I've had a number of BT engineers visit the house to try to get DSL working. And they've done some work on the line to improve the signal strength. They conclude that it ain't going to happen; anecdotally, because the line is mainly buried, old, and waterlogged.
As they have reached this conclusion, they've marked my phone line on their database as "cannot get broadband"... and that's it. They'll make no further attempt / take no further interest / decline any further order from me for broadband.
I cannot give a precise distance to the exchange; the straight line distance looks about 4km, by the roads probably 6 or 7. I know the house a half mile before mine in the direction of the exchange can get a slow broadband. And communities all around mine can get broadband, albeit in a number of cases, from different exchanges.
I'm in discussions with my MP, who's talking, as they do, to the useless secretary of state for business (his advice dated 12 months ago: wait for the market to provide, or maybe knit your own in your spare time - I kid you not), and also to BT regional management and the local development agency.
Concerned as I am with slow speeds, I'm more concerned that I cannot at home get broadband at all because there's insufficient regulation of the monopoly landline supplier. BT is not interested in fixing the twisted pair arriving at my house such that ADSL will work. The UK government is not interested in extending the Universal Service Obligation - the thing that forces the monopoly to connect you to the phone system for voice calls - to broadband.
HMG's insistence that broadband is of economic and social importance is just so much humbug and cant if they will not bother themselves to lift a regulatory finger to ensure that the whole population can access at least a basic service.
Perish the thought that the vast additional profit arising out of millions of DSL connections should be put towards improving the basic infrastructure.
But I can get 2kbps downstream (yup, that's right) through my 2.5 or 3G connection. Yay. I think I was getting better than that on dialup in about 1995.
The paragraph starting "To trial the Contextual,..." refers to the purchase of advertising space. The table lists the ad campaigns which were substituted into the web page. The paragraph starting "The advertisements were used to replaced [sic]..." mentions the "default" charity adds.
121Media, who ran the trial, placed charity ads (at its own expense) on a number of websites, and then intercepted them and replaced them with commercial or other charity adverts on the fly. Thus they were replacing their own adverts/and/ serving the charity adverts to those who viewed the web pages and were not in the trial.
Thus there is no question of damage to charities, quite the contrary; nor to websites advertising revenues.
There is, though, the privacy issue.
It would be helpful if we could hang them for what they are guilty of, rather than making unsupported allegations.
I think all the posts and the lead story misrepresent the position. Brazil is sending a "protest" against the BRM and delay in publishing the standard; it is not appealing.
The author of the linked article felt strongly enough about the distinction between protest and appeal that he has resigned his position.
I do not understand fully the difference between the protest and an appeal, but strongly suspect that the former does not lead to a requirement to re-open consideration of whether the proposal should be accepted as a standard.
As the author makes clear in his article, M$ has triumphed again, excellent meeting engineers that they are, and Brazil and the rest of us have lost again.
Much as I hate to rain on your parade, it looks as if there was a debate about the notability and wording of the issue. The current revision of "Criticism of Wikipedia" mentions the incident and references the register article. Admin "Jossi" is the most recent person to amend the entry. Clearly s/he is not that happy about it, but it is in nevertheless. I suppose it will survive in the current version.
Citizendium claims 3300 articles. After a year, only 39 of these are "approved" articles... expert approval being their unique selling point. Far from exhibiting accelerated growth, Citizendium's own statistics shows a year's worth of uniformly flat growth.
After one year, Wikipedia - which did not have the distinct advantage of being able to lift content wholescale from, err, wikipedia, had 21,000 articles.
The other piece of legislation useful to you is the the Unfair Contract Terms Act. Specifically, it mandates that excluding liability for defective or poor-quality goods is permitted only if it is reasonable. No reasonable person would suppose that a change of OS was a reasonable cause for denyng a hardware warranty repair.
The suggested course of action would be to write to the vendor reminding them of their responsibilities under the SOGA, noting that the UFTA precludes exclusion of their liability because of the OS change, and noting that it is your intention, if they do not honour their liability to repair the goods, to bring a small claims action for the cost of the machine.
GNER has had WiFI on (faster) trains running between Aberdeen / Leeds and London. The single drawback is that the firm that set it up, Icomera having just sold a system to a Swedish train company, Linx AB, appears to be routing through Sweden, meaning that your default google becomes google.se. Oh. And the GNER website has a lovely little map which updates itself as you wind up & down the country, showing you where you are. In sum, it rocks.
So at any given time, 60% of dialup users do not want to switch. 40% do switch. Next year, 60& want to switch => some of the original 60% must have switched sides to the 40%.
Mom does not need an endorsement of the fact that you've wasted your life to date on this interweb thingie. All she wants is grandchildren, Timothy. When are you going to deliver on that?
Umm. Slight absence of any mention of virus writing for profit: there's enough evidence that a number of recent virii were mainly about installing SMTP Relays on infected machines to propogate spam, or leaving a backdoor open so that this could later be done.
Or else installing DDOS software aimed at Spamhaus servers, or leaving backdoors open for same.
None of us, I guess, has paid the 24 quid or whatever mi2g are asking for their report and can only speculate on its place on the credible to bogus scale.
I'm not uncomfortable with a finding that Linus boxes leak like sieves whilst windows boxes immitate Fort Knox; I'm by no means in security denial here. But I simply don't believe a word mi2g say.
Given that the indictment was laid against the Philly spammer before the supposed start date of the supposed operation...
http://www.cybercrime.gov/carlsonArrest.htm... I'd venture to say that the probability is that operation cyber sweep is little more than a PR exercise to link together various extant cases to make it look as though serious co-ordinated action is taking place.
Long Darl McBride and Chris Sontag Interview
on
SCO News Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
mi2g - authors of the report being discussed, are the single most dissed security company I know of. They're derided by such a long list of organisations, that one might wonder if there's any point giving their work houseroom. They certainly appear to be PR whores, and, bless' em, good at this part of their job.
Vmyths appears to summarise the anti-mi2g camps position. Searches for mi2g on NTK and The Register, (when its search engine is working) for mi2g are as enlightening as they are amusing.
Market data concurs with Menta's analysis
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 4, Informative
At the risk of karma whoring... since I posted much the same story a couple of days ago... the latest market data in the UK suggests that reducing the bloated price of CDs increases sales (wow) to - for the UK- record high levels (gosh, who'd have thought in the year of Kazaa that we'd see record CD sales?).
The RIAA's "xxx's is killing music" (substitute cassettes, P2P, MP3, whatever comes next) is somewhat undermined by all of this.
Menta makes the point that CDs are priced by the big five at the point that maximises profit. No surprise then to hear that whilst UK CD sales were up by 3%, profit was down by 2%.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had a number of BT engineers visit the house to try to get DSL working. And they've done some work on the line to improve the signal strength. They conclude that it ain't going to happen; anecdotally, because the line is mainly buried, old, and waterlogged.
As they have reached this conclusion, they've marked my phone line on their database as "cannot get broadband" ... and that's it. They'll make no further attempt / take no further interest / decline any further order from me for broadband.
I cannot give a precise distance to the exchange; the straight line distance looks about 4km, by the roads probably 6 or 7. I know the house a half mile before mine in the direction of the exchange can get a slow broadband. And communities all around mine can get broadband, albeit in a number of cases, from different exchanges.
I'm in discussions with my MP, who's talking, as they do, to the useless secretary of state for business (his advice dated 12 months ago: wait for the market to provide, or maybe knit your own in your spare time - I kid you not), and also to BT regional management and the local development agency.
Concerned as I am with slow speeds, I'm more concerned that I cannot at home get broadband at all because there's insufficient regulation of the monopoly landline supplier. BT is not interested in fixing the twisted pair arriving at my house such that ADSL will work. The UK government is not interested in extending the Universal Service Obligation - the thing that forces the monopoly to connect you to the phone system for voice calls - to broadband.
HMG's insistence that broadband is of economic and social importance is just so much humbug and cant if they will not bother themselves to lift a regulatory finger to ensure that the whole population can access at least a basic service.
Perish the thought that the vast additional profit arising out of millions of DSL connections should be put towards improving the basic infrastructure.
But I can get 2kbps downstream (yup, that's right) through my 2.5 or 3G connection. Yay. I think I was getting better than that on dialup in about 1995.
That would be in section 1.2 on page 7.
..." refers to the purchase of advertising space. The table lists the ad campaigns which were substituted into the web page. The paragraph starting "The advertisements were used to replaced [sic]..." mentions the "default" charity adds.
The paragraph starting "To trial the Contextual,
It's always worth reading the document first.
/and/ serving the charity adverts to those who viewed the web pages and were not in the trial.
121Media, who ran the trial, placed charity ads (at its own expense) on a number of websites, and then intercepted them and replaced them with commercial or other charity adverts on the fly. Thus they were replacing their own adverts
Thus there is no question of damage to charities, quite the contrary; nor to websites advertising revenues.
There is, though, the privacy issue.
It would be helpful if we could hang them for what they are guilty of, rather than making unsupported allegations.
I think all the posts and the lead story misrepresent the position. Brazil is sending a "protest" against the BRM and delay in publishing the standard; it is not appealing.
The author of the linked article felt strongly enough about the distinction between protest and appeal that he has resigned his position.
I do not understand fully the difference between the protest and an appeal, but strongly suspect that the former does not lead to a requirement to re-open consideration of whether the proposal should be accepted as a standard.
As the author makes clear in his article, M$ has triumphed again, excellent meeting engineers that they are, and Brazil and the rest of us have lost again.
UK consumers who have reason to contest contract terms would likely be protected by the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977.
Because it's so difficult to type http://www.openoffice.org/ into your browser. Slow new day?
Much as I hate to rain on your parade, it looks as if there was a debate about the notability and wording of the issue. The current revision of "Criticism of Wikipedia" mentions the incident and references the register article. Admin "Jossi" is the most recent person to amend the entry. Clearly s/he is not that happy about it, but it is in nevertheless. I suppose it will survive in the current version.
Citizendium claims 3300 articles. After a year, only 39 of these are "approved" articles ... expert approval being their unique selling point. Far from exhibiting accelerated growth, Citizendium's own statistics shows a year's worth of uniformly flat growth.
... only four entries, to four articles that do not exist.
After one year, Wikipedia - which did not have the distinct advantage of being able to lift content wholescale from, err, wikipedia, had 21,000 articles.
Again, despite it's touted experticity, it still has barking mad articles such as Jake the Explainer, that looks like little more than a homespun essay; Cows in popular culture, deleted from Wikipedia for being just too barking mad, massively incomplete in Citizendium; Common student exercises in computer science - random drivel. I could go on: Joan of Arc, memory of (WTF), Choosing a dog - decent enough article but encyclopaedic? And their Catalog of Cajun and Creole cuisine - one of a number of similar catalogues
Even with the very best will in the world, it is difficult to see Citizendium progressing in any meaningful way before its funding expires.
The other piece of legislation useful to you is the the Unfair Contract Terms Act. Specifically, it mandates that excluding liability for defective or poor-quality goods is permitted only if it is reasonable. No reasonable person would suppose that a change of OS was a reasonable cause for denyng a hardware warranty repair.
The suggested course of action would be to write to the vendor reminding them of their responsibilities under the SOGA, noting that the UFTA precludes exclusion of their liability because of the OS change, and noting that it is your intention, if they do not honour their liability to repair the goods, to bring a small claims action for the cost of the machine.
GNER has had WiFI on (faster) trains running between Aberdeen / Leeds and London. The single drawback is that the firm that set it up, Icomera having just sold a system to a Swedish train company, Linx AB, appears to be routing through Sweden, meaning that your default google becomes google.se. Oh. And the GNER website has a lovely little map which updates itself as you wind up & down the country, showing you where you are. In sum, it rocks.
Sadly, the Reuters story of Dow paying $12Billion is false.
I'd have E=0.5mv^2 rebated into every car steering wheel in the land. And maybe a nice E display on the dashboard.
So at any given time, 60% of dialup users do not want to switch. 40% do switch. Next year, 60& want to switch => some of the original 60% must have switched sides to the 40%.
In other news: dog bites man.
Mom does not need an endorsement of the fact that you've wasted your life to date on this interweb thingie. All she wants is grandchildren, Timothy. When are you going to deliver on that?
You're probably right. I'm mistaking virii with their own SMTP engine, for virii with SMTP Relays.
That said, a search for "SMTP Relay" on Symantec gives:
Backdoor.Hoogle
and
Trojan.Naldem
for instance. So maybe.
Umm. Slight absence of any mention of virus writing for profit: there's enough evidence that a number of recent virii were mainly about installing SMTP Relays on infected machines to propogate spam, or leaving a backdoor open so that this could later be done.
4 23258&mode=nested
0 51056136
Or else installing DDOS software aimed at Spamhaus servers, or leaving backdoors open for same.
So. Art: Check. Vandalism: Check. Profit Motive: Check. Insubstantial "infiltration" by journalist: Check.
Ferinstance
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/03/1
- Oops. There goes Spamhaus
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/
- most of this week's crop install backdoors.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040221
- Your IP Addy for sale to a spam-merchant near you...
But it is instructive to read some prior comment on mi2g, such as "Iraq will destroy us by computer" the experts screamed, or a more general index of mi2g myths, or a search for mi2g at NTK or even their own reasonably barking mad press releases.
I'm not uncomfortable with a finding that Linus boxes leak like sieves whilst windows boxes immitate Fort Knox; I'm by no means in security denial here. But I simply don't believe a word mi2g say.
The Grey Album is an exhibit at Illegal Art , an site dedicated to discussion of the copyright issue as it affects creativity.
Given that the indictment was laid against the Philly spammer before the supposed start date of the supposed operation...
... I'd venture to say that the probability is that operation cyber sweep is little more than a PR exercise to link together various extant cases to make it look as though serious co-ordinated action is taking place.
http://www.cybercrime.gov/carlsonArrest.htm
Long Darl McBride and Chris Sontag Interview dated 7:36 PM EST Tues., Nov. 18, 2003
I imagine the International Telecommunications Union would make a better fist of it than ICANN.
Conflating "monitoring boards" with this proposal looks to me like shroud-waving.
Forbes.com employee e-mail addresses are formatted: first initial last name@forbes.net (jdoe@forbes.net).
So that would be DLyons@forbes.net.
Vmyths appears to summarise the anti-mi2g camps position. Searches for mi2g on NTK and The Register, (when its search engine is working) for mi2g are as enlightening as they are amusing.
The RIAA's "xxx's is killing music" (substitute cassettes, P2P, MP3, whatever comes next) is somewhat undermined by all of this.
Menta makes the point that CDs are priced by the big five at the point that maximises profit. No surprise then to hear that whilst UK CD sales were up by 3%, profit was down by 2%.