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The UK government will soon be debating laws for internet service providers and telecommunication companies to keep records of all internet activity for a year creating concerns by many people over privacy.
These plan are part of a government initiative, called the “Intercept Modernisation Programme.”
The data would be made available to government bodies without the need to be approved by a court judge and would be accessible by 635 public bodies including the police, firebragade, financial authorities and many more.
These measures go against the privacy laws of the European Union would allow only for the storing of data for as long as necessary. (which seems fairly vague and pretty open to interpretaton in my opinion.)
These measures are being introduced under the guise of protection against terrorism, however, any internet savy users and presumably terrorists would know that users could still use Virtual Private Networks VPNs (such as Xerobank and ipredator) which encrypt the data across the network making storing the information useless. The result will be a database where innocent individuals will have their data stored with open access to a wide variety of government organisations without their knowledge. Given the government’s poor record on data security in the past and the number of organisations which will have access to the data, there is also the possibility that the data may fall into the wrong hands. Time to purchase a tinfoil hat I think.

Undoubtedly this would be a great partnership but unfortunately this is very unlikely to happen any time soon. This is mainly due to technical reasons as the iphone uses HSPA/GSM where as the Verizon network uses CDMA/EV-DO making the two devices incompatible with each other. However if Apple wanted too, they could integrate the cellular technology to make the two compatible. But Apple have said they have no plans in the near future to do this as it’s not cost effective to implement the technology required in the short term. However i do think that if in the future Verizon and Apple did partner up this certainly would be very beneficial to home and business users alike.

Google has announced a profound new music related search, making it easy to find previews of the songs you like. If you don’t know the name of the song you want but can remember some of the lyrics, you can enter what you can remember into Google and it will search thousands of listing to find the closest matches to the song. If you want to delve deeper into these new features then there is a video on the Google blog spot to explain all the functions of this new feature. I think this new feature will be good for allot of music fans out there and in some way quite surprised Google has not implemented this before now. What do you think?

Augmented reality applications could be the next big revolution to hit smart phones, which could open large channels for business advertising. Smart phones such as the iphone already come equipped with the base technology to implement augmented reality applications, so if you can imagine pointing your smart phone at a landmark and retrieving all the information about it or maybe making a quick sweep of the area to find and see all the information on local pubs, diners ect, which would be pretty amazing. Watch this space for the next big thing to hit the smart phone systems.

Windows 7 finally launches today after a long anticipated wait. Windows 7 will fix allot of the compatibility issues that plagued windows vista such as forward and backward compatible drivers and performance issues. Windows 7 also boasts a cleaner architecture and is faster than its predecessor making it ideal for home and business users alike, and if that’s not enough it’s also cheaper than Windows XP at $119.99 for the home edition and for just an extra one hundred dollars you can get the full Ultimate edition package. Personally, i can’t wait to grab a copy of the O/S to see if any of the predictions are true.

IT giant Microsoft has released its new home PC security package, but with an unusual twist for the company – it is free.

Microsoft Security Essentials, as it is called, is the successor to the Windows Live OneCare service and is freely available from the company’s website without paying a fee. All the user needs is a fully legal copy of Windows and an internet connection and they can download the software for free, along with future updates to the virus definitions.

Windows Live OneCare was discontinued earlier this year to make way for this free offering after it suffered lacklustre sales in a very saturated market. Microsoft had hoped for it to challenge the market share of companies such as Symantec and McAfee but it ultimately failed.

Whether users will switch to this anti-virus and internet security suite over established free choices like AVG and Avast! remains to be seen, but with Microsoft trying to carve out a new niche for themselves as a more ‘caring’ software company, it could well help.

ICANN, the internet regulatory body is expected to be given more control over its own affairs and oversight on Wednesday when a meeting with US government officials goes ahead. A document is due to be signed on the matter, something the international community has been going after for quite a while.

The group is responsible for, amongst other things, administration of the ‘top level domains’ available for use (think ‘.com’, ‘.net’, etc) and the available IP address allocations on the internet. Until the late 90s, the US government tended to run all of these areas directly but has gradually handed control over to the international organisation. While a complete detachment of ICANN from the US is unlikely in the near future, it is seen as a crucial step.

International observers from the EU (amongst others) wish for ICANN to become “universally accountable” to the international community – i.e. to give them as much say and oversight as the US government has had in the past.

Recently, ICANN and the IANA (an organisation run by ICANN in order to administer the addressing system) have been looking at ways of including a new series of TLDs for various industries – ranging from ‘.xxx’ for adult material to ‘.sport’ and ‘.film’ for sports and film related sites, respectively.

Google’s plans to sign a deal with book copyright holders, in order to digitise books for browsing and purchase online, has been postponed after the US law system raised objections to it.

The idea of the project is to make the hundreds of thousands of books covered by the deal available to users online, with sale proceeds being split between the publishers, authors and Google themselves. Companies such as Microsoft and Amazon have opposed the move, worried that Google may achieve a monopoly on e-book sales and have an unfair advantage across the world from the deal, even though it supposedly only applies in the USA.

While the problems have yet to find solutions, Google is mobilising its supporters in action in the hope it may swing the legal case in it’s favour. Sony is among these allies, as the company is one of the major providers of e-book reading devices. However Google try though, it may not pay off – lawmakers are starting to view Google in the same manner as Microsoft and have begun to keep close tabs on everything the company tries to do.

Whatever the outcome, consumers should benefit from future projects like this one by having greater access to a wider library of publications available at lower prices.

Google’s moves in the book market include the recent acquisition of the company ReCaptcha, a service to eliminate spam by recognising a human submitter from an automated program. It performs this task by presenting difficult-to-read words and asking for the user to type in what it says. The words come from books where the OCR software could not recognise the word, nicely dovetailing with their efforts to scan as many books as possible.

The UK government intends to introduce a tax on all people who own a fixed telephone line in order to fund the expansion of the country’s high speed internet infrastructure.

Plans unveiled in front of the BCS Chartered Institute for IT by the Minister for Digital Britain mean that everyone who has a fixed phone line will be required to pay a £0.50/month tax in order to raise an expected £175 million per year. This is earmarked for future upgrades to the broadband network, something the government has been keen to chase up as it tries to ensure that all homes in the UK have access to at least a 2mbit internet connection by 2012.

While various organisations have found the plans laid out in the ‘Digital Britain’ report something to debate over, primarily timeframes and how the government plans to finance this massive engineering undertaking, the government seems intent to steam on and bring about its planned changes.

The Conservative party will allegedly vote against the new tax, claiming it is another example of the Labour government’s intent to raise taxes. While it remains to be seen how many taxpayers will object against £6 a year more in tax and where it will, in fact, be spent, one thing that is clear is that in order to fund the plans laid out by the government, money will need to be found.

You’ve probably seen the offers in your local mobile phone store – a free laptop or netbook with any mobile broadband package. “Great,” you think, “I can access the net wherever I am!” But is mobile broadband all it is cracked up to be?

A Which? survey says that generally, no they aren’t. Advertised speeds are pie-in-the-sky as far as most users are concerned, with most people experiencing between 20-25% of this advertised speed. So, is the problem with the telecommunications networks or with the expectations of the end-user?

All ISPs advertise the maximum theoretical speed of their connections in their marketing headlines. It is a big number, and sure to impress an unwitting consumer. Now they have to specify that these speeds are seldom reached by the time the cabling reaches your house, and that depending on your distance from the local exchange (as with ADSL), you could get a vastly reduced capacity. People have become used to this now, but for some reason when it comes to mobile broadband, there is still a level of misunderstanding.

With most companies promising that speeds of up to around 4mbit/s are available, people seem to expect this from their connection and are surprised when it only averages around 1mbit/s. The main reason for this is that, just like a mobile phone, signal varies depending on your geographical location. Another factor is the network load at that moment in time – with 3G networks still relatively youthful, the infrastructure that we came to expect over time with mobile phones is still not quite there (remember being unable to get through to anyone on the phone around New Year’s Eve!).

So in many ways, it is both the advertising and the customer who are at fault. The advertising claims top speeds which will never be reached by the vast majority of people, and would need perfect conditions to reach in any case, while the customer expects this to be the verbatim truth of what they can expect 100% of the time. Maybe it is the steady speeds we experience with home broadband packages that have made consumers more demanding.

When you come to sign up for a mobile broadband package, don’t pay any attention to the top speeds the network claims you can get. Instead, look around to see how reliable their network is. No signal is a lot worse than poor signal, remember!