Posts by Christopher W

Cloud iTunes DESTROYS music business FOREVER!

It was just one use case

My sister, who's one generation of kids after me, used to swap files mostly via sneakernet (Bluetooth via mobiles etc). She had (stlil has) LOTS of low quality MP3s.

For those who have massive collections amassed via P2P (Limewire, Grokster, even KaZaA or ripping audio from video sites etc) the quality will likely be very variable. Collections can go back five, ten, even fifteen years. There's still a lot of 96s, 128s and 160s floating around on P2P. I'm well versed on what's available both publicly and privately on BT and Tor, I grew up with Audiogalaxy, Napster, XDCC etc. ;-)

Even for people who download 16/44.1 FLACs, they can still get a guaranteed, 10-device-synced version of the file for their iDevices and have it legitimately tied to their Apple ID as long as they pay the almost token sum of $25 a year.

Please clarify

Andrew, you realise that the uploading of content-to-Match isn't transcoding or reencoding, the audio is identified via fingerprint? After that, a copy of the AAC file (as available on iTunes), encoded from the label-supplied lossless master, is made available in your iTunes library through your Match account. There's no transcoding of MP3s, that'd be horribly inefficient and error-prone if metadata was wrong/missing etc. That's what I took from where you wrote about it "chewing and spitting out" AACs)... You may want to rephrase that to clarify.

For the handful of files it might not be able to identify from fingerprinting, it will upload the original files and then (I hope!) make those originals available from the cloud instead of transcoding to AAC. Transcoding would make no sense, and Apple (to be fair) are pretty anally retentive about audio quality through iTunes.

I work in the music industry in the independent sector, and I think - as Apple will have already carefully thought about and realised - that there will be a subset of customers who immediately attempt to use it to 'legitimise' their huge catalogue of unlicensed (read: shonky) MP3s. However, once they're locked into that $25-a-year model... Boom. Pure profit from that customer after year 1.

Far more importantly for labels, it's yet to be revealed what the actual base royalty rate will be as paid to labels whenever a customer is given access to a track through Match. Given a track sale through the iTunes store only yields (on average) 50-59p gross to the label, I suspect iTunes Match royalties will be comparabie to Spotify levels of royalty, which are an absolute pittance. (You have to get multiple hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify to earn more than $100.)

I'm on the fence about Match at the moment. We could see another incremental source of revenue, but I guarantee it won't be a large amount (and lots of our catalogue has been pirated and shared online, particularly on filesharing blogs). We send out DMCA notices if we see lots of catalogue sprout up but we could send out hundreds a day and never get on top of the problem.

We'll have to see if Apple implements and enforces a FUP with regards to how many tracks you can fingerprint and get access to at once - the majors (whose favourable royalty rates haven't been disclosed, but still won't be amazing) will get really pissed off if the majority of Match customers use the service to basically download 128kbps (or lower!) MP3s then get a pretty-much-free upgrade to 256kbps, DRM free, A+ quality AACs. I know I'd be pissed off by that.

Mine's the one with a copy of the iTunes Music Store Style Guide handbook in it

A peek inside Apple's iCloud data center

Nor is it very ethical!

From the company that brought you unibody Macs (which seem fairly environmentally friendly) - coal-fired electricity to power their cloud services... Natch.

Producing RED devices with one tentacle, destroying the world's future climate with another. Perhaps they want the Earth to glow white during use like their flaming logo?

iTunes Match is iPiracy, claims loopy Oz industry troll

Apple of course!

Apple takes 30% just for being special. The remaining 70% will likely be split 58/12 - 58% of the remainder to labels, 12% for the US publishing. This will have to change for non-US royalties because publishing is administered differently in the US from almost everywhere else in the world because the rest of the world usually has just one unified collection agency per country, not two or three!

Thing is, the actual amount on which the royalty will be calculated will be an absolute pittance - revenues will probably be similar to Spotify (where you need hundreds of thousands of plays to earn $100).

Nope, cleverer

Neither - ID3s can go missing or be wholly incorrect, they'll almost certainly be going the Shazam-esque route and using previously produced fingerprints of the audio provided by the labels (through a third party service) to identify the tracks. These are VERY resistant to abuse, degradation, corruption or even transcoding / playing out of a speaker then rerecording back in via micrphone!)

Think of YouTube's audio ID and replacement system; this also uses the same fingerprinting solution (it's likely Audible Magic's platform). We've been courted by Audible Magic at work (indie label) to fingerprint our catalogue in the past (at the behest of Merlin); we've not done it yet as the cost is disproportionate and it wouldn't stop people uploading entire albums in RARs to blogspots.

Tesco pricing cock-up provokes beer stampede

Not really

Several moons ago, when I worked at Tesco, I sometimes had the job of oversight on the self checkouts. (they're all manufactured by NCR and the manual inside the top lid makes for some amusing reading - also some have keyboards in the cabinet underneath the main controller's station, they all run Windows XP!)

There's no way to manually adjust prices of things already scanned (deliberately!), you can only void off items if the customer doesn't want to buy them.

I'm sure they will have cottoned on though if every single customer just had three multipacks of Stella... However the tills could just as easily have been closed, forcing customers to go the manual route.

Bletchley Park completes epic Tunny machine

This = amazing

Bletchley Park is one of the most undervalued historical landmarks in Britain, nay, Western Europe. Incredible feats of both human and computer engineering were achieved there during one of the pivotal times in recent history and I find it disgraceful that parts of it continue to suffer from underfunding and lack of understanding about the Park's significance. Where's the EU funding for BP? What about some more from the Lottery Heritage fund? Surely there's some spare in the 2012 budget, we can't have frittered it all away on shuttle bus lanes and Underground extensions.

I can't stand to see how some of the Park is, quite literally, still falling apart, and I applaud the team of staff and volunteers for continuing to maintain it as best they can and preserve the immensely important site and its contents for future generations of visitors. (why is the whole site not listed as a national treasure already and fully funded by the Government?!)

I will most certainly be visiting the Park again soon to see this new exhibit, it sounds absolutely fantastic.

Virgin outsources techies, pulls plug on Trowbridge call centre

That's a shame

I used to live near Trowbridge when I was growing up, even went to school there. I remember when VM opened its call centre, quite a few people coming out of college or GCSEs who didn't want to do the Uni route were given their first opportunity into work (including a couple of my friends) and it sounded like a pretty good place to work from some of the stories I heard.

This last little bastion of locality means they might as well just port all their customers over to T-Mobile and be done with it, there's no real value left in the Mobile part of the company any more AFAIC. Will be sad to see more jobs leave Trowbridge too, it's not the prettiest of places but I still kinda like it.

Sage Pay, down and out yet again

Yet Another Alternative Gateway Provider

We've been using SecureTrading at work for many years, both their hosted SSL payment pages and we've been experimenting with their API (not for the faint-hearted). Probably not the cheapest around and the rates aren't the best either, but they're Rock. Solid.

They're also capitalising on the SagePay exodus on their Twitter feed :D

CodeWeavers pours Wine for the masses

Dirty Donkey?!

Shit, I'd buy it if it was called Dirty Donkey. Ages of endless amusement as it gradually topped my Wakoopa most-used software list.

Nice to see a C level talking plain English too for once...

Ace Reg reporter in career suicide shock

eJourno moves to Dead Tree media shocker!

I'm just jealous ;-) All the best and I might even pick up a copy of the Telegraph to read your stuff once in a while. (it'd be the first time I'd read the Telegraph in mannnnnnnyyyy years)

In other news, does this mean there's now a Technology correspondence post waiting to be filled by me at Reg Towers?

Mine's the one with the CV and an envelope with the interviewer's name on it full of non-sequential used twenties in it

Groupon cops triple slam from ads authority, blames newbies

Idiots in not reading small print shocker

Whodathunkit.

I hereby propose learned scholar and erudite student of the high arts Paris Hilton, because even she knows full well that first impressions can be very misleading

Windows Phone 7 gets unlocked

Pah to WP7, a pox on it

The first person to develop a 'translator' so I can run all of my (purchased!) WinMo v6.* apps on a WP7 handset gets a gold-plated cookie from me, and perhaps even a donation. I'm fed up with MS dumping an entire decade of platform back-compatibility just because it didn't suit them.

I'd wager they could've brought WP7 to market with an XP Mode-style compatibility layer, which is why I found it odd they aren't offering legacy support like they do with all of their other OSes. I won't buy a WP7 handset, irrespective of how pretty they are, until I can properly run WM6 apps on one.

...Or someone does a decent community port of WM6.5 to a WP7 device... (here's lookin' at you, XDA-Devs)

Mine's the one with a battered but perfectly functional Touch HD and HTC Hermes in the pocket

Virgin Media begins 100Mb upgrades

@AC

Sure, of course your old copper can handle 40/10MB - BT Infinity is effectively VDSL, hence the extra street cabinets required. Your DSLAM is inside the cabinet instead of in the exchange, so the line length is dramatically shortened. A piece of wet string could manage 40/10 at that distance.

The longer your loop length is, the higher its tendency to act as a massive aerial for EM and RF interference. Also dry joints / poor crimps or water ingress has less of an impact upon VDSL, but it still makes a diff. Once BT Infinity's max speeds are ramped up you'll see that you probably won't be able to make it all the way up to 52MB/16MB - VDSL2 can theoretically manage 100/100MB - without a rip and replace of your drop cable. VDSL's sync rate tails off dramatically past 300m from the street cabs.

Mine's the one with an ADSL2+ modem in the left pocket

Re: In a perfect world, sure

What you don't understand is that cable broadband is remarkably similar to ADSL except in how it presents the available bandwidth. Cable modems sync to available frequencies and then the bandwidth is contended all the way from the UBR to the CPE. This is why DOCSIS 3 makes such a big difference as it has far more available concurrent channels (and the bandwidth of each is significantly higher).

HOWEVER, if the provider decides to undersupply bandwidth to the UBR the CPE is connected to, that customer WILL ABSOLUTELY experience slower-than-headline speeds, higher pings, potentially higher packet loss and frustratingly slow internet access. Sure, the modem may say it's synchronised at 104857600 bits/sec downstream and 10485760 bits/sec upstream but realistically it might spike at that but average much lower. Same will happen for oversold areas, of which there are many. (Pick a town, any town)

Source: my previous experiences on cable broadband, just after VM bought out Telewest and finished the rebrand (and flushed it all down the pan by introducing 20MB followed sharply by unannounced STM)

VM, Vituperous Marketing

Nigerian airline ticket fraudster gets 8 years

In a perfect world, sure

However my boss paid for plane tickets for two other people to Canada and back on the company debit card - he wasn't a traveller nor was he mentioned anywhere on the travel documents.

In fact, I gave the nice lady at Co-op Travel the card details. Third hand card details? Nice. I think I passed the phone to the boss for two minutes so he could verify his address but that was about it. What can they ask in terms of verification? They have no prior knowledge of him. I suspect most over-the-phone travel operators will do exactly the same thing, the whole system is rife with loopholes for potential fraud and CNP transations will continue to be a major source of revenue as long as the balance of liability isn't too harsh on the payee. Accepted losses?

Paris, because her credit card says Daddy Hilton on it

Nielsen cops to iPad stat cock-up

Nielsen is all thumbs

Maybe the poor sod putting the presentation together was using Keynote on a company iPad... Amazing what can result from careless multitouches.

F1 2010

Stuff and nonsense

I'm a racing game enthusiast but come on, this game has a bug list as long as your arm. Codies will hopefully redress these faults in the weeks to come (fortunately Steam will push the updates down for me as and when they arrive) but I get the feeling this game was hurried out of the gates before it was fully finished in order to beat the end of the IRL F1 season.

Very disappointed with some of the bugs, they really detract from the realism I come to expect from a market-leading (and eye-grabbing) franchise such as this one. Bit of a letdown for initial release.

Everything Everywhere unveils contrary figures

I've said it before and I'll say it again

T-MOrange.

(say it quickly.)

I will chuckle away when the day comes where, once the "Everything Everywhere" branding 2.0 has been foisted upon us for so long, people just abbreviate it to " I'm on E" when asked what mobile network they use

Honestly I think they should stick with T-Mobile, it has a better brand image and customer service reputation than Orange (which I think you will find is almost universally dismal). Second only to Three in terms of rubish after-sales service.

Pope makes central London no-go zone for BT engineers

Not quite

BT Openreach = physical network, "final mile". LLU ISPs pay regular access charges for SMPF and MPF access.

BT Wholesale = provide the actual backhaul and broadband services (their IPStream products and, for aggregate access, Central and Central Plus services, are used by ISPs)

BT Internet = the donuts to whom you pay your £25 per month for dismal quality service.

You're welcome.

Mine's the one with the LLU BE Broadband + telephone service bill in the pocket

BioWare zeroes in on Mass Effect download snafu

Oh come now, Google can tell you this

1.5 gigabytes = 12 884, 901 888 bits Guessing it's using 1024bits/Kb.

Paris, because even she can type "1.5 gigabytes in bits" into your favourite calculator-equipped search engine

Hotmail still not working? Use Chrome to fix it, says MS

Certainly

In the same manner as when I see whiney amateurs complaining about their "important business web sites" not working on their Dreamhost account

Chrome first...

(surprised they didn't recommend using Chrome Frame!)

First they suggest their users move to Chrome. Can we start placing bets on when they'll migrate hotmail.com over to Google Apps for Business?

Paris, because even she preferred it when it was called HoTMaiL

Hackers spoof car warning system

Ooer

My Dad's previous car (Toyota Avensis, circa 2007) had, like most Toyotas built around the turn of the 21st century, a 100% fly-by-wire accelerator system hooked into the ECM/ECU.

I can imagine a time not too far from now when the entire pedalset is wirelessly linked, probably encrypted with WEP knowing how tempting it is to not bother with all that tricky 2048bit private key nonsense

Mine's the one with a real metal key to put into the ignition of my backup 2001 Ford

Council staff breach DWP database

If BT can see it

then they've already analysed everybody's profiles and are targeting them with 'relevant' ads.

Given that some people may have accessed their own accounts, surely they can't be sacked for that? They have a right to see what information is held on themselves per the DPA... Or are they denied access to their own information? Glossing over the technicalities and ethics a little, but on the face of it that particular scenario seems a bit arse backwards.

Alleged pirate fingered for filming film at Harrow flicks

Why do UK cammers even bother any more?

First cams always come from Eastern Europe and have dodgy sound. If you can wait a few days or so, the DVD5s are always out with the line audio (love the irony of a crooked projectionist) but even THEN the quality ain't really up to snuff.

I could never understand the appeal of watching what might be a good film with an EXTREMELY dodgy recording. Some cams I've witnessed in the past are hilarious bad. But then, I'm 100% 1080p now. MKVs anyone? (no weight on my conscience here, I gave AMC another £12 tonight to sit and watch The Expendables - and bloody good it was too).

Cammers deserve to be locked up if they're stupid and brazen enough to continue doing a shit job. Moreso, they deserve to be mercilessly beaten in public by the police for attempting to profit from it. The history of the scene was always that nobody profited from it, it was done for enjoyment only. Whilst that in itself is a moralistic can of worms, and is to be deftly sidestepped this time around, the scumbags who try and flog binbags of £3 DVDRs down the local pub deserve to be taken out bag and summarily dealt with. Then exiled.

Man sentenced for DIY gift-card cloning

Curious

I wonder if using Tor would've helped mask his true location?

This could be a good little earner...

Mine's the one with the portable swiper in it

Turkish groom accidentally sprays wedding guests with bullets

It's all in the wrist

You just have to do very tight circles as you fire. Have you never played CS:S?

Either that or he was singleshot headshotting but didn't take into account the updated hitboxes...

Now some remote trig C4 on the main doors as the remaining guests ran out? That'd be a classy finish.

This guy is my hot tip for the Decade's Finest round of the Darwin Awards.

HMV takes on mighty iTunes with 40p promo

Royalties, royalties, royalties

There's several sets of royalties in music. Performance, publication, songwriter, phonogram... PPL handles the live stuff, MCPS-PRS alliance handles songwriter and mechanical. In order for singles to chart on the OCC Top 40, there MUST be a minimum royalty paid which exceeds HMV's selling price in this promo - they're effectively swallowing the loss and marking it down on the launch campaign budget. A wise move IMO.

The artists will still be paid, eventually - minus the collection agencies' percentages of course... (Cynical? Moi?)

Also, HMV Digital has a Canadian site because they operate a nationwide business over there. The HMV brand has always been strong in Canada - it's been their number 1 territory for a long time. Go to Google Maps and search for HMV stores in Canada... There's hundreds of the things!

Paris, coz she thinks she's royalty (and constantly gets screwed)

Ex-staffer pleads guilty to massive T-Mobile data scam

Good riddance

Those fuckers should get a loooong stay at Her Majesty's pleasure for illegally selling on those records. I was (and still am) a TMUK customer, and I was disgusted to see such a flagrant breach of customer information - potentially including mine (which might explain why I had such a surge of companies calling me at the end of my last contract, around the time this happened).

They may be being made the scapegoats in all of this as everybody else managed to slither away quietly, but these chaps enabled the sale and are at the very least knowing accessories to the crime. I don't stand for these kinds of breaches in UK law so why should the CPS?

I wish these kinds of penalties were applied to people who lost UK.gov, military or confidential information - only today, yet another announcement was made by the MoD detailing the loss of a disc - in Bicester of all places! - back in APRIL:

"The disc was lost from the Defence Storage & Distribution Agency (DSDA) in Bicester, Oxfordshire, in April but staff were told this month.

Details lost included names, dates of birth, national insurance numbers and possible redundancy payouts.

The MoD said there was no evidence the information was being used for crime and an investigation had been launched.

The disc contained two-year-old information of civil servants who had applied for redundancy and how much they would receive."

When the law is adjusted so civil servants and Government contractors face the same penalties, then I'll finally be satisfied...

Kaspersky blocks BBC News over false phishing fears

Not arf

I'd rather my security software be slightly overcautious than not recognise a potentially valid phish / badware site when I happen across it.

At least Kaspersky doesn't do Really Bad Things, like BSOD machines after laxly-compiled definition updates... Been a pretty satisfied KIS user for a couple of years now. Even better, Barclays online banking pays for my three machine licence, but I'd cough up for it anyway because me and KIS... We've become rather attached. I actually TRUST it, and I'm paranoic about online security.

KIS isn't without its foibles and slightly 'odd' behaviours, but on the whole it's one of the best all-in security suites.

Legionnaire's Disease linked to driving, screenwash

Windscreen wipers are a non-story

This is a moribund news article, I watched the BBC News video earlier and it really is a dead donkey. I think almost everyone always uses screenwash to some extent when they top their washer bottle up; the amount of crap and grime that lands on windscreens in daily driving is so bad these days you need some kind of surfactant and detergent to work with the water, even in summer. I personally use a 80/20 mix in summer and 60/40 or even stronger concentrations in harsh winters.

I can't be bothered to explain this in more depth as I'm at work, but a poorly maintained aircon/climate control in a car is as dangerous, if not more, to your health.

http://www.lvvservices.com/aircon.htm explains it fairly well. Rule of thumb: if you have smelly aircon, time to get it recharged and cleaned.

Or just pour some beer into it...

Sky TV gets even more demanding

Crikey

They've missed a trick here. Many customers will be tied into contracts with their existing providers and be unwilling to change just to use this service - what's the point if half of your most highly-paying customers can't access the value added features they deserve? Seems a bit rich.

No doubt their justification is that they'll do some BT Vision style QoS prioritisation to give an assured minimum throughput for the digiboxen, but it still sucks that for people on decent ADSL / ADSL2+ (e.g. Be / O2) who are paying the premium amounts to Sky for telly won't be able to use this.

Paris, because even she knows when she's getting shafted

Canadian mobe firm sued over disappearing husband

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaaa-

-aaaaahahahahahaha. Classic. I love the desperate attempts to deflect blame and admonish an innocent party for someone else's wrongdoing - Only In American. Hopefully this gets thrown out of court with a severe reprimand for wasting court time as soon as the case is heard, what a ridiculous couldn't-make-it-up story.

Mine's the one with a separate paper bill in it

Waterstone's whips out its pendulous dugs

At least they're reducing, reusing, recycling

That W looks familiar... http://www.venturethree.com/#/home/80

Paris, because she's good at recognising things upside down

F*ck you, thunders disgruntled fanboi Apple user

from niche to the mainstream...

and the fanboi says, well, I can't jump because my weight only contributes to about 3% of the market - if I jumped out, it'd hardly register!

Mine's the one with a copy of Q110 industry sales figures in it

Vodafone to introduce out-of-bundle data charges

Meh...

Anybody who can avoid Voda's data packages already do so anyway. I've been a happy TMUK Web & Walk Plus customer for more than three years now. Three gig a month? More like it... Even though I hardly ever use more than half a gig ;-)

At least Voda are introducing a realtime monitoring facility to check up on bandwidth usage. It'd be ironic if a customer incurred a £5 charge from checking their remaining allowance and in doing so exceeded 500Mb...

I don't mind about this change to ToS on the whole, as long as they stop using 'unlimited'! I somehow doubt they will so no doubt it will incur further wrath because it's disingenuous and frankly condescending, to say the least. Lusers need to understand once and for all that unlimited != unmetered - and start appreciating the monetary value in all kinds of broadband a little more.

Paris, because even she avoids getting fucked by tariff changes

Are West Bromwich Borg pliers actually side cutters?

@ Tom Mason

Surely that'd actually be an Unidentified Plying Object?

Curiously, if you follow Street View through parts of Handsworth, bricks seem to be mysteriously following the car in places in gentle arcs... Might we unwittingly be the stage for an epic Space Battle featuring two long-forgotten races, the fearless Pliers race of Sparky'sbox IV and the lesser-spotted Bricks of Bryanthomes, third orbiting moon of Autoclavia XI?

Maybe they're just doing the initial groundwork for the interstellar space superhighway and nobody bothered to check the Alpha Centauri planning office...

Paris, because even she can tell pliers from side-cutters (she's dab handy with big tools)

NatWest suffers calamitous online banking breakdown

The Windows Updates are finished

Looks like everything's back to normal again, I logged in to my NatWest account first time just now (and the web site seemed pretty snappy compared to its previous performance). Perhaps they're running Dual Cores now?

Huffington Post retweets all of Twitter

Beh?

HuffPost has content?

Honestly, this site has never once given me even one piece of *newsworthy* news I hadn't already aggregated myself from the primary news sources. If I wanted somebody else's opinion on US-centric news, I'd read HuffPost. And watch Glenn Beck just for shits and giggles.

German retailer Tweets iPad details

And One More Thing...

New from Apple: the iMortgage, where we take ownership of your soul in exchange for these lovely slabs of aluminium, chrome and plastic. Only 600 simple payments and the products are yours (until we decide to release the updated model of whatever you own nine months down the road, at which point we offer a generous 0% discount on trade-ins)

Paris, because even she would need a mortgage to buy new Apple hardware

UK mobile operators call for UK competition regulation

T-mOrange?

Say it how it looks

or Orange T... Which I'm told tastes horrible.

It'll all just become first Orange, then eventually Wanadoo as the deal is finally closed - because those Frogs will go to almost any lengths to piss us off (PS I love France xx)

Paris, because... Well, France.

O2 and Be Broadband speeds dip

Time to bond

You might as well ditch plus.net and get a second Be line then take up their Bonding service - you'll get 7mbps down and 2.5mbps (ish) up! Tasty.

Guinness to hit three quid a pint

Bloody minimum pricing... I need a beer

I don't go to the pub that often mostly because of my work schedule - usually so knackered by the time I get back, I just collapse in front of the TV with some food and a quick pint in the evening. When I'm at the supermarket I'll buy a multipack (but I find myself buying more and more local/regional ales).

They're not doing themselves any favours promoting minimum pricing - I won't be able to afford to buy as much beer - and I'm a very sensible drinker - my money will end up being spent on (probably) the real ales, as they taste nicer... And if they cost the same as a can of Carling or Guinness for example, I'll simply only buy the ales as they're better value for money. The hardcore who binge drink will continue to do so irrespective of pricing, and the regular people who buy supermarket beer because it's a bit cheaper than the pub will just get pissed off and not bother as much.

Good job there.

10,000 Hotmail passwords mysteriously leaked to web

@ "You really don't get why people would have a non-isp e-mail account?"

Three good reasons for not having a freetard email account:

1) you get to choose your own domain name

2) For ca. £20 a year you can have as much diskspace as Google/Microsoft/Yahoo et al offer, within reason (why would you store gigs of emails online anyway?!)

3) You don't look like a retard when dealing with companies or other people - "oh yeah, my email address is [e-mail]" "... and you're the boss of your business are you?"

Particularly whenever you use email for business use, there's no excuse to not have your own domain. Being emailed by PR agents or tour managers from a Yahoo address is HIGHLY amateur.

Plus, 4) (kinda) - security through obscurity. Aside from all the other benefits (disposable forwarders, multiple POP3 inboxes etc), there's much less chance of being preyed upon for having a less-than-strong password if your email is all on your own domain. Script kiddies will hammer wordlists to try and get into as many free email accounts as possible, but I've never seen that happen to any of my own, private, paid for email addresses.

Even my technophobe mother has her own email address on her own domain name!

Paris, because her login portal's been hammered a few times

Colt Telecom cable cut mystery

Oops

Nice to know that a premium managed service provider is just as crap at actually running a fault-tolerant network as the regular providers ;) Why is it everybody harps on about n+1/n+n resilience (and charges accordingly) until someone plugs in a hoover, trips the main breaker and takes all of Northern Europe's connectivity with them?

I'm looking at you too, certain British datacentres

T-Orange: How it's going to work

T-M-Orange?

Say it fast. It'll catch on.

Well, I predict two things will happen: 1) Orange will play a massive game of thumb wars with the two companies' billing systems until they magically 'fit together', never mind the massive struggles for CS staff and customers alike over that time.

Then, they'll dump all the (brilliant) remaining UK CS staff from T-M and outsource to hapless Indian callcentres which I can't understand or even get a sensible answer out of (yes, I've also been an H3G customer within the past 18 months). URGH. NO.

The saddest thing is that I've been a customer of theirs for a long time for the excellent customer service, the UK call centre staff and the market-leading data and call tariffs. However, in the past few months whenever I've rung 150 I've ended up speaking to someone in the Phillipines (or some other bizarre country like that - very worrying) and they won't let me move to the newer Flext tariff and keep my accrued loyalty discounts. Smacks of a loss of interest in customer base.

What finally confirmed it for me was when they superceded their WinMo handset range with their shiny Android exclusives, and didn't even bother to release the Touch Pro 2 (Voda have been offering it for a while to business customers and I covet it greatly).

TMUK is dead, long live TMUK. Hello T-M-Orange! (more like Hello goodbye, I must be going)

NHS Direct gets to be number one, one, one

@AC Thursday 9th July 2009 13:09 GMT

I thought the 'alternative' NHS Direct number (for people being PBXes, etc) was 08457 454647 ?

All NHS/Polizei/non-emergency calls should be charged as per 03 standards imho. West Midlands Police STILL use 0845 numbers for their non-emergency switchboard, although there's a perfectly good 0121 number (which the 0845 points to). They won't publicly acknowledge this though, because they make £23,000 a year off the NGN :( (see http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=in_the_back, "POLICE 5: DON’T CALL US…", or http://www.west-midlands-pa.gov.uk/confirmation.asp?filename=436&main=0)

Paris, because even she's not stupid enough to call 0845 numbers without checking saynoto0870 first