It’s Safer Internet Day! The day on which we’re meant “to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology”, according to the official website. Instead, it seems many companies are using it to peddle irresponsible nonsense. Here’s just a few of those we’ve found – let us know if you find any more on comments below, and we’ll update the blog.

FREE AV WILL RIDDLE YOUR PCs WITH VIRUSES!

“You may think you’re safe surfing the web but there are any number of internet nasties that can creep up and harm your computer,” warns the video on Virgin Media’s Parental Controls site. “If you have no internet security installed, or just other basic free solutions, viruses and malware can take over.”

Really? Running something such as Microsoft Security Essentials or AVG Free will leave you with a virus-riddled heap of silicon, will it? Even with detection rates that are not much worse than the Trend Micro-supplied software offered by Virgin? That’s scaremongering of the highest order. As our forthcoming Labs on internet security software will prove…

BRITAIN’S “SAFEST BROADBAND CONNECTION”

You may recall the ever-fearsome Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) recently took exception to TalkTalk describing its service as the “UK’s safest broadband”, just because it provides network-level content filtering.

Luckily, TalkTalk found a way around that ban – by adding the word “connection” to the end of that phrase – as we can see from the company’s Facebook page, which is of course promoting Safer Internet Day.

We’ll remind you what the ASA said about TalkTalk’s adverts last month. “Customers could interpret ‘safest’ as referring to a number of features, such as virus protection or protection from hacking, and that HomeSafe only offered a basic range of security features”.

A “basic range of security features” or “the UK’s safest broadband connection”? Which sounds more plausible to you?

POLICE VIDEO NASTY

As we pointed out yesterday, why bother spending taxpayers’ money educating the public about internet safety, when you can knock out a nauseating fifties-style public information video that is so bereft of information and entertainment value, even ITV4 wouldn’t touch it?

Step forward the Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre (CEOP) – funded by the taxpayer to the tune of £6.4m per year – with this enormous waste of time and money.

I suspect it would cause a bit of a stir. The Daily Mail would be apoplectic.  #burnrupertmurdoch would be a trending topic on Twitter in less time than it takes to strike a match.

Yet, Britain’s biggest ISPs and Ofcom are driving us towards exactly this kind of scenario on the internet. At a Westminster eForum last week, TalkTalk’s director of strategy unashamedly admitted that he could foresee a situation where Google paid his company to give YouTube priority bandwidth over the BBC iPlayer. His counterpart from BT said likewise. Both described it as a “legitimate business practice”.

So Britain’s two biggest ISPs, with more than seven million customers between them, would happily cripple a publicly-funded service for a pot of cash. And for those, like my colleagues David Fearon and Tim Danton on last week’s PC Pro podcast, who argue that this is an over-reaction, that giving one service priority over another doesn’t mean the other wouldn’t work, ask yourself this: why would content providers pay an ISP for priority bandwidth if everything worked hunky dory without it?

Why would content providers pay an ISP for priority bandwidth if everything worked hunky dory without it?

Worse still, we’re not only talking about giving one more bandwidth than the other: the prospect of ISPs actually cutting off websites because their rivals have paid for exclusivity is also being discussed at the very highest levels.

Nigel Hickson, head of EU and international ICT policy at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, said the Government was actively considering the following type of scenario:

“I sign up to the two-year contract [with an ISP] and after 18 months my daughter comes and knocks on the lounge door and says – Father, I can’t access Facebook anymore. I say – why? She says – it is quite obvious, I have gone to the site and I have found that TalkTalk, BT, Virgin, Sky, whatever don’t take Facebook anymore, Facebook wouldn’t pay them the money, but YouTube has so I have gone to YouTube. Minister, is that acceptable? That is the sort of question that we face.”

For most people, the answer to that question would be ‘absolutely not’. For telecoms regulator Ofcom, the answer is ‘bring it on’.

Laissez-faire regulator

Ofcom has recently completed a public consultation on net neutrality. The results are absolutely frightening, if Alex Blowers, the regulator’s international director, is to be believed.

When I asked him specifically if Ofcom had any objections to content owners paying ISPs for preferential traffic, he replied:

“We were very clear in our discussion document that we see the real economic merits to the idea of allowing a two-sided market to emerge, particularly for applications like IPTV where it seems to us that the consumer expectation will be a surface which is of a reasonably consistent quality that allows you to actually sit down at the beginning of a film and watch it to the end without constant problems of jitter or the picture hanging or whatever.

So from our point of view we were pretty clear on that point, and nobody has yet knocked us off that view that a two-sided market could be economically beneficial. The issue is, as always, the devil is in the detail.”

To be fair to Blowers, he did say that both the EU and Ofcom would demand transparency from the ISPs, and that the EU would almost certainly object to the outright blocking of legal services. But just because a particular website or service isn’t blocked, it doesn’t mean it can’t suffer irreparable damage.

The Skype problem

Net neutrality has already been smashed by most of Britain’s biggest ISPs. All of the big six British ISPs routinely discriminate between different types of internet traffic: putting the brakes on peer-to-peer traffic during peak hours, for example. They claim this is necessary to deliver a smooth and consistent service to all of their customers, although it’s worth noting that the seven-time winner of PC Pro’s broadband ISP award, Zen Internet, doesn’t deploy traffic management (and is routinely praised for the speed of its connections), nor do some of the big ISPs in the US.

Slowing peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl doesn’t only harm the bandwidth hogs who are trying to download ten different HD movies from Pirate Bay, it harms legitimate services too

This blanket discrimination against certain protocols can be enormously damaging. Slowing peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl doesn’t only harm the bandwidth hogs who are trying to download ten different HD movies from Pirate Bay, it harms legitimate services too.

As Skype’s director of government and regulatory affairs, Jean-Jacques Sahel, pointed out:

“Peer-to-peer applications are very wide ranging, they go from the lovely peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that were referred to in the Digital Economy Act, all the way to things like the BBC iPlayer [which used to be P2P] or indeed Skype, which is both a VoIP and a peer-to-peer application. So what does that mean? If I manage my traffic from a technical perspective, knowing that Skype actually doesn’t eat up much bandwidth at all, why should that be de‐prioritised because it’s peer-to-peer as opposed to any other applications.”

Sahel pointed to the mobile market as a prime example of the harmful effects of such blocking. Skype is routinely blocked – both by protocol and specifically – by British mobile networks, who are worried that the VoIP service would harm their voice revenues. Campaigners such as The Open Rights Group’s chief executive Jim Killock are worried that fixed-line broadband is heading down the same path:

“You look at the levels of restriction on devices in the mobile sector compared to what we are able to do on our computers at home and it’s an entirely different world. This is why I say look at the mobile market, think if that is how you want your internet and your devices to work in the future because that is sort of where these things are leading.”

Britain’s sleepwalking into a net neutrality nightmare, and the powers that be think it’s a good thing.

That’s why broadband company TalkTalk teamed up with students from Goldsmiths University of London to create a series of conceptual routers that push the design beyond a black plastic box with obtrusions exploding from the rear.

Here’s what they came up with:

ROUTE O’CLOCK

The bastard lovechild of the Countdown Clock and a wireless router, the Route O’Clock changes colour to display the speed of the internet connection during different parts of the day. The aim is to provide a simple visual cue to users, encouraging them to perform large downloads during off-peak hours when there is maximum bandwidth available.

“This router is essentially a twenty-four hour clock divided into half hourly segments,” The Goldsmiths team explains. “As a reaction to the broadband signal, a different traffic light colour indicates bandwidth strength at each interval.”

ENERGY SAVING ROUTER

Leaving the router on while you’re at work all day is dragging us ever closer to the nightmare scenario of Birmingham-On-Sea. The Goldsmiths students’ answer? Combine the router with a simple key hook, which switches off when everyone’s left the house.

“We identified house-key hooks as an appropriate indicator for the presence and absence of people within the home,” the team claims. “So, we programmed the router to switch off automatically when the last key is taken off of a hook. When someone returns home and re-engages a hook, it then switches back on in time for them to start surfing.”

An automatic timer would allow users to set the router to stay on for an extra couple of hours after they leave the house, if they want to complete a large download.

HYBRID ROUTER

The reason that grown adults exert more effort hiding their router than a teenager does hiding his “magazine collection” is because the hideous-looking device sprouts more wires than a patient in intensive care. The Hybrid Router attempts to add a splash of style to proceedings.

The guts of the router are hidden inside the funky-looking hardwood table, with no eyesore aerials and only the bare minimum of trailing wires.

“Contemporary homes have to deal with the mess of wires that come with a high-tech lifestyle,” says the Goldsmiths crew. “So we created a stylish side table that can hold and disguise our router cables, as well as other objects – making it a multi-functional piece of furniture.

“Flashing lights, hidden behind frosted acrylic, signal the presence of the router embedded within the base of the table, and add a subtle glow. It’s an ambient object, integrating classic lines into a modern living space.”

THE JELLYFISH

Give students free rein and one of two things will happen: supermarket trollies will be turned into late-night taxis back from the pub and they’ll come up with something as ludicrous as the Jellyfish.

“This is our craziest design and we were given full creative license,” the team explains. “We wanted to place the router at the centre of the community, at the heart of the house. We wanted to come up with a router that would live and breath; an organic element inspired by nature that would be emotionally engaging for its users and become a real talking point.”

Those tentacles aren’t just for show, either. Each of those can house an Ethernet cable, creating a router with up to eight different devices connected.

Make no mistake: BT’s decision to drop Phorm is a cataclysmic blow for the advertising firm (as reflected by the sharp drop in its share price this morning). In one stroke, it’s lost the UK’s single biggest ISP and its closest ally.

Phorm’s three UK ISP partners – BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk – have been playing a cowardly game of chicken over the past 18 months. The service has attracted so much negative publicity that all three have sat on the fence, hoping that one of the others would be brave enough to roll out the service, so they could judge just how much of a PR disaster it would be.

BT was the only one of the three to have completed a full public trial of Webwise and has long been the favourite to deploy first. Now, it’s decided it’s perfectly comfortable collecting splinters on the fence. “The interest-based advertising market is extremely dynamic and we intend to monitor Phorm’s progress with other ISPs and with Webwise Discover before finalising our plans,” the company claims.

The harsh truth is Phorm has made startlingly little progress with either of the other ISPs. Virgin has been repeatedly forced to deny stories that its interest in Phorm was waning over the past couple of months, while its customer service team has (unofficially, according to Virgin) been sending out letters reassuring worried customers that it has no plans to roll out Phorm.

TalkTalk, meanwhile, has just bought Tiscali and its associated ISPs, and faces months of complicated integration work ahead. A distraction like Phorm is the last thing it needs. Neither Virgin or TalkTalk have even tested Webwise with their customers, let alone committed to a rollout.

BT has also undermined Phorm’s chief selling point: that it’s a money-spinner for ISPs. “Given our public commitment to developing next-generation broadband and television services in the UK we have decided to weigh up the balance of resources devoted to other opportunities,” BT claims, suggesting that it views Phorm as a cost rather than a pot of gold. So much for the service that was going to help boost the finances of ISPs.

In short, despite a public relations onslaught and concerted attempts to convince everyone from ISPs, to politicians, to advertisers about the merits of its technology, Phorm seems no closer to rollout in the UK than it was 18 months ago, when it first arrived on these shores.  In fact, its chances of success have never looked weaker.

Earlier this year, Canon blamed none other than hapless ex-England manager Steve McClaren for costing it millions of pounds of digital camera sales. Why? Because Canon was one of the official sponsors of Euro 2008 and thanks to the umbrella man’s incompetence, fewer footy fans would stop mid-game, turn to their mate and say: “Sod this penatly shootout, I’m popping down to Dixons and picking up an Ixus” every time the Canon logo appeared on screen.

Now the Carphone Warehouse’s Charles Dunstone is blaming his company’s sliding broadband sales on the property slump. “One of the key times people change broadband provider is when they move house,” he claims in today’s Times. “If you’re not moving house, the catalyst to make you think about changing provider does not exist.”

Hmmm… I’d say the main catalyst for switching broadband provider is shocking service from an ISP. And how did Carphone’s TalkTalk rank for customer service in the most recent PC Pro Awards? A mighty two stars out of six for customer support and one for reliability.

Perhaps Mr Dunstone should be looking a little bit closer to home?

The answer, according to those lovely folks over at BT and TalkTalk, appears to be “as difficult as we can possibly make it without sticking two fingers up and suggesting yoghurt pots and a piece of string”.

Here’s the deal: the current TalkTalk line is in the process of being transferred to the previous tenant’s new address, but I’ve been told that’ll take a whopping four weeks (starting, bizarrely, from a week after I moved in). Both TalkTalk and BT have insisted I cannot do anything with the perfectly good phone line in my house until after that point – despite the fact that it’s currently taking and making no calls. It’s effectively useless.

Even worse, though, is that both companies then proceeded to fight to not have to take my custom. TalkTalk insisted the line would automatically revert to BT after that, and they could no longer help me – odd seeing as most of their new customers are switched over from BT lines. BT countered by saying the line was now TalkTalk’s property, and I’d have to stump up £125 to get it switched back over.

Faced with the not wholly attractive prospect of waiting four weeks to find I have no line at all, I gave up on the both of them.

Five minutes later, I got off the phone to Virgin Media. My broadband is already activated, I can install it myself and I’ll be online (with a far more reliable connection than ADSL, I’d imagine) in days. Now if only they still showed Sky One…