The Government’s giving up on rural fibre broadband

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Chancellor Alistair Darling’s pledge of £250m to help Britain achieve universal broadband might sound like progress – but it’s practically an admission that rural areas will never get high-speed fibre connections.

The amount of money on the table is derisory. BT is spending £1.5 billion on bringing fibre-to-the-cabinet to 10 million homes across the country, and BT is (so far) concentrating on urban areas where deployment costs are lower. Does the Government really think it can bring even 2Mbit/sec broadband to the whole of Britain on a sixth of the budget?

(more…)

Could McAfee (and Firefox) kill spam?

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Today I received the most convincing phishing email yet to hit my inbox, to the extent that it inspired enough doubt in my mind that I clicked on one of the links (making sure my security software was up to date first, just in case!).

Why was I fooled? For one, it actually had my name in the email, and for another we as a magazine have been focusing on eBay for the last month or two as part of the investigative cover feature that adorns the current issue (eBay exposed). Could it be some sort of malicious attack from an eBay devotee, a paranoid part of my mind wondered?

(more…)

First look: Toshiba Mini NB200

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Hot on the heels of Toshiba announcing its new 10.1in netbook, the NB200, we got a chance to try one in the flesh – or, to be precise, several in the flesh. And they look impressive.

A little confusingly, the Mini NB200 isn’t one new netbook but a range. There’s a plain black offering, which will use a 1.6GHz Atom N270, but Toshiba is also releasing far more stylish versions dressed in satin brown, white, pink and blue – and these will use the marginally faster 1.66GHz N280.

In reality, you won’t see much difference in speed between them day to day, but you will notice the keyboard. While the black version uses a traditional style of key, the other versions include the increasingly popular Scrabble-style keys.

(more…)

New BBC iPlayer: good news for PC and Xbox 360 owners

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

The BBC has once again overhauled the iPlayer, with the new service far outrstripping the derisory first effort that was launched back in September 2007. The big additions are a new desktop download client and HD streaming/downloads – we’ll be bringing you a full review later in the week. However, a new feature that’s slipped under the radar is potentially the most useful for PC owners: direct WMV downloads.

If you go to any show on the iPlayer menu, you’ll now find an option called More Downloads, under which there’s an option called Windows Media Player. This basically bypasses the new Adobe AIR-based desktop client and downloads the programme directly as a .WMV file.

(more…)

Top ten Pirate Bay putdowns

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

A $3.4 million fine and one-year prison sentence mean this is unlikely to be considered the Pirate Bay’s best month ever. On the bright side, the site’s founders have kept us entertained with a barrage of quips, jokes and commentary throughout, meaning that even if they do disappear into a Swedish slammer, we’ll always have something to remember them by.

Before the trial

The response to Apple’s threat of legal action: Instead of simply recommending that you sodomize yourself with a retractable baton, let me recommend a specific model – the ASP 21. The previous lawyers tried to use a cheaper brand, but it broke during the action.

(more…)

Google Profiles – a spammer’s dream?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Amid all the rumours about Google buying Twitter, it appears the search giant has been quietly refining its own social-networking arsenal. The company’s “official” social network, Orkut, has been largely ignored to death. However, the company has another trick up its sleeve – Google Profiles.  

This is essentially a stripped-down Facebook-style profile page, which allows you to share photos (from Flickr or Picasa), videos (YouTube), web links (to your Facebook and Twitter profiles, for example) and the usual biographical gubbins. However, perhaps its most useful feature – which was only added last week – is the option to create vanity URLs. This means that, unlike Facebook, you can create a profile with a memorable web address, such as http://www.google.com/profiles/barrycollins.

(more…)

First look: Dell Mini 10

Friday, April 17th, 2009

The Dell Mini 10 hasn’t had the smoothest of births thanks to grocery juggernaut Tesco, which accidentally revealed its existence before the machine could be officially launched. We haven’t yet been able to get our hands on Dell’s latest netbook until this morning, though, when one arrived in the Labs.

First impressions are good, with the Mini 10 oozing class: the screen sits flush with the wide bezel, the red lid looks inviting and classy rather than garish, and the lack of chrome around the rest of the case, aside from the small power button, leaves the Dell looking more mature than most netbooks.

(more…)

You feel exploited? Je ne sais pas pourquoi…

Friday, April 17th, 2009

Pop mogul Pete Waterman is feeling hard done by. At a press conference last Thursday he announced that, in 2008, he’d made £11 in royalties for Rick Astley videos being viewed on YouTube – a sum with which he was not happy.“I get more from Radio Stoke playing Never Gonna Give You Up than I do from YouTube,” he pouted.

Well, this is an increasingly pressing issue. How should royalties work in the internet age?

Unfortunately, it rapidly became clear that Mr Waterman didn’t actually want to confront that question. What he wanted was our sympathy. (more…)

HTC’s Diamond2 touches down

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

When HTC launched the Touch Diamond (pictured on the right), just before the iPhone 3G, it was clear that the software was far from polished. The new TouchFlo 3D interface was intended to offer Windows Mobile fans (and Apple haters) the chance to benefit from touch-related delights similar to that of Apple’s iPhone, without having to go out and line Steve Jobs’ pockets.

But, as with so many Windows Mobile-based handsets, while the front end looked nice and the hardware impressed, it just didn’t come together as a coherent whole. The software was sluggish and frustrating to use and, more importantly, just didn’t mask Windows Mobile effectively enough.

It’s good to see, then, that with its latest phones – the Touch HD and now the second generation Touch Diamond2 (on the left in the photo above) – it’s started to focus more on the software than the hardware. So, while the core hardware and specifications remain the same (with just a few cosmetic and practical improvements) TouchFlo 3D has undergone a dramatic overhaul.

(more…)

Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds has us seeing double

Wednesday, April 15th, 2009

Laptops, I have no doubt you’re tired of hearing, are taking over the world. Slowly but surely over the past decade or so, sales of portable computers have caught up and overtaken sales of desktops to the point at which most ordinary folk wouldn’t even contemplate buying a hulking great desktop machine.

But you still wouldn’t replace a graphics workstation machine with a laptop, would you? Well, if first impressions are anything to go by, you might if you had the chance to swap it for one of Lenovo’s W700ds workstation laptops.

You may have seen it before on various blogs and news websites, including perhaps our very own – it’s the one with two screens (the DS bit stands for dual screen), and understandably we were very keen to get one in.

But nothing quite prepared us for our first meeting with it…

(more…)