 |  | By Neil Hawkins Senior Staff Writer Friday, 18 April 2008 |
ANOTHER twist in the Phorm tale this week, we’ve a good mind to start charging them for advertising soon! But seriously, their tailored advertising system could produce interesting results for people working out of the office, if ScanSoft’s research is anything to go by...
Government limbos under awkward Phorm questions
TRUE to phorm, sorry form, the government this week refused to do anything about the clandestine trials carried out by BT to test the controversial advertising system.
Despite a Home Office civil servant describing the trials as illegal without consent, the government retracted the claim and instead insisted that another body has jurisdiction over the issue.
A Lib Dem MP who is handling the issue in parliament on behalf of consumers said, ‘The Home Office needs to step up to the plate and decide whether BT's secret technical tests were legal and, if not, decide what will be done about them.’
The Phorm story has moved faster than a London torch relay and this week further details emerged.
Phorm admitted to The Register that it used tens of thousands of people as data guinea pigs, meanwhile BT is preparing for a new trial of the system using about 10,000 customers.
It says that in future all trials will be a very much ‘opt in’ events, however when the system goes live later this year it is not clear whether the same generosity will apply.
So far three companies are planning to use Phorm, TalkTalk, BT and Virgin Media. Only TalkTalk has said that its customers will have to opt-in if they want to have their data-pimped.
Virgin £9.99 offer ending soon
VIRGIN Media’s £9.99 per month offer for unlimited (non-cable) broadband with free evening and weekend calls ends at the end of this month so if you are thinking of switching have a look!
The offer reduces the price of Virgin Media’s Unlimited Broadband and Talk option 3 package to £9.99 a month for the first year of the contract, normal price £12.99 a month.
This package is actually cheaper than taking Virgin Media Broadband without the free phone calls so you’ll be saving more money if you currently pay BT separately for calls.
This is a non-cable offer only and ends at midnight on the 30th April, but we hope that Virgin Media will replace it with another super offer.
If you happen to be blessed and live in a cabled area then check out our Virgin Media comparison page to benefit from some of its other good deals.
BT’s high speed broadband mix up
IN a briefing this week, BT announced that its next generation high speed, ADSL2+, super-duper connections may not be as fast as anticipated.
"I can confirm that the figure which states that 50% of UK households can expect to achieve speeds of 6.3-9.3Mb/sec is the latest lab trial data," a spokesperson told PCPro.
The mix-up was down to BT being too modest about what it could achieve in its test data, so when briefing journalists they bumped up the speeds a bit based on how their ‘up to’ 8Mbps technology faired when first rolled out.
Speeds will obviously vary depending on the same external factors that affect line speed at present. As a rule of thumb, those of you who can receive broadband connections above 3.5Mbps will see a decent increase in your broadband speed, whilst anything below will be less spectacular.
BT estimates that the most customers will be able to reach speeds in the region of 6.3-9.3Mbps.
Not quite the 24Mbps most were hoping for but still, not too shabby eh?
ScanSafe discover that working at home can make you blind
CALIFORNIAIAN web watchers, ScanSafe presented the world with a groundbreaking piece of really useful research on Thursday.
Confirming what they purported to be “a long held belief” their analysis of 8 billion web requests showed that employees working from home or out of the office on laptops are putting their employers at risk of legal liability and exposure to spyware and the like.
Apparently if you leave the office you are two-and-a-half times more likely to visit porn sites, four times more likely to try to look at illegal activities (i.e. how to build a bomb) and eight and a half times more likely to file share illegally.
Seriously though, this sort of behaviour highlights the lax security that some companies employ on their remote equipment.
Whether or not this applies to the secret service I don’t know but I imagine they don’t bother to spend the time installing anti-spyware software if the likelihood is that the computer will end up travelling the Circle Line on its own anyway.
 Compare broadband and bundle services
Back to broadband guide
|
.gif)
.gif)
.gif)
Compare broadband packages from