What do the Utah First Credit Union, US Weightwatchers, a school in Washington State, an alarm system for elderly people, Bell Canada Telecom, and the Danish Pipe Shop all have in common? They have all sent e-mails to me, believing them to be addressed to one of their customers. I always thought I was fortunate [...]
Ever since Classic FM’s owners made half-hearted attempts to stop overseas listeners from listening online a few years ago, people around the world have been listening quite happily to internet streams of the station. If the streams are accessed directly by URL, for example using a media player, there is no check of the listener’s [...]
This post is slightly late, but around two weeks ago there were two cases in the news of people who had been arrested for posts or “tweets” they had written on the micro-blogging site Twitter. The first was an appeal against a sentence earlier this year by Paul Chambers, the man who tweeted that he [...]
I was surprised to read today that the Colombian domain .co challenges .com. The Colombian government have handed the running of the domain to a private company to realise its commercial potential. They hope that .co will replace the ubiquitous .com domain as the domain of choice for companies – or should that be companies [...]
I don’t use Facebook, largely because I don’t like giving up control of who sees various pieces of personal data. Traditionally, an address book was a very private thing, kept securely at home. But now, with social networking sites such as Facebook, people seem happy to publish a list of their contacts on the internet. [...]
It comes as no great surprise that The Times newspaper’s website is to charge for access to content. Rupert Murdoch has been threatening this for some time, having already closed his free London newspaper thelondonpaper last September. But at £1 per day – the current price of the printed daily – how many people are [...]
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. [...]
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