BACKBYTES

Europe may have been slow off the mark in terms of take-up of Internet commerce, but someone's making up for lost time.
Last month, a 15-year-old Irish boy was surfing the Net when he discovered a site selling chocolate.
Having ordered $2,000-worth of Toffee Crisp, Dairy Milk and Mars Bars, he typed in a credit card number at random - and succeeded in charging the bill to a credit card user in Argentina.
Police tracked him down as he was attempting to consume the evidence.
He is 'remorseful and sick of the sight of chocolate', they say. Not surprising: by our calculations, he'd have had to consume about a cubic metre of the stuff?

Hitting the HiNote
'You can bake them, freeze them, drop them and spill coffee over them,' says Digital's publicity after its HiNote notebooks won PC Computing's 'Torture Test'.
The press release doesn't reveal why you would want to do these things to its computers.

Fantasy island
Three hundred Andersen Consulting partners were helicoptered in some style to Silverstone last week to watch the British Grand Prix as part of a corporate hospitality package.
Once there, they dined next to the Williams tent in the Paddock Club.
It's part of a sponsorship deal whereby Andersen gets its name on a helmet, and Williams gets free consultancy in return.
By the look of the goody bags Williams was dishing out though, some of the partners are in need of a refresher course - they included copies of the Microprose computer game 'Fantasy F1 Manager'.

Data dingbats
Data protection registrar Elizabeth France revealed last week that she was living with three of her neighbour's children until 1996.
Actually, she wasn't, but France had taken the opportunity to check the data held on her by a credit-rating company, and found the mistake.
Really, it's one record that you think they might have taken special care to get right.

Saving disgrace
More on the Office Backwards Save Icon scandal.
Several of you have written in to say that not only is Microsoft's Save disk icon backwards, but it's also write-protected, making a successful save doubly unlikely.

Jackson Pollock's
Who says that German bores SAP have no imagination? Not Backbytes, after seeing their choice of modern art for their office walls.
'The works of artists? transcend the company itself,' SAP says. 'A conscious and direct way of dealing with the arts can be regarded as indicative.
'In SAP offices, artists have experienced presenting their work to a new public, viewed as a contribution to the art community, employees, partners and visitors with the belief that SAP is an integral part of the whole.'
What?

Net kidology
If you're planning an IT strategy at the moment, we commend www.techweb.com's horoscope page.
'Remember, the keyboard is mightier than the sword,' Netstrologer Kelli Web counsels Cancer.
'Call technical support?it won't be as tedious as you thought,' she tells Scorpio.
Warning: we tried both. Neither was true.

Only in America
The International Herald Tribune reports that a man from Washington State was coaxed out of his home last week after he brandished a gun and shot his PC. Apparently he was frustrated.
With Microsoft in nearby Seattle, we wonder why he didn't just call them for help. Or maybe we don't.