At midnight tonight, a WordPress plugin will kick in which “blacks out” this blog (and my travel blog). I know I only get a few hits a day (around 50-100, usually), but it’s my small way to take part in the STOP SOPA Wednesday.

For those who don’t know, SOPA (and also PIPA) are motions to be put through the US legal system in a bid to allow large copyright holders power to close down websites simply because they don’t like them. OK, it’s a little more complex than that but that’s what it boils down to. SOPA has, in fact, already been shelved as a result of public outcry but PIPA is still alive and threatening horrific levels of censorship.

Essentially what these laws will do is allow a copyright holder (read “rich media company”) to force any website to be taken offline if it claims said site infringes on its copyright. Forget about any discussion over “fair use”, similar content which isn’t actually copied, mistakes and the like – it’s “guilty until proven innocent, which you won’t be because the people putting in the complaint have more money than you”.

Notice, that I said “site”. Remember the case a couple of years back with a baby dancing to a Michael Jackson track on YouTube? Jackson’s record company attempted to sue the baby’s parents for breach of copyright as they dared to put a dodgy recording of part of a song by dead weirdo onto a publicly accessible website. Obviously, this would cost them a fortune in lost revenue. Tossers.

Under SOPA, the media company could force YouTube offline. An extreme and unlikely example, but under the wording of the legislation completely possible. The host is liable for the content uploaded by its members. Even if those members number potentially in their billions.

The methods used to remove sites from the internet is also flawed and involves messing about with the internet’s central servers – something which has had industry experts who actually know what they the hell they’re on about (therefore obviously not politicians, lawyers or record company execs) up in arms.

I’m glad SOPA has been shelved, but I fear it will return. Right now we have to ensure that PIPA is also put down. Although obviously focussed on the US, this will affect anyone using the internet if it goes through. It could also lead to similar legislation being put in place in other countries.

Many sites, far bigger than this little bunch of rants and reviews, are also blacking out for 24 hours. Reddit, WordPress.org, TwitPic and Wikipedia are amongst them. Imagine an internet without them – and many other sites who are not participating. Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. Blogger.

Frankly it beggars belief. Yet the ignorance and stupidity of the media companies trying to push this madness through does not.

Related articles

• What is SOPA/PIPA and Why the Web is Going Dark on January 18, 2012 (aisjournal.com)
• SOPA/PIPA Internet Protest: Web Sites go Black (magsx2.wordpress.com)
• ANTI-SOPA/PIPA Blackout (pumabydesign001.com)
• Websites Protesting SOPA, PIPA (disclose.tv)

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Stop SOPA

Judging from several reports, they could be facing a fine of around £500,000 for possibly the most serious breach of the Data Protection Act ever seen since the Act was put into force. BT are also in line for a kick in the teeth on that one.

What really got my goat, though, was the contents of the mail archives. They detailed numerous cases where the legal team attempted to force money out of people who they had absolutely no evidence against them. The letters were very much along the lines of the ones I was getting from ParkingEye (which I realise I’ve not detailed on here… that’ll be up soon).

Essentially, the letters stated that the person who paid for the internet connection was liable for illegal downloads on that connection which had taken place. And that if they coughed up £495 chosen as it was below the psychological £500 barrier), further action would not be taken. Otherwise there were threats of possible legal action, courts and so on.

This was, of course, bullshit.

One of the stories highlighted that ACS:Law were only targeting, in the first instance, people they reckoned had downloaded one particular music track, or porn. Any porn. So going for the embarrassment tactic, then.

Has anyone seen Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? There’s a story given in a monologue that I’d heard of before the film and essentially it is this – to get a lot of cash, advertise something in the dirty magazines. Let’s say, huge double-ended sex toys for men. They’re twenty quid. You don’t have any – you just wait for people to pay you and hold the cash for a bit. Then you send out apologies (“sorry, our supplier let us down” or similar), and a cheque for £20. But the company the cheque is from is called “HUGE SEX TOYS FOR MEN WITH TINY PENISES plc” or something.

Most people will be too embarrassed to cash the cheque and will just write off the £20.

This is the tactic, I feel, that ACS:Law were using. Hit people with a “you or someone in your home was downloading copyrighted filth” charge and a lot of people may well have just blushed, lumped it and coughed up. Indeed, a lot did. Courtesy of the hideous lack of security on ACS:Law’s servers, the credit cards details, addresses and so forth of hundreds of these victims is up for grabs on the internet.

What ACS:Law have done is a mixture of incredible naivete (believing that it’s so easy to link an IP address to an individual) and bare-faced cheek. Reading the emails is, frankly, stomach-churning as you see just how disparagingly they treat their victims.

The whole tone is simply “can we get money out of these people?”. In so far as being a system of punishment, their methods are no better than speed cameras. You’re “guilty” until you can prove yourself innocent by incriminating someone else.

A complete and utter shambles, kicked off by a terrible system that allowed them to jump onto this money-making bandwagon in the first place. It’s only a terrible shame for those who’s details have been leaked that it took such a breach of their privacy for these disgusting tactics to be revealed to the general public.

Related articles by Zemanta

• ACS:Law: When bad things happen to bad people (technollama.co.uk)
• Alleged film sharers’ details leak may see ACS:Law fined (independent.co.uk)
• ACS:Law’s mocking of 4chan could cost it £500k (go.theregister.com)
• Sky suspends co-operation with anti-piracy firm (independent.co.uk)
• ACS:Law facing legal action over data breach (v3.co.uk)
• Law firm faces huge fine over leak of personal files (independent.co.uk)
• Privacy International Plans To Sue ACS:Law For Mishandling Information On Those It Threatened (techdirt.com)
• ACS:Law could face £500,000 fine over porn list leak (telegraph.co.uk)

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ACS:Law and other dodgy organisations

Don't use Three - use Ping.fm!

Don’t believe the hype. After their trial back in February, Three are now offering “free” Twitter if you’re a customer. The only thing is, it’s not flipping free!

Once you register you can set it so you receive texts when certain people you follow post a tweet. This is free. However, you tweet by sending texts to a shortform number (86xxx – something like that) which costs 10p a pop. These texts can’t be part of your contract bundle so you will face this charge even if you have unlimited texts per month.

How they can advertise this as being “free” is beyond me.

If you have an unlimited texts plan, then I still recommend ping.fm – it is free. Sign up, tell it your mobile number and when you text them they forward your posts to Twitter. Or facebook. Or anywhere else they support. The phone number is a genuine UK mobile and I’ve been using them for months so I can promise you they’re included as part of a UK texts package (unlike the actual Twitter number, which is based in the Isle of Man so doesn’t count, resulting in surprise charges on your bill).

They’ll also forward photos you send on to Flickr or facebook, though I prefer to do that via email.

Either way, just make sure you always read small print on things like this. And then wonder how something that costs money can be advertised as being free. Advertising Standards Authority anyone? Mind you, they’re the muppets that let broadband companies advertise “unlimited” capped broadband.

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Twitter is NOT free on Three

Nice try, Three...

I got a text message from Three (my mobile carrier) telling me that Twitter is free on my phone until March 31st. It uses one of those short-code phone numbers and there’s no indication of the cost once the promotion ends.

However, given that I have unlimited (erm… 4000 I think, so not actually unlimited) texts per month, this is utterly pointless.

I may have mentioned ping.fm before. If not, then head over there, register and link it to your phone number. It’s completely free and the number you send a text message to is a genuine UK mobile number, and therefore free to send to with any inclusive package.

It does a lot more than just post to Twitter, and it’s all customisable. I’ve set mine to forward text messages to Twitter and photo attachments sent via email to ping.fm are passed on to flickr. All of this is free, and doesn’t expire on March 31st.

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Twitter free on Three (but why bother?)

Facebook - at least the logo's not changed

A large number of people received the new facebook layout yesterday. I gather this was facebook’s “6th birthday present” to its users. Some had had it since earlier in the year and others still haven’t got it – but will.

There are a lot of ways of looking at the design, but the single biggest flaw is that things have changed. It’s not so much what they have changed into, but the fact that things people have become used to have been moved or tweeked for no discernible reason.

This might not sound like a big deal to a lot of people, but I know of one user who’s dyslexic. For him to get used to finding something that’s moved from one corner to another is a big deal – he uses interfaces by memorising the location of things, not by visually recognising them. He has to relearn the interface from scratch – and for what purpose? None that I can ascertain.

I don’t use facebook to any great depth, so what I’ve spotted is likely to be fairly superficial. However, none of it makes any sense to me. First up is shifting the bottom bar around. The chat area is still at the bottom of the screen while the rest of the bar has been removed. Notifications are now in the top left instead of the bottom right.

This does give an extra line of screen real estate. I think. Or is the top now a little larger? However, it’s this particular move that’s caused problems for my dyslexic friend (and I’m sure many like him).

My particular bugbear is that I can’t be bothered with the news feed. It’s a mess and I really couldn’t care two hoots who is giving stupid virtual gifts to who, or who’s just got a highscore on some crappy game. I just want status updates.

In the previous version, I went to the correct area and dragged “Status” to the top of the list. Henceforth when I visited my “Home” area, I received status updates. This is no longer possible. “Home” now takes me to News Feed. It won’t even default to “Most Recent” so I have a completely useless splatter of informational crap that is of no use whatsoever.

I now have to go into “Friends” in the leftmost column. This in itself is badly-designed as there’s no indication whatsoever that “Friends” opens up sub-menus. There is a reason we have design standards, such as little boxes with “+” in them, or arrows with move from right-pointing to down-pointing. It’s simple design practise which facebook have chosen to ignore.

Once there, I’m stuck in the default Friends page and I then click on the newly-appeared “Status Updates” menu item to get what I used to find by simply clicking “Home” in the past. As far as I can tell, there is no way to set this as my default view.

Given that the press release from facebook read as follows:

A simplified home page to provide easier access to what you’re looking for on Facebook. You can now quickly navigate to commonly-used areas of the site from the top and left hand menus. From the Top Menu, you can now easily find new messages, requests, and notifications using the icons in the top, left hand corner. The left hand menu is now where you can find all of your applications, previously located in the bottom dock.

I would take issue with the use of “easily find”. Something that’s easily found should be immediately apparent, not located by means of a random search. I would also be tempted to say that the left hand columns isn’t a menu – it’s a list. Until you click on it and realise it just looks like a list.

Sure, it’s functional. There’s no denying the new look is tidier and reduces redundancy (there were so many ways on one screen to do the same thing before). But it’s very poor design. For a brand new user it lacks indication of the functionality of certain areas and for experienced users it’s moved things too far from where they were before with no obvious indication of where to look to find them.

As an aside, I think it’s badly programmed as well. This may just be coincidence, but when I left my browser (Chrome) on the Status Update page for about 11 hours yesterday when I was out, I came home to find that it was using stupid amounts of memory and froze. I never had this issue with the old design.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Facebook revamps home page (news.cnet.com)
• Facebook Intros New Homepage Design (appscout.com)
• Facebook Begins Rolling Out New Home Page Design (Eric Eldon/Inside Facebook) (techmeme.com)
• More Users Seeing New Facebook Home Page – a Birthday Launch Coming? (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook Changed their Home Page yet again, + plans to create Web-Mail Client (the-web-tech.blogspot.com)
• New Facebook Redesign 2010: PICTURES Of The New Layout (huffingtonpost.com)

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Why the new facebook layout is crap

More feeds, please, vicar!

Yes, OK. I gave up and started using facebook because so many of you don’t bother to reply to emails or use Twitter. It’s all your fault. You all suck. Fine.

One (of several) annoying things I’ve found with facebook is that it will only let you publish feed from one blog on your wall. I have two that I want to put up there. I started off with one of them, which it popped up as “notes” well enough, putting the complete blog post up. But that wasn’t enough so I started digging.

I found a few feed “aggregators” which effectively take multiple RSS feeds and create one merged feed from that. Yes, I know that’s not the correct term for them, bit it does make sense. Unfortunately, none of them published the entire article. Instead they’d publish the first few hundred words followed by a “click here to see the rest” link to the original page.

In honesty, this did the job although I know personally that I often won’t bother. And I wanted people to read everything.

For the record, the aggregator I settled on was Feedoor which did the best job with the most ease. It’s also set at my favourite price point, i.e. it’s free. [NOTE: Mamod from Feedoor saw this blog post, replied and sorted out my feed from them so that the next step wasn't needed! Please see the comments]

As luck would have it, I just found another website. What this one does is takes partial feeds from anywhere, locates the original posts and creates a complete feed from it. This web page is Five Filters.

Popping my feed from Feedoor into Five Filters generates a complete RSS feed containing posts from both this blog and my travel blog. I put the full URL given my by Five Filters into my “notes” page on facebook and *ta-da*, the whole shebang.

Yes, only a few lines show on my wall, but it now includes the images from the blog posts and it means people can stay within facebook if they don’t want to hop out to another page. Clicking on the article takes you to the entire blog post as a note within facebook.

A bit of a long way around, but finally the job is done.

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Posting multiple blogs to facebook

Speedyfox

Recently I’ve been having problems with Firefox taking an age to boot up. I’ve more or less fully migrated to Google Chrome, but still need Firefox for some pages that don’t quite work properly in Chrome. Thing is, it’s taking about a minute to load what used to be a quick browser.

After a dig, I found this little solution called Speedyfox. It is a tiny download (0.3Mb) and essentially all it does it optimise the Firefox database. It’s Windows-only at present but it’s knocked my load time down to nearer 10 seconds. Much more acceptable!

Oh, yeah. How much does it cost?

Nothing. My kind of price point.

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Speedyfox

Backupify

Another little utility I’ve started using is Backupify. Unlike such backup tools as the excellent Dropbox, Backupify doesn’t take things off your PC and store them online… it takes your online resources and backs them up. In this case, using the Amazon cloud.

There are little utilities for over a dozen common online resources including Google Mail, flickr, twitter, facebook, WordPress blogs and so on. The format the backup is made in with oft-times not be hugely useful (a massive xml file, for instance) but it’s better than nothing. In the event of a serious failure, Backupify technicians will help you restore it in some fashion.

The site is in beta and that’s one reason it’s operating at a very low price right now – free. As long as you register before January 31st 2010, you will get free lifetime use of Backupify for nothing. Including all upgrades etc. After the deadline they’ll be offering a free version with less features and scaled pricing depending on various factors.

It takes the briefest of moments to set up each backup (except WordPress which involves downloading an installing a plugin). These will run initially over a week so they’re not hammering servers anywhere and then become more regular as smaller differential backups are taken.

You can checkout your history, browse files and get a report via the online interface.

It’s simple. It’s free. It’s useful. As far as I’m aware, it’s also unique. Highly recommended.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Free Cloud Backup at Backupify (Till January 31st) (smarterware.org)
• Free Lifetime Backup for Gmail, Flickr & Twitter (shankrila.com)
• Best Online Backup Tool: Dropbox [Hive Five Followup] (lifehacker.com)
• Backupify goes free: time to save your social media life? (thenextweb.com)
• Backupify – Back Up Your Online Accounts (sparksspace.blogspot.com)

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Backupify

Great... but not perfect

I watch a fair bit of stuff off the BBC these days, yet I still find myself using torrents to download programmes rather than using the BBC iPlayer. I don’t have a TV so the internet is the only convenient way for me to catch up.

But why do I use torrents rather than streaming or downloading from the BBC directly? Some of the reasons are a little picky, I admit. Others genuinely bother me or could be something the Beeb could work on. In the meantime, though, despite the fact I can often download faster from Auntie, I’ll stick to slower torrents.

I’d like to point out, though, that I watch the programmes once then delete them – usually within the same time-frame given for iPlayer downloads.

• Torrents are generally smaller downloads. An hour’s programming is typically 730Mb compared to iPlayer’s 850Mb or so. This does mount up if you’re on a limited, throttled or capped ISP account.
• iPlayer playback can still be stuttery on my laptop and netbook. It’s particularly bad under Linux. No such issues with AVI files taken from torrents. GOM and VLC play them easily enough.
• I can download or convert AVI files for viewing on a PSP. This means really small downloads if I get them direct and portable viewing once I have them.
• iPlayer won’t work for me when I’m abroad even though I’m resident in the UK. This is very annoying though I do understand the BBC’s reasoning for the restriction.
• Some programs on iPlayer are only available for streaming, such as Match of the Day. Again, I appreciate the licensing restrictions being placed on them by the Premier League, but that doesn’t help when I want to watch it at another time. After all, I could record it on video, DVD or hard drive direct from the TV to watch any time I felt like it.
• There’s only so much stuff you can get on iPlayer until it vanishes over time. I like to watch series all in one shot, not week by week. With some series this is possible (series catch-up), but with others it isn’t. Some series just disappear completely. I managed to catch three episodes of Casualty 1909 then went abroad. I couldn’t get the last three on iPlayer when I got home.
• I run dual OS’s on my laptops and also run two machines. I’d like to be able to d/l on one machine and still watch on the other – but I can’t due to the DRM. I have managed to d/l on one OS and watch on the other on the same machine, though.

Again, please don’t get me wrong. I think iPlayer’s great. It’s just a little too limited for my personal needs right now.

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Why I use torrents instead of iPlayer

Broadband Genie

Joe’s made a couple of comments on some of my older posts and he asked me to have a look at his website. I admit, the first time he left a comments I thought “spam”…  but the fact is he read the blog post and wrote a pretty darn lengthy and appropriate response. Not the acts of a spammer, just of a guy who’s interested in blogs and happens to work for a web-based company.

I’ve been buried with coursework over the last few weeks and I’ve been meaning to review his site for ages, feeling guilty every time I saw the email reminding me “starred” in my inbox. So here it is!

Joe’s site is Broadband Genie and it is genuinely useful. It’s not so much a sales site as a consumer advice one and therefore I’m happy to give it the once over. Now is an ideal time to have a look, actually, as there’s a special section on all the package deals on mobile broadband being offered by a few of the netbook and laptop retailers.

I don’t think I’ve ever reviewed a website before, but here goes!

First impressions are good. It’s well-enough laid out that you could think it’s commercial. However, it isn’t. It’s funded by people clicking on links to providers once they’re decided – using the information on the site – which one they want to go with. The links are sponsored and BG get a little kickback.

Having looked through everything (well, a lot of it!) I’d say their claim to be unbiased is a true one. All the information you could need to decide on a UK broadband provider (home or mobile) seems to be here and in a nice, easily-readable format. There’s also a regularly-updated blog and a forum where you can air your views publicly.

If you’re in the market for a new broadband provider, this certainly seems to be a site worth visiting to help you come to a decision.

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Broadband Genie