Web

BT Digital Cost Calculator: Value Your Digital Life
BT are pushing BT Digital Vault, their product to store all of your digital data on, to that end they’ve just launched a Web service to calculate the value of your digital output.
The site lets you enter the number of music tracks, photos and videos that you have and attach a ‘sentimental value’ to each format.
We threw a few numbers into it and it tells us the total monetary value of our digital doodlings is £3,490.
We’re confused as to how they’ve come to attach these arbitrary values to the various bits of media – Music tracks – 79p; Photos – 10p; Videos – £12.
The music pricing is based of the costs of tracks on iTunes. The other two? Photos based on BonusPrint.co.uk and films, Lovefilm.co.uk.
Frankly the valuation service is a bit hollow – but may draw attention to the fact that people don’t have a backup.
Backup your data
Our view is that you cannot attach a value to the photos of friends and family that you have – they can never be replaced, so we’re all for people looking after their data. BT’s Digital Vault is one way of doing this.
One of the major advantages of an online backup service is you are protected against fire in your home, that may well wipe out backup that you hold at home.
BT offer a free service, the ‘Basic,’ which lets you store up to 2Gb of data, but you have to manually copy the data up there. With a price like that, why would you refuse? You’ll need to sign up for the service before 8 Jan 2007, after that you’ll only get 1Gb.
The pay-for service is £4.99/month, but gives 20Gb of storage and an automated backup manager. It’s this that provides the essential feature of any backup system – the ability to not to have to think about it – your data just gets backed up. Sadly the software only works on PCs though.
BT are far from unique from offering this, as there are many other services around.
Other services
One example that has been running for very many years is Iron Mountain Connected Backup, or connected.com as it used to be. Back in our PC days, we used the service on a daily basis as it was just so simple of use – the backup occurred automatically as the machine was shutting down. Prices range from $10 – $75/month for their 30Gb service.
When you look at the amount of storage BT offers for its price, it looks quite a bargain against the Connected Backup.
Vault Calculator
BT Digital Vault
12 December, 2006
£180m To Be Spent Online Today In UK
It’s being predicted that today will be the biggest Internet-based shopping day of the year in the UK. The Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) research points to a massive £180m being spent just on this day, more than double the £82 million average for 2006.
They see most of the e-shopping (as it used to be so sweetly called) being done in peoples lunch hours, between 1-2, when £14 million will be chucked over the line towards various online shops. This far out weighs the average of £4 million-per-hour being spent online in the 10-weeks run up to Christmas.
It’s not just those chomping the lunch sarnies that are clicking-until-they-drop, eDigitalResearch.com’s director, Chris Russell, chimes in with, “The evening Internet shopping peak is a recent phenomenon that has become possible with consumers’ acquisition of broadband at home. The evening peak – between 7 and 9pm – is now 80% as high as lunchtimes, when the highest sales are still recorded, between 1 and 2pm.”
Figures like this point to 38% of the sales taking place outside of traditional shopping hours, either before 9am or after 6pm. IMRG are really keen for you to notice this – differentiating them from ‘normal’ stores.
It’s not just today that is rather large in the sales department – the shopping joy/nightmare will be spread over the whole week. They estimate online sales worth £1.145 billion (!) will be made in the week 4-10 Dec, with the whole of December ringing up £3.55 billion.
IMRG
4 December, 2006
Spam Soars With Nine Out Of Ten Emails Being Junk
Just over nine out of every 10 e-mails sent worldwide are junk, with a “spam tsunami” flooding inboxes with relentless junk advertising.
That’s the findings of e-mail security company Postini, with vice-president Daniel Druker telling the Sunday Times that the internet is “under siege.”
“Spammers are increasingly aggressive and spam has evolved from a tool for nuisance hackers to one for criminal enterprises,” he said.
According to their figures, spam has almost trebled in the last five months, with the company detecting more than 7 billion spam e-mails worldwide in November – up a massive 2.5 billion from June and now making up 91% of all e-mails.
Chief culprit for the rise in spam is sneaky software that hijacks home PCs and then uses them to blast out spam, unbeknownst to the owner.
Because each hijacked PC only sends out a relatively small amount of spam, they’re not detected by anti-spam networks and thus avoid being blacklisted on industry spamlists.
Although UK regulations were introduced in 2003 to outlaw spam, they’ve been spectacularly useless, failing to make a single prosecution.
In America, there has been some success, with a court jailing serial spammer Jeremy Jaynes for nine years in September after he despatched hundreds of thousands of junk e-mails daily from his North Carolina home.
The Top Ten Spammers
Last week, anti-spam firm Spamhaus released their list of the top ten networks responsible for delivering spam:
1. verizonbusiness.com
2. serverflo.com
3. sbc.com
4. xo.com
5. proxad.net
6. rr.com
7. tpnet.pl
8. edu.tw
9. hinet.net
10. ttnet.net.tr
Spamhaus blames much of the problem on ISP’s who either fail to stop the spammers or do nothing to stop them through mismanagement or good old fashioned corporate greed.
The company also noted that around 80 percent of spam is generated by no more than 200 professional spam gangs, with the top ten spam bad boys including four Russians, two Americans and one each from Canada, Hong Kong, Israel and Ukraine.
Spam, spam, spam, spam… you’ve got mail [Suday Times]
Spamhaus
Postini
20 November, 2006
UK Web-rage Man Gets 2 Years Jail
The UK first case of Web-rage to go through the courts has reached sentencing.
Paul Gibbons, 47, of Bermondsey, south-east London has been handed a two year jail stretch.
It all started when Gibbons took an extreme dislike (to put it lightly) to some of the online discussion comments put forward to John Jones, 43, who lived in Essex. This grew to the point where Jones taunted Gibbons.
The normal course of events in this type of occasion, would be a flame war as the various parties attack each other over a series of posts – then, eventually it would fizzle out.
Not this time. Gibbons took such affront, that he gathered details online about John Jones’ address and went to pay him a visit, complete with a pickaxe handle and a friend with a machete.
When Jones opened the door of his house – with a knife of his own, he was severely attacked.
There have been previous examples of people being attacked for online conflict. In China, one player of online game “Legend of Mir 3” killed another over a dispute over ownership of a virtual sword.
As Investigating Officer Det Sgt Jean-Marc Bazzoni of Essex Police said, “The dangers of giving personal information out in a chatroom environment must never be underestimated.”
(via)
17 November, 2006
Zend To Help PHP Run Faster On Windows
Microsoft have finally woken up to the fact that people aren’t using their Web server product, Internet Information Server.
Un*x-based Web servers rule the roost with the majority of commercial hosting companies, for a couple of reasons.
First is cost – Apache is free, as is Linux that it runs on, where as the Microsoft option requires a copy of Windows Server which retails for around $1,000.
Another is that many of the applications that are run on the Internet, and are freely available, use the programming language, PHP – twenty-two million Web sites currently. PHP is widely know as running slowly on IIS.
Microsoft have now signed a deal with Zend Technology to get PHP running faster, more reliably and increasing its stability. The deal covers Windows Server 2003 and the upcoming version Windows ‘Longhorn.’
To get the PHP working efficiently on their Server products, Microsoft will develop a version of FastCGI them. They will give away.
Microsoft will be excited with the comments of Andi Gutmans, co-founder and chief technology officer at Zend, “Since our preliminary work with Microsoft, we have already seen a better than 100 percent performance gain with some PHP applications on Windows Server 2003.” Good start.
Clearly this is great for Zend, a major mover in the PHP-world, as we suspect that they’ll be getting bundles of money for their troubles. Actual details of the financial arrangements were not disclosed.
As to whether anyone will actually choose to run PHP on Windows Server, when they can get it running for free on Linux – What do you think?
Zend
1 November, 2006
Firefox 2.0 Launches Today
The final version of the Firefox 2.0 browser is expected to be released into the wild today.
Our browser of choice for some time now, the update to the open source browser includes onboard anti-phishing controls, built-in RSS and XML feed-viewing capabilities, and a new inline spell checker.
Firefox is developed by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, and a spokeswoman commented that the final version was substantially the same as the final beta, with the program scheduled for free download sometime this afternoon.
The release comes days after Microsoft launched their catch-up Internet Explorer 7 upgrade, which saw the program finally introduce tabbed browsing – something that Firefox users have been enjoying for years.
Firefox 2.0 also features a new “close” button on its tabs – with links opening in tabs by default – and a handy Session Restore feature restoring windows, tabs, text typed in forms, and in-progress downloads from the last user session, with the ability to restore previous sessions after a system crash.
“If your browser needs a restart or the OS asks you to reboot, losing all of those web pages and content is pretty disruptive,” commented Mozilla VP of products Christopher Beard. Ain’t that the truth, Chris!
An enhanced search feature will offer search term suggestions for punters using the integrated text box to search Google, Yahoo! or Answers.com, with a new search engine manager making it easier to add, remove and re-order your fave engines.
Although Firefox has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity and made a real impact on Microsoft’s near-monopoly of the browser market, recent figures from OneStat.com reveal that global usage of the browser slumped 1.44 per cent from July, and now stands at 11.49 per cent.
Internet Explorer still rules the global roost with 85.85 per cent of the market, increasing 2.8 per cent since July while, global usage of the Mac-only Safari browser is just 1.61 per cent, down 0.23 per cent from July.
Firefox 2.0 release notes
24 October, 2006
Scrybe Online Organiser: A Google Calendar Buster?
Set for a beta launch this month, Scrybe looks to be a ground-breaking online organiser if it lives up to the claims made in the promotional video posted on YouTube.
Calendar app
The slick Web 2.0 interface lets users drill down through calendar dates, with the context sensitive display intelligently expanding and contracting to display the required information.
Boasting sharing and collaborative tools, the program handles multiple time-zones beautifully with a polished interface and a neat feature which ran alternate time zones alongside diary pages.
According to the video demonstration, users will be able to seamlessly import popular document formats like Word, Excel and Acrobat, with lists cut and pasted from Excel automatically being converted into a ‘To Do’ list. Very neat.
Web snippets – complete with bookmarks, graphics and text formatting – can be copied into a categorised Thought Pad interface and integrated with calendar events and To Dos, with multi page documents browsed via a sleek, pop up graphic navigation pane.
Offline, Online…
What’s unique about Scrybe is its ability to let you work on your organiser while you’re offline, with any changes synching to your online account once you’re connected again – great for getting work done on a plane journey.
When it comes to syncing all this information with portable devices, Scrybe has gone for the oldest format of them all: paper.
It a rather daring (some may reckless) move, the program appears to forgo all thoughts of trying to sync to Palms, PDAs and smartphones and offers PaperSync – a series of clever, foldable templates that can be printed out, folded and tucked into your back pocket.
What we think so far
So far, we’re very impressed with the interface, the offline functionality and the ambitious re-jigging of the calendar app, although the seeming lack of proper phone/PDA integration looks to be a potential Achilles’ heel.
It may be great having your week’s agenda folded up in your back pocket, but any notes you make are going to have to be manually added back into your PC at the end of the day. And where’s the email integration?
Although the online demo looks amazing, we’ve seen far too many slick presentations be followed up by a hideous kludge of a program, so we’ve signed up to the beta trial and will hopefully be able to give you our hands-on verdict soon.
Mind you, if it looks and runs as well in the real world as it does in their promo video, Google’s usability and interface team may be sent back into the lab for some hasty overtime.
Scrybe
24 October, 2006
Internet Explorer 7 (IE 7): Microsoft Releases
Microsoft have made their latest version of their Web browser, Internet Explorer 7, available for download.
The build-up to the release has been considerable, as the product has been available as a beta download for the last 14 months.
To many, Microsoft’s browser has become less relevant as alternative browsers have become more stable and accepted – primarily the open source Firefox and to a lesser extent Opera.
Feature Catchup
The other browsers have been innovating features that their users couldn’t imaging living without, such as Tabbed browsing, where new browsing sessions are opened in a tab across the top of the screen rather than littering the desktop with new windows. With ie7, Microsoft has finally caught up and has built it in.
Other features included to match the same level of functionality, are reading RSS feeds and building in a search box to the browser that they call Live Search. There has been some controversy over the search, as it defaults to searching on Microsoft’s own service. It is understood that this was the only option right up to just before the final release, when other search options were added.
Phishing warning
Built into ie7 is the knowledge of sites that are known for phishing – sites that lure the innocent user into providing personal information, often banking details, that are then used for criminal purposes. When an ie7 user goes to one of these sites by mistake, the Web address bar is turned red and a message is displayed.
Beware! spoof versions
Some naughty Trojan writers have used the release of ie7 to attempt to spread their evil seed to the world. They sent out a spam email using the [email protected] email address, pointing people to a link that launched a Web site made to look like Microsoft’s own download site.
Microsoft ie7
20 October, 2006
Wikipedia Co-Founder To Launch Rival Citizendium Encyclopaedia
Unhappy with the inaccuracies of the online encyclopaedia he set up, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has announced that he will be launching an alternative to the free online reference this week.
The free spin-off site, sporting the rubbish name of ‘Citizendium,’ will introduce user registration and editorial controls for user-submitted articles in an attempt to filter out pesky trolls, biased contributors and Tourettian troublemakers.
“Wikipedia is amazing. It has grown in breadth and depth, and the articles are remarkably good given the system that is in place. I merely think that we can do better,” Sanger said.
“There are a number of problems with the system that can be solved, and by solving those we can end up with an even better massive encyclopaedia,” he added.
An invite-only pilot version of the non-profit site will launch this week, although there’s no news about a full release.
The rise of Wikipedia
In five short years, the advert-free Wikipedia has become one of the most popular research tools on the Web, boasting more than 2 million articles in 229 nationalities, with Nielsen NetRatings registering more than 33 million unique visitors in September this year.
Such is the explosive growth of the site, this figure represents a whopping 162 percent rise from the same period last year.
With anyone able to write and edit content on Wikipedia, the site has been accused of unreliability, with controversial topics and some political entries being bogged down by never-ending disputes from warring factions.
Sanger has accused Wikipedia of failing to keep a grip on its writers and editors, commenting that the latest articles don’t represent a consensus view, just a reflection of what the most persistent ‘posters’ say.”
Larry Sanger hopes to introduce some order to his rival site by introducing editors, volunteer ‘constables’ and personal accountability which will see people using real names.
Although the site will be open to submissions from anyone, editors will be empowered to authorise articles with “constables” charged with wading into rows and asking, “why can’t we all just get along?” Or something .
With backing from an unnamed foundation, Citizendium hopes to evolve with public participation, growing from a “fork” of the open-source code of Wikipedia, with new content replacing existing content until it grows into a new compendium of its own.
The Citizendium Project
Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge
18 October, 2006
Catch-A-Perv: IM Paedos Beware
Two UK lads, Gary and Ash, have taken upon themselves to go into Internet chats, posing as a 13 year old girl and converse with various men who happened across them.
Sadly many of the men who chat to them aren’t asking them about their interest in sewing patterns, but do in fact try to engage with them in sexual discussions.
Gary and Ash keep up the 13 year old act, while recording the conversations, they then encourage the (normally) older men to turn on their Web cams, which they also record.
The old boy at the other end of the connection then begs for them to switch on the “13 year old’s” Webcam. Much to their surprise, they see two lads who then inform them that they’ll be featuring on the Catch-A-Perv Website.
While it looks clear that they are exposing people who shouldn’t be discussing such things with those so young, Gary and Ash have given themselves a route out of possible legal problems by stating that “The website does not claim any persons shown on the site are paedophiles – there is no reference that suggests this – it is clear however, that the behaviour demonstrated is unacceptable.”
It’s a pretty distasteful read, so it’s lightened by reading the front page, where perhaps by mistake, or in joking way, they say they’re “raising awareness of the issue in hand.”
via BBC Radio 4: You and Yours
Catch-A-Perv
3 October, 2006