With mobile data, it pays to be European

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

The EU might not be everyone’s cup of lattechino, but when it comes to representing the masses it does at least stand up for the man in the street.

While some of its proposals – such as the widely ignored cookie laws  - are near worthless, others are more robust. It’s not all about regulating carrot length and ruling on the smelliness of cheese.

Take, for example, the pressure being put on mobile networks by EU officials that want to see an end to the cash grab that is mobile data roaming. Charges for a MB of data cost more than a beer in many parts of Europe, a situation which the EU believes is restricting usage and lining the pockets of mobile operators. (more…)

Why is email so ugly?

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

When the decorators come in for a makeover, you’d hope that the end result would a nicer, new-look living room – otherwise, what’s the point? But sometimes, a look “just works”, making changes a perfect example of fixing something that isn’t broken.

App designers are caught between these two divergent camps, which is perhaps why email clients and services seem never to have had a proper revamp – they are still based on linear rolls of messages that generally have all the design hallmarks of a 1970s filing cabinet, which perhaps reflects the way they are used.

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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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