Good

Vendor sales guy is demonstrating an e-commerce tool for a roomful of decision-makers and IT who's sitting in. "The sales guy left his instant message client on but minimized," reports IT. "Once in a while, messages would pop up on the screen. As the fourth message popped up, our president asked the salesman, 'How much extra would it cost for us to have that green pop-up message thing?' To this day, he still doesn't understand why the audience of 12 people started cracking up."

Bad

IT guy sends an e-mail to the whole company. Subject: Phishing examples. "He described two classic examples of convincing phishing attacks," says admin who got the message. "He attached the two original e-mails, and also included the directive, 'Notice where the links take you.' Less than an hour later came the follow-up e-mail: 'DON'T CLICK THE LINKS.' I guess his original description of the evil e-mails was a little too subtle for some users."

Ugly

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have undermined the rights of Chinese to freedom of expression through their actions in China, Amnesty International said in a report.

The report is available online at: http://irrepressible.info/static/pdf/FOE-in-china-2006-lores.pdf. This is not the first time that Amnesty has criticized the business practices of these three companies. Yahoo has taken heat for handing over user information that helped Chinese authorities identify and jail dissidents, including Shi Tao, a journalist imprisoned in 2005 for 10 years. Microsoft and Google have also faced criticism from Amnesty and other human rights group. Microsoft shut down a blog on its MSN Spaces Web site following a request from the Chinese government and Google introduced a censored version of its search engine specifically designed for China. But Amnesty did applaud Google's admission that its actions in China were at odds with its stated corporate mantra of "don't be evil".