UK chancellor George Osborne has chosen the morning of the 2013 budget to unleash himself on the Twittersphere, sending his first tweet on Wednesday morning. Under the @George_Osborne account, he tweeted:

Today I'll present a Budget that tackles the economy's problems head on helping those who want to work hard & get on twitter.com/George_Osborne…

— George Osborne (@George_Osborne) March 20, 2013

The tweet is accompanied by a picture of the chancellor with his red box, indeed working hard and getting on, if you call sitting with a blank piece of paper and doing some scribbling as evidence of achievement.

Sneak hopes that one of the budget announcements will be providing the UK chancellor with a calculator or actual computer to add up his sums. 

Osborne had managed to amass more than 20,000 followers by mid-morning Wednesday, including  MPs and industry groups like David Cameron, Liam Fox and the British Chambers of Commerce - those that Sneak would define as dull as ditchwater, and keeps far from his Twitter feed - plus a few random ones like Bill Gates and The Beautiful World: the most beautiful, crazy, stunning pictures of this earth, the biography claims.

Obviously our chancellor needs a little light relief every now and again, though Sneak would have gone for @sockington.

However, no sooner had poor George published his one and only tweet this morning, but the floodgates opened on a torrent of abuse and mick-taking aimed at the chancellor.

It took Sneak a fair while of searching through the hundreds of welcome tweets to Osborne to find some clean enough to post on a professional site like V3, but this gives a taste of the messages.

It's good you've joined Twitter, @george_osborne, because if you're doing rubbish at your job, Twitter can really help you focus.

— David Schneider (@davidschneider) March 20, 2013

I despair that @george_osborne is a) about to help plunge more people into poverty, and b) incapable of punctuation.

— El (@ellesueur) March 20, 2013

Some might feel sorry for the chancellor being subject to this level of abuse and ridicule, on the most important day of his year. But Sneak suspects an ulterior motive.

Osborne, or his canny PR team, would have known full well the likely outcome of unveiling his Twitter account on Budget Day, and must be secretly hoping that the interest in all the tweeting will overshadow any controversial decisions the chancellor announces this afternoon, or at least encourage some level of sympathy for him.

Sneak is sorry to reveal to Osborne that Twitter is not exactly a hotbed of sympathetic and measured viewpoints. All of which puts us in mind of this delightful moment from last summer:

Sneak has always admired those lone fighters, the rebels, the individuals who stand against the odds to stick it to The Man. So it is with utter admiration that Sneak doffs his hat to rapid left-wing street fighter George Galloway, having learned of his one-man fight against the might of microblogging site Twitter.

Galloway, most famous for his sumptuous facial hair and cat impersonations, has manfully tried to get the lily-livered weaklings in the House of Parliament to wake up to the spectre of Twitter, proposing an early day motion to impose sanctions on on the site.

“This House notes that Twitter is now a very widely used mode of social networking,” his motion begins inauspiciously. Thanks George, Sneak – along with the rest of Western civilisation - was kinda aware of that.

But old firebrand Galloway soon gets going.

“Twitter is now used for a variety of criminal activities including sending malicious communications,” he rails, before accusing the site of failing to co-operate with police, calling its behaviour “reprehensible”.

Sneak had been rather impressed with the Transparency Report Twitter had published earlier this year, but now feels – in light of Galloway's clear-sighted rant – that he must have had the wool pulled over his eyes by this, “US-based enterprise whose primary motivation is to maximise its profits”, as @georgegalloway describes them.

Sadly, no other MP has dared rally to the cause, making Gorgeous George's the only signature of the motion to date. Odd that, it's almost as if this were just some crude publicity stunt rather than a serious political campaign.

The folk in North Korea don't have it easy and that's putting it mildly.

In fact Sneak finds it outrageous that in a world of internet access and smartphones and tablets people in the nation are barely allowed online and mobile phones can only call internally, effectively shutting off the outside world.

Of course, the leaders of such despotic regimes rarely place the same burdens on themselves as they do to their poor populous, and a photo that's emerged from North Korea shows its leader Kim Jong-un seeming to enjoy the benefits of smartphone.

Speculation immediately suggested it could be a Samsung. This would of course be highly embarrassing for the North Korean leader as the south is the nation's sworn enemy. However, it appears more likely to be an HTC device.

HTC is a Taiwanese firm, struggling in the market, and having its brand associated with a tyrannically leader bent on smothering a downtrodden population with the simply swipe of a smartphone doesn't help.

The use of an HTC would suggest Kim is a fan of the Android operating system, despite its security issues. Only recently the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, was in North Korea to talk up web access. Perhaps he gave it to him as a gift.

Of course, the real question is, what does he think of BB10?

With the UK heading into the last week of its conference season, Sneak was heartened to see the prime minister David Cameron doing his 'man of the people' bit and belatedly joining Twitter. What better way for the country's leader to keep in touch with voters (and the latest foul-mouthed tirades from professional footballers) than to join the microblogging site.

While Cameron may have been hoping to learn a thing or two from this social engagement, Sneak has to confess that a quick peek at the tweets sent to the PM provided a different sort of education. In fact, Sneak had no idea that it was physiologically possible to do such things with watermelons.

The prime minister kicked off his Twitter stream with a little joke about the frequency with which he'd be tweeting.

I'm starting Conference with this new Twitter feed about my role as Conservative Leader. I promise there won't be "too many tweets..."

— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) October 6, 2012 ;

His comments recall his previous proclamation that “Too many tweets might make a...” with the blank standing in for a word Sneak couldn't remember until reading through the messages sent to the prime minister. 

At least now Cameron can save himself from having to listen to the endless conference speeches by checking out the latest Twitter updates. 

Ever since the so-called cookie law came into force in May, Sneak has noticed his web browsing experience rudely interrupted by annoying pop-ups, slide downs and overlay boxes urging him to give consent for the use of cookies.

For the majority of web users this will have been met with confusion and irritation as usually these sorts of attention-grabbing methods are nothing more than adverts or, worse, spam-filled linkbait.

However, the cookie law is meant to be noble, to protect web users from evil privacy-related concerns. Oh, the horror, the horror.

Despite this, though, it's proved such an annoyance to one web firm that it's issued a challenge to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) over its lack of compliance.

On a specially designed nocookielaw.com site, Oliver Emberton, the founder of the firm, Silktide, laid down the challenge after revealing he'd removed all relevant cookie-related warnings from the site.

"We've taken all our cookies solutions off all our websites. The evil cookies are back, and the pointless slidey warning messages are no more," he wrote.

"Presumably we now fly in the face of the law you are sworn to uphold. Please, please do your worst. Send in a team of balaclava-clad ninjas in black hawk helicopters to tickle us to death with feather dusters. Just do something."

Sneak loves the idea of Christopher Graham and David Smith donning ninja suits and breaking into Emberton's house in the dead of night, slowly reconfiguring his software so the cookie warnings do display, but somehow Sneak doesn't think it's going to happen.

Anyone who has been to the US will know that passport control is serious. Sure the UK takes it seriously too, but there's something about the officialdom of the US that makes you instinctively add "sir" to every question you're asked as you try to enter the Land of the Free.

So perhaps it is not surprising a message posted by an Irish citizen on Twitter proclaiming his desire to "destroy America" was interpreted rather literally as a terrorist threat against the good old US of A, rather than as a colloquial term for having a good time. It resulted in him and a friend being ejected from the country.

According to The Sun, Coventry resident Leigh Van Bryan's messages were written several weeks before he left for Los Angeles with a friend, Emily Bunting, but on arrival he was subjected to almost five hours of interrogation, held overnight and then sent back. Imagine the jetlag, urgh.

That wasn't the only message which got the pair in trouble, with one that noted Bryan's desire to dig up the corpse of Marilyn Monroe - in a reference to joke in so-called comedy show Family Guy - also under scrutiny.

Homeland Security reported, with Orwellian tones, that "Mr Bryan confirmed that he had posted on his Tweeter [Tweeter? - Ed] web site account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe".

Because whatever someone writes is always The Truth and can never be interpreted in any other way.

The po-faced nature of this message would be laughable if it wasn't actually so serious an issue and related to what were clearly a couple of light-hearted, highly public messages by a 26-year-old bar manager.

However, the situation is clear: before you write anything on Twitter ask yourself, would I want an overzealous law enforcement official to read this? If the answer's no, best not tweet. Sneak had better quit Twitter then.

The Department for Health (DoH) is vaguely planning to probably introduce electronic medical records online for patients at some point in the future. A confusing message? Yes we thought so too.

Although a report in the Guardian on Tuesday said the government will implement a new system of online patient care records by the end of parliament, the DoH was unclear of its plans when V3 asked for more details of the strategy.

Electronic medical records was one recommendation made by the NHS Future Forum last June in a report that also advised the government on a number of other ways to modernise the NHS.

On Tuesday, the DoH said it would accept the advice from the Future Forum, but in a press release the department only outlined its plans to improve the education and training of health care workers, improve integrated care for patients and promote healthy living.

No reference to online electronic records was made.

V3 contacted the DoH to ask how it was planning to implement the online system and when patients could expect to see it in action.

"We support the recommendation," said the spokesman, before adding that he could not comment on whether the DoH has any online electronic record strategy in place, or whether the department was even discussing the issue.

"We can be certain about implementing it as much as we can be certain about anything," he added. Well that's crystal clear then.

Sweden has long been a hotbed for the file-sharing movement. From the early days of the Pirate Bay to the establishment and eventual triumph of the Pirate Party in European Parliament elections, Swedes have been on the forefront of the battle for the free exchange of information.

This week things were taken one step further with the recognition of the first church devoted to copying and sharing information.

Dubbed the "Church of Kopimism," the group has been recognised by the Swedish Kammarkollegiet as an official church. On the official Church of Kopimism site, the group said it had to apply three times before finally gaining recognition.

According to its site, the church considers the act of copying information to be a sacred act for its members.

"For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament," the group said.

"Information holds a value, in itself, and in what it contains and the value multiplies through copying."

A posting to church's Wikipedia entry further suggests that Kopimism considers the "Ctl+C" and "Ctl+V" symbols to be sacred