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.

The change that’s really struck me, though, is the pricing. Back in 1996 I paid £30 for my old mr20, then signed up to Orange’s popular “Talk 15” plan. At £17.50 a month, this gave me a generous 15 minutes of voice calls a month, after which calls cost 10p a minute to Orange phones and, presumably, more to other sorts of phone. Hey, it was a long time ago.

As I mentioned, I couldn’t send SMS messages from my phone, and as for data services, forget it. This was 1996: most of us didn’t have the internet on our landlines, let alone our mobiles.

Now compare my new O2 contract, which starts today. Once more I’ve paid £30 up-front for the phone, and from here on I’ll be paying £21.50 a month. Accounting for inflation, that makes my new contract about 20% cheaper than my old Talk 15 tariff. Yet for that money I get vastly more than before: 200 minutes of talk time, unlimited text messages and 500MB of internet usage.

To be fair, the contract’s longer (two years, rather than one), but still, this represents an incredible increase in value. It’s easy to grumble about mobile phone providers, and often they deserve it: I’m sure we’ve all had frustrating experiences where providers switch around contracts in unwelcome ways, demand exorbitant fees for bog-standard services, screw up your credit rating or point-blank refuse to help with technical problems.

But when I reflect that, compared to my undergraduate self, I’m getting around 15 times as many minutes for my money – plus text messages – plus internet access – plus a phone that is itself, quite simply, gorgeous – it’s hard to feel too hard done by.

And I have to admit, I get a little excited trying to imagine what sort of phone I could possibly have in 15 years to make the S II look as ridiculously antiquated as the mr20 does now.

What terrible tariffs have you been on in the past? What chunky phones are you now ashamed to admit you once proudly carried around in an unseemly bulging pocket? While my positive mood lasts I’m declaring an amnesty, so share your worst!

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.

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.

In other words, does giving everything an IP address open the door for your fridge to start spamming you? Or perhaps more appropriately, given the type of crap contained in most of the spam I see, your toilet for that matter? Seriously though, what does IPv6 mean for security?

Much of the FUD coming is coming from those with something to sell, be it product or consultancy

Given enough IP addressees, the argument goes, the spammers can cycle through such a large and diverse range that spam blacklists become unsustainable, as by the time a domain has been verified as a spam source and added to the blacklist, the spammers behind it have already moved it to another IP address.

This, it seems to me, is less an IPv6 problem and surely more a ‘rely on blacklisting to defeat spam’ problem. Other content-focussed techniques, such as Bayesian filtering, don’t care about where the source is but only what the output consists of.

So are there actually any hidden dangers in the move to an IPv6 address space system at all, or is it all just the usual round of FUD? As some organisations have already implemented IPv6 without any great collapse of security systems, I am inclined to think it is just that. Much of the FUD is coming from those with something to sell, be it product or consultancy.

Potential problems

There will be problems, of course. I’ve heard reports that the Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) system, which provides the means for a device to ask others on a subnet if they are using a particular address, could be used for denial of service (DoS) attacks without too much effort. But then again, those in the know have told me that it doesn’t take a whole big bunch of effort to detect this happening and block it.

Am I scared that IPv6 will cause the sky to fall in? Nope, and neither should you be. IPv6 itself is not intrinsically any less secure than IPv4, as long as it is implemented properly — which means doing your homework during any transition period between the two and ensuring you are not creating holes through which your own particular little piece of sky could fall. But that’s not different to any transition from one network technology to another…

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!

Aside from the enormous technical challenges of applying age ratings to every site on the internet, does the Government have any right to foist censorship on the British public? As a father of young children, I’m no keener on kids getting unbridled access to pornography than Mr Vaizey, but if he thinks slapping onerous filters on every web connection is going to hold back the tide, he’s wrong.

If Mum and Dad are worried about their teens running off to their bedrooms and downloading porn when they’re not looking, they could try something radical – discipline

The internet was as futuristic as Red Dwarf when I was at school, but I had no problem laying my hands on the copies of Playboy or Razzle being passed round the playground (sorry Mum). And if teenagers can’t get access to cyber smut, they can always flick to the nether regions of the Sky EPG late at night and catch more than an eyeful on the adult channels (funny how Perry and Vaizey aren’t so het-up about Murdoch’s money-spinning channels, eh?).

Vaizey’s using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, imposing blanket censorship when two simple measures will prevent children accessing adult content: filtering software and good parenting.

Everyday software such as Norton Internet Security includes parental controls that are almost certainly as effective as anything the ISPs can impose. If Mum and Dad are worried about their teens running off to their bedrooms and downloading porn when they’re not looking, they could try something radical – discipline. Insist the kids only use computers in communal rooms or set up Windows parental controls to prevent children using the PC late at night, for example. It’s really not hard.

My biggest worry about Vaizey’s iron curtain is: where will it end? Pornography’s an easy target: the argument that “no right-minded parent would want to subject their children to pornographic content” is morally difficult to oppose and will play well in the tabloids. But then what right-minded parent wants their child looking at snuff movies, or a Frankie Boyle sketch, or the BNP website?

Where does it end, Mr Vaizey? Where does it end?

Let me start by saying this isn’t sour grapes. PCpro.co.uk gets its fair share of unique visitors (1,016,577 last month, 1,041,618 the month before, if Omniture’s figures are to be believed), but I know of many other sites with similar figures that only deliver one or two page impressions per visitor.

Why does that matter? From a potential advertiser’s point of view, more page impressions equate to more ad slots. From the publisher’s point of view, more ads means more money – well, potentially.

Surely what matters is how much people actually like the site?

From an editorial point of view, I care about how much people actually like the site, and my ways of measuring are again page impressions and dwell times (that is, how long people stick around on the site).

And there’s another problem: monthly uniques are incredibly easy to manipulate. Chuck enough money at any site and you can get over a million uniques: just activate a pay-per-click campaign on keywords that match your site’s subject matter.

Surely what matters to publishers, advertisers, readers and those of us who actually produce websites is how much people actually like the site?

So that’s why I object to monthly uniques as a measure. Yes, it’s an indication of how well your site is set up for Google, how well you do on social aggregation sites such as Reddit and Digg, but it’s no measure at all of – for want of a better phrase – brand loyalty.

We need a new methodology, and I don’t for a second pretend I’ve got the perfect answer. But how about this as a starter for discussion:

Site strength = Dwell time x monthly uniques x (weekly uniques/monthly uniques) x (page impressions/monthly uniques)

Now yes, I admit this is much more complicated to understand than a simple “uniques” figure. But it’s also a whole lot tougher to fake, simply by switching on a PPC campaign.

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.

According to a few webmasters, this effect includes some of the mass-market BT Broadband routers – you may well see a little note on some sites telling users to reboot their routers in order to bask in the full feature set of the site, for exactly this reason.

Of course, if you have gone away on holiday as all this has started, and you’re expecting to use remote access, or for your servers to carry on being available when they are behind a device which stores numeric IPs after you’ve typed in a name-style address, then you are out of luck. And you wouldn’t necessarily be able to test for this effect when you chose either your ISP or your router and firewall hardware.

On the bright side, a cold restart seems to sort out the problem, in most cases, so you won’t have to give the house-sitter, dog-walker or next-door neighbour the management interface password to your border device, while standing pumping Swiss francs into a callbox at the top of the Spluegenpass (or wherever).

Pull the power lead, count to 20, bang it back in, wait for the little red light to go green.

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.

I suspect, in the long run, Microsoft will look back at IE8, Vista and Windows Mobile 6 in the same way an alcoholic looks back at the bleach he drank when the wine ran out. Sometimes the bottom is the best place to discover the best path to the summit. However, what really gives me hope for Microsoft is that it finally appears to be looking forward, rather than happily playing catchup.

Case in point, Pivot. At first glance Pivot is a browser inspired by the sleek minimalism of Chrome. It’s a good looking thing, and worthy of discussion if only as a clue to the eventual direction of the IE9 user interface, or lack of. What really makes Pivot interesting though is the Collections feature – Microsoft’s attempt to rethink how we explore the huge amounts of data housed in websites.

It looks like this.

Each of these tiles represents a single site, or information gathered from multiple sites on a single topic, whether that’s music, sports or history. At present Pivot includes 24 Collections built in collaboration with sites including Wikipedia and Sports Illustrated. However, anybody can create a collection using XML, though you’ll need to transform all images included within the Collection into the Deep Zoom format.

We’re going to take a look at the Dog Breeds Collection (this will also help put me in touch with my feminine side – which is handy because I haven’t been able to get hold of it over telephone, email or carrier pigeon for the last thirty years).

This is a portion of the Dog Types Collection. The full Collection is much more extensive, but there isn’t enough blog to do it justice. Now, imagine you’re in the market for a dog – preferably one that will last longer than Ledley King’s knees and have the good grace not to rip off your face the first time you’re late with the Pedigree Chum. With this criteria in mind I hit the Grooming filter on the left, click that I want to do Very Little grooming, and instantly hundreds of canine candidates are culled from the page, leaving these lucky survivors.

Returning to the filter, I next deal with that pesky “not likely to kill me in my sleep” issue and the list is whittled down to:

Because Collections are built on Microsoft’s Deep Zoom technology, which allows you to … erm… zoom deeply into a page, I can now roll the mouse and zoom smoothly into the pictures and pick the dog on the only criteria that ever really mattered: cuteness. Leaving me with:

I shall call him Bob. Bob the beagle.

Pivot really is a lovely way to wade through information, and more importantly displays a flair and confidence that suggests bright things from Microsoft in the future. We’ve heard a lot about IE9’s performance, but very little about new features or the user interface and it’ll be interesting to see whether Pivot is pointing the way, or merely Microsoft playing about. Either way, I walk away from it with my faith renewed – which is worth a dozen dismal press conferences any day.

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.

Having never reset it manually, that’s my total cellular data usage since I bought my iPhone 13 months ago. Yes, 789MB in 13 months – or around 60MB a month. The internal counter may not be entirely accurate – as many will be quick to point out – but a quick check on the last six months of my itemised O2 bills backs it up. I simply don’t use anything like the data I imagined.

True, it doesn’t include data downloaded via Wi-Fi – which discounts much of my usage at home and at work – but that’s surely not unusual. When I’m out and about on the 3G network I download apps, I browse the internet on my commute, I check the football scores in the pub, I read and send emails and spend too much time on Facebook and Twitter. I’d guess a typical day with my iPhone isn’t at all dissimilar from the vast majority of consumers.

Even if I used my iPhone for business, it’s hard to envisage a realistic scenario in which I’d download more than 12 times the amount of data I already do – with the speed of 3G I doubt I’d even have the patience. The only thing I can think of that may contribute heavily is streaming media, but there are very few apps of that kind that don’t specify Wi-Fi as a must.

Sure, there’ll always be the odd power user who blitzes any cap, which the networks will point out is the entire reason for the majority of us being covered by the fair use policy. But in this case the fair-use cap size does at least appear to be pretty fair.

If only Orange hadn’t tried to hide it behind that word…

UPDATE: To put my casual-user figures in perspective, here is the data usage (in KB per month) for an iPhone power-user working for our sister title MacUser. As you can see, even someone pushing the iPhone 3G, and then 3GS, to the limits – with apps and media featuring prominently – has only once come within 100MB of hitting that 750MB cap, although his monthly average is rising.

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. I’m talking about the pre-release hounds, feeding on dodgy leaked movies and unfinalised games. Why? Just, why?

There’s an interesting interview here with SCEE President David Reeves, in which he drops his guard for a moment and comments honestly about the scourge of BitTorrent, particularly with regard to a company like Sony which often staggers releases across different regions. I quote:

“We are a PAL market and we are going to do it in PAL and we are going to do it properly, you can wait for it and you can have it in good quality, you know you can get the stuff from Bittorrent if you want to and download PSP games, it’s up to you.”

Aside from the fact that it’s so refreshing to hear a high-level Sony executive acknowledging that people are going to use BitTorrent and there ain’t much anyone can do about it, it’s the tone of his quote that really hit home.

In essence he’s saying, yes you can download the dodgy leaked version before it’s ready, but why on Earth would you want to? If you’ve waited so expectantly for a game or movie that’s going to knock your socks off, why don’t you want to savour it in all its glory, rather than seeing it as filmed by a bloke in the back row with a handycam?

A quick check of one popular torrent portal gives a depressing chart of the current top searches, with cracked copies of Wanted, the new Mummy film, Hancock, and even PSP games – the subject of Reeves’ resigned comments. But the worst is at number three.

Why why why oh why would anyone in their right mind wait three long and tense years for The Dark Knight to finally arrive – a film so mindblowingly perfect that scenes are still hurtling round my head days after witnessing it – only to download a dodgy copy to watch on a laptop? Whether it has the back of someone’s head in view for the duration is irrelevant – I doubt its $180 million budget was spent to be watched at 1,280 x 800 while you’re on the lav.

I can just about begin to understand some of the reasons behind it. Yes, the cinema is increasingly expensive, and bafflingly few people seem capable of holding their bladder for two and a half hours these days. And games that arrive across the pond months before they do so here can be infuriating when reviews are gushing with praise.

But the popular argument that these people then go on to buy a ticket or a copy of the DVD upon release just doesn’t cut it for me. You only get one first time. Rewatching a film when it then arrives in the cinema won’t let you unlearn the plot twists, and you’ll never get the same exhileration as the first time you sat in a crowded cinema and saw Batman turn his [SPOILER REMOVED] into a [SPOILER REMOVED] before [SPOILER REMOVED] into [SPOILER REMOVED] all in glorious HD. (See, I’m better than that.)

It’s like watching Match of the Day when you already know the results – you may as well just fast-forward to the goals.

But it’s human nature that some people would rather be the one to spoil the plot twists for others than to actually enjoy them for themselves, and the great shame is that innovations like BitTorrent have, unfortunately, given any spotty oik the means to do it.

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.

Pence per megabyte

Of course, you can do that with any old phone if you want to: but until recently, it’s been a pricey proposition. With my old Orange contract I paid £10 a month – around a quarter of my total bill – for ten megabytes of data transfer. Ten megabytes a month! Just the front page of Slashdot comes to over 500K.

And, naturally, if I ever used more than that, the price went up even further. Since there’s no easy way to tell how much data you’ve actually consumed at any given point – nor to predict how heavy a page will be until it arrives – I kept my mobile internet use to a bare minimum. (The barely-usable interfaces of most smartphones and mobile browsers played a part too.)

To be fair, not all data plans are as poor as mine was. T-Mobile, for example, offers a range of 1GB-per-month tariffs at quite reasonable prices. And Orange was always trying to persuade me to buy into various deals which would give me better value if I regularly used the net at certain times of day (and worse value if I didn’t).

But I’m not going to change providers just to get cheaper mobile internet access, especially not via the same old clunky devices. Nor am I interested in trying to calculate which mobile internet package best matches my highly sporadic usage.

And if I find that sort of thing too tedious to bother with, I’m pretty sure the man in the street will too.

So I think O2 has got it absolutely right by distilling the iPhone into a very simple proposition: “this is the world’s most usable mobile internet device, and you can use it as much as you like for one flat rate.” That’s an easy message to understand, and the price is pretty competitive too. Just what’s needed to coax smartphone skeptics onto the mobile browsing bandwagon.

Sucking up juice in the pub

For my own part, I was certainly excited about being free to browse without worrying about the bill. I pictured myself using Google to settle even the most trivial arguments in seconds. I imagined myself chatting to friends online just to while away long train journeys. Hell, if I ended up in a ropey pub, I could use the web to find a better one while finishing up my pint. And now I have my iPhone, I can indeed do all of these things.

Unfortunately, what I hadn’t realised is that doing so hammers your battery. I learnt that on my first day with the iPhone, which I largely spent trying out online resources: downloading things from the App Store, browsing Facebook as I walked down the street and marvelling at how the built-in YouTube application, coupled with a pretty decent speaker, turns the iPhone into a free video jukebox.

Within a few hours my battery was almost empty.

You can safely skip this digression

Now, I’m pretty old – or so our staff writers tell me – and I’ve had a lot of mobile phones in my time. But I particularly remember my first phone (a Motorola mr20), which I bought twelve years ago, because it had a standby battery life of around ten hours. And that caused a degree of trauma it’s hard to forget.

With such a short battery life, the thing needed charging every single night. If I ever ended up away from home for the night (hey, it happened), or simply forgot to put it on to charge before stumbling into bed (which admittedly happened more often), I’d be left incommunicado the next day.

Indeed, if someone called me in the morning, I’d always try to cut the call short. Otherwise, the strain on my battery could have caused it to expire before the evening. And then, who knows, I might have ended up missing out on the social event of the season.

Eventually, I upgraded to a Nokia 6130, which lasted for a good three or four days between charges, even when I’d been using it to – shock, horror – make phone calls. My phone-related anxieties evaporated. It was like a weight lifting from my shoulders.

iPhone better than phone from 1996

The iPhone 3G’s battery life isn’t stunning, but it’s nowhere near as bad as my old Motorola. It’s too soon to gauge properly, but it looks like it’ll happily stay on standby for at least three days. My alarming first-day experience arose from abnormally intensive use, which I’ll probably never repeat.

But nevertheless, it’s rekindled my long-dormant battery angst. I can indeed now sit on a train and chat with my friends – but will I still have a usable phone by the time I get to my destination? And yes, I can use Google to find a better pub, but will I be able to call my girlfriend to tell her where it is?

And so I find myself opening Safari with just as much trepidation as I used to open the browsers on my previous phones. The iPhone has delivered me from the fear of running up a huge bill, but in its place has come an equal fear of running down my battery.

For sure, overall the iPhone is still a great stride forward. But, alas, I’ve found that stride comes at a cost of… let’s say half a step back.