Today, many internet service providers in the UK have censored a page on Wikipedia due to an image used on the page. The image was blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), an “independent, self-regulatory body” that aims “to minimise the availability of… child sexual abuse content hosted anywhere in the world and criminally obscene [...]
In July 2006, another Wikipedia user left a message on my talk page to say that he had begun an article on renowned Leicester space physicist Ken Pounds, and noting that I was a Leicester physicist, invited me to contribute to the article. Although I was reluctant to write about someone I vaguely knew, the [...]
Today marks 10 years since I was given my first e-mail address and started using the internet on a regular basis. The occasion was that I started university. The internet was only just starting to find its way into people’s homes, so the majority of people online were academic users. I kept the same university [...]
I’ve decided not to post an April Fool on my website this year. That’s not because of a lack of imagination (well, OK, it’s partly that too) but rather that I realised the internet covers all of the different timezones, so it would always be the wrong day for the joke somewhere in the world.
I [...]
Yesterday I read about a new web browser, called Browzar, on BBC News. This browser, so claimed the BBC , would offer “total privacy for its users” by removing any trace of the sites they had visited from the computer.
Today, the BBC article’s claims have been significantly toned down. Now the program simply “leaves no [...]
Legal video download services are looking to the technologies used by “illegal” fire-sharing services to speed up downloads. By using a peer-to-peer network, the files are downloaded in parts from other users instead of being downloaded sequentially from a central server. This should improve the speed as it isn’t limited by the server’s bandwidth. But [...]
Last week I noticed that the appearance of my Google search results had changed. There was a new column down the left side with links for Images, Groups, News, etc. and alongside each one there was a green bar-chart, presumably to indicate the number of search results for each type of search. There were some [...]
Recently, I read about two newly-launched web-based services that help to match people up with others for their mutual benefit. One, studentswaps.com, was for students going away to university to live in the home of another family in a swap system, with the aim of saving money on accommodation costs. The other, localmothers.co.uk, was [...]
Last month I described how a new licensing regime has meant that listeners from outside the UK may no longer listen to British independent radio stations. But certain stations, including Classic FM, only required the listener to enter a valid UK postcode to listen.
Then, at the start of this month, something changed again, and people [...]
From 1 April 2006, internet streams of British independent radio stations ceased to be available for listeners outside the UK.
Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL), who collect royalties on behalf of record companies, informed broadcasters that they are only in a position to sell broadcasting rights for the UK. Therefore, when the old licences expired on 31 [...]
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