Hokum watch: Safer Internet Day

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

It’s Safer Internet Day! The day on which we’re meant “to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology”, according to the official website. Instead, it seems many companies are using it to peddle irresponsible nonsense. Here’s just a few of those we’ve found – let us know if you find any more on comments below, and we’ll update the blog.

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Prepare to be patronised: it’s Safer Internet Day

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Nowhere, in a world full of vacuous guff, are grown adults treated with such unbridled contempt as when it comes to “advice” for keeping your children safe online.

Exhibit A: the latest video from the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP), a staggeringly insulting four minutes of patronising, big-budget twaddle, that’s about as informative and entertaining as getting an enema from Charles Bronson. I challenge you to watch all three minutes and 59 seconds of it, without wishing to punch someone in the face, primarily yourself.

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Forget innovation: why Lenovo leads the way for sheer fun at CES 2012

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

The most fun I’ve had in Las Vegas? Spending ten minutes with the Lenovo IdeaCentre A720. Sounds crazy but it’s also 100% true.

I played the piano, lost a strange game involving multiplying insects (don’t ask) and then showed my considerable skill at losing by being heavily defeated at an excellent multiplayer game in the mould of Guitar Hero. Who needs dancing girls, cocktails or casinos?

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First look: Lenovo ThinkPad S430

Monday, January 9th, 2012

We laid our hands on a hand-built Lenovo ThinkPad S430 at the first CES press event of 2012, CES Unveiled. Packing in a treasure trove of up-and-coming technology, there’s much to like.

First up is this:

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Spotify apps review: first look

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

Spotify this week unveiled apps that integrate directly into the music streaming service, but this isn’t quite FarmVille for music lovers. Instead, the apps are, for the most part, geared at helping listeners find music — the system offers 15 million tracks at last count, so figuring out which ones you want to actually hear can be a challenge.

At the moment, the 11 apps are all free, and available to those on free subscriptions, and it’s hard to see that changing any time soon. For the most part, the apps are generally reviews and playlists — hardly something many people will shell out for. Moving the service to handsets might make apps chargeable, but even then, these are little more than curated content.

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How bad is superfast broadband uptake?

Friday, November 11th, 2011

We’ve been waiting for years for true “superfast” fibre-optic broadband, but now it’s here it seems few people actually want it. At least, that’s the impression given by Ofcom chief Ed Richards’ comments earlier this week, when he said superfast (24Mbits/sec+) broadband uptake was “still low” and largely confined to families with teenage children.

How low is “low”? We asked BT for its latest fibre figures. More than six million premises now have access to BT’s fibre lines, but only 300,000 customers have actually signed up for the service. That’s a less than impressive sounding conversion rate of 5%.

It’s even less impressive when you consider that BT Infinity fibre costs no more than the company’s most expensive ADSL package, and that the company admits to “really going for it” in terms of marketing fibre to customers. People are being offered an effectively free speed upgrade and many seemingly don’t want it.

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Tech City: are there really 600 new tech firms?

Friday, November 11th, 2011

The Prime Minister has said Tech City is well and truly established in East London, with the Government claiming 400 new tech firms have set up in the so-called Silicon Roundabout area since last year, bringing the total to 600.

Now that would indeed be an accomplishment, if it were true. However, the new Tech City Map – launched to mark the one-year anniversary of the plan — doesn’t support that claim.

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A brilliant solution to Britain’s 3G woes

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

When Ofcom (or Oftel as it was known back in 2000) auctioned off the 3G spectrum for a sum that could probably buy you Belgium – Norway, at a stretch – those expensively acquired licences came with strings attached.

One of those strings was that each of the winning bidders had to cover 80% of the country – by population, not land mass – by the end of 2007. Four out of the five networks met that target, with O2 earning itself a fine for finishing the job late.

So, given that each of the five networks has at least 80% of the country covered by themselves, the figures released by Ofcom yesterday showing that only 73.1% of premises in the UK has 3G coverage from all five networks seems, at first, to be contradictory. Until you realise, of course, that those five lots of 80% coverage don’t overlap precisely, creating many “3G areas” where only one or two networks provide a signal.

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No wonder people are confused by security…

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

The Met Police can feel justifiably proud of themselves, with an investigation leading to the jailing for many years of a pair of criminals who attacked computers with malware to steal £3 million from UK bank accounts.

Excellent news; high-fives to everyone involved. However, the force’s communications team slightly tarnished the win with some rather confusing advice on internet security.

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Google must get a grip on the Android orphans

Friday, October 28th, 2011

We may have griped about the problems we had upgrading our iPhones to iOS 5, but at least those old handsets are being upgraded to Apple’s latest OS. A new piece of research published in the US suggests the majority of Android handset owners are being left behind by the ever-evolving Google operating system.

The research, by Michael DeGusta from TheUnderstatement.com, tracked every Android handset released in the US before July 2010, and then recorded how many of them had been updated to the latest version of the OS. The results were startling.

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