Posts by James

Parliament's take on Freedom of Information

Copyright's raison d'etre

It's important to bear in mind the justification for copyright restrictions: in order to provide creators with a reward for creating work, so I can make money out of writing novels, developing software, composing music or whatever. None of that applies to Parliament, which is not supposed to be in the business of, er, business: it's funded by our taxes in order to legislate on our behalf, not to create commercial products!

The US government has the right idea here: we pay for it through our taxes, so the copyright belongs to the public (i.e. public domain) not to the individual bit of our government we paid to do the work for us. If they license something from a commercial entity, that's different - but anything we pay for, we should own.

NSA spied on US aid workers, officers, and journalists in Baghdad

Domestic versus foreign wiretapping

Most of the protection is supposed to relate to *domestic* calls - spying on phone calls in a foreign country is a very different matter. Did anyone expect them to go and try to get a warrant from an Iraqi court first? Come on, the NSA monitoring what's going on in Baghdad should hardly come as a surprise to anyone!

Defrauded punter says 'catflaps' to PayPal marketing stunt

Painpal

I don't think I can find much sympathy for the guy apparently shipping a £300 phone to an unverified address without using recorded delivery! The one time I got scammed, it was as a customer; Paypal weren't particularly helpful, but I did get a full refund via my credit card company. What exactly did this guy expect - Paypal should just eat the loss for him, even though he hadn't taken the basic precautions they tell you to? Why should they be left out of pocket for his business mistake?

Paris, because I bet she could figure out the bit about verified addresses.

Ballmer gives Norwegian students free love

Empty gesture, nothing new

They've been doing this for many years - I remember getting Visual Studio 6 (complete with NT 4 Server, SQL Server and the other bits) as a student (here in the UK) along with a beta of Visual Studio .Net, back when those were the latest versions out there.

Did it work? Well, in addition to Linux and Solaris hosted websites I do develop software for Windows (and the Mac) ... in Java. That would be a no, then.

Right now, I can just grab the developer tools for most of the common platforms and languages with nothing more than a web search or two. The biggest difference, from my perspective, is that if I want anything more than the most basic tools for Microsoft's platforms, I either have to go to dodgy sites or extract a pile of cash from someone first - for other platforms, it's a straightforward download. No messing around with Crippled Edition with Bits Missing, product keys etc.

Even Microsoft themselves ended up posting what amounts to a "crack" for the free Express Edition, since they had gone too far in crippling it before release!

With programs like this, the free 'Express Edition', giving small software companies five licenses for MSDN Universal for £200/yr etc, it's obvious MS can see there's a problem here - the question is, are they prepared to go far enough to deal with it? So far: no.

Google's IP 'anonymization' inadequate, says EU watchdog

Fraud

Looking at the IP addresses generating particular results is a key part of detecting fraud: it isn't the searches, it's the adverts Google serves. If I stick Google ads on my site and click on them myself, I'd get paid by Google - unless they notice it's my IP address (or a suspicious pattern of addresses) generating those clicks. Remember, Google is more than just a search engine.

Similarly, what "unnecessary" personal data? IP addresses are not personal data - but Google does hold e-mail, passwords, billing information and other things for a great many people. This nonsense about IP addresses is absurd when they hold actual personal information for perfectly good reason. Do these people worry about their GPs knowing what kind of car they drive, too?

Paris, because she'd probably miss the point too.

Noel Edmonds defies BBC's jackbooted enforcers

Jackbooted anachronisms

The TV Tax and the notion that we "need" a vast government monopoly to provide us with a handful of channels of expensive tat when other companies are quite happy to provide dozens of alternatives are both completely outdated. There may be a justification for genuine 'public service' broadcasts - educational content, coverage of Parliamentary sessions etc - but that is a far cry from anything the BBC exists for today.

As another poster pointed out, with the switch to digital we had the perfect opportunity to eliminate the 'enforcers' entirely: make the "license" a viewing card, without which you don't receive channels. End of story. Of course, the BBC was terrified this would be the first step towards making their overpriced subsciption optional, hence their rush to dumb down Freeview receivers to remove this facility as soon as ITV Digital was out of the picture.

* It is a monopoly in the legal and economic sense, since we are not permitted to replace it with a competitor, whether we want it or not.

Bill - because he knows all about expensive monopolies, but at least we can use computers without being forced to pay him now.

Obama: McCain can't email, remembers Rubik's Cubes

Not sending e-mail

He doesn't say that he doesn't understand it, simply that he feels no need to send e-mail himself. Perfectly understandable: he's had one or more secretaries to deal with that for him for more than two decades! I doubt he feels any need to type, either - not because he doesn't understand the concept, simply because he pays someone else to do it for him.

I feel no need to go out and perform an oil-change, for that matter...

Euro mobe companies mass against cap proposals

Crying wolf to protect the perfect scam

We all know these companies love to screw their customers, but the insanely high termination charges allowed them to go one better and screw *other* companies' customers instead: if Vodafone charge me too much to make calls to other people, I can switch - but if they demand an arm and a leg from other people to call me, there's nothing they can do about it short of not calling me. It doesn't matter if O2 or Orange would be cheaper, because they aren't making that choice!

It's good to see one telco being honest enough to admit, in effect, that it's all just a scam. It infuriates me whenever I have to call a mobile that I know I'm being screwed by whichever company is terminating the call - for that matter, I feel the same way about incoming calls, knowing that the caller is being screwed for calling me. Yes, they'll either have to eat a slight drop in profits, or push prices up a bit somewhere else - the same is true of ending *any* price gouging, though!

C&W orders up base stations for Tesco

Employees?

I'd have thought their plans would extend further than that, particularly with the Tesco Mobile customers (who are normally on O2, since it's a joint venture with O2). I'd like to see nanocells, too: T-Mobile offer these in the US now (pay $10/month and get a base station in your house, with unlimited calls using your mobile at home), why can't we have that here?

For that matter, if C&W have this license now, why haven't they done anything (that we've heard of) yet?

US wireless pioneer to carriers: Don't be European

Deja vu all over again

Back in the early days of the Net, all the big players seemed determined to ram their precious "content" down our throats, often by keeping us confined to "walled gardens" where we had little choice: AOL's the most obvious example, but Compuserve/CIM, Prodigy, MSN - they were all plugging the same agenda, and all failed, eventually evolving into ISPs.

Then the mobile companies tried to pull the same thing here, with their beloved pay-per-byte WAP, with visions of us checking our train times, news and sports scores on our phones - with every click making them a little bit richer, of course. We all know how that turned out for them.

No doubt their US counterparts would like to do the same, although I think that boat has already sailed: certainly I saw AT&T promoting their Internet access more heavily than the UK companies have, not to mention the iPhone, which is very definitely built for accessing the Internet via AT&T, not for accessing AT&T content.

Google to ‘anonymize’ user IPs after 9 months

Misses the point

The IP address which submitted any given query is irrelevant after 9 months anyway: it doesn't uniquely identify you (most of them are dynamic anyway, so the guy using 1.2.3.4 today probably isn't the same guy using it tomorrow) or provide a way to contact you. There's stuff Google have on most of us which is actually personal, like our e-mail addresses and search histories — the IP addresses are a complete red herring.

Paris, because she'd probably fall for the red herring too.

Debian components breach terms of GPLv2

GPL requirements

fluffy, it's a bit more restrictive than that: you have the option of providing an offer, *in writing*, to supply the source code to anyone who asks for it in exchange for a fee to cover duplication costs.

Or, to quote the GNU GPL FAQ: "If you want to distribute binaries by anonymous FTP, you have to distribute sources along with them. This should not be hard. If you can find a site to distribute your program, you can surely find one that has room for the sources.

The sources you provide must correspond exactly to the binaries. In particular, you must make sure they are for the same version of the program—not an older version and not a newer version."

So, shipping the binary of version X and source of version Y isn't good enough, nor is shipping CDs of X with the source to Y and putting the source of version X on your website. It's a pretty minor and accidental 'violation' in this case, though, so just getting the versions back in sync should be good enough.

Bosch strategy boutique fails greenwash test

At least there's hydrogen involved...

The international flight will involve a fair bit of carbon, and the Solid Rocket Boosters on the side aren't nice chemicals, but the Space Shuttle Main Engines are hydrogen fueled: the giant orange tank is a container of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which is supposed to be The Fuel Of The Future(TM), as we're always being told.

(Of course, producing that hydrogen isn't clean, but burning it only produces water.)

How to stop worrying and enjoy paying for incoming calls

It's called line rental.

To most of us, that ADSL payment is effectively part of the line rental for VoIP services, particularly since I'd like to think most of us are on flat-rate services of one sort or another. Receiving a call does *not* cost us money, because the bill we get for that month is the same whether we receive it or not unless it just happens to be the final few packets which push us over some usage threshold, which is very unlikely.

I think termination fees for all devices should be the same, either the fraction of a penny per minute BT and Virgin get now for landline calls, or zero, as for a lot of Internet traffic at peering points. I don't think incoming calls should cost anyone: the (trivial) cost of terminating incoming calls should be recovered through line rental except on pre-pay phones. The present termination fees are insanely high, to the extent that one operator pays customers to receive incoming calls; the idea that cutting these would require charging for incoming calls instead really needs to be killed off. BT doesn't charge me to receive landline calls, even though it gets two orders of magnitude less payment from my callers than those calling my Vodafone line!

(Bill, because he knows all about big companies screwing people with hidden charges.)

Holiday text messages to cost less than 9p

Roaming

I do the same as David Barr, just paying local PAYG rates for calls and data. The roaming rates do seem completely insane, not that I have much interest in EU-specific regulations since I travel outside the EU rather than inside.

I think I should be able to set up a Skype number which will forward to whatever my temporary local number is when I'm abroad, which would simplify things, but haven't looked too closely yet (I didn't bother on my last trip).

Mobile companies have a long list of scams: charging the poor people who call you from landlines through the nose, charging you through the nose if you set foot outside your home country, often ripping you off on data at home as well - yet still pouring a fortune into giving away handsets as loss leaders, screwing us on every other aspect of service to pay for it! I'd be happy to see those three scams ended, even if it meant actually paying for the shiny gadgets instead of paying through the nose to get them "free".

Bill, because he knows all about giving one thing away free in order to screw you on others...

Vodafone says termination rate clampdown would hit the poor

About time too.

The current charge for calling mobiles from landlines is absolutely insane. How on earth can anyone pretend it actually "costs" Vodafone and co €0.08 per minute for incoming calls, when they sell outgoing calls for a tiny fraction of that price - and at least one operator finds enough change from that one euro-cent to pay customers a penny per minute to receive incoming calls!? (Also, if I call one mobile from another, it's often *free* - which, according to Vodafone-maths, means they're haemorrhaging money on that call. Somehow, I doubt that.)

I'd make it like Internet peering at LINX and co: you pay for your network, I'll pay for mine - and neither side pays the other for traffic in either direction, it's just exchanged on a reciprocal basis. Yes, this kills off one nice cash cow for the mobile telcos, while freeing the fixed operators, but it's hardly likely to kill those mobile telcos, just adjust their pricing a bit. An extra quid a month for contracts, an extra penny a minute for PAYG - no big deal, but we'll no longer be shafted for calling mobiles from landlines. Sounds good to me.

Ofcom considers termination charges

Termination charges here already, and bad

"I'm gonna get me an 090 number with a £1.50 a minute charge rate (or more if I can manage it) and wave that around in my contact details, in front of as many marketing parasites as I can."

Apart from being cheaper than £1.50, that's exactly how mobiles work right now: callers pay through the nose in inflated termination fees. The "termination fee" is not a charge to you for receiving calls, it's the fee callers pay right now to have their call delivered ("terminated" in telco-speak) at your handset.

Right now, the termination fees for mobiles are much, much higher than for landlines. Ofcom decided they were unreasonable (obvious even to the dimmest regulator, when one mobile company actually started paying its users to receive calls to boost profits!) and forced them down a little bit, but they're still far too high.

What I hope is that Ofcom is considering removing, or at least slashing, this termination fee. This would bring the cost of calling mobiles down closer to the cost of calling landlines - and no, it wouldn't mean paying to receive calls, it would just mean the networks would have to make their profits on something other than incoming calls. When they are selling their own customers outgoing call time at 200 minutes (plus 200 texts, line rental and an expensive handset), how on earth can they pretend it "costs" the better part of 10p/min for them to handle incoming calls?! Even 1p/min is inflated - but far less than they charge in termination fees right now.

Apple slapped for dodgy ads

Yet Virgin get away with it

So, because it lacks two particular plugins, Apple get slapped down - yet Virgin are allowed to keep lying about their cable modems being "fibre optic broadband", on the pathetic excuse that their network backbone is fibre optic (just like every ADSL provider) and "only" the "final mile" connection is copper (again, just like every ADSL provider). Equally, "unlimited" is apparently allowed to include all sorts of limits, and confusing bits with bytes is OK, because that's "only" exaggerating the capacity by a factor of eight.

I wonder how they'd react to a complaint about themselves, on the basis they clearly have no standards?

iPhone passwords not worth the paper they're written on

Jailbreaking

The funny side-story to this is that it is, in fact, almost exactly how the early jailbreak/hacktivation trick worked! Before 'activating' the phone with iTunes, you can only make emergency calls - which means you can also access Favourites, which let you open Safari, which in turn could be used to jailbreak the iPhone through a buffer overflow. Hey presto, jailbroken iPhone, without even plugging it into a computer!

Sadly, Apple fixed that buffer overflow early on, making jailbreaks slightly more difficult. As others have pointed out, though, once you have physical access, almost any computer's security is null and void; apart from anything else, with most systems - including the iPhone - you can simply boot from external media and use your own OS in place of the currently installed one. A trick I often have to use when users forget their Windows passwords...

Election watchdog makes ID card U-turn

Absurdly insecure

It always seemed absurdly insecure to me that we aren't already required to produce photo ID before voting; literally anyone who knows me could turn up at my local polling station, give my name and address and cast my ballot without me knowing! Presumably that would be discovered if I turned up later to cast my vote, only to be told that "I" had already voted - but that's a pretty feeble excuse, not to mention being totally worthless if anyone knows I'm on holiday that day, for example, or have told someone I won't be bothering to vote this time.

Paris, because even she could do a better job of securing a voting system.

BBC iPlayer upgrade prompts new ISP complaints

Two steps backwards

In the longer term - the next few years - the BBC should be moving to multicast delivery anyway, which is apparently what the iPlayer had been intended to use originally, except the older BT ADSL connections don't support that yet. (The new network being rolled out over the next four years, "21CN", does, along with the higher top speed of 24 Mbps.) This would be delivered, presumably, from the BBC's existing server farm connected to LINX, rather than going through some third party.

Moving to Level3's CDN rather than Akamai's seems like a step back as well, from Akamai's ubiquitous and fast (but expensive) network which offloads peering links, cutting ISP costs, to making more money for Level3 (by charging ISPs for peering). It's probably cheaper for the BBC, but will be less efficient and more expensive for ISPs - when the move to multicast will be the opposite.

Wireless browsers shut out of the Olympics

License fee?

This is very stupid in two ways: you can be in the UK without owning a TV, and thus access the BBC's services without paying, or (as others here have pointed out already) you can be a license-fee payer overseas, prohibited from accessing the content you're paying for.

I really hoped that with the digital switchover, license-fee enforcement would become purely technological (as it is already for Sky subscriptions, cable, mobile phone service etc): your license fee would get you a smart card to insert into your set top box in order to watch BBC services. No license fee, no card, no BBC signal: as simple as that. No more threatening letters to non-TV owners from Capita (the company which collects the fee), no watching without a license - everyone wins, except the freeloaders! Throw in some sort of PIN or user account, and it'll even work fine for online content, wherever you are.

(OK, there's a loophole with multiple sets and multiple user accounts, but that should be much easier to deal with.)

Watchdog hits 070 swindlers with big fine

Stupid regulator

IMO the blame falls firmly on Ofcom for allowing a plethora of disguised premium rate numbers. We used to have 0898 numbers, which cost an arm and a leg and everyone knew it. Those moved to 09..., which is fine: anything starting 09 is a premium rate number.

What they should not have allowed is the creation of lower premium rate numbers in the 07, 084 and 087 ranges. 0845 is not "local rate" for anything except perhaps BT payphones: it is far more expensive to call than any genuinely local or indeed long distance, because it's a long distance call plus a surcharge paid to the recipient. Ditto 0870 and 070, only with bigger surcharges: they are merely premium rate for all intents and purposes, except misleading advertising scams like this.

If Ofcom had the brains and guts to say "all premium numbers must be in the 09 range", this scam would have flopped - particularly if they barred the presentation of premium rate numbers in Caller ID and 1471. Instead, they go and create these stupid loopholes for disguising ripoff numbers, then blame those who fall for it!