Plus.net close webmail service

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/news/viewnews.cgi?id=EEZAFlAplABmgWAOaP

When will the incompetency end?

I fell out with plus.net, previously known as one of the best ISPs in England (alongside Zen, who are still excellent) when I used them for work and used the IMAP protocol so that email would be stored on their servers. There was a policy in place for staff to make their own backups, given that our dying charity couldn't afford a proper backup system, but this seemed like a great double safety net.

Seemed logical at the time, after all, what kind of pathetic ISP not only breaks such a mission critical system, but doesn't even make backups?

Answer: plus.net.

Now they've managed to break webmail, leaking addresses to spammers (the absolute WORST thing you can do as an internet service, good effort lads) and rather than fix it, they've admitted defeat and closed their webmail service. Much like when they couldn't work out how to recover data, they gave up and said it was lost.

Good job I vowed never to use them again, eh?

Here's an idea plus.net - you can't run an ISP, so give that up too, and do the internet a big favour.

Come on t'internets, do keep up

So bandwidth seems to cost around £1/GB at the moment. When you're doing things like downloading video or even streaming it, or in a media-rich world such as Second Life, it's very easy to use up your ISP's allocation, and the ones that offer some insane amount actually lose money before you hit that threshold. Then when you think that for every GB you download you pay £1, that can actually become expensive very quickly.

Others, such as Pipex Homecall, boldly offer "Unlimited downloads" and market it bigtime, and then sneak a clause in the fine print (locked in the basement of the company headquarters inside a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'beware of the leopard') saying "Actually, you can download unlimited so long as you keep to our Fair Use Policy of 1GB/week". Well um, that's not unlimited then, is it? In fact 1GB/week is extremely limited for Broadband, you can use it up in about an hour of downloading. This kind of misleading advertising needs to stop.

The availability of bandwidth (i.e. amount transferrable) simply does not match - anywhere near - the speed of the connections available or the requirements of today's media-rich internet services. And it's only going to get worse - pretty soon. Those of us pushing the boundaries may only be a minority now, but in the world of computing and the internet, things change very very quickly.

What about all this talk of 24Mb broadband? You'd use up your allocation on some ISPs within about 5 minutes!

Somebody start a revolt. I'm revolting enough already.

10 uses for audio cassettes

BBC NEWS | Magazine | 10 uses for audio cassettes

Behold: All manner of funky ideas for cassettes, which have now been "declared" obsolete (by the media; read into that what you will) because some outlets have stopped selling them.

I think they're still very useful in cars, as many still have cassette players fitted. They failed to die out in cars due to those CD-to-cassette adapters you could get, and unlike an iPod they don't go flat or rely on trailing leads.

I was going to use cassettes myself in the car, after frustration at my iPod going flat after 2 minutes and issues with the adapter, but Minidisc was a better option (I have an MD recorder in the house, but not cassette, which has been relegated to the loft). Attempts to fit that, however, led to temptation in Halfords which then led to the purchase of a CD player.

As it turns out it's superb: it has the option to attach an MP3 player through a front port but I prefer to pop an MP3 CD in as it "just works" and can be left in the car (the idea of using cassettes in the first place). As a bonus it acts as the best-integrated bluetooth handsfree kit I've seen yet, automatically connecting to the phone as you turn on the ignition and using the existing speakers.

But I digress.

Not everyone wants to fork out £100 for a new head unit, especially the younguns on their first banger where it'd double the value of the car! Until the cassette player leaves the humble panel between the driver and passenger seat, and I've seen them included with relatively new cars too, I suspect the cassette is perfectly alive and well. You'll just have to go somewhere other than Currys.

King of Piel crowned

Evening Mail article

Heh.... thought it'd be our mate Stretchy! After all he's already got the throne in the King's Head!

If someone throws a potato at his head, will he be crowned by King Edward?

Student, Denied Degree For MySpace Photo, Sues

Slashdot | Student, Denied Degree For MySpace Photo, Sues

It's interesting to hear this.

I think it's quite troubling that people such as this student, and the employee of Barrow's Thorntons, can get into trouble for something they post "privately" amongst friends.

This is the issue with the Internet as it currently stands, however. If you're going to write something publically, you have to know that anyone in the public can view it.

Blogs need some sort of categorisation on who can view what, like:

Level 1: "These are my general acquaintances, co-workers, parents etc so show them only the professional stuff."
Level 2: "These are my friends so show the larking around and the booze-ups in all their gory detail."
Level 3: "These are my very close trusted friends so go ahead and show those diary-type posts where I'm baring my soul."

It's not like there's anything to hide as such, and I'm sure the same goes for many people concerned with privacy and the effect of the internet. But there are some things that you want to tell certain people and keep quiet from others. Issues like the one linked are just one type of many.

You can sortof do this with Blogger, but of course people need to register and the last thing people want to do is register for yet another blogging site. Maybe one day we'll be able to use one login and one friends-list for all these "Web 2.0" things... blogs, myspace, msn, etc etc. That would make things so much easier, don't you think? I mean even as a convenience, how many people have built up almost the same list on myspace, bebo, xanga, livejournal, msn spaces, that new google one (not blogger), the list goes on?

Someone needs to create a centralised friends list, basically, and make it work with everything. Any takers? Go make a fortune! I'm too lazy to be an inventor!

Old content re-imported

I found that plenty of people were wanting to move from Blogger to Wordpress, but very very few wanted to do the reverse. What can I say, I'm weird.

For those who, like me, were struggling to figure out how to import from Wordpress to Blogger - the tool you want is called Blogsync GUI and it's available here: http://zeaster.blogspot.com/2007/02/blogsync-with-gui-coming-import-your.html

The only problems with it are:

• Ability to import the author of each post. So right now I appear to be claiming credit for all of MG's posts. I will be fixing this very shortly.
• No way to import comments. Luckily there aren't many (well, since I got rid of the 100,000 or so spams I had on Wordpress) so hopefully there will be some way to do them by hand.

Other than that, it's superb. The formatting of the posts, date, time and even labels have all been transferred across. Excellent.

UPDATE: comments are now imported. They didn't keep their time stamps, so I put those in by hand.

BBC does it again: On-demand service given the OK

BBC NEWS Entertainment BBC gets TV on-demand service OK

Another fine example of the BBC leading the way forward and proving the license fee worthwhile, as the green light is given for internet downloads of TV programmes.

They can be downloaded within 7 days of broadcast, and kept for 30 days.

Others in the media industry just don't seem to "get it", for example with music and movies, something like this would be seen as a huge 'no-no' because of the potential piracy risks and intellectual property concerns. "Oh no," they say, "a very small minority might crack the 30 day limit and trade it, so forget it, everyone loses out because everyone's a potential criminal."

The likes of the BBC seem to see the light - that not everyone is seeking to use the downloads for some sort of evil deed, and that in fact... people will be delighted with the convenience of this service (even better than TiVo or Sky Plus), and any losses they do make to people cracking the 30 day limit instead of buying DVDs (a very small minority I'm sure) will be greatly offset by happy and loyal viewers. BBC wins again.

As I've said in the past, if the BBC and Google got together there would be an earth-shattering surge of Quality and Common Sense on the web.