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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First look: the Android G1

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

After months of hype, we’ve finally laid hands and eyes on the most hotly-anticipated mobile phone launch since the first iPhone came out.

As you’ll probably know by now, unless you’ve been living in a particularly dark and damp cave over the past few months and weeks, the T-Mobile G1 is the first handset to sport Google’s Android mobile operating system. And, after a brief tete-a-tete with the phone this morning, we’re ready to report our first impressions. So how does it stack up?

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T-Mobile’s magic stick

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

This past fortnight, I have been mostly testing USB mobile broadband modems. Testing them until my eyes bleed.

Until yesterday, T-Mobile had provided us with the larger Huawei E220 USB modem you can see at the top of the photo here. And to be honest, it was pretty ropey. Tim Danton described last week the trouble he had installing the device and the download speeds we recorded – even when sat upon the 6th floor balcony here at Dennis Towers – were distinctly underwhelming. Speeds were typically hovering around 300-400Kb/sec, placing T-Mobile well behind rivals such as Vodafone and 3.

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