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This is hardly the first report of kids' smartwatches being insecure tracking devices. We've heard that in 2017, in 2018 again, quite bluntly, if you haven't heard it by now, you probably don't give a rat's ass about your kids' privacy.

Then again, buying such a watch is already a pretty good indicator that you don't give a fuck about your kids' privacy, so...

This wouldn't be tolerated in the UK (or wider EU which all have similar regulation). We have distance selling regulations built into consumer rights. I do find it very odd that so many American posters seem prepared to bend over for Corporate rights over.

On the whole these regulations do favour the good companies and I've never had any issue with Amazon UK, but no end of trouble with ebay suppliers and ebay ignorance of consumer law.

https://www.which.co.uk/consum...

I got one of these

https://www.which.co.uk/review...

It's a laser so the it doesn't have the problem of the ink drying out like my old HP multifunction color inkjet. It prints and scans with my Windows 7 machine, my Mac and my Android devices. The toner cartridges are cheap and last 1000 pages.

The only downside is that, unlike my old HP inkjet it doesn't do color. But, realistically, how many times do you need that? And if I did I could get printed somewhere else.

Basically don't buy an inkjet - they cost a fortune in ink cartridges if you only use them infrequently. Buy a cheap mono laser printer or a mono laser multifunction device if you do a lot of scanning.

Firstly - no one knows what the performance cost of compliance will be yet, no fix has yet been approved. If they retro-fit an AdBlue SCR it may be negligible.

Secondly, it isn't clear that any other car or mfr would be better, you could have bought an Opel instead - they are currently silently updating cars during services to reduce emissions (and allegedly performance according to some reports I've seen) - http://boingboing.net/2016/01/...

Thirdly, once the dust settles on this the VW engines might even be among the best, they are certainly not amongst the worst in recent independent testing (e.g. http://www.which.co.uk/cars/dr... ). Even the petrols are busting limits (majority exceed CO limits, 10% exceed NOx), and the hybrids.

Or you could have bought a Tesla, which is probably the only unaffected option...

another application I could envision would be amateur prospecting. But smartphones know your location, so same problem.

So? The smart phone will report it's location at the time that you analyse your specimen. Which will probably be in the hotel/ motel that you go to when you get back to something resembling civilisation.

You think that you'll have a mobile phone signal out in the field at your prospect? Damned all chance of that, because mobile phone companies don't put transmission towers where they don't have customers, and if there are any significant numbers of people in an area then it has probably been gone over already by mineral prospectors.

I'm an amateur mountaineer and professional geologist. I don't normally have signal on my mobile when I'm out on the hill. Likewise when I do onshore jobs in the deserts of Arabia or the tundra of Russia. And when I'm 100km out at sea, again, no signal.

Look at this map ; get out into unpopulated areas and you've got little chance of getting a signal. If you're in a populated area, then it's almost certainly already been prospected.

DIstance Selling regulations in UK have been superceded by Consumer Contract Regulations as of 13th June 2014. it does not provide for a cooling off period for services where the consumer has agreed to provision of those services before completion of a minimum 7 day cooling period except where the provider has failed to provide information in accordance with the regulations.
more info see : http://www.which.co.uk/consume...

Things like electricity supply are monopolies by their very nature. Most people can't choose to have another company's cables hooked up to their house.

Here in the UK, we can choose exactly this.

This is because the gubmint (in their infinite wisdom) separated the cables from the suppliers.

Thus we have National Grid in charge of distribution, but consumers buy power from one of dozens of energy suppliers.

They can do 160km/h safely, bumper to bumper.

No, they can't.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/the-power-to-stop

http://www.which.co.uk/news/2012/05/best-and-worst-supermini-braking-distances-285596/

Even with the same car, stopping from 40mph, some stops took 40 meters longer than others. 40 meters is not bumper to bumper.

Pile-ups happen because people don't understand stopping distances.

Like 'dim' streetlights in Winter because they have frozen over, and (for cities that don't think of these things ahead of time) failure to install seasonally enabled heating units into the enclosure. All in all the human-time and effort of manufacturing and deploying these new solutions, along with the added heater circuit to make them useable, will really eat into that eco-energy difference equation.

Lots of eco initiatives these days come down to someone smiling and pointing to a little device that saves a few ergs of energy here and now, and just over the ridge there is a brand new factory making these things that is poisoning rivers and people with heavy metals. While very little energy is actually saved and unintended consequences pile up.

(Thank You Planet Saving Fluorescent Bulbs for saving the planet by seeding our landfills with elemental mercury instead of evil carbon. And giving me a HEADACHE whenever I am trapped in a room with you.)

And with LED light bulb revolution say goodbye to lots of radio communications. While the goofy things thrive on DC it is achieved through the use of really radio-noisy often insufficiently shielded switching power supplies and forced rectification. And brief high current pulses to 'cheat' higher light output without causing overheating.

Our city has LED traffic lights and even moderately strong FM stations disappear completely at intersections. I have no doubt that this interference affects emergency services' communications too, and that a whole lotta FCC Title 47, Part 15 violations are going on.

No one seems to care because people seem to be stupid when it comes to so-called eco-friendly product selling jobs. Sorry I so incorrigible about the subject, I do love the planet.

It is possible to successfully read the data exchanged with a NFC card up to 2 meters away. Just have a decent snooping device in your backpack or handbag and you can sniff the transactions of other people.

You can have a transmitter with decent power at 13.56MHz that you turn on when you get in an area with NFC readers and see how many checkouts that fails to work.

There are a few other listed security issues too with NFC cards here: MMN-o | Blog, for those that aren't able to read Swedish - use the online translator.

Yet more reading:
Study on Public Transport Smartcards – Final Report
Do contactless cards expose you to fraud?

Anyway - when it comes to NFC there are different types of cards, some are simple and doesn't have any encryption at all (E.g. Mifare Ultralight), some have an encryption which is very weak and is cracked within minutes (Mifare Classic) and some are running DES, but I expect that it has a few weaknesses too since the exchange between the card and reader is easy to snoop.

I picked the first large TV that came up on a search, but the same TV is the "best" for energy efficiency according to an impartial consumer review organisation in the UK: http://www.which.co.uk/technology/tv-and-dvd/guides/tv-energy-running-costs/#/the-best . You have to pay to see the detailed statistics (that's how they remain impartial), so I don't know how they measured the consumption.

In any case, it's closer to £120 than $1095 a year.

In the UK, a shop owner can refuse to sell a product to a potential customer for almost any reason (excepting discrimination on the grounds of gender, race etc.

When a retailer displays a product for sale, legally it is giving you 'an invitation to treat', which means it is inviting you to make an offer to buy. The retailer can refuse that offer if it decides that it doesn't want to sell you the goods. To have a legally-binding contract the retailer must have accepted your offer to buy. So your rights depend on where in the sale process you are.

http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/sale-of-goods/your-rights-pricing-disputes/your-rights/

Much like HD televisions, the majority of which until quite recently were never used with HD media even when it was available, 4G seems like something that a purchaser either knows what it is at a technical level or they are blissfully unaware of it.

Well, there was a bit of a fuss when TVs started to be sold as "HD Ready" (Example 1 Example 2 - I'm sure there are more where those came from.)

Meanwhile, like many people, I bought a TV with an integrated terrestrial HD tuner about a year before HD broadcasts were due to start in my area. When my local transmitter switched, lo and behold I got HD. I didn't get some excuse along the lines of "well, when we said HD, we didn't mean the sort of HD that was coming in your area."

Likewise, there is much talk of 4G "coming soon" to the UK. Around the time of the iPad launch, there was even talk of 4G arriving later this year (although that's fallen through). Some UK carrier sites talk of 4G coming soon (and, by the way, a quick perusal of the Ofcom website shows that, in the UK context, 4G means "LTE or WiMax" not HSDPA+ etc. as some US carriers are spinning it). So, it would have been quite reasonable to expect that an "iPad with 4G" would work with 4G when it arrived. At the time, the only way you'd know that this was not true is if you'd dug the actual supported frequencies out of the tech specs page and compared them with the proposed UK/EU 4G frequencies - that's not the sort of research you should expect to do when buying a consumer-oriented device.

Apple have since had several rounds of refinement to their small print so its a bit clearer bit, last time I looked, they still didn't come clean and say "this will not work on existing or proposed 4G networks outside of North America".

If Apple were a Mom&Pop company in the US exporting a few units to the EU this would be excusable - but when you have major distribution and retail networks in a country, and produce otherwise fully localized goods for those markets there is no excuse for selling them as "iPad with 4G*" <font size="-2">*doesn't actually do 4G in this country</font>.

Although it might not hurt Apple much, this might set a precident to dissuade other firms from selling stuff as "4G" when it isn't.

(Of course, some blame also applies to the supposedly international - but really US-centric - standards bodies who have let "4G" mean different things in different markets - I could buy my TV with confidence because the UK had got the "Freeview HD" branding sorted out in advance).

Can you point to this in legislation? I believe the GP is right, everything I've seen in the Sale of Goods Act and Consumer Protection Act seems to suggest 6 months statutory burden on the seller to prove user fault, and after 6 months on the buyer. Most companies if you push it wont ask you to prove you weren't at fault though because they know full well that you weren't and that in pushing it to that point could escalate their costs as they may then face small claims court costs, costs for time and money spent trying to get them to accept fault etc. too.

John Lewis isn't just accepting a legal minimum with their 2 years at all, they're just saying that they'll accept fault assuming there is no obvious evidence of user damage no questions asked and deal with the problem up to 2 years. It just gives you piece of mind that they wont try and shirk their obligations by trying to shift burden of proof of cause of fault onto you, which is something you don't have with the likes of Dixons group stores.

I had a look for the 2 year period you mention but can find absolutely no evidence of it in the acts themselves:

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1979/54

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1987/43

Further, all of the consumer advice organisation seem to be agreeing with the 6 months, and again no mention of 2 years so I'm not sure where you dug up the 2 years figure from:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/consumer-rights-refunds-exchange

http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/index/your_world/consumer_affairs/buying_goods_your_rights.htm

http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/sale-of-goods/understanding-the-sale-of-goods-act/your-rights/

Six months doesn't sound great, but in practice it works well, I've had a leather office chair replaced outright by Staples after 2.5 years because the pump went on it because they knew it should last longer than that, and similarly my Dell laptop was replaced at 3 years and 1 month with a newer model because it was high end and should've lasted longer and they knew they couldn't just shirk it off as "out of warranty now". The maximum period for a claim is 6 years.

According to this article, O2 mobile broadband customers already get access to WiFi hotspots run by "The Cloud" (I see these quite often, usually in pubs), and T-Mobile customers to T-Mobile's hotspots. This helps them reduce demand for 3G spectrum in busy places (stations, airports etc).

It seems Virgin rolling out a similar service, and as a Virgin customer I may well find it useful. However, my 3G signal is usually excellent and unmetered.

That said, based on Spotify's revenues which they have publicly stated along with subscriber numbers, it looks like they made about 50p in advertising per "free" user over the whole of 2009. While some argue they're paying for their experience with ads, 50p per annum for unlimited streaming music cannot look like a good business proposition to the music industry, and it's hard to say they're being unreasonably greedy by refusing to drop their royalty demands down to that level.

Right now it appears that Apple is using every advantage they have to keep the pricing low...

Hi, my name is Steve, welcome to the Apple store and thanks for purchasing the iPad. In order to use your device, you'll need to register with iTunes to ensure a constant flow of money to Apple for apps, music, media, ebooks, etc. Don't worry, e-magazines and such will still be the same price as other websites if they want to get their stuff on your tablet (don't worry that we are taxing your media companies 30% for the privilege of getting through the gatekeeper to your DRM'd locked down device...) Which credit card would you like to register with?

This kind of exists in the form of Consumer magazines and TV shows such as Which and Watchdog. The problem is shareholders don't really care about consumers, they care about profits and you would have to do something that would really fuck off a lot of consumers before it affected profits. Irritating a small number of people will not (which is what T-Mobile have done here).

Or everything.

In the UK, you must be able to pay the advertised price for anything. No compulsory fees allowed, unless they're already included in the advertised price. Tax must always be included. etc etc.
More info: http://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/sale-of-goods/your-rights-pricing-disputes/your-rights/

What if Sony went out of business? (absurd, I know) Amazon would have to pick up the bill?

Yes, I think so.

I'm all for protecting consumers, but a reseller doesn't have any more direct control or responsibility for the actions of a manufacturer than the consumer does.

They do choose which products they sell. From what I read on /. the US is too far in the other direction -- an MP3 player could break after 91 days and there's nothing the buyer can do.

This is a good general guide. (Or search "sale of goods act" on Google.co.uk)

In the UK, all electrical goods worth more than a certain value (and some other classes of goods) are automatically garuanteed for one year, as part of the customer's statutory rights

That should be two years now because of the EU Directive on Consumer Rights. The same directive gives a minimum warranty period of two years but UK law extends that to six, except for Scotland where it's five.

Better yet, the onus is on the shop to show that the failure to prove that it was due to your misuse, not you having to prove that it was a poor design or manufacturing defect.

Actually that's only true for the first six months in the UK or three months (as a minimum) for the rest of the EU. After that you have to show that the fault was present when you originally purchased the item. For most classes of "the damn thing just broke!" that's not too hard though.

Here's the full directive; the relevant chapter starts on page 30.

LOL BePro have a VERY VERY LOW contention ratio indeed. i fact if you check it's 1:1(BePro only) which, as far as i know is the best i have ever seen! http://www.which.co.uk/reports_and_campaigns/computers_and_internet/reports/internet/internet_access/Broadband/pp_excel_546_131166.jsp check the "capped contention raio", it says "not contended" i too don't use the BT phone line at all really, except for sending/recieving faxes(achaic i know but still the only use my landline has! My mobile plan has 900 mins and 350 texts so i pretty much use that ad skype for all my calls and if my minutes are running low and i am calling a landlie and am near a friendly wireless access point i use truphone to call uk landline for free!

* Trading Standards.
* The Consumer Association.
* BBC's WatchDog.
* The Register.

Then make a charge back against your credit card on the grounds that they've refused to honor their statutory responsibilities under the Sale of Goods Act.

One phone call, spoke to a human being who discovered that due to some error or another I had been paying a higher rate than I should have been.

She apologised for the billing error, cancelled the account for me, thanked me for having been a customer and sent a prompt refund for the overpayment.

Not bad!