Posts by Graham Anderson

Deleted after 7 days?

I'm not sure Theresa May would be very happy having all that communications data deleted before MI5 have a chance to look for any funny business.

not another Granadaland retune??

Granadaland has already had two DTT retunes. The first one I was able to talk my 80-year old parents through on the phone. The second screwed things up royally and my mother was left with the Welsh channels in one part of the house - the bit she actually uses. The house is big, so calling out an aerial engineer is a complete pain and an unwanted expense. My poor old Mum had to wait for me to come visit (from That London) and even as a reasonably techie person, looking up the correct channel groupings for Granada TV as opposed to Welsh was annoying and confusing. Add into this the Chinglish inspired set-top box UI for manually changing the channels and it was a nightmare. As it turned out, there was a problem with the box as well, but the process was so confusing that I didn't know if it was a mistake I'd made, or if the aerial was completely incapable of picking up Winter Hill.

With a new set-top box, we worked out that it wasn't the aerial at fault, but then with the new Humax I had yet another designed-by-autistic-engineers-in-another-language interface to wrestle with in order to tell the stupid box to tune into Granada and not S4C.

If they're going to screw around with the retuning again, I may as well save myself the £100 train fare back to Liverpool and get a satellite dish installed. Oh wait, I can't because they live in a conservation area...

AAAAAAAAARGH!

BT Openzone and BT Openzone

My main gripe with BT Openzone is that not all hotspots called BT Openzone behave in the same way. With my O₂ iPhone package, there's supposed to be free access to both BTO and The Cloud. And for a while, BTO access was great - once I was authenticated once, my iPhone seemed to be fine across multiple hotspot locations and yea, the browsing was good.

Then BTO launched their FON boxes all across London. They use BT Openzone as their SSID, so the iPhone happily joins it. But the Fon versions do not seem to be part of the free access deal for O₂ - so if you're using Safari you end up trying to use the authentication pages, which don't work. If you're using an app, you don't see the authentication pages and your connection seems to be broken. You have to tell the iPhone to not auto-join BTO hotspots. I pretty much never get a working BTO connection now.

I'm fine with BT deciding that their deal with O₂ only extends to their BT Openzone operated hotspots rather than their Fon network - but FFS, don't call them the same thing if they are not.

blocks apps too

I've been having trouble using a popular gay dating app on the iPhone for the last day or so (when did the block come on?). The app kept just hanging and I thought it was the app's fault. When I tried accessing the dating site using Mobile Safari, I got the age verification messaging for the first time.

So you'll have a chunk of users who are using apps rather than phone browsers who can't see the messaging from O2 at all.

I just asked for my PUK - I've had problems with pre-paying for international data where they credit the add-on the *following billing cycle*, ending up with me being charges extoritionate rates for mobile roaming in the US when I thought I was covered, and having a useless bundle of pre-paid data a month after my trip. Add in crap mobile reception and many dropped calls, this is the last straw for me.

Photography banned in the security screening areas and... everywhere!

One place where photography and videoing is banned is the security areas.

The Heathrow website claims that ALL photography requires permits and written permission, so it would seem that the press bunny who said that photography was OK is misinformed. Of course, trying to enforce no-photo rules in a world of camera phones and 14x zoom super-compacts is stupid, but that's BAA for you.

http://www.heathrowairport.com/portal/controller/dispatcher.jsp?CiID=4fb584e8148c0210VgnVCM10000036821c0a____&ChID=af9484e8148c0210VgnVCM10000036821c0a____&Ct=B2C_CT_GENERAL&CtID=448c6a4c7f1b0010VgnVCM200000357e120a____&ChPath=Home^Heathrow^General^Our+business+and+community^Media+centre^Filming+and+photography^FAQs

Hardwearing?

Difficult to measure on a new machine, but in general, Macs seem to last longer because they are better built - especially with the aluminium unibody construction.

I'm still running the very first Intel MacBook Pro from 2006 and its been around the world several times with me.

My female friend - possibly the clumsiest person I've ever known - used to get through a Sony Vaio a year. She also trashed a plastic MacBook, but is in love with her aluminium MacBook Pro - which has survived her and her 6-month old baby. So far.

I've not used a netbook myself - as they're generally made as cheaply as possble, how does that affect their durability compared to the very solid construction of the alu-Macs?

Indoors signal atrocious here, "Good" according to the map

Does anyone see a "report a flagrant lie in our reporting" link on the status pages?

No corporation tax in the UK

Being an "Irish" company, Google pays no taxes on revenues generated from the sale of advertising by UK companies, to UK consumers on searches performed within the UK. The UK represents 12% of all of Google's revenues according to the last earnings release. This is perfectly legal.

The Americans have particular reason to be upset at this arrangement as Brin & Page's research which gave rise to the technology behind Google was funded by the US taxpayer bankrolled National Science Foundation.

O2 More says nothing about constant location snooping

The Placecast technology uses cell tower triangulation at the carrier network level. So Placecast will have a stream of your movements AT ALL TIMES.

People are used to location apps being about checking-in - the O2 More faqs make no mention of the fact that a 3rd party will constantly be following them around to see if they go anywhere near a Starbucks.

Mine borked too

After a number of attempts to restore, I now have my stuff back. Deffo not as smooth as previous upgrades.

wil they pay for my Experian?

When my employer lost a disk with my details on it, the company paid for me to get Experian credit watch. Will the Guardian cough up for Experian/CIFAS subscriptions for all affected users?

PS3 not talking to Lacie either

When my housemate had a PS3, it would only see some music and the images on my Lacie 1TB NAS. Almost none of the movie files would play. The same movies being served via a Windows box to the PS3 were fine. The Sony PS3 would also only see some of the content being served up by the various versions of iTunes on the network. I blame Sony - in fact, I blame Sony for most of the world's ills...

Why no torrents?

Perhaps if they had posted some torrents of the files, they wouldn't have fally over servers. I'm pretty sure they used to encourage you to download via Torrent before, but this time around they seem to offer only HTTP and FTP links.

Even now - with their super small emergency homepage - they are pushing you to HTTP/FTP.

photography *not* banned at Canary Wharf

Living close to CW, and having seen the plastic police harrassing photographers myself, I thought I would look at the Canary Wharf website to see if there was a list of the dos and don't of the estate - it being private property and all that. I was hoping they might have them on the web as I certainly have never seen a sign with them listed on the estate itself.

www.canarywharf.co.uk has no information about what is and isn't allowed on its private land - no information even of the fact that you will be stopped by their plastic police and inexpertly swabbed for explosives if you drive in.

Google however provided this gem from a Flickr user questioning the CW Estate Security Manager on this very topic:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/canarywharf/discuss/72057594125957343/

[snip] "Photography is not banned on the Estate and therefore there are no signs advising of its prohibition. However, professional photography is only permitted with our permission and when granted, a permit is issued. Amateur photography is welcomed but, in the light of the current extremely high threat from terrorism, photographers may be questioned by security staff. Once satisfied with their legitimacy, security personnel will permit the photography to continue and I am very disappointed at your comments about the threats to confiscate the memory card or delete the photos. " [snip]

This is between the artists and the labels

Part of the problem is that musicians sell their "intellectual property" to large evil corporations. Said evil corporations then screw up the marketing of product - trying to sell formats and products that punters don't want. (Case in point, I quite like the French artist Camille. She has a new single out according to her website. This morning I tried to buy it from the iTunes store and couldn't because it was only available in the French iTunes store. This isn't my fault, its between EMI and iTunes - and I suspect its down to EMI only licensing their precious acquired "intellectual property" for sale in France. They have just lost a completely free sale - no marketing required. Free money for more coke - I mean, candles and flowers!)

When artists do better deals with labels - or cut them out completely - then they will find a way to make money out of their fanbase. But please stop blaming the fans. Fans don't sit on artsits' back catalogues preventing fans from buying material - that's the labels and their precious "intellectual property". The long tail should be a massive opportunity for the music business - and they have borked it completely.

Except of course for labels like 4AD. I can go to the 4AD website and buy pretty much every release they ever made. If I can't buy the CD because its out of print, I can buy high quality digital downloads. With David Sylvian's Samadhisound, I can buy all of his new releases while cutting out the middle-man.

change to notification reqs

Well yes, the whole idea is stupid to think that a determined child abuser is going to be stopped from joining a social network by this regulation.

But what it will do is make it an offence for people on the sex offenders register to NOT disclose all their email addresses. So if it is found out that they have created a new Gmail account - guilt is presumed and they can be banged up for an extra five years. Regardless of whether or not any grooming or abuse has taken place - the failure to disclose is the crime.

I wonder if the Goverment plans on using the CRB people to operate this email address blacklist? If so, I guess you can look at a 6 month waiting list before you can join Facebook successfully.

Service is Windoze/IE only - uses ActiveX

Well, their FAQ seems to completely ignore the fact that there are people out there who choose not to have a Windows PC, but as they rely on ActiveX, that locks out Macs, Linux and any Internet Exploder refuseniks.

So their soopa-secure service relies on a technology that lots of people really don't trust.