Why Britain’s watchdogs have fewer teeth than goldfish

Friday, November 20th, 2009

If there’s one thing that makes me angry, it’s other people not getting angry enough. Britain has swathes of so-called regulators and “watchdogs” monitoring everything from advertising, to telecoms, to the protection of our private data, and they’re all about as much use as a toaster in a bath.

Take the Information Commissioner, for example. Christopher Graham may have started talking tough about cracking down on data leaks when he waltzed into his six-figure salary job this summer, but his feeble actions speak far louder than his fighting talk.

It was the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who revealed that staff at a UK mobile network had illegally sold thousands of customer account details to brokers. That data was used to cold-call customers nearing the end of their contracts, in a bid to convince them to move to a rival network.

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The Windows 7 chkdsk bug that won’t go away

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Back in August, I told you how two of us in the PC Pro office had been struck down with an irritating Windows 7 chkdsk bug.  The fault saw the check disk utility spring into life every sodding time Stuart Turton and I booted our PCs, yet report a clean bill of health once it had completed its laborious scan.

Well, it appears the problem isn’t going away. A recent flurry of comments on the August blog reveals that the chkdsk flaw isn’t restricted to the beta software we were running at the time. The problem appears to be afflicting users of the final Windows 7 code, and in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. A number of people leaving comments on both our blog and the various web forums discussing the issue pointed the finger at Avira’s free antivirus software (which both Stuart Turton and I were running), but there’s a groundswell of non-Avira users reporting the issue too, so that appears to be a case of mistaken identity.

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Who’s viewing PCPro.co.uk on an Amiga?

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Yesterday’s story on how more than 10% of PCPro.co.uk readers were already running Windows 7 caused something of a kerfuffle. However, it wasn’t the swift uptake of Microsoft’s newborn operating system that yanked people’s chains; it was the fact that 6.8% of our visitors were still running Windows 95 that sparked mild hysteria.

“Call me a doubting Thomas but I just don’t believe the Windows 95 figure,” said rjp2000, commenting on the story. “I haven’t seen a Win 95 PC in the wild for years. Has anybody else seen one recently?”

Well, rjp, I promise you that it’s true. In fact, Windows 95 looks positively bleeding edge compared to some of the operating systems that darken our door.

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Did Stephen Fry and Twitter really score a victory for free speech?

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

“What’s the difference between libel in print and libel on the web?” the trainer on a recent legal training course I attended asked rhetorically of his audience. His answer: “None whatsoever – the law applies to both.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking after the events of yesterday, however, that the rule of law had completely collapsed online. For while a team of smart solicitors effectively managed to gag The Guardian from revealing that oil company Trafigura was the subject of a recent question in Parliament concerned with the dumping of toxic waste, it wasn’t able to silence the Twittering classes.

Within hours of the judge awarding the injunction, bloggers were already untying the gag, openly linking the oil firm to the Parliamentary question – a practice that could have landed The Guardian editor in jail if he’d done likewise.

Meanwhile, thousands of Twitter users, including Twitterer-in-chief Stephen Fry, were bandying around the #Trafigura hashtag on tweets linked to the story. Subtle, it was not.

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Why ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to NDAs

Monday, October 12th, 2009

I have acquired a rather unfair reputation in the PC Pro office for being a bit of a moaner. However, I’ll happily (or should that be grumpily?) confess that one thing is guaranteed to get my dander up: non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

These horrendous documents are becoming increasingly common in the technology trade. For those of you who are unfamiliar with their evil ways, they work as follows:

Company A decides to launch a new product, but it doesn’t want Company B or (more importantly) its customers knowing about it, just in case Company B decides to copy it or its customers decide to stop buying its current products and wait for the launch of the Shiny New Loveliness. So Company A invites a bunch of journalists along to see the new product, but before said hacks can get a sniff of the goods, they have to sign a five-page document promising not to mention said product before such and such a date.

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Why are iPlayer viewers exempt from the TV licence?

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

There was a chap from TV Licensing on BBC Breakfast this morning, reminding Britain’s small business owners that they owed his employers £142.50 if they wanted to watch live TV on their computers at work.

“How you can possibly enforce that?” asked the BBC man, somewhere in between the 96 daily reminders of how you can watch BBC News online. “We can and we will,” was the gist of the not particularly convincing reply. Still, it’s nice to see that, just as small businesses are putting the worst of the recession flames out, TV Licensing wants to open another can of petrol.

But why pick on small businesses? During his convoluted explanation of what you can and can’t do, the enforcer explained that you don’t need to buy a licence to watch BBC programmes on iPlayer after they are broadcast.

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How to make the Windows 7 taskbar better in an instant

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

I’m a huge fan of the new Windows 7 taskbar. From Jumplists, to pinning icons to the taskbar, to the long-overdue option to juggle icons into whatever order you wish, it makes my working day precisely 62% easier.

However, there is one thing I’m not so keen on: the habit of piling multiple windows from the same application behind one another like a deck of cards, like so:

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Google’s new motto: pi** off Microsoft

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Google’s official motto may be “do no evil”, but I rather suspect the company has a new unofficial mission statement: “pi** off Microsoft”.

That can be the only explanation for the events of the past couple of days. First the company announced one of the most audacious moves I’ve ever seen with the Google Chrome Frame.

Not content with having its own browser, Google now wants to hijack Microsoft’s as well. Google Chrome Frame is an IE plug-in that replaces the IE rendering engine with the WebKit engine that underpins Chrome. Why? Because like the boy racers that hang around the McDonalds car park in my local town centre, Google wants to show off that it has the fastest engine.

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Microsoft Office Web Apps review: first look

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

We’ve been looking forward to getting to grips with the Office Web Apps ever since the first, highly impressive demos at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) almost a year ago.

But do the limited apps on offer in the technical preview live up to the promise of those well-polished demos? We find out.

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Internet radio exec: don’t mention Linux!

Friday, September 18th, 2009

It might be used to run everything from PCs to power stations, but it seems some people are still a wee bit shy about using the (cough) L word.

Speaking at the launch of the touchscreen Pure Sensia digital radio, director of marketing Colin Crawford was pressed for specifics of the new device’s software. But after his CEO reminded him that the new radio was based on a Linux OS, Crawford remarked: “I don’t like the using the word ‘Linux’ on a radio.”

Why did the man in the sharp suit go queasy at the very mention of Linux? His reluctance may be borne out of perceived consumer antipathy towards versions of the open-source operating system. PC retailers have largely retreated from Linux-based netbooks following reports of consumer confusion and a marketing onslaught from Microsoft, which has persuaded manufacturers such as netbook pioneer Asus to drop Linux in favour of Windows XP.

Equally, it may be that Crawford simply doesn’t want to draw attention to the OS on a consumer device where, quite frankly, the flavour of the operating system is about as noteworthy as the colour of the screws they used to hold the thing together.

Either way,  don’t expect to see a penguin logo on the Sensia box in Currys.