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Darren Waters

Phorm's devil is in the detail?

  • Darren Waters
  • 17 Mar 08, 13:57 GMT

The controversy over BT, Talk Talk and Virgin's plans to which monitors web behaviour of users in order to target adverts shows no sign of diminishing.

More than 5,300 people have now signed the , expressing their concern about the technology.

Tim Berners-Lee, the architect of the web, has even although he was speaking about such systems in general, rather than this system in particular.

Privacy advocates have been pouring over every detail of these plans, and asking very particular questions about how the technology works, and debating wider issues about the nature of privacy and personal data.

A lot of the debate and analysis is taking place in the mailing lists of.

The Register has also done a thorough job and has turned up some strong news lines, the is BT's admission that it conducted a technical trial last year without the knowledge of customers.

The Register suggests BT "mis-led" customers last year about its involvement with Phorm.

If true, this may damage people's trust in BT but really has no impact on the technology and how it works.

We've had a fair sprinkling of e-mails about Phorm in the last few weeks. Some of them have urged us to almost take sides on this story, which of course we can't do.

We have to be balanced to both sides. Yes, we have a duty to readers to get to the heart of the story, but we can't assume guilt, or foul play etc.

There's also a question of detail - how much is too much for a mainstream audience? I think we've covered the key points very well, and the main issues. But you may have another view.

We are still following this story - as the Tim Berners-Lee news I hope shows.

And there are still unresolved questions that we are chasing answers on:

Will BT and Virgin make Phorm opt in or opt out?

Do website owners need to give their permission for their pages to be "trawled" by Phorm's Profiler?

If there are other questions you have, please let me know.

UPDATE: BT have contacted the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ to ask us to change a reference in this blog in which we quote The Register's story. We have changed it only because the sentence was quoting the Register's headline, which the site itself had changed.

Darren Waters

Leopard's roar turns to whimper

  • Darren Waters
  • 17 Mar 08, 11:38 GMT

I’ve been using , for the last five months now and was interested in hearing your thoughts and experiences of it, as well as sharing mine.

My overwhelming feeling about the release is one of disappointment, especially compared with the benefits and features that Tiger, the previous iteration, introduced.
Apple Mac book

So what are the causes of my disgruntlement?

The first is the failure of Leopard to match expectations. I can’t blame Apple entirely for this, as expectations were my own.

But there’s no doubting the fact that - and why not, they are a company selling a product after all.

My first expectation was that Leopard would at least match Tiger in terms of ease of use, responsiveness and stability.

But on every machine that I have installed Leopard, the computer is less stable, more prone to crashes, and "hangs", while start-up times are longer, applications feel more sluggish.

The spinning beach ball, representing an application "hanging", is now a close friend, rather than a casual acquaintance.

This is despite bumping up the RAM on each of my machines to 3GB. And it’s not as if my Macs are old. My iMac is the first of the Intel-powered machines, while my Macbook is just over 12 months old.

To be clear: I’m not saying my Macs are now crash-prone, glitch boxes. But there is a definite, measurable decline in performance since I installed Leopard.

And I’m not alone - these problems have been documented on many forums.

However, the latest issue of Macworld magazine reports that 81% of new Mac owners are very satisfied with Leopard.

Some of the key features of Leopard have proved less than useful - Stacks is a gimmick and quickly becomes impractical once a folder has more than a dozen files in it, while improvements to the Finder are still a work in progress.

In some cases Leopard seems to have taken a step backwards.

The new Front Row system has been crippled so that music can no longer be streamed from your Mac to an Airport Express plugged in to a hi-fi.

Why would they do this, unless they wanted to force consumers into buying an Apple TV?

There are also well-documented issues with Leopard and wi-fi networks - from periodic dropouts to problems getting connected at all.

It’s not all bad however; Quick Look has become adopted into my workflow as a simple way to check files, from video to photos.

And it’s now simpler and quicker to network your Macs thanks to the visibility of machines in Finder.

Spotlight, the tool to search your indexed hard drives, is more responsive while Time Machine has removed my worry about back-ups.

So am I alone here? Has Leopard been a disappointment?


Rory Cellan-Jones

Talking To Sir Tim

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 17 Mar 08, 09:13 GMT

He's the greatest technological pioneer Britain has produced over the last 30 years - and Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been rewarded with all kinds of honours, from , to the , to . What he is not is the most fluent of interviewees - so I was rather worried about our encounter the other day. I need not have been.

Sir Tim Berners-LeeAs you can see, he gave us a great story with his views on the . And, as we sat in the slightly incongruous surroundings of the Millers Association in a lovely old St James's building (getting the wi-fi working almost proved too great a challenge for the web's creator), he delivered a fascinating 25-minute tour of a whole range of issues.

Social networking (he's tried it - and thinks it may eventually be more for the old than the young), what's right and wrong with the web (it's great that user-generated content is taking off - but why aren't more people doing it?), why we need to study the science of the web (so mistakes such as allowing e-mail to be swamped by spam won't be repeated), whether web firms were right to compromise their principles to get into China (maybe it was worth it to bring a degree of openness to the web there). His mind seems to work rather like the web itself - one idea links to another, so you suddenly find him galloping off in an all sorts of different directions, and have to try to haul him back to the original question.

The man who could have made a fortune out of his invention but chose instead to stay in academia has firm principles. He believes the web is all about open standards and interoperability and he is determined to be seen as above all commercial interests. We had asked him to choose a number of websites that illustrated the web's growth - but he was adamant that he could not be seen to endorse any particular product, whether it be or or . He'd even put a sticker over the logo on his laptop to avoid any product placement. (Here's a clue - it was a fruity logo).

For a television report you do need some pictures - so we asked Sir Tim to talk us through a map he has created as a way of depicting the growth of the internet and the web. It shows a few streams feeding into a small lake marked "internet", and from there into a bigger lake marked "World Wide Web". The web river then meanders through a green and fertile land land before flowing into the "Sea of Interoperability."

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's webmapBut there is also a parched area on one side of the map described as "wasted arid lands". Among its features are the "Patent Peaks" and the "Proprietary Pass". And right at the centre of this gloomy landscape is something called the "Tor of Cism". For the life of me, I can't work out what that means, but I have a feeling Sir Tim might have been passing on a coded message.

PS. For a larger version of the map, (pdf format).

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