Over the past few days, I've been going over the old Benscomputer.no-ip.org archives and have republished some of the content.
What's struck me as funny though, is how times change, but a lot of the issues remain exactly the same.
Originally published on Benscomputer.no-ip.org 04 June 2006
It would seem that Apple have elected for more vendor lock-in. It used to be possible to download a Windows
executable file to update the firmaware of your iPod, however now you are forced to download iTunes 7 and update
through that.
That may seem like something normal, but the beauty of the old system was us Linux users could extract the new
firmware and install it manually, now we can't as Apple don't provide a Linux version of iTunes. This from a
company who has already been criticised for Vendor lock in with their Fairplay DRM.
One day companies will remember that it is the consumer who provides their revenue, and that whilst it may be a
small percentage, creating disgruntled customers is never a good idea. Once the world becomes aware of what
companies are doing to restrict their rights (DRM, Vendor lock-in etc) these companies are going to find
themselves very short of revenue.
Originally published on Benscomputer.no-ip.org on 13 August 2008
I've noticed that the number of links on the main page to stories about Phorm is quite large, so to make the stories a more useful resource I decided to create an index with all Phorms links on it.
The newest entries can be found at the bottom of the page, and all links will open in a new window/tab.
Originally published on Benscomputer.no-ip.org 16 June 2009
Well, the long awaited 'Digital Britain' report is out. It's 254 pages long, and not being at the RSA I haven't had chance to have a full read through yet. I have managed to pick out a few highlights though, and although certain sections made me want to throttle whoever suggested Lord Carter was the right man, he does redeem himself in other areas.
So lets take a look at the good and then the bad;
Originally published on Benscomputer.no-ip.org 14 June 2009
Now, it can hardly have escaped anyones attention that BT ran some very
questionable trials of Phorms system. It's been on BBC News, as well as
many other sources, including the Governments refusal to take action.
This has led to the EU intervening on our behalf, not that much has
happened from that so far.
But most of the media has focused on the RIPA element of it, that is to
say the Illegal Interception of the users traffic. Having read the
leaked test documentation (Have a look on WikiLeaks), I'd say that
there's another element to it that appears to have gone largely
unnoticed.
The original trial involved injecting Javascript into each and every
page the user visited (with some unfortunate results on forums), and
based on the test documentation, even users who were opted out (not
that they were given the opportunity in the trials) would find
JavaScript being run on every page.