Why Britain’s watchdogs have fewer teeth than goldfish

Friday, November 20th, 2009

If there’s one thing that makes me angry, it’s other people not getting angry enough. Britain has swathes of so-called regulators and “watchdogs” monitoring everything from advertising, to telecoms, to the protection of our private data, and they’re all about as much use as a toaster in a bath.

Take the Information Commissioner, for example. Christopher Graham may have started talking tough about cracking down on data leaks when he waltzed into his six-figure salary job this summer, but his feeble actions speak far louder than his fighting talk.

It was the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who revealed that staff at a UK mobile network had illegally sold thousands of customer account details to brokers. That data was used to cold-call customers nearing the end of their contracts, in a bid to convince them to move to a rival network.

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SimplicITy ‘over 50s’ PC is so un-PC

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

This morning I had a press release emailed to me about a new range of systems by simplicITy computers to be launched today by Valerie Singleton, her of Blue Peter and ’sticky-backed plastic’ fame. She was also presenter of the BBC Money program for many years.

What got me fuming was that this range of computers was for the ‘over 50s’, those people whose brains are just too old and addled to understand new technology, like me and a lot of my friends. I find the term ’silver surfer’ particularly annoying; my hair went grey in my mid-30s so presumably dementia set in then as well. Heck, even our own youthful Jon Honeyball has a few threads of grey, so perhaps he’ll need some help with his computer soon!

By all means market a computer for ‘those who find existing computers confusing,’ but this assumption that the over-50s and silver surfers have special needs is just plain ageist.

As for this computer launch, the operating system is Linux, so you are not going to find as much local help for that as you would with a Windows machine. By all means build an easy-to-use interface on top of Windows, make a simple email client, and remove all the unnecessary buttons from the browser (or use Chrome). But keep an operating system underneath that your kids can help you with, and that has support for all those devices that you might want to plug into it.

I’ll get off me soapbox now.

Your iPhone has a virus? Well it’s your fault

Monday, November 9th, 2009

So anyone who has hacked their iPhone now finds it open to attack. There is one word to describe this – “excellent”. I am extremely pleased that this has come about. I am delighted that people who have hacked their iPhone are now under attack. (more…)

Will you hit the Orange iPhone “unlimited” cap?

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Orange’s big unveiling of its iPhone tariffs has caused a bit of a kerfuffle, not least because its prices are almost identical to those of O2. A lot of people are up in arms about the promise of “unlimited browsing”, which in fact comes with a fair-use limit of 750MB.

But, ignoring the terrible decision to put an “unlimited” label on a very clearly capped tariff, is that amount of monthly data actually “fair-use”?

As discussed in this week’s podcast, there’s a very easy way for existing iPhone owners to find out if that data cap would prove troublesome. Just go to Settings -> General -> Usage, and take a look at your Cellular Network Data. I did just that, believing this cap would be encroaching at least a little on my roaming lifestyle, but I was in for a surprise. (more…)

Windows 7: the licensing mess continues

Monday, October 19th, 2009

There’s a fabulous new document on Microsoft TechNet entitled “The 10 Things to Do First for Windows 7″, which is an excellent checklist on what you need to think about doing in your organisation before you move to Windows 7.

I was particularly thrilled to read “Section 3: Plow through licensing”.

Now maybe I am just being a stick-in-the-mud, and I accept it is a Monday morning and I have a headache, but my headache is made worse by reading this:

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Mollom: What’s in a Name?

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Regular readers will know that I am a major fan of Belgian developer Dries Buytaert,  the man behind Drupal. Drupal is the most powerful open source content management system and IMHO deserves to replace Dreamweaver as the web designer’s tool of choice. In fact, as far I am concerned, the major factor holding it back from world domination, apart from its precipitous learning curve, is its name. Let’s face it “Drupal” (pronounced “droople”) sounds old, ugly, gloomy and deflating. It’s almost perversely uninspiring. “Dreamweaver” it ain’t.

Now I’ve come across a brand name that’s possibly even worse… (more…)

Why ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to NDAs

Monday, October 12th, 2009

I have acquired a rather unfair reputation in the PC Pro office for being a bit of a moaner. However, I’ll happily (or should that be grumpily?) confess that one thing is guaranteed to get my dander up: non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

These horrendous documents are becoming increasingly common in the technology trade. For those of you who are unfamiliar with their evil ways, they work as follows:

Company A decides to launch a new product, but it doesn’t want Company B or (more importantly) its customers knowing about it, just in case Company B decides to copy it or its customers decide to stop buying its current products and wait for the launch of the Shiny New Loveliness. So Company A invites a bunch of journalists along to see the new product, but before said hacks can get a sniff of the goods, they have to sign a five-page document promising not to mention said product before such and such a date.

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The shame of Microsoft’s Media Center EULA

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

For reasons too boring to relate, I just had to fire up a Windows Media Center installation on an HP touchscreen device – the one that comes with every bell and whistle, and is actually quite a nice box.

In going through the TV setup for a DVB-T TV tuner which is built into the device, you get to this glorious licence screen. There are a half-dozen lines of text in that box, and then sixty-nine, yes SIXTY-NINE pages to scroll through. It’s 67 pages if you maximise the window to full screen on this large, high-res display. (more…)

The mystery of Vodafone’s mobile broadband filtering

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Whatever your views on porn, I’m sure you will agree with me when I say that content filtering just seems like such a good idea. How nice to be able to decide what you see, especially when it seems that makers of adult materials go through occasional phases of trying their utmost to stick something in front of you when you’re looking for something else.

When that happens, I’d like my content filtering services not so much as a way of protecting my innocence, but more so I can just do my stuff without interruption. So I am having serious trouble understanding exactly what is driving the content filter on Vodafone’s 3G dongle service.

Some days, whole swathes of the net are invisible – not because they are known to be rude, but because Vodafone claims it can’t even decide whether they are rude, or not. Vodafone’s content filter is offline, so to be on the safe side it just bars all accesses to marked sites.

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Google and Firewalls, round one

Monday, October 5th, 2009

My mailbox has been filling up with pleas for an end to confusion. Not globally, just in the tiny bit of the sum total of human achievement which concerns Google and their applications.

For ages, I have been telling everyone within reach to get themselves a hardware firewall. I hate the fact that “Firewall” has come to mean a whole lot of different things to different people – some say it’s software, others believe it’s a thing a router just does as if by magic; others still say “firewall” and mean “endpoint”… but that’s a digression.

It seems as though Google’s calendar web application wants to actually sniff around in your machine, to pick up re-publishable events in whatever local calendar program you’re using – and it does it from afar. This means, it doesn’t work unless your PC is naked to the web on the particular traffic port it wants to use – and opinions vary over what port that is. There’s a slew of sync utilities, many forum threads, and ominous mentions of Port Forwarding configurations for various chunks of hardware. (more…)