anyone beat that?

¿ We'll also take nominations for iTunes' "most expensive track" - presently Yes's "Gates of Delirium", track one of the three-track Relayer album (prog rock ahoy). You can buy track one only as part of the whole album; but the other two tracks are available individually at 79p each. The whole album is £8.99, which makes that lone track a bumper £7.41 by our calculations.

network@independent.co.uk