Sneak was recently invited to a party hosted by the lovely folks at Research in Motion (RIM) at which the musical songstress and all round good-egg Jessie J was set to perform.

Despite warnings from his mother that parties with alcohol can be dangerous places, Sneak donned his glad-rags and sprayed on some Brut and was already for his big, annual, night out, but was sadly stopped from going when the engine in his car was run down having left the lights on overnight.

However, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise (like a vicar in a tutu) when revellers turned violent, and one bottled another in the neck, leaving a pool of blood everywhere, a man in hospital and RIM left wondering why it can't stop generating negative publicity.

Obviously, it's not the firm's fault this incident occurred, but it seems symptomatic of its endless run of bad decisions, poor investments, confusing messages to the media and just plain bad luck that even a fun, social, event ends in yet another PR disaster.

Sneak is just glad he wasn't there to witness the event, and can't help by wonder if his mother wasn't right after all, the wide world is no place for him - back to the internet, it's much safer there.

News today that local authorities have managed to lose sensitive data on individuals over 1,000 times in the past three years is serious stuff, and underlines how much information we place in the hands of civil servants tasked with running the country.

The data, uncovered by privacy advocates Big Brother Watch, revealed that most of the incidents councils fessed up to involved the loss of devices such as laptops, mobile phones and USBs, which is not a huge surprise.

However, there were one or two bizarre incidents that caught Sneak's eye and show that for all the legislation and technical measures you can put in place to try and stop data going missing, you can't legislate for every eventuality.

These incidents include a staff member in Kent leaving a diary on top of his car before driving off, causing the diary to go missing, while the same error befell an employee in Gloucestershire who left conference case notes on the roof of his car.

An even better Gloucestershire incident, though, was the case of a van delivery door swinging open causing several bags of files to go missing, although all but one were recovered in the end. The council's action? "Van door fixed".

Sneak's favourite, however, was the report from an authority in Aberdeenshire that it lost sensitive data when a paper file was "blown away in the wind". This led to a verbal warning for the staff member involved and a "review of handling paper outside".

Basically, if it's windy, don't let go of paper, is the thing to remember. It certainly gives a new meaning to the term cloud computing anyway.

Steve Jobs (pictured left) and George Clooney (right).

Sneak's not known for his ability to rank the attractiveness of other males of the species but even he has to admit there's not much resemblance between oh-so-dreamy George Clooney and other man Steve Jobs.

Sure, Jobs was a great guy and Sneak loves using the iPad as a make-shift dinner tray when he can't be bothered to wash up his single, solitary plate, but let's not pretend he was as hot as one of the most attractive men on the planet.

But yes, according to movie gossip from Digital Spy, the former doctor from ER is in line to play Jobs in the forthcoming biopic that will be written by The Social Network scribbler Aaron Sorkin.

The report also suggests that someone named Noah Wyle (also from ER) could play Jobs, and a look over a few pictures of Mr Wyle does suggest he has a far more Jobsian appearance than Clooney.

Wyle actually played Jobs once before in the awfully titled Pirates of Silicon Valley, which given the fact Sneak's never heard of it, can't have been that good, but he's stuck it on the Lovefilm queue anyway.

The real question this all drags up, though, is who would play Sneak in a biography of his life: probably Javier Bardem as seen in No Country for Old Men. Same haircut.

At VMware's recent VMworld conference in Copenhagen, a colleague of Sneak's happened to notice that a fellow IT journalist was carrying two phone handsets; one was an iPhone, the other an old-fashioned looking Nokia.

It turns out that the iPhone is so bad for making voice calls that the guy decided to keep his Nokia for this purpose, presumably holding on to his iPhone for other stuff such as music, emails and running apps.

With all the bad publicity that Apple got over poor signal quality after the launch of the iPhone 4 last year, this set Sneak wondering if it is a widespread phenomenon.

We have all heard people complain that their iPhone has terrible reception, or it cuts out in the middle of calls, or that it has to be recharged every single day, or some other flaw.

With all this going on, how come the iPhone is still one of the bestselling handsets on the market? Is it possible that people don't generally use their iPhone to make voice calls, but instead use it as a kind of glorified iPod touch while making calls from an old Nokia, like that journalist does?

If this is the case, then it is quite ironic. The whole reason the smartphone evolved in the first place was supposedly because people were tired of lumping multiple digital devices around with them, and wanted one device capable of doing everything.

In other words, Apple hasn't built the most successful smartphone in the world. Instead, it appears to have reinvented the PDA.

The notoriously strict application gatekeepers at Apple appeared to let their guard down on Tuesday when they approved a game called Phone Story for download on the firm's ever growing App Store.

However, the dozy staff should have looked closer, as the game is a none-to-subtle dig at the way smartphone factory workers are exploited in less well-off nations.

One level of the game involves the player trying to catch workers attempting to commit suicide, a reference to the fact that several staff at Foxconn, Apple's notorious manufacturing supplier, have done just that.

Eventually the staff at Apple realised their mistake (See? People at Apple do make mistakes) and pulled the game from the store, but not before countless thousands of iPhone owners had no doubt downloaded the game to see what it was all about.

Sneak thinks the developers should now make Phone Story 2, in which a disgruntled customer has to overcome levels such as The Inept Shop Worker, The Unfathomable Contract of Doom and The Fiddly Sim Card of Death on their way to getting a new phone.

Sneak is a worldy wise kind of fellow and would like to think that not much gets past him, so it was with some suspicion that he heard of another Apple employee managing to lose another top secret iPhone prototype in a bar recently.

The reports suggest that a test version of the much anticipated iPhone 5 went AWOL in San Francisco Tex Mex hell hole Cava22 sometime in late July, and may have been sold on.

Now, Sneak's spider senses are tingling at the moment, and it's not just because the air-con is on full blast. AGAIN.

No, it's because an almost identical story emerged last year with an iPhone 4 prototype which eventually ended up in the hands of Gizmodo editor at the time Jason Chen.

On that occasion the cops were called in and Chen was apparently lucky to avoid gettin' himself into some serious bother. But of course the real winner in the story was Apple, which managed to get some brilliant publicity in the process, whipping its fanboys into a near frenzy by the time the dratted handset was finally launched.

Now, Sneak is not saying the current story is all the invention of Apple's magnificently Machiavellian PR team. Oh, no. It's easy to see how said employee managed to lose the phone in Cava22.

To be honest, looking at the web site - with its references to 'live Mariachi music and Margaritas that make you want to say "Una mas, please!"' - Sneak is surprised he didn't lose his mind too.

The bookish geeks at the Oxford English Dictionary have announced that 'retweet' and 'sexting', words casually bandied about on Twitter and mobile phones, are now so common as to be worthy of a place in the hallowed book.

Sneak is pleased to see this, although while he was aware that 'retweet' means repeating someone's message on Twitter, he wasn't quite so au fait with the term 'sexting' until he undertook some horrific Google searches to arrive at his own definition:

"Sexting [verb] pronounced: sex-ting. The act of electronically distributing pictures of ones intimate areas to a potential mate via the medium of mobile or electronic communications. Usually undertaken by 11-14 year-old chavs or US politicians. Used in a sentence: Rob and Sandra fell in love after sexting one another on their iPhones."

It's not a huge surprise that these terms have made it into the OED as the growth of mobile communications and social networks has given rise to a wealth of jargon such as '@reply' and 'follow Friday' on Twitter, and 'poke' and 'like' on Facebook.

Other notable entries into the OED were 'auto-correct', 'cyberbullying' and 'woot'.

Another benefit of this, aside from enriching the glorious English language, is a few new words for Scrabble games with the family. Lol!

Sneak is a clumsy soul. His fingers have spent so long feverishly bashing at keyboards, pads and tabs that the art of nimbly holding and manipulating an item, of gauging pressure, touch and sensitivity, has deserted him completely.

This means many a dropped phone, crashing pathetically on pavements and wooden floors, much to the dismay of Sneak's bank manager as another £300 is forked out for a swish touch-screen device.

But help may be at hand. The chief executive of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, obviously not busy enough heading a multi-million pound firm, has patented a device that could limit or avoid damage to dropped phones by deploying an airbag as they fall. An airbag!

The Amazing Amazon Airbag would somehow detect when it was hurtling towards the ground and release its hidden, built-in protection to cushion the impact of smacking into the side of planet Earth.

It's a wonderful idea, although perhaps a parachute that springs open and helps the device gently down would be better. Or what about a miniature rocket pack that allowed the device to hover inches from the ground? That would be cool.

Sneak doesn't really mind, though, as long as it happens. This has all the hallmarks of a piece of technology that we could all do with Right Now but that won't happen for years and years, just like hoverboards, teleportation and robot butlers.

By the time it's invented they'll probably have found a way to make smartphones unbreakable.