Author Archives: Gary Hawkins

Instagram forces you to sell your photos?

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I find it amazing that people really won’t learn when it comes to “free” web sites that just happen to make money by selling all your data, whether it’s Facebook, Google, or anyone else.  Today, all over the news sites and newspapers, comes the news that Instagram (who are owned by Facebook) are basically going to sell any photos you upload to their web site without your permission, and are changing the terms and conditions to allow this.

Either people really are not concerned that a company is basically selling their personal information and data to advertisers or they haven’t really woken up to the fact that this is what they are doing.  This is precisely the main reason why I basically have cancelled most, if not all, of my social networking accounts because I bothered to read the terms and conditions and saw what they were trying to do with my data!  Copyright law exists to protect owners of “content” – so if I take a photograph of something, the copyright of that photograph belongs to me, and I decide what can and cannot be done with it.  I don’t want to sign it away to some faceless corporation to do what they want with it, all on the basis that they are providing me “free” somewhere to store my photos.

Let’s hope Instagram gets plenty of bad PR from this, because I don’t know what’s going to stop companies from doing this and getting away with it.  Perhaps it’ll need to be some high-profile celebrity or politician having their privacy rights trampled all over before something is done.

Update: Instagram/Facebook now claim they’re not really doing this.  It still doesn’t inspire me with confidence though.

Comet and gone

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Today marks the final closing down sales of the UK electrical chain Comet which has, as I write this, has or is about to pull down the shutters on the remaining 49 stores which were open for the final time today before closing down for good.  Whilst obviously it’s sad that so many jobs have been lost, Comet probably wasn’t going to survive long term because there was basically no room for them any more, sandwiched as they were between Dixons Group (owners of Currys/PC World) and the supermarkets, both of which are now selling the cheap electrical goods of the type that Comet was, and so it had to go, in an environment radically different from the original Comet Battery Stores of the 1930s.  Not to mention of course the constant financial problems the company seems to have had in recent years.

RIP Comet Group Ltd (in administration) 1933-2012

6::UK Closes Down

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You’ve probably never heard of 6::UK – and that’s pretty much the problem.  They were an organisation that started in 2010 and funded by the Government to the tune of £20,000 to help and assist UK organisations and companies to make the switch to IPv6.  Today, the entire board of 6::UK resigned because they say the Government is basically not backing them.

The hopeless state of IPv6 in the UK is not really something any of us should be proud of, and none of the Big 6 consumer ISPs have rolled it out yet.  There are a few smaller ISPs that have, but in the main the ISPs that control 90-something% of the consumer market just haven’t rolled it out.  My view is that no-one basically wants to make the first move on this, because whoever does, costs themselves money, and it’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem.

Perhaps a nice bit of public embarrassment will get things moving, but based on previous experience, I predict not.  And as the article points out, the British Government should be doing something towards this, especially as other governments around the world are.  Before it’s too late and it costs everyone three times as much to roll it out in a panic rather than do it now.

Update: The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills did bother to comment on this eventually, the text of which you can read on the BBC News article.  I’m not sure if it adds anything, though.

D-Day for D-Digits

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Ofcom, the UK telecommunications regulator, announced last Thursday that for the 01202 (Bournemouth/Poole/Christchurch area) dialling code, callers from landlines will have to dial the full national number including the 01202 code, because Ofcom want to make local numbers available beginning with the D-digits 0 and 1 – for example, 01202 012345 and 01202 123456.  (These numbers can’t be dialled without the 01202 first, since 0 and 1 have other meanings as the first digit).  Although these numbers have been available for a long time as ‘National Dialling Only’ numbers, suitable for use as ‘hidden’ numbers possibly as the destination of a redirect, they haven’t been issued to your average member of the public in the UK before.  It looks like this is all about to change, and means that an extra 200 DEF blocks (1,000 numbers) will be freed up to allocate to Communications Providers in the 01202 area, giving them a few more years before they run out of numbers.

30 Years of Channel 4 and S4C

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Today marks the 30th birthday of S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru), the fourth channel in Wales, which started broadcasting on 1 November 1982.  The following day in the rest of the UK, Channel 4 started broadcasting to the nation along with its first programme, Countdown, first broadcast on 2 November 1982 at 16:45, orignally presented by the late Richard Whiteley, and of course the programme still broadcasting to this day 30 years later.  I don’t think they expected it to last that long…!

Happy birthday to both channels.

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RIP Analogue Television in the UK – 2 November 1936 to 23 October 2012

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Today marks the closing of a nearly 76-year chapter in the history of television – the final three transmitters and their relays are being switched over to digital television tonight in Northern Ireland.  The first production ‘high definition’ (that is 405 lines) black-and-white television service was introduced by the BBC on 2 November 1936, and although the number of lines has changed and a chrominance signal added to provide colour television, a lot of the technology used in analogue television is very similar today as it was then.  Along with it goes several other related technologies which only existed on analogue TV, the first of which is NICAM 728 Digital Stereo (which stands for Near-Instantaneous Companded Audio Multiplex, and 728kbit/s was the bitrate) which introduced stereo sound on UK television for the first time in the 1986.  The second is PDC (Programme Delivery Control) which was a way of instructing video recorders when to start or stop for a given programme, and was broadcast as teletext packets, so when CEEFAX gets switched off tonight, so does PDC.  (Freeview does have digital equivalents of both of these of course).

It’s nice to see that BBC1 Northern Ireland and Ulster Television (UTV) are jointly producing a commemorative programme tonight to mark the occasion, something which none of the other English nations and regions did to my knowledge.  It’s being shown on BBC1 Northern Ireland tonight at 2235, finishing at 2330, at which point the analogue signal will be switched off, taking with it over 75 years of history and good old CEEFAX.

So, as Phillip Schofield used to say a lot in the Broom Cupboard when BBC1 NI wished to opt out of the end of Children’s BBC – “Goodbye Northern Ireland” – for analogue television tonight in NI, it really is goodbye.

Don’t forget to switch off your television set.

RIP Pages from Ceefax

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This Wednesday sees the end of analogue television in the British Isles, both in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland when all the remaining transmitters in both NI and Ireland are switched to digital.  One of the casualties of this is the Ceefax service, which began on 23 September 1974.  And although some European countries still broadcast World System Teletext services on their DVB-T transmissions, the UK and Ireland do not, choosing to use the MHEG-5 based digital text services instead.  Although the Ceefax service will be continuing to work up until pretty much the end of analogue transmissions at around midnight on Tuesday 23 October, another British institution is ceasing its broadcasts tonight, and that is ‘Pages from Ceefax’, which was basically a rolling broadcast of what was orignally P198 or 298 depending on channel, but is now I think P152.  This page is a special magazine page consisting of various pages from the main teletext service, and can actually be viewed on a real teletext set as well as it being “in vision”.

The BBC has been broadcasting Pages from Ceefax ever since I can remember, presumably because the BBC thought that it was a good way of showcasing the teletext service to viewers who did not have a teletext set.  Various teletext decoders were used along the way, from the original ones which used a Texas Instruments TIFAX (74S262) character generator (which were easy to spot because of the curious designs of the 6 and 9 characters), all the way up to the Mullard/Philips SAA5050 chips, with the ‘BBC Mode 7’ character designs in the 80s and the new SAA5243 character set with thicker horizontal lines on the numbers introduced at roughly the same time as Fastext sets were coming on the market.  These days, it’s very hard to find an analogue TV in existence which doesn’t have some kind of World System Teletext decoder in it, but when PfC was first introduced, not many people had them and they were expensive.

Although most of England, Wales and Scotland lost their Ceefax service some time ago, Northern Ireland still has it on analogue BBC2 until the end of Tuesday 23 October, and so the early hours of Monday 22 October sees the last broadcast of PfC, which is on BBC2 between 04.45 and 06.00.  (For some reason, there is no PfC on Tuesday 23 October which probably should have been the last one.)  The end of an era, and I somehow don’t think ‘Pages from the BBC Red Button’ is going to replace it, since there’s no need – or at least I can’t think of any DVB-T TVs or set-top boxes which don’t have the feature built in.

Goodbye Pages from Ceefax, and all that (some might say “cheesy”) library music that was played alongside it.

The end of analogue television in England

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As I write this, we are just minutes away from the official switch-off of analogue television in England, with the three main transmitters in the Tyne Tees region, Pontop Pike, Bilsdale and Chatton due to be switched to digital starting at midnight tonight.  Wales and Scotland have already been fully switched, and the only transmitters left are those of Northern Ireland, who will switch at midnight on October 24, along with the transmitters in the Republic of Ireland who switch over at the same time.

It’s odd to think we’ve been waiting a long time for this moment to come, and it’s finally here, with Ceefax just under a month to live until it’s finally switched off for good.  Goodnight, and don’t forget to switch off your television set.

The Wednesday IPv4 Report

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Today’s news is that yesterday ARIN went below 3 /8s left.  As their announcement shows, this means the RIR has now moved from Phase 1 to Phase 2, which has slightly different rules on allocation.    Block requests for /16 or larger are now going to be processed in strict order, and LIRs will have 60 days to pay up and not 90 (for IPv4 blocks only).  Also unused blocks are going to be put back into the pool earlier, after three months and not six.

Interesting news, and the squeeze is on.  Let’s see how it pans out…