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.

FREE AV WILL RIDDLE YOUR PCs WITH VIRUSES!

“You may think you’re safe surfing the web but there are any number of internet nasties that can creep up and harm your computer,” warns the video on Virgin Media’s Parental Controls site. “If you have no internet security installed, or just other basic free solutions, viruses and malware can take over.”

Really? Running something such as Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG Free will leave you with a virus-riddled heap of silicon, will it? Even with detection rates that are not much worse than the Trend Micro-supplied software offered by Virgin? That’s scaremongering of the highest order. As our forthcoming Labs on internet security software will prove…

BRITAIN’S “SAFEST BROADBAND CONNECTION”

You may recall the ever-fearsome Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently took exception to TalkTalk describing its service as the “UK’s safest broadband”, just because it provides network-level content filtering.

Luckily, TalkTalk found a way around that ban – by adding the word “connection” to the end of that phrase – as we can see from the company’s Facebook page, which is of course promoting Safer Internet Day.

We’ll remind you what the ASA said about TalkTalk’s adverts last month. “Customers could interpret ‘safest’ as referring to a number of features, such as virus protection or protection from hacking, and that HomeSafe only offered a basic range of security features”.

A “basic range of security features” or “the UK’s safest broadband connection”? Which sounds more plausible to you?

POLICE VIDEO NASTY

As we pointed out yesterday, why bother spending taxpayers’ money educating the public about internet safety, when you can knock out a nauseating fifties-style public information video that is so bereft of information and entertainment value, even ITV4 wouldn’t touch it?

Step forward the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP) – funded by the taxpayer to the tune of £6.4m per year – with this enormous waste of time and money.

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.

The video has been launched to coincide with Safer Internet Day, historically an opportunity for overpaid and under-qualified “child safety experts” to get five minutes on the This Morning sofa, trotting out the same bland sound bites they’ve been issuing since Netscape Navigator was de rigeur: don’t let kids sneak off to their bedroom with a laptop, talk to your kids about their internet habits, set boundaries on net access – advice any parent with a working frontal lobe will have figured out for themselves.

Yet, when it comes to actually delivering practical advice, these “experts” fall pathetically short. Take the following advice on implementing parental controls on the CEOP website (CEOP’s emphasis in bold, not mine):

Use parental controls on devices that link to the internet, such as the TV, laptops, computers, games consoles and mobile phones. Parental controls are not just about locking and blocking, they are a tool to help you set appropriate boundaries as your child grows and develops. They are not the answer to your child’s online safety, but they are a good start and they are not as difficult to install as you might think. Service providers are working hard to make them simple, effective and user friendly. Find your service provider and learn how to set your controls.

In other words – work it out for yourself.

Instead of paying a media agency £50,000 to knock out that appalling piece of faux-fifties codswallop, how about paying someone a tenth of that to write a set of concise instructions for Windows 7 parental controls, for example? You never know, it might actually protect some children.

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?

The reason is a piece of innovation that’s bound to be copied quicker than the speed of my colleagues’ ears pricking up at the sound of dancing girls: a folding arm.

In this instance, a video is worth at least a thousand words:

The rest of the spec is almost irrelevant. Yes, it’s got a 27in display, an Intel Core processor, Nvidia GeForce graphics and up to 1TB of storage – but what matters is that arm!

Perhaps that simplifies it a little bit. Another key technical inclusion is support for ten-point multitouch. That means you can play sophisticated games with multiple players, plus any number of other applications: photo and video editing, maps, music creation to name but a few.

And it isn’t just for home use: the A720 would be absolutely perfect as a “front of office” PC for a trendy company. The A720 will be released with Windows 7, but the version I played with was running Windows 8 Developer, and it’s undoubtedly the best showpiece yet for Microsoft’s forthcoming OS.

Then we come to the Android TV

Now this one is a little more of a concept piece; it’s a 55in TV that will be released in China this year, along with a 42in version, and it looks terrific.

Its headline feature is that it runs Android Ice Cream Sandwich, and Lenovo has done some clever interface work – as seen by the photo.

Nor is it just a pretty face, with some equally clever work going into the remote. Want to perform a search? Then speak into it. Want to swipe left or right? Then sweep away with your finger using the remote’s built-in touch-sensitive area.

There’s also a 5-megapixel camera to bring in some interaction, and the inevitable tickbox of 3D.

Unfortunately the Lenovo rep was guarding the remote quite closely, so I couldn’t actually play with this one. But if and when this machine arrives in the PC Pro Labs, I’ll be asking for first dibs.

First up is this:

The key here is the port on the left, namely Thunderbolt. We expect this to be a big theme of CES 2012, with the weight of the industry moving behind the inevitable successor to USB.

And so it should. To quote Lenovo, Thunderbolt allows you to “transfer a full-length HD move in less than 30 seconds and back up a year of continuous MP3 playback in just over 10 minutes.”

Intel’s Ivy Bridge architecture will also make its debut with the S430, with our Lenovo spokesman making it clear that this would be one of the flagship products at the time of launch.

This helps the 14in S430 to shed some weight and girth compared to the ThinkPad S420, which it replaces. The main stats are “under 4lb” and “less than 20mm thick” according to our insider, which is quite respectable for a machine that includes either a DVD burner or a second hard drive.

The other enhancements are less eye-catching but welcome nonetheless. Keyboard junkies will appreciate the larger cursor keys and what Lenovo claims to be a quieter click. This latter aspect was rather difficult to judge in a crowded hall, but the keyboard itself was enjoyable to type on.

Lenovo also includes a number of technologies to improve speech recognition and voice-over-IP performance, including dual-array microphones and software enhancements.

It adds up to a tasty sounding laptop that should pack decent performance (a separate graphics chip will be included for those after-hours games) and enormous battery life.

As ever, the proof will come when we get a chance to test the S430 in our Labs.

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.

However, when it comes to music, that’s no bad thing. Billboard, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone magazines all have slick-looking charts, offering playlists of their most popular songs. Well, most of the top songs, at least. Billboard’s top ten chart is not alone in being blighted by a greyed-out track, meaning it’s not available via Spotify.

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.

Why can’t Britain’s two biggest broadband providers tempt more people to upgrade to the superfast speeds?

In BT’s defence, its conversion rate is much higher than this time last year, when the company had signed up only 38,000 out of three million fibre-enabled households, a success ratio of only 1.5%. And its chief rival is doing no better. Virgin Media’s Q3 financial report reveals that eight million homes now have access to its 100Mbits/sec service, but only 187,000 of its customers are on 50Mbits/sec or 100Mbits/sec lines – a conversion ratio of only 2.3%.

Reasons for refusing fibre

So what’s going wrong? Why can’t Britain’s two biggest broadband providers tempt more people to upgrade to the superfast speeds?

There could certainly be an element of once bitten twice shy. For years, broadband providers have over-egged their advertised broadband speeds with the largely fictional “up to” speeds. According to Ofcom’s latest fixed-line research, the UK’s actual average broadband speed is 6.8Mbits/sec, but the average advertised speed is 15Mbits/sec. The broadband providers have only themselves – and the ever-pliant Advertising Standards Authority – to blame if nobody now believes their speed claims.

Price is clearly a major factor, too. Virgin’s 100Mbits/sec service costs £35 a month (when taken with a Virgin phone line), but its cheapest 10Mbits/sec package costs only £13.50 – almost a third of the price. And while BT does indeed match the price of its top-end ADSL and fibre packages, you can get BT’s up to 20Mbits/sec ADSL for as little as £13 (plus line rental), compared to the minimum £28 per month outlay for fibre. When the whole country’s looking after the pennies, people need a pretty good reason to upgrade.

And what is that reason? Remember that, to date, fibre has largely been rolled out in inner-city areas, places that already had fairly decent ADSL speeds. For the average consumer (who is far less demanding of their broadband than the average PC Pro reader), there are few apps or services that would run a great deal more smoothly on a 40/50/100Mbits/sec line than they would on a 10 or 20Mbits/sec ADSL connection.  Unless you’re downloading multiple HD video streams – as you might in Ed Richards’ stereotypical teenage family – there is currently no compelling reason for the man in the street to upgrade.

The people who would surely jump at the chance of a fibre speeds are those in rural areas, smaller towns or on the edge of exchanges, for whom the jump from only 1 or 2Mbits/sec – or even slower – to 40Mbits/sec and beyond would be truly life changing. A point that was reportedly made by senior telco execs at a recent conference in Denmark. But, of course, they’re harder and more expensive to reach.

But with BT admitting its business case was based on 20% of broadband customers making the jump to fibre at this week’s Westminster eForum – four times its current conversion ratio – you can’t help but wonder whether it may regret taking the soft option first.

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.

It maps 819 companies — 219 more than the Government’s claims — and is supposed to allow users to “analyse the tech ecosystem in East London”. Scroll down the list, and it’s clear a fair few aren’t really so much tech start-ups as marketing agencies, lawyers, architects, photographers, PR firms, art galleries, financial services and dance studios, as well as festival organisers, clothing shops, and the singer Mary J Blige. It even includes Fabric Live, as though the famous club having a website meets the criteria for inclusion as “tech”.

We — myself and my poor work experience assistant Oliver — looked into the first hundred companies (if anyone wants to look into the next 719, I applaud you). About half are tech related, and that’s pretty generously including digital marketing and designers who looked vaguely techy.

Even if you stretched a bit and included designers, photographers and “creatives”, it would be tough going to get to 600 out of the list — a point financial data company Duedil and startup support firm TechHub agree with, saying in a blog post that they’ve identified only “200 high-growth, technology-oriented companies” in central London.

A spokesperson for Tech City said the data came from two sources; it included 250 software businesses gathered by business agency Gateway to London and 550 more “broadly defined digital businesses” put together in a door-to-door survey by the team at Digital Shoreditch. That full list includes 1,000 businesses, which Tech City whittled down to “550 more-broadly defined digital businesses, which included those who were part of the digital movement, so may include fashion houses, architectures, etc, who are doing interesting things with software, etc”.

“As such, some of the businesses that came in as part of the Digital Shoreditch dataset are not tech firms, but they are still part of the startup ecosystem,” the spokesperson said, so the team “worked through a random set of a hundred companies and found 25 that weren’t tech related. That suggests 200 or so non-tech businesses in the whole dataset”.

Startups or settled firms?

It’s also unclear how many of the listed firms are actually newly founded. To get a sense, I took a very unscientific look — although clearly scientific enough for Tech City and the Government — at the first ten firms listed (this is out of 819, so it’s very much a snapshot):

1. RedMonk is a developer-focused analyst firm, founded in 2002.

2. Ruby Pseudo is a consulting firm. I don’t really understand what they do, but they started in 2008.

3. Indigo makes customised T-shirts, and has done so since 2002, moving to the area in 2007.

4. Mark Smith appears to be a graphic designer, and has been since 2005.

5. Mind Candy is a successful app developer that makes Moshi Monsters. It was started in 2003.

6. Dopplr is another UK tech start-up success, and has been since its launch in 2007.

7. Rapid Eye has offered darkrooms to photographers since 1996.

8. Last.FM is another darling of the start-up scene, and deservedly so. The music streaming service has been kicking around since 2002.

9. Darq is an IT support firm — and apparently the commercial side of hacking group Darq.net. It’s been going since 2001.

10. SoundCloud is a sound sharing system, started in 2007.

Not one has been founded in the past year. Surely some of the remaining 809 firms listed sprung up in the past 12 months, but it’s rather hard to tell, so we’ve asked Tech City for more detail.

Time for a curator?

Rather than release a confusing, padded-out list,  Tech City should curate it carefully and highlight the real tech start-ups — the next Last.FM or TweetDeck, not the next Nathan Barley.

I realise the Tech City folks are trying to create excitement around the project, and big numbers help that (and the buzz must be working, as the BBC reports that some firms say rents are already going up). But it’s hard enough for tech startups to get their names out without having the very body created to help them adding to the noise.

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.

Areas (or, indeed, entire countries) such as Wales, where only a fraction under half of premises are getting 3G from all five providers. Or Northern Ireland, where only 51.7% of premises have a choice of all five.

Ofcom didn’t earn its reputation as the chocolate fireguard of regulators by forcing companies to do things they don’t want to do

Consequently, the good citizens of Wales, Northern Ireland or indeed any part of the UK will most likely find that there are plenty of times when their chosen network doesn’t offer a 3G signal as they travel around the country, thus rendering their smartphones or 3G dongles effectively useless.

The networks don’t really care: they’ve already got your monthly subscription fee nestled in their coffers and the more data you download, the more it costs them. Once they’ve met their minimum 80% obligation, there’s little or no incentive for them to invest in expanding their coverage, especially in those awkward rural areas. And Ofcom didn’t earn its reputation as the chocolate fireguard of regulators by forcing companies to do things they don’t want to do. Perish the thought.

The solution

So how best to improve this patchwork quilt of UK 3G coverage? A quite brilliant answer comes from none other than a PC Pro reader, commenting on yesterday’s news story.

Step forward Mr John A Hind:

“Ofcom could make a massive improvement for everyone simply by mandating network fallback, so if a handset cannot get a signal on its home network it can transparently use any of the others with appropriate inter-network financial transfers. Also there should be something that can be done with public Wi-Fi provision to offload some of the data traffic, again with automatic fallback.”

That solution is so simple and inspired, that if Ofcom chief Ed Richards were to tragically fall under the wheels of a bus, I would camp outside Ofcom HQ until they made John A Hind the new head honcho.

It gives networks two financial incentives to improve 3G coverage: the first in the penalty payments they’d have to make to rivals for customers ‘roaming’ on their 3G network; the second being the potential money they could make by erecting a 3G mast in areas not covered by the others, and reaping those roaming fees.

There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t work, either. Take your phone abroad, and you’ll often find it will hop from one network to the next, with your home network taking care of all the billing and associated roaming fees with its foreign partner network. These systems are already in place.

In fact, the only real stumbling block is the aforementioned chocolate fireguard. “Your suggestion will be roundly ignored by Ofcom as it is far too sensible,” reader tirons1 said of Mr Hind’s masterplan.

That’s two readers who are – unfortunately, in the case of the latter – absolutely spot on.

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.

It’s easy to forget that online security can be confusing for people who don’t spend all day reading about it. Odd jargon such as phishing and trojans, and shrill warnings from security firms don’t help matters, so the Met’s Police Central E-Crime Unit (PCeU) — the UK’s experts on such matters — has offered some tips to help.

Some of the advice is perfectly fine: keep OSes up to date, use antivirus software, consider installing a firewall, and think before you download.

Other tips it offered are rather confusing — and gathered bewildered laughs from the PC Pro team.

The PCeU statement advises:

“Disconnect your computer from the internet when you’re not using it.”

This one raised some eyebrows. By all means switch the PC off when you’re not using it, but disconnecting it from the internet seems a little extreme. Of course, the best way to avoid infection is to leave your PC in the box, but we’re not going to do that (it makes it hard to type).

“Run full disk scans periodically, which will help prevent malicious programs from reaching your computer.”

Err… what? How does scanning the computer prevent malware from reaching your computer? Doesn’t that mean it’s there already?

“Avoid opening attachments or following links in emails and on websites.”

It’s certainly good advice to not download attachments from unknown senders or click shortened links from untrusted sources, but if we never clicked a link again, Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s web would be rendered rather useless.

While the finer points of online security are complicated, keeping yourself generally safe on the web is common sense. But it’s hard enough to sift through the hyperbole coming out of some security firms and even the Government, without adding confusing advice from the experts at the PCeU to the mix, too.

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.

Only three of the 18 handsets had been updated to the latest version of Android.   Ten of the 18 were at least two major versions behind, and 11 of them had stopped getting any support updates less than a year after their release.

By the end of an 18-24 month mobile phone contract, the vast majority of Android handset owners will be left with a phone that has none of the latest features, and which poses a potential security risk

Amazingly, seven out of the 18 handsets had never run the latest version Android, having shipped with an outdated version of the OS and never caught up.

By the end of an 18-24 month mobile phone contract, the vast majority of Android handset owners will be left with a phone that has none of the latest features, and which poses a potential security risk because crucial OS patches are not being applied.

Compare and contrast that to Apple, which included the two-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 3GS in this month’s iOS update, and Microsoft, which has today confirmed that it’s delivered the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update to “100% of eligible phones around the world, regardless of carrier”.

Apple, of course, updates handsets directly, while Microsoft tests updates with handset manufacturers and carriers, before pushing them out itself via Microsoft Update. Android updates, on the other hand, pass from Google to the phone manufacturer to the mobile network – and those extra links in the chain appear to be the problem.

As DeGusta states: “There’s no incentive for smartphone manufacturers to update the OS because manufacturers don’t make any money after the hardware sale, they want you to buy another phone as soon as possible.”

“Apple’s way of getting you to buy a new phone is to make you really happy with your current one, whereas apparently Android phone makers think they can get you to buy a new phone by making you really unhappy with your current one.”

Android owners can, of course, root their phone to upgrade to the latest version of the OS themselves. But should Android owners really have to turn into low-grade hackers and risk invalidating their warranty just to get their hands on the latest software and features? No wonder Google bought Motorola…