Mobile phones: 15 years and a world apart

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

Fifteen years ago – almost to the day – I got my first mobile phone, a Motorola mr20. It was a chunky thing, with a two-line black-on-green LCD display and a battery that lasted for up to 12 hours (so long as you didn’t use it to make calls or try out any of its three different ringtones). It could receive text messages, but not send them: for that you needed the upmarket mr30 model.

Today, a decade and a half later, I’ve taken delivery of a Samsung Galaxy S II. If ever you wanted an illustration of the phenomenal pace at which technology advances, here it is. In what seems like an alarmingly short time, we’ve progressed from that rudimentary brick to a slim, slate-style affair with a vibrant full-colour touchscreen, a feature list as long as your arm, 16GB of internal storage and, well, slightly better battery life.

Consider that voice calls are now just a small part of a smartphone’s job and you could question whether the two phones are even really the same sort of device. (more…)

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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How insecure is IPv6?

Friday, March 25th, 2011

The internet has been running out of space for the best part of ten years now, address space that is. In a nutshell, the 4,294,967,296 addresses provided by IPv4 are pretty much exhausted and so we must start embracing IPv6 which can provide a few more.

How many, exactly?

How does 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses sound to you?

Now I’m not going to get stuck into the whole ‘how to migrate to IPv6 thing’ here, nor even the debate about how long we really have left to make that migration (although Steve Cassidy will be examining this in issue 200 of PC Pro). Nope, I’m more interested in what the potential impact upon internet security will be when it’s a done deal and everything is connected to the internet.

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Internet censorship: the slippery slope starts here

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Do you remember good old AOL? The once near ubiquitous, “family-friendly” ISP that only let certain “safe” websites into its walled garden, and practically forbade users to venture any further. Think Steve Jobs crossed with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Well we’re all AOL customers now: or at least, that’s what the Government would like us to be.

A few weeks after Conservative MP Claire Perry tested the waters by suggesting ISPs should apply cinema-style age ratings to pornographic sites, Communications Minister Ed Vaizey has all but made it Government policy (i.e. he told The Sunday Times).

“This is a very serious matter,” he told the newspaper. “I think it’s very important that it’s the ISPs that come up with solutions to protect children,” threatening to do so by law if the ISPs don’t get it together, much like the previous Labour Government did over music piracy and the ensuing Digital Economy Act – and look how swimmingly that worked out!

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The fallacy of unique visitors

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

We all do it: measure the success of a website by the number of monthly unique visitors that come to the site. But as year passes year, I’m becoming increasingly cynical about the figure, and increasingly amazed that uniques are still considered the instant measure of a website.

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Why you might need to reboot your router to see a website

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

Just at holiday season begins, it looks very much as if various service providers and backbone connection suppliers have been very busy.

Lots of services have had their public IP addresses updated; I am getting calls from clients whose internal systems don’t genuinely use a domain name to get to a service. It’s not uncommon for all manner of software products (including router firmware) to let you type in www.pcpro.co.uk, and then look it up at that moment and convert it to 212.100.242.151 – which is what they then store for future connection attempts.

When we decide to change that underlying server address – which isn’t a bad thing to do, it’s a supported and allegedly seamless choice for a connectivity person to make – these various bits of software and hardware that use “one-shot lookup” simply fail to re-connect the PCs behind them.

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Pivot: the future of Internet Explorer?

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Being a tech journalist, it’s easy to become disillusioned by technology. Mind you, being a person, it’s easy to become disillusioned by people – the trick, in both cases, is expectation management.

I stalk through the tech world warily, automatically translating every “revolutionary” to “uninspired” and every “magical” to “probably pointless” until proven otherwise. Contrary to accusations, I’m neither cynical, nor hard-bitten. I’m experienced. And, more importantly, still sane. Which is why I still throw up in my throat whenever journalists cheer at press conferences.

This tactic had served me well these past years, but even so the recent product launches from Google and Apple have managed to be underwhelming. The iPad is the answer to a question never asked, and offered few surprises beyond the ridiculous price tag. Buzz and Wave were comically inept and so badly implemented I’m beginning to wonder if Google isn’t doing it on purpose to see how many times it has to kick the FTC before the privacy watchdog bites back.

Funnily enough, the only company getting it consistently right is Microsoft. Office Web Apps is shaping up nicely, Windows Phone 7 has a personality all its own and Windows 7 just works, unlike Vista – not so much an OS as a series of really bad ideas explored in painful detail. I’m still dubious about Internet Explorer 9. You can only judge a horse on the races run, which would make Microsoft’s next browser a three-legged mare with one eye and rabies, but otherwise the signs are positive.

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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…)

Hating BitTorrent (or How To Spoil Three Years of Anticipation)

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Like Napster and every other file sharing service since, BitTorrent has altered (some would say scarred) the digital landscape immensely. I’m not going to go into the legalities here – we all know people who use it, a noble few for genuine legal file sharing, vastly more for getting the latest Coldplay album without having to shell out for it (I’ve heard it, I can sympathise).

It’s part cause and part by-product of the fact that the Internet has hugely magnified the hype and speculation around new albums, movies and games, to the extent where we often know far more than we need to about something before we experience it.

Simon over at fanboy site Den Of Geek makes the point well here, with even seemingly innocent Facebook walls proving a minefield before a much anticipated film release. I can understand this to a certain extent – I read previews and speculate about films more than is really healthy. But I stop there.

The people I simply won’t ever understand are those seemingly intent on deliberately ruining their own enjoyment of the thing they’re so desperate to get hold of. (more…)

Two and a half cheers for the iPhone

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

Before the iPhone 3G came out, I was telling anyone who’d listen that I thought it would change the smartphone game. I reckoned it would finally make internet access via mobile phone a mass-market norm – rather than a geeky proof of concept, as it tends to be with other smartphones.

It’s not just that the iPhone actually makes the internet pretty usable on a pocket device. That’s certainly a big part of the formula; but for me, the coup de grâce is that, in the UK at least, it comes with a simple, standard unlimited data package.

That means you don’t need to ration your mobile internet usage. You can use the web the same way you use it at home – for looking around, for trying things out, for exploring. For browsing. (more…)