Despite buying broadband-themed issues of the magazine in record numbers, and filling our comments sections with gripes about your pitiful connection speeds, you never really cared that the “up to 24Mbits/sec” line you were sold was denying you access to publicly funded services such as the iPlayer or ruining your business, did you?

At least that’s what our spine-free advertising watchdogs are claiming. The consultation document released by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) shows remarkable disdain for the broadband public; a grudging irritation that they’ve been forced to even consider this issue after years of outright advertising abuse by Britain’s ISPs.

“The disparity between theoretical maximum and actual speeds was not until recently considered to be so great as to cause significant detriment to consumers,” states the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) and its broadcast equivalent (BCAP), which carried out the review, whilst seemingly shrugging its shoulders and wondering what all the fuss is about.

It then manages to contradict itself mere paragraphs later. “The number of consumer complaints to the ASA about specific broadband speed claims has fallen significantly since 2007,” it states. Make your mind up – either this has only just become a problem, or it’s an old problem that people don’t care about any more. You can’t have it both ways.

However, the real sucker punch comes in the very next line. “The ASA continues, however, to receive general enquiries from the public and media comment, particularly in the technology press and user forums, which suggests some continuing dissatisfaction with the present policy.” In other words, they would have got away with it, if it wasn’t for people who know what they’re talking about kicking up a fuss. How inconvenient.

Neverthless, it still seems they’re going to do next to nothing about the broadband ad abuses. CAP/BCAP has “no plans” to prevent ISPs from using the weasel “up to” phrase in their advertising. And of the five proposals on the table for tightening up broadband ads, only one of them has any teeth – the proposal that would only allow ISPs to quote a speed that 50% of its consumers could receive.

If this is the option they go for – after a month of consultation with the ads industry – I’ll tattoo the phrase “I love the ASA” on my backside.

However, perhaps it is because it is a slow news day or I the fact that I need to get something geeky into my system following the mind-numbing experience that is shopping at Tesco, but a press release from Protegrity Corporation and Teradata managed to get me considering the speed of encryption question.

It would seem, in the case of the Protegrity/Teradata data security management partnership at any rate, the answer is more than 9 million encryptions per second. Decryption performance is lacking though, at just 6 million decryptions per second. Oh the shame!

The speeds were reported after testing carried out using a Protegrity Defiance data Protection System combined with Teradata User Defined Functions in order to embed encryption and decryption functionality within a database. The parallel architecture and high performance UDF implementation allows for a highly efficient execution utilising industry standard AES-256 encryption and a six node Teradata 5550 platform with 12 Intel Xeon processors.

All very impressive stuff. But when it comes to encryption speed records I guess it all comes down to how you do the measuring, the metric that you use. For sure, 9 million encryptions per second is a good one, no doubt about that. However, it just doesn’t seem to carry the same gravitas as creating an encryption key at 4 million bits per second over a distance of 1km. Now that has a certain Olympic feel about it, conjuring up images of some nerdy guy reciting the value of Pi to a million digits while running a marathon at the same time. That’s the kind of speed record I am talking about.

Unfortunately, when the people behind the record actually do start talking about it you might wish you hadn’t asked. How about “The NIST fiber QKD system has two channels operating over optical fibers that are wrapped around a spool between two personal computers in a laboratory. The photons are sent in different quantum states, or orientations of their electric field, representing 0 and 1. The system compensates for temperature changes and vibration, which could affect performance, with a NIST-designed module that automatically adjusts photon orientation on a time schedule” for starters?