Posts by Jim Murray

Virgin Media wipes out websites with routing blackhole

No, there aren't any reliable providers left in the UK market and there won't be for so long as people want massive speeds for virtually no cost.

Reliable infrastructure and the people to keep it reliable are not cheap. Peering bandwidth is (generally) not cheap - yes, I know there are some reciprocal peering agreements but they're becoming less and less common now as cash-strapped providers look for some way to pay for the infrastructure the users are unwilling to pay for.

If you honestly think you can get a reliable 100Mb/sec downstream connection with no caps/throttling or limitations for the prices currently offered by Virgin then you are, quite honestly, delusional. EVERY ISP is recognizing the fact that bandwidth demand is far exceeding the cost users are willing to pay, hence the introduction of fair use policies, caps, throttling and more.

Until people are willing to pay for decent, reliable service it just won't exist - it's not economically viable.

Three questions that could put out Amazon's Fire

Not quite like Phorm

As one of the faces behind the anti-Phorm campaign I think there a few differences between what Amazon is doing and what Phorm tried to do.

Amazon is NOT imposing this on existing users. It's a feature of a new product developed by Amazon, not something bolted on later with no advance notice to users and no real consent. If you buy a Kindle Fire, you are, by definition, consenting to Amazon's use of this system. If you don't want to , either opt out or better yet don't buy a Kindle.

Do I think it's right - no I don't.

I don't see that it's necessary to 'pre-process' content in the modern computing environment. I suspect the whole thing is one big data-profiling excercise for the benefit solely of Amazon. I won't buy a Kindle, mainly because I don't like Amazon's business practices but to accuse them of 'doing a Phorm' is unfair - they have at least been open about what they are doing and why, the choice lies with the customer as to whether it's acceptable to them.

Jim.

Was Microsoft's Office 2010 worth killing Clippy?

Purely Cost

Having sucessfully migrated a number of small businesses away from Office I can say without question that it IS possible to do so and it DOES save a considerable sum of money.

As an example, one site I dealt with was looking at a bill of around £3000 for licensing office, a bill which was cut to £280 by taking the decsion to dump MS Office in favour of OpenOffice. I won't say the transition was completely painless but it was reasonably smooth (certainly easier than many other software migrations I've managed over the years). Management buy-in is essential, there WILL be bitching for a few weeks from some users but once this is overcome (through training or in some difficult cases by Word From Above) there is no more support overhead associated with OO than with MS Office.

A saving of over £2500 on a 10-user site is more than enough to kill any notion of upgrading for most small businesses - if the options are explained to them clearly.

BT pimped customer web data to advertisers last summer

Worse and worse

I'm not at all sure why Phorm seem to be interested in DNS lookups. From their own description of their technology they appear to have access to all the contents of any non-encrypted HTTP traffic, so what is the need to monkey with the DNS?

What do they gain from this, other than perhaps using it to obtain some details from those who are trying to evade it's data mining by technical means?

Where does it stop...

I'd love to hear from any other BT customers who with experience of Phorm, perhaps it'll shed some light on just how this company is actually going about it. Tails of woe welcome on www.badphorm.co.uk