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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Did we miss a trick on ID cards?

Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

When the previous Government wanted us to carry ID cards — and remember this was at the height of the anti-terror campaigns — the UK shrank from the idea as a form of totalitarian nightmare.

It was seen as too Big Brother, too expensive, and ultimately pointless, largely because it wouldn’t be obligatory. After spending billions (£10bn-£20bn according to the London School of Economics)  on the idea, the cards were scrapped.

Good riddance, many said at the time, but there’s a danger that in the hullabaloo over the problems of establishing initial ID and how ID cards wouldn’t stop terrorism, the baby was thrown out with the bath water.

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What goes on in that computer repair shop?

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Ever wondered what happens to your PC when it goes in for repair? Us too. We’ve heard a few cheeky tales, and smart workarounds that computer repairers have employed to get a computer back up and running, but there must be many more, either kosher or not.

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Right royal shambles of a booking system

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

When will organisations realise that a website is more than window dressing and needs to be treated as seriously as everything else in the operation?

Take the Royal Opera House, for example. Famed around the world as a centre of cultural excellence, it takes longer to use its website booking system to buy tickets than it took Wagner to write his Ring Cycle.

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Privacy? Oh for fax sake

Monday, November 29th, 2010

When we think of data breaches, we remember lost CD-ROMs packed with personal details of tax payers that are lost in the post, Ministry of Defence laptops left in the back of taxis, and USB drives dropped in pub car parks.

Encryption is the key to battling such breaches, we are told, as locking down data helps keep it private in the event of hardware or media loss or theft. Who’d have thought, then, that these days anyone would really send private details out in a readable format without any obfuscation of data should the missive be intercepted?

Yet this is apparently what happens as a matter of course across the UK as the painfully decrepit fax machine lingers on like a paper-spewing ghost of offices past.

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Where is Spotify for eBooks?

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

The eBook market should be booming. Prices for readers have never been lower and there are plenty of services available. Yet somehow the model just doesn’t seem to work – and the reasons seem horribly familiar.

The publishing industry’s current attitude is like a flashback to the music industry as it was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital age.

We’d all love access to hundreds of books and travel guides in a lightweight, easy-to-read device with a long battery life, but I also want a decent selection of books at a fair price, with the same level of freedoms offered with a paperback. That’s where the services from everyone from Amazon, to Apple and Barnes & Noble fall over.

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Taxpayer to fund French file-sharing resistance

Friday, October 15th, 2010

The French are good at many things. Nice wine, good cheese, and a fine line in shoulder shrugging. But let the bureaucrats within a metric mile of the real world and Gallic pragmatism falls apart.

The French authorities have come up with a scheme aimed at encouraging young people (anyone aged between 12 and 25) to buy music rather than download it illegally. All well and good, but the Government proposes using taxpayer money to subsidise the scheme. Youths that buy into the project will receive a card to the value of €50, for which they will pay €25. The other half is covered by the State.

This is enough to make this French taxpayer (vested interest declaration) mad on so many levels.

While one would never condone illegal file-sharing, there are plenty of reasons to dislike the record companies’ aggressive stance and action on copyright. It is a matter of personal pride that the last time I lined the pockets of the recording industry fat cats, The Verve were the next big thing.

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Microsoft takes on Apple in shopping mall turf war

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

You’ve heard of the Rumble in the Jungle and the Thriller in Manila, but clashes of the Titans don’t get much grittier than this. Microsoft is about to open a retail store at the Mall of America in Minneapolis – right opposite Apple’s shop in the same shopping venue.

You’ll have to pardon the gladiatorial, no-holds-barred imagery, but given the unaccountable level of seething animosity that persists between Microsoft in the blue corner and Apple in the white, it’s hard not to see security guards being called in to break up the inevitable fan-boy fracas.

Within mere paces of each other (possibly chanting “come and have an OS if you think you’re hard enough” and waving that light sabre app in each others faces) employees and customers alike will come face-to-face with the enemy.

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Time for an iPod spring-clean button, Apple

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

The last of our latest iPod reviews is up, and very nice the 4th generation touch looks, but like all iPods, it’s still missing a button that would make so much sense. Just why can’t Apple put a simple “delete song” button on its MP3 players?

When I’ve mentioned this to friends of a fruitier computing ilk than myself, they suggest quite correctly that you can delete songs via iTunes when it’s connected to a computer. But that’s not the point of a portable music device.

Organising a large music collection – sifting through files, tweaking ID3 tags and searching for files that you want to delete – while sitting in front of a computer feels like work. The joy of MP3 players is the freedom of music anywhere, listening to a large collection wherever the mood and Shuffle takes you.

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