Occasionally, I’ll see something in an article on the BBC News website that seems wrong, so I drop them a note via their contact form to point it out. They are actually quite good at correcting factual errors, although they seem not to write back to thank the the people who pointed them out. The […]
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 […]
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 […]
Yahoo! have released their first music download in MP3 format without digital rights management (DRM) copy protection. This means the track can be played on any hardware device, or played using the software and operating system of your choice. The track in question is A Public Affair by Jessica Simpson. What is most surprising is […]
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 for […]
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 […]
Last weekend, one of the first cases of fraud involving “chip and pin” payment cards was reported to have forced Shell to suspend the system at its petrol stations. A brief background to chip and pin: originally, all credit and debit cards carried information on a magnetic strip, and to make a payment, the cardholder […]
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 […]
We often hear about the “Great Firewall of China”, the filter put in place by Chinese censors to prevent access to material that is disapproved of by the Chinese government. For example, there is no access to BBC News. However, for those in the West, it’s usually only possible to read media reports, or hear […]
