This month, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) tells off BT and Network Associates for fibbing, and tears into Sega for making a racist joke.

The ASA has upheld a complaint against BT after a punter pointed out that the telco's adverts for BT Highway exaggerated the speed of the download using the service. Although the copy of the advert said the ISDN line would be twice as fast as an average modem, the visual exaggerated the capabilities of the technology suggesting it was ten times as fast.

Anti-Virus guru Network Associates also got a slap on the wrist for using old data and misleading graphs in a recent ad campaign. The company claimed that Dr Solomon's virus checking software was unchallenged in the market, but the ASA disagreed. Tut tut tut.

Meanwhile Sega's invitation to players of Dreamcast to: "Spank Johnny Foreigner Online" met with official disapproval. The ASA said the campaign "could be seen to condone violence against foreigners and was likely to cause serious or widespread offence."

Sega said it was trying to encourage international gaming "by means of humorous stereotyping".

Santa will not be bringing this lot PS2s for Christmas. We reckon they should consider themselves lucky if they warrant a bag of coal after Santa has done his annual naughty/nice list checking. ®