Apple sold a million iPhone 3GS units in the first three days worldwide, and now it would have appear to have run out of them altogether in the UK. According to the stock update checker at the exclusive provider of the iPhone in the UK, O2, the iPhone 3GS is currently out of stock.

O2 says “Due to the phenomenal demand for the new iPhone 3GS, we’ve temporarily run out of stock online, over the phone and in our retail stores. We expect additional stock of the new iPhone 3GS to be available online, over the phone and in our retail stores at the end of this week.”

This despite a huge hoo-hah over the cost of the new iPhone, and in particular the spectacular double-barrel rip off that is the high price of tethering and the high price of data transfer outside of the UK. It also seems to suggest that the general public are either unaware, or simply do not believe, the ongoing reports of overheating problems facing the 3GS which have left some white units discoloured and some users complaining of the iPhone being too hot to hold when using GPS applications.

Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO who is now back at work following his liver transplant, says “Customers are voting and the iPhone is winning… iPhone momentum is stronger than ever.” Which is fine, but that momentum hits something of a brick wall when stocks run out while demand is still so high. Perhaps your first job back at your desk, or from bed if you are working at home today, should be getting those distribution lines sorted. Your second job might be investigating the overheating claims and giving us some kind of official comment. Just a thought.

Whatever your opinion of the man and his music, there can be little doubting the impact that the death of Michael Jackson has had on the Internet. I was working late when I spotted the first message floating past on Twitter which said that Jackson had suffered a fatal heart attack. Of course, Twitter is not immune to the usual run of hoaxes and fakes, so I did not take much notice. At least not until the next message popped up on-screen within a few minutes, and pretty soon the unconfirmed news of the death of the King of Pop was pretty much dominating my Tweet stream. So it was I Googled ‘Michael Jackson’ only to warned that my query “looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application.”

It would appear that Google mistakenly thought it was under attack, when in fact all that was happening was a huge spike in the need for information from millions of people around the world at the same time. You know, the kind of thing that Google was pretty much invented for, that the Internet is meant to do so well. Google called it a “meteoric rise in related searches” and “one of the largest mobile search spikes we’ve ever seen.” In fact it admits that the Michael Jackson search spike was “so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack” and took those malware warning precautions.

Twitter wasn’t faring much better, with more than 60,000 Michael Jackson tweets posted in 60 minutes and causing a slowdown in service accessibility. I’ve heard tales of protestors in Iran being unable to get their Twitter updates which have served them so well, for example. Indeed, I have posed the question before that celebrities could be killing Twitter and on this occasion a celebrity managed to crash the site for a while.

I would have hoped, given just how important the Internet has become around the world, that such a news spike would be absorbed much better than this. If Google, Twitter and others struggled to stay working properly because of this, just what would happen if World War Three was declared? The kind of event for which we would, as a nation, as a planet, turn to the Internet for information and advice. So much for the network that could survive a nuclear attack, it couldn’t even cope with the death of a controversial pop star.

Last week I was getting into trouble for suggesting that 88 percent of web users are morons, now I suspect I am tempting fate once more by stating that an even bigger percentage of IT Admins are idiots.

If the first rule of IT Security Club is trust nobody, then the second should be the same again with knobs on for ex-employees. So why am I not surprised to discover that, according to a new survey from governance and compliance specialists Courion Corporation, some 93 percent of the IT Admins from large enterprises insisted when questioned that there is no risk at all from former employees?

The results of the survey which was conducted throughout May this year, shows that the vast majority of those people who really should know better in large enterprises are actually seriously underestimating the security threat that ex-employees pose. Such unwarranted confidence, or arrogance if you prefer, is surely leaving systems and companies potentially vulnerable to attack? Especially when you consider that 53 percent of those questioned also admitted that they are “largely unaware” of employee access rights to their systems so causing a proliferation of what you might call zombie accounts.

Zombie account are those that remain active after employees have left the company. Quite how the administrators taking part on the survey, from enterprises with at least 10,000 employees, can be quite so adamant that such zombie accounts cannot trigger malicious attacks or cause data leaks is beyond me, especially when you take into account all the pretty high-profile evidence out there to the contrary.

Let’s look at some of the other figures to emerge from this study:

Nearly one in three companies still manually provision user accounts, increasing the likelihood of human error or delays when de-provisioning departing employees – and ultimately the risk of data theft via zombie accounts.

Almost half of organisations currently take more than one business day to alert IT departments of employee terminations.

Close to one quarter of companies surveyed also take another day or more to switch off employee access to their systems, creating a substantial window of opportunity for malicious former employees.

More than one third of business managers reported that it can take up to a week or longer to be completely certain that terminated employees do not have access to systems.

“The fact that 53 percent of IT managers are largely unaware of employee access rights to systems is of great concern and is a problem that has been exacerbated by the high frequency of mergers and acquisitions in the current climate” warns Courion’s General Manager, Stuart Hodkinson. “The time for over confidence has passed. It is important for IT Managers to close these exploitable holes by undertaking regular audits of their systems, ensuring that employees have access to only the information they need to do their jobs.””

New research suggests that only 12 percent of web users are able to tell a phishing scam website from a genuine one. And that can only mean one thing, that 88 percent of web using folk are morons. Let’s put it this way, the last time I got an email from the soon to be ex-President of a small African state offering me 50 million quid if I could help transfer his ill gotten gains out of the country well, guess what, I smelt a rat and declined the very generous offer. I would not send Jack Straw 3000 quid because he lost his wallet. Similarly, I do not tend to respond to emails that inform me my online banking security has been changed and I need to update my details by clicking on the helpful link. More often than not because I don’t have an account with the bank concerned, but even if I did then the spelling mistakes, the fact that the email was sent from a Hotmail or Yahoo.com address and the numerous spelling mistakes would probably put me off.

Yet a YouGov survey commissioned by VeriSign reckons that a full 88 percent of UK web users simply cannot identify the different forms of phishing currently happening online. Worryingly the average Brit is worth around £10,000 online. These are, I suspect, the same folk who invest in pyramid schemes, think that they WILL win the lottery and believe MPs do the job out of a real calling to serve their country rather than an easy way to screw the public purse of as many pounds as possible.

The research asked each respondent to identify which of two web sites, presented side by side, was a fraudulent phishing site. Only 12 percent spotted the obvious spelling mistakes of the fake site. Other findings showed that a woman over 55 living in Northern Ireland is most likely to fall for a phishing scam. You can see how you would have got on here.

VeriSign, naturally enough, are using the results to push the idea of Extended Validation which triggers the web browser address bar to turn green and show genuine sites at a glance. “With nine out of ten people in the UK vulnerable to phishing scams, a method for easily identifying a genuine site from a phishing site is a must for all businesses online” said Tim Callan, vice president of product marketing at VeriSign, “for additional clarity, the name of the organization listed in the certificate as well as the certificate’s security vendor is also displayed” he added.

Great, the EU has just handed the London School of Economics a 2.5 million Euros grant to research, wait for it, the safety issues experienced by children and their parents on the Internet. Oh Jesus H Christ on a bloody moped, in the middle of a recession when most of us are struggling to find cash for the essentials in life (such as foreign holidays, new cars and designer clothing) the EU throws millions in the direction of a question to which everyone already knows the answer.

It is, so the press release informs me, “one of the largest grants ever won by the London School of Economics and Political Science” and has been awarded to Professor Sonia Livingstone who will “spend two years conducting original empirical research into online safety issues” as experienced by “thousands of children aged 9-16″ as well as their parents, in up to 25 EU countries. Professor Livingstone, a prof of social psychology in the LSE department of media and communications, says “At last, Europe’s children are to be asked directly what they see as the opportunities and risks of the internet” and adds “…to counter the media panics, this new project will examine the nature, extent and consequences of youthful experiences of online risk, as reported to the researchers by a thousand 9-16 year olds.”

Apparently, by this time next year there will be enough evidence collected to be able to present comparable findings for each country, and to pinpoint for which children in which countries the various kinds of online risk are greatest.

Here, let me save you a little time and a lot of our money by providing the answers right now.

The risks are: access to pornography, exposure to paedophiles, online bullying, revealing personal information and learning how to swear in multiple languages. Of these, the latter is probably the least dangerous although for 15 and 16 years olds access to porn is probably not going to be perceived as being too much of a danger either.

Look, I know this is a serious subject and, as a parent and grandparent myself I do care about the safety of children online. However, I also care about how public money is thrown around and where it lands. I find myself questioning if we really need yet another survey into this which will tell us what we already know: the Internet can be bad, m’kay.

If proof were needed, this is actually the second project to be undertaken by the ‘EU Kids Online’ network, the first of which evaluated the experiences of some children across 21 countries. The results will be published later this week, but I am told that key findings include, and I hope you are sitting down for this, that giving out personal information is the most common risky behaviour and meeting an online contact offline is less common but nonetheless the most dangerous risk. Well, duh.

Of course, the report will also make policy recommendations to governments within the EU such as regulatory frameworks, self-regulation and education. Double duh, with knobs on.

Who do I send my invoice to?

So mobile phone maker INQ has decided that Twitter is hot, and with Christmas coming up the ideal marriage would be the first mass-market phone that comes complete with an Internet-based Twitter client installed.

A Twitter Phone in fact.

Frank Meehan, INQ Chief Executive, told Reuters that it will “drive Twitter use on mobile.”

While I wish him luck in his endeavour, I have to say a couple of things do occur to me.

1. Twitter usage does not driving on mobile devices, it is already bombing along the motorway in excess of the speed limit. Just look at the number of mobile Twitter clients out there, and for that matter the number of us that Tweet while on the move. That is kind of the point, after all.

2. Ah yes, those mobile Twitter clients. The ones that are designed to be installed on your mobile phone. Pretty much any mobile phone that has access to the Internet and supports the installation of applications can already be used for posting Tweets.

Which leaves me wondering, WTF is a Twitter Phone then? The only answer I can come up with is a good marketing ploy which will no doubt make an ideal xmas present for chavs who do not know better. Throw in a few Twittering celebrity usernames in the contact book, maybe the odd psychic trial or two, and it will be a xmas best-seller.

Recession, what recession? That seems to be the message that Internet shoppers are giving loud and clear. Online spending is growing by £2.4 billion this year, with e-Retail spending set to hit £20.9 billion by the end of the year. That’s a growth rate of some 13.3 percent over the previous year.

A new report from Verdict Research admits that Internet sales are actually starting to slow and become more competitive as a market, online retail is still set to hit £31.2 billion by 2013 which would be a 10 percent slice of the total retail spend.

Verdict says that through 2009 the overall total retail growth will contract by 0.6 percent courtesy of consumer spending being ravaged by the recession. During the same period the online market will continue to expand, driven by a continued increase in Internet shoppers with a higher expenditure per head. This follows on from the trend of 2008 when there was a 1 percent increase in Internet users and an 18.1 percent increase in online shoppers, both spending an average of 5.8 percent more than in 2007.

It should be noted, however, that while online growth in 2008 represented a substantial out performance of wider retail it was not all good news historically speaking: this was the smallest rise in the channel’s sales since bursting of the dotcom bubble back in 2002. Verdict reckons the growth rates will continue to fall over five years as penetration of the population begins to level out.

“The key for individual retailers is to formulate two clear strategies, one for succeeding through the recession and one targeting growth beyond this, as the online channel begins to approach maturity,” says Malcolm Pinkerton, Senior Retail Analyst at Verdict Research and author of the report. “Those with less money to spend are turning to the internet to search out bargains on branded items like electricals,”says Pinkerton. “Additionally, the more affluent groups, who do still have money to spend, continue to appreciate the internet for its convenience, making the channel doubly resilient to the downturn.”

That said, there is some evidence that those with the least money are turning to cheap and chavvy high street alternatives such as Primark, Matalan, Poundland for their clothing and lower priced household items. “But overall this is being more than outweighed by increases in bargain hunters looking for larger, branded items and the loyalty of those most financially comfortable consumers who continue to value convenience over price” Pinkerton concludes.

So-called psychics often claim to have the power of remote viewing, that is the ability to identify a distant and undisclosed location using no more than their psychic ability. Richard Wiseman is “pretty skeptical” about such things, so has teamed up with the New Scientist magazine to conduct a hopefully not so little Twitter experiment.

Wiseman claims the American government has spent “millions of dollars examining remote viewing” so has come up with an experiment to see if it has been money well spent. Starting at 3pm GMT tomorrow, and then every day this week, Wiseman will travel to a different and undisclosed location which has been randomly selected.

“Once there, I will send a Tweet” Wiseman explains “asking everyone to Tweet about their thoughts concerning the nature of the location.” Thirty minutes after that, he will send another Tweet that links to a website with photographs of five locations to include the real one and four decoys. People can then vote as to which they think is the real target location.

“If the majority of people select the correct target then the trial will count as a hit, otherwise it will count as a miss” Wiseman concludes, adding “Three or more hits in four trials will be seen as supporting the existence of extrasensory perception.”

In order to participate simply follow RichardWiseman.