A very senior executive at Australia’s leading telecommunication carrier, Telstra, has slammed the iPhone, telling Apple that it should “stick to its knitting”.

It’s like a scene from a Hollywood thriller. You receive an email from a hitman who says he’s been paid $50,000 to kill you. It’s your lucky day, however, because after following you for a week the hitman is convinced that you’re actually a nice guy, and so he’s willing to make you this offer: if you pay him $80,000, he won’t kill you. Would you treat the email seriously?

Until a few weeks back if you typed “miserable failure” into Google, the first result that appeared was George Bush’s biography at whitehouse.gov.

Google moves to limit Google bombs

Nintendo once ruled the console world. Its Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems (SNES) helped revitalize the games industry after the big console crash of 1983. But for the past few years Nintendo has been in the games console wilderness.  

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates is infuriated by Apple’s recent anti-Vista video, which claims that upgrading your PC to Vista is so difficult, that you’re better off buying a Mac. 

Gates: Jobs didn’t invent the world

At a family gathering recently my uncle pulled me aside and asked “Should I upgrade to Visa?”. He’d heard all the media hype about Vista, and while he was not even sure what Vista was about, he had idea that upgrading to Vista would be a good thing. My advice to him was a resounding no, which would also be my answer to many other non-technical users. Here’s why.

If you’re a PC user running iTunes software, Apple’s advice is to avoid upgrading to Vista for time being.

Apple: stay away from Vista

You’re walking down a busy street and you come across a group of people huddled around a shop window. If you’re like most people, you’d want to find out what’s going on. A new web site, Me.dium.com, is trying to bring the same concept to the Internet.

Microsoft is advising Excel users to “exercise extreme caution” when opening unsolicited attachments from known and unknown users.

More security problems for Excel users

A new search engine technology is being demonstrated at music social networking site midomi.com that allows you to identify a track by singing, whistling or humming a few bars of a song to the search engine.

Vista is disrupting game play for up to 70 million online gamers at sites like RealArcade, Yahoo Games and AOL Games, as well as at Microsoft’s own MSN gaming portal, according to WildTangent, an online gaming network.

Hoaxes and practical jokes are nothing new to YouTube. But the latest hoax, a video that purportedly shows you how to obtain an invitation to join Google TV (a non-existent service, by the way), is so well done, that it’s worth a look - especially if you know that some people have actually been taken in by it (videos are at the bottom of this report).