Why is TalkTalk’s year-old porn filter suddenly big news?

Monday, May 14th, 2012

If you’ve been reading the newspaper headlines yesterday and today, you could be forgiven for thinking that TalkTalk has suddenly taken strident measures to block online pornography from children’s sensitive eyes.

The Sunday Times dramatically describes the ISP as having “broken ranks” with its fellow ISPs by offering “all its 4m subscribers a blanket opt-out for pornography sites” and forcing all existing users — rather than only new customers — to say whether or not they want the service (I’ll leave it to you whether that’s opting in or opting out). “TalkTalk is offering parents protection for every computer, games console or e-reader accessing the internet via the family broadband connection.”

Following the Times’ lead, Channel 4 proclaims: “TalkTalk now plans to question all of its 4.2m customers, forcing them to choose whether to use settings that would block information on computers, mobile phones, games consoles and e-readers.”

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How Apple forced consumers to pay more for ebooks

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

Who would you rather had the monopoly on ebooks: Amazon or Apple? That’s the question Forbes asked last month, and now the US authorities have chosen the former.

The Department of Justice has sued Apple and publishers Macmillan and Penguin (three others have already settled), accusing them of colluding to create the “agency model” of selling ebooks. The filing document offers intriguing detail about what’s happened in the past three years of the growing ebook market.

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How white space brought broadband to a remote Scottish Isle

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Standing in the sun, admiring the view of the sea along the southwest coast of the Scottish Isle of Bute, it was hard to imagine I was there for a broadband trial, but this small, sparsely inhabited island is home to a cutting edge experiment in rural connectivity.

In fact, perched along the roadside, overlooking seals to the right and a herd of cows to the left, is a large aerial, grabbing signal from unused TV spectrum to deliver a sturdy, if not fast, connection 6km from the nearest exchange.

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Speculative invoicing: are anti-piracy threat letters set to return?

Monday, March 12th, 2012

A porn distributor is working with a third-party firm to send letters threatening legal action to accused illegal file-sharers unless they stump up hundreds of pounds in settlements.

Regular readers of PC Pro will be feeling a bit of déjà vu at the moment, but I’m not talking about Andrew Crossley’s ill-fated “speculative invoicing” affair, which ended with the ACS Law solicitor declaring bankruptcy and suspended from practising his profession for two years.

Rather unbelievably, an entirely different porn company is trying the same trick (and has been for some time) — even though its lawyers dropped out last year.

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Apple replaces broken iPhones – even if they’re stolen

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

There’s nothing worse than having your phone stolen: your contacts, photos, data, all in someone else’s hands. It’s especially bad if it’s a high-end smartphone, and even worse if it’s an iPhone — and not only because the handsets are so expensive.

Last week, PC Pro reader Simon wrote to us, explaining that his daughter Charlie’s phone had been stolen three months ago. Since then, she’s been locked in a battle with her insurance company to get a replacement. That firm, Protect My Bubble, has refused to pay out because Apple has already replaced the phone, with the identifying number (IMEI)  for the stolen device showing on the system as being “replaced”.

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What Size Am I? A tech solution for a fashion problem

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

It’s not often a website about women’s clothing excites myself and most of  the PC Pro team, but today at lunch that’s just what happened.

A story on The Guardian reveals a web app that pulls in sizing data from women’s shops. Enter in your measurements, and it tells you what size to pick at various stores.

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Lytro light-field camera: first look

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

The Lytro has been kicking around for a few months — we covered its launch in issue 207 of the magazine — and it picked up an award at CES last week, but the camera has yet to actually ship. However, the company had a few pre-production models to let us try out the intriguing new camera technology.

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CES: Why booth babes are bad marketing

Monday, January 16th, 2012

I spent last week in Las Vegas, which is always a bit strange for women, surrounded as you are by very pretty ladies, in very little — and often very sparkly — “clothes”. I’m speaking, of course, not of the casinos or bars, but of CES and its numerous “booth babes”.

The BBC did an excellent piece on the subject — if you haven’t seen it yet, the video is here, and it’s well worth watching — interviewing female tech journalists, marketing staff, booth babes and CES head honcho Gary Shapiro.

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How to get email without a computer

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Here in Vegas, CES is overflowing with computing embedded in devices of every kind — cars, home appliances, booth girls (I’m assuming, anyway) — but one stand is touting a way to cut the computer out of your life, while still receiving email.

The Presto Printing Mailbox is the antithesis of Martha Lane Fox’s digital divide plans: it’s for people who simply can’t understand — or can’t be bothered to understand — how to get email off that infernal computing box.

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Windows 8 with eye-tracking: hands on

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

One of the major complaints my colleagues at PC Pro have had about Windows 8 is that the touch-focused OS is annoying to use with a non-touch enabled laptop.

Convertible laptops and touchscreen desktops could help get around the problem, but eye-tracking firm Tobii has come up with a better idea.

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