Chrome’s shine getting lost in translation

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Google’s developers might be as smart as a Savile Row suit with a masters degree in quantum physics, but sometimes software makers can be too clever for their own good.

Take Google Chrome, for six years the browser of choice for your correspondent. It’s clean, fast and simple, yet increasingly it tries to second guess how I want to browse the web.

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Forgotten countryside should look to satellite broadband

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

Rural broadband is one of those topics that divides opinion as certainly as politics. The urban-rural internet split is one of the most parochial issues in technology, outside anything involving Apple.

Many people living in the countryside, constantly bombarded for adverts for 100Mbits/sec broadband, are sick to the back teeth of the promised benefits of “next-generation access” that has attracted massive funding from the private sector, and a rather more modest £530m from the Government.

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Twitter sparks London riots – #yeahright

Monday, August 8th, 2011

If you believe newspapers like the Sun and Daily Mail, the rioting in London over the weekend was orchestrated and organised on Twitter, with the Mail, for example, claiming the “violence was fanned by Twitter as picture of burning police car was re-tweeted more than 100 times”.

Really? So what sparked the riots of three decades ago? A ZX Spectrum and a fleet of Raleigh Grifters?

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Gatecrasher Google has clout to make friends

Friday, August 5th, 2011

Google+ has been gaining headlines this week over how quickly people have signed up for the social-networking strand of Google’s online empire.

Figures from web-traffic researcher ComScore suggest the service had reached 25 million users in just a month since launch – not bad for a project that remains in beta.

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The Python plant-watering PC

Wednesday, June 8th, 2011

It might work like a breakfast machine from Wallace & Gromit, but this life hack could be just the thing to help out PC Pro publisher Tim Danton, who’s been bemoaning the sickliness of his pot plants since he moved into his very own (very tidy) office.

The ingenious software/physical interface creates a low-tech chain reaction watering system, sparked by ejecting the CD tray on a PC tower.

According to the brains of the operation, Bill Snitzer, the “automatic watering system” runs a Python script (as opposed to a rootkit), which kicks in after 6.5 days to freshen up the foliage.

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Revealed: Bin Laden’s trick to beat email snoops

Friday, May 13th, 2011

The news wires are abuzz with details on the “painstaking” system that Osama Bin Laden used for sending emails so that US authorities could not spot either the messages or the recently deleted terrorist leader.

With an army of electronics surveillance professionals scouring the wires and airwaves for Bin Laden’s digital fingerprint, he avoided detection with a technical master stroke – not actually using the internet.

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Why are rights lawyers still allowed to bully consumers?

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

It seems the rights holder community, their parasitic lawyers,and the authorities haven’t learned their lessons when it comes to taking on illegal downloaders. Despite court rulings on both sides of the Atlantic that have declared scatter-gun lawsuits based on flimsy IP address evidence to be untenable, lawyers are being allowed to continue to pursue the money-spinning tactic.

In the US, a judge has given the US Copyright Group permission to start legal proceedings aimed at identifying an unprecedented 23,000 BitTorrent users alleged to have downloaded Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables – a film deemed so poor that the Twittersphere believes watching it should be punishment enough for pirates.

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Street View rival takes Microsoft down blind alley

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

You’d assume that the high-fliers at the top IT companies are a smart bunch, given the importance of their roles to the industry, but every so often you have to sit back and wonder what they’re thinking of.

Take Microsoft’s decision to mimic Google’s Street View photographic mapping of the world, the service that landed Google in hot water with authorities around the world for breaching privacy codes.

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Unlimited Carphone Warehouse data? Computer says “no”

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011

Red faces all round at the Carphone Warehouse today, when it announced a £12 per month unlimited data plan that included a handset, 200 call minutes and – most surprisingly – no fair-usage policy.

The company’s UK trading director Mark Eastham underlined the surprise element of the all-you-can-eat package with a press statement, stating: “There’s no small print or fair-usage policy, so when we say ‘unlimited internet’ access we really mean it.”

The only problem was that a quick trip to the site to check the availability and, perhaps, even, place an order revealed the dreaded asterisk right next to the “Unlimited MB” column in the feature list. The asterisk led to the familiar footnote: “subject to fair-use policy.”

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Who’s really behind the net neutrality code?

Friday, March 11th, 2011

The news that major ISPs are on the verge of signing up to a Broadband Stakeholder Group code of conduct on net neutrality and traffic management might sound like good news for consumers, but what will it do for the net neutrality debate?

The issue of how ISPs treat packets of data from various sources, and whether they can prioritise some websites over others if they have been paid for express delivery, has been hotly contested and there is a possibility that these guidelines will settle a dispute that regulator Ofcom has resolutely distanced itself from.

Indeed, in the absence of any higher authority there is a danger that the BSG guidelines could be seen as de facto regulations on how ISPs can approach net neutrality and traffic shaping – largely because the BSG is, it claims, “the UK Government’s leading advisory group on broadband”. It’s even part funded by the Government.

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