jonathan.rawle.org

A number of local authorities in the UK have started to fit microchips to dustbins so that they can monitor how much rubbish households are throwing away. Many commentators believe councils will eventually use the technology to charge households according to the weight of their waste.

Now, I think charging according to the amount thrown away is a good idea in principle. I’m often amazed at how much waste some small one- or two-people households produce each week, filling a large wheelie bin, whereas mine is often hardly half full. The relatively small number of people who bother to use the recycling service is also quite pitiful.

Unfortunately, I think the idea is unworkable, and likely to be extremely unfair. What is to stop people sneaking rubbish into a neighbour’s bin? Most people leave their dustbin out in the street the night before collection day; even if they don’t, it will be left outside all day while they are at work. The only solution to this would be to provide some new sort of high-tech bin complete with a lock, but as councils have already started to fit bins with microchips, it seems unlikely there are any plans to do this.

As with any sort of metering (water being another example) it’s likely to hit certain groups of people harder than others. People with young children, for example, might find they are paying much more for their refuse collection, which isn’t necessarily desirable (although perhaps this could be addressed through the benefit system). It could also be bad for people living in multiple-occupancy accommodation: the tidy, conservation-aware people who already have to pay high water or heating bills, and spend their time cleaning up after other people, might find they also have to pay for others’ rubbish to be thrown away. People living in flats might have a problem too, particularly if there are communal dustbins. Flat-dwellers also won’t have the chance to compost waste if they have no garden, and are already often denied the chance to recycle as it’s inconvenient for councils to include flats in their recycling schemes.

Another undesirable side-effect of charging by weight of a dustbin would be an increase in fly-tipping. At present, a lot of illegally dumped rubbish is commercial; in the future, we could see far more domestic waste in the hedgerows – or even simply left on the street corner with no-one wanting to claim responsibility for it, and even the most community-spirited neighbour reluctant to put it in their own bin due to the charge this would incur.

Finally, does anyone believe that the new fees for refuse collection would be balanced by a reduction in council tax?

So let’s not introduce this unfair and badly thought out scheme. Instead, they could start by offering incentives for people to recycle (for Leicester City Council, that could mean actually bothering to collect recyclable items that council tax payers have left in their green box outside their house…) Something also has to be done to reduce the amount of packaging that new items come in, and to educate people about re-using boxes, bags and envelopes.

And if they really want to encourage people to put less in their wheelie bins, could I suggest issuing smaller bins? If the size is insufficient, a larger bin could be provided, but at a cost. That would be far simpler to implement and harder to abuse. While not perfect as an idea, it would be less rubbish.

Yesterday, the new Eurostar station at Ebbsfleet in north Kent was unveiled by Eurostar. At the same time, they have announced that Ashford International Station, in southern Kent, will lose all of its direct services to Brussels, and all but three to Paris and one to Disneyland. This has been met with dismay by the London-centric press, and by people living in south Kent, who complain they will now have to travel 34 miles to Ebbsfleet if they want trains at different times. Others have suggested this will turn Ashford into a “ghost town”.

Eurostar have also announced that they won’t start to use their other new station, at Stratford in east London, until 2009 or 2010, partly due to it being in the middle of the building site for the 2012 Olympic Games.

People living in south London similarly complained when it was announced that Eurostar will be closing their Waterloo terminal when the new terminal opens at St Pancras, complaining that this would mean a journey by tube to reach the new station.

For people living outside London and the south-east, this seem like a joke. The plans to run Eurostar trains north of London were scrapped long ago, and the sleeper cars that were to be operated sold off. The rest of us have to travel into London if we want to take the Eurostar. I don’t think people in Birmingham or Manchester (2 hours from London and then the tube) or Glasgow (5 hours+) are going to worry about people from Ashford or south London having a 35-minute journey to catch trains to Europe.

When I first saw that the new Channel Tunnel Rail Link would have two additional stations between St Pancras and Ashford, I wondered whether the extra stops would cancel out a large proportion of the time gained by having a faster line. Now it seems the trains won’t normally stop at all the stations, which means faster journey times – which will be welcomed by those who’ve already had to travel down from the Midlands or the North.

It does seem that Eurostar’s next move is likely to be the cancellation of services from Ashford International altogether. One thing I am slightly uneasy with is shutting down new stations after only a few years of service. Waterloo International station opened in 1994 at a cost of £130 million, and will now be closing after only 13 years. This seems a big waste of money (and of acclaimed architecture by Nicholas Grimshaw), but reflects the difficulties and inefficiency of undertaking an engineering project such as a new railway line in the UK (France’s high speed line opened at the same time as the Channel Tunnel). St Pancras is a great station and the Eurostars should have been there from the start. But the slow planning process made this impossible, so Waterloo had to be used instead.

Ashford International opened in 1996 at a cost of £100 million. It’s unlikely to be closed altogether as some domestic services do operate from there, and from 2009 high-speed commuter trains will run from Ashford to St Pancras. That will be convenient for the people who live in southern Kent as they can then change trains at St Pancras if they want to travel to Paris or Brussels!

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 trace of a user’s online surfing habits on their computer.”

The new version of the article is, of course, more accurate. Browzar only offers local privacy. In other words, other people using your computer – or more exactly, people using your user account – won’t be able to see which pages you’ve visited or what search terms you’ve Googled. Once the data has left your computer, it makes no difference. Your ISP knows what sites you have visited, as does anyone else “listening in” on any of the dozen-or-so computers between you and the web server. Total privacy it is not.

The other main change to the article concerns Browzar’s relationship with Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE). Originally it said that Browzar was “similar to” IE. In actual fact, Browzar is simply an IE shell, a wrapper that goes around Microsoft’s browser (which is why it’s only 264K to download). Therefore it will have all the security loopholes and rendering deficiencies that IE has. Versions of Browzar are promised for the Mac and Linux, but as neither of these can run IE it seems that the Browzar on these platforms will have little in common with the Windows version.

The article states that “Most browsers, including Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari, allow users to [delete cookies, history, cache, etc.] manually… but it is often fiddly…” Originally it only mentioned IE: I wonder why they saw the need to add Safari, but didn’t mention Mozilla Firefox, the most popular browser after IE? Firefox already runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and since version 1.5 it has had a nice feature in the Tools menu, “Clear Private Data”, which is also accessible by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Delete. This allows all the same data to be cleared that Browzar clears after each session.

Given all the advantages that Firefox already has over IE, I’d recommend using it instead of Browzar. It’s easy enough to remove any information you wouldn’t want anyone else to see. Browzar’s developers say it is “designed to be run at those times when we want privacy”, and that it should complement existing browsers. So instead of taking the trouble to start a different browser to view “private” sites, why not instead just press Ctrl+Shift+Delete when you have finished?

Better still, create separate user accounts for everyone, with passwords, so that no-one else needs to use your browser (and can’t look at your documents either).

The one place where Browzar would come in useful is in internet cafes where only IE is available. Browzar can be downloaded and used without requiring administrative privileges. But then don’t forget: someone could still be looking over your shoulder.

Update, 3 September: It seems Browzar has been widely derided for making its users use a pay-per-click search engine, forcing the BBC to carry a new article on these criticisms. A good quote from web3.0log:

There was time when badware developers tried to install ad pages as homepage or searchpage in user’s IE by any possible means. Nowadays users install adware voluntarily and write news about it. True web2.0 style!

I think this is definitely one download to steer clear of.

I have now signed up with Flickr, to provide another way of sharing my photos. Later I plan to integrate my Flickr photos into the existing gallery on my website. In the meantime, I have uploaded a few new photos to my Flickr account of my trip to Diamond, and of the newly restored roof at St Pancras station.

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 it also means that the company providing the content doesn’t need to invest in so much hardware or network bandwidth.

Everyone using one of these services to download video must give over part of their internet connection for uploading the files to other people. Now, on one of the so-called illegal networks, this seems fair enough: everyone who downloads then uploads to give something back to the community. Everyone gives a little, meaning the files can be distributed for free. With the “legal” services, however, users are paying for the content, but are still having to upload the files for other customers. Imagine buying a DVD from an online store, but when it arrives, you find there are a couple of other DVDs in the package that you must deliver to addresses in the neighbourhood. This is exactly what customers of the legal download sites are being asked to do.

Sky by broadband and the Integrated Media Player service that the BBC trialled both use a peer-to-peer application called Kontiki. Sky provide a FAQ page for users of their service, and one point in particular is worth examining:

Q: If Sky is using my PC to help distribute media files to other people, will my ISP charge me for this?

A: … Most ISPs only impose limits for the amount of data you download… not on data which is uploaded. These limits will only impact the number and size of videos that you want to download from Sky by broadband.

Most ISPs now limit the amount of data that can be transferred in a month, meaning that customers effectively pay per gigabyte transferred. But do they only measure downloads, or uploads too? Here’s what major ISP BT say about it:

Q: What is a monthly usage guideline?

A: This is the total amount of data you can send (upload) and receive (download) through your broadband connection each month.

This means that you are in effect paying to send the videos to other users. As the Kontiki software is installed automatically, runs in the background, and can’t be configured by the user, whenever the PC is switched on, the user’s precious monthly quota will be eaten up as the software sends the videos on.

Admittedly, both the Sky and BBC services are currently “free” for people who already pay subscriptions (in the case of the BBC, the licence fee). However, the movie industry plan to use the same model to distribute paid-for video to customers. Legal music download sites are becoming more popular, but video remains a problem for the industry due to the huge investment in infrastructure required to distribute the content. So the industry has had the smart idea of making the customers pay for the infrastructure, in addition to paying for the content in the first place: in effect, paying twice. From the BBC article:

Jonathan Arber, an analyst at Ovum, said [the peer-to-peer network] Velocix could prove attractive to net service firms as it reduced the amount of bandwidth they had to pay for.

So who do people think is paying for the bandwidth instead?

Of course, I haven’t even touched on the fact that legal downloads come with the dreaded digital rights management (DRM), meaning they can only be played on one computer, kept for 30 days then deleted, and can’t be played without Microsoft’s expensive and proprietary software. But that’s another story best left for another day.

The company behind Velocix “hopes its technology will start to wean people off illegal use of file-sharing networks.” Unfortunately, this is likely to to be the case, as once downloading films becomes mainstream, the average consumer won’t realise they are paying twice for the same thing.