Ianforrester

When Unlimited does not mean unlimited

When your a UK ISP like Demon advertising to the public. The advert above for 8meg business enabled broadband at 24.99 pounds a month is exactly what I have had for the last 3 plus years. When Broadband first came out, Demon offered only one option of 512k broadband at 24.99, then has upgrades came along they split the line up into a cheaper 19.99 a month one which had no access to things like Newsgroups or static IPs. Fine I thought, Home Office is good for me, I don't mind pay extra for some of the above. However, when 8meg Broadband came along Demon changed the AUP. There was no mention of a limit on Broadband download use or anything till they changed it. Now it reads.

The THUS FUP* applies to Demon Home 8000 and Demon Home Office 8000 Broadband and variants of these products Customers only.

It is in place to ensure that THUS can continue to provide an acceptable standard of service in terms of download speeds, to the vast majority of our customers.

THUS will continually measure the performance of our broadband network and take steps to restrict the download speeds of very heavy users during peak periods, should their activities significantly contribute towards the risk of reduced speeds being experienced by the majority of our broadband customers. The peak period is 9am to 10pm .

All users will be monitored on a continuous basis. Only customers that consistently download exceptionally large amounts of data over a rolling 30 day period will be affected by the THUS FUP. THUS expects that less than 1% of its Demon Home 8000 and Demon Home Office 8000 customers will be affected by the THUS FUP. Any Customers who are affected will be notified if their speed is being restricted.

Speed restrictions will only apply during peak periods. Should a Customer's usage return to acceptable levels, adjudged on a rolling 30 day period, speed restrictions will be removed.

Now bearing in mind I've been with Demon for 13 years in some kind of form, you can understand why I'm pretty pissed off. Also you don't get a warning letter, they just do it and send out a letter. The letter which I don't have right now but keep meaning to type out (although we did read it out on geek and geekhag podcast number 6). In the letter they say the limits which are not specified in the above AUP are 50gig for home users and 60gig for home office users. I went over by 4.85gig at 64.85gig last month. So the upshot of all of this is that me and Sarah have been restricted to 128k broadband between 9am – 10pm every night. This wasn't so bad at the start because it only applied to weekdays. But then it changed to weekends too. I asked Demon many times to prove what they were saying by giving me a breakdown of the traffic but they never did (I'm going to leave out the many nasty stories of talking to Demon Customer Services – I hope to record them one day soon, when i get back from the states) So in the end I got the number for Demon Customer Care Support (yes there different and UK based) from the ADSL guide forums (you need to be logged on) which is 08000279190 for anyone who actually wants to cancel there account with Demon and get the MAC code so they can move somewhere.

But this is the problem, almost every ISP now has a AUP but their not being upfront about the actual limits and they still advertising as unlimited. Two ISPs which I was considering are pretty upfront about everything is Zen Internet and UK Freesoftware network.

So anyway, I'm obviously not the only person to have this trouble. Glyn pointed me to a register post about the same issue and a nice link to an e-petition about ISPs using the word unlimited in all advertising.

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Insist that OFCOM and the ASA stop Broadband Providers advertising 'unlimited' services that are in fact limited in the small print or by un-defined fair use policies

So far 2,427 people have signed up including myself. The petition is open till June 10th, so I would get signing soon. As for now, when I get back from the states, I'll be switching to UK Free software network which don't packetshape or restrict beyond whats been described up front on the site. Now if only others would do the same.

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Opening Keynotes on Monday evening

So after a brief talk by Rael Dornfest, We're into Tim's talk. He's doing his radar talk but not using his usual quote. This time he uses the pulling your weight quote. Then talks about hackers pre-production and pre-business. Mentions Snowboards, makers, Chumby and quick to produce hardware. Didn't know O'reilly was an invester in the Chumby. Made in China.com came up because theres lots of parts being made and others creating interesting bikes. Tim calls it opensource for hardware. Then points to a few talks like Matt Webb's and Adam Greenfield's talks. Moving on Tim brings up the Digg model for threads – Threadless.com. The future of manufacturing? Maybe but Tim did say something interesting about how you can make only the right amount of things. So labor costs and environment costs can be calculated a lot better.

The future of Attention. The attention recorder comes up but Tim talks about how people are putting out more details about themselves and shows off Twitter and Twitter vision. No one knows why its interesting it just is – promiscuous attention. Talks about Jyko? Looks like twitter. Tim says something is bubbling up here which he can't put his finger on quite yet.

Web 2.0 and Wall Street? Tim talks about Cathy Sierra and how the stalker has kept her away from the conference. Good on you Tim. transparency. Now hes talking about Limewire and Limebrokerage. Now prediction markets in inkling markets, just in time for a quick plug for the new magazine release 2.0.

Right now Peter Rip's: Web 2.0 over and out. Tim talks about what different about web 2.0. What Distinguishes Web 2.0 Uses System that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. Tim now brings up a screenshot of Aljazeera and the page translated by Google. And makes the point that translations haven't got better, there's just more data to parse. Brings up Freebase then wonders where is the web 2.0 for credit cards and address books? Wesabe and Mint come up, how do we harness collective intellegence into old economies like banks and building socities.

Finally he ends up talking about online and offline and Adobe Apollo for about one minute.

Good talk Tim

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Live and direct from the Emerging Technology Conference 2007

So when I bought my Dell laptop with the extended battery, I was thinking about conferences where theres usually very little power. So now I'm at Emerging Tech or Etech2007. I'm thinking I should really take advantage and try live blogging from the conference. Now don't expect beautifully written notes like Rachel Clarke (who does a awesome job of note taking). Mine are going to be rough and ready. I also tend to writedownthings which are totally new or very interesting to myself, so if your after actual conference news, this isn't going to be the place for that.

So whats happened so far? Well besides going out clubbing on Saturday night (yes Sarah is certainly not pleased with the photos either and Ben thought these were the tame ones, and that I actually had more). Getting my conference pass early and meeting up with Noor and Tom Loosemore yesterday inthe Hyatt,Honestly not much else has happened. I did go for a walk down to the bay/docks part and took loads of pictures. And was tempted to go looking for the FreETech unconference thing and somewhere to rent motorcycles but decided against it all. The Etech2007wiki isa little quiet at the moment except Phil Windley has posted up his notes and I'm staying off the IRC backchannel for now.

The social events are pretty much sorted out already. Monday (today) theres a load of special sessions including ones from Tim O'reilly and Rael Dornfest. Tuesday is the EFF pioneer awards, Wednesday theres the MakeFest and yes Werewolf afterwards. Thursday night theres some unofficial get togethers. Depending on how many people are left over on Thursday, I might throw a backstage werewolf social event because frankly 2 hours of werewolf isn't enough for us English.

Anyway, there's not much more to say right now. I'm going to charge my laptop and cameras up now. Go find some late lunch then head down to the Hyatt for the rest of the day. Oh my hotel – The Bristol Hotel is about 12mins walk from the Hyatt and is ever so cooler that those stuffy boring roomsin theHyatt. I'll take some photos of my room tonight but its nice and big, reliable free wireless through-out the hotel including the rooms, restaurant and lobby. If you don't have wireless they also supply ethernet connections free of charge and if all else fails you can request a modem (this is what the lobby staff were telling me). Oh just to note, there is no block ports and you can skype, vpn and use bit torrent without a problem. I bet Tom Coateswisheshe was here. There's also a 7-11 which is open 24hours a day everyday just around the corner along with wendys and some other stuff. Horton Plaza is the odd shopping mall and I'm only a short walk from the lively streets of 4th, 5th and 6th streets (gaslamp area).

Can anyone tell me why my GPS on my new M700 phone doesn't work here? I'm on Cigualar while here and yes some guy in the bar on Saturday did ask if my phone was the iphone – which i was not pleased about. He saw me wondering around using Google maps with my finger and must have assumed I was on a iphone or something.

meta-technorati-tags=etech07, etech, mobile, iphone, m700, san diego, werewolf, conference, sessions

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My first night in California

So what would do after a 10 hour flight to San Francisco then a transfer to San Diego 3 hours straight afterwards? Easy, go clubbing right? What? Don't tell me you would crash at your hotel, moaning about Jetlag!

Well I hit the streets of San Diego look for the low down on the city. By talking to bouncers you can find out everything you need including places to avoid and places to go at certain times. In the end I settled at a Bar called Henry's Pub (5th and Market street). It was playing a mixture of music including some quite funky house. Anyway I got talking to one of the bouncers (sorry forgothisname) and before long I ended up talking to a bunch of women who seemed to adore my accent although not exactly what they had expected in the middle of San Diego.

What was weird about chatting with these women was first there lack of maturity. Some of them were older than myself but acted more like teenagers that women. I gaged from a couple of them that they were all from a catholic school which kept them till they were 21! Most of the fake hair group were nurses and one of them was a teacher for high school (secondary school). There was also lots of talk about fakeness. They explained how in LA lots of women are completely fake and in San Diego its not likethat, bara few clubs outside of the market street area.There was also this odd look when I said I was going to San Francisco later in the trip. A couple of the women, talked about how there were lots of gays there. I found this very odd, and would say how there were a lot of gays everywhere including London just to freak them out a little. After to speak to one of more on this topic, I wouldn't say they were exactly homophobic, just slightly ignorantt because they were going by what they had seen on TV not reallife. Butwhat do you expect being locked up in a religious school till 21. The same women (the teacher) then mentioned she was a science teacher in biology. I had to ask about the whole evolution thing. She said her school was quite progressive and didn't band evolution but they've also allowed creativism into the classroom which in her mind was screwing everything up. It was odd because she was quite religious, like shetold meshe had only slept with one guy and that was her to be husband on the night of their engagement. So I'd assumed she might go for the whole intellngent design stuff. Just before we finished our conversation she mentioned how America is a new nation and will make lots of mistakes but it will get better.

Generally the women I spoke to were quite progressive and although somewhat religiouss, only about things like sex before marriage. The guys on the other hand were, well lets say not so progressive. No one I spoke to supported Bush but I certainly didn'tt want to push it.

So yeah good night had, didn't get back till about 2:30am (all bars and clubs shut at 1:30am in San Diego by the way) mainly because I walked the wrong way and decided to look for late night food. I think tonight I'll take it a little easier as its the day before Etech. But hey my Jet lag is gone now.

meta-technorati-tags=san diego, clubbing, america, women, bars, drink

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A review of Belle and Herbs in Newcastle

Belle and Herbs cafe

Belle and Herbs has been recommended by Meri, Elly, Gareth and Molly. So I checked it out with Meri and Elly when I was down in Newcastle the other day for the Backstage University tour. Its got a strange 60's vibe to it allwith odd shaped chairs and tables dotted around. The menu is used in the myspace page for the cafe. But once the smoothie comes out, you know your in for a treat. I ordered the berry which was Cranberry and something else. It was certainly lush and I had it not been for the size of the glasses, I would have ordered another one. Then the breakfast came out… I think I ordered the American.

American breakfast for myself

2x Hashbrowns
2x Bacon
3xSausagess
2x Fried eggs
4x thick as a piece of toast pancakes
2x pieces of toast

Yes seriously I couldn't manage it all although it was flipping awesome. I'll certainly be back one day soon. If your ever in Newcastle and can get to Heaton which is east Newcastle then go to Belle and Herbs. Its fantastic value for money and great tasting food, Thanks to Meri and Elly for the morning breakfast there, it was great.

meta-technorati-tags=breakfast, belleandherbs, belle and herbs, newcastle, heaton

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So busy and tired recently…

I have not blogged for quite a while. This is down to a few things.

Ecto is simply doing my head in, as it keeps loosing draft entries and screwing up on the spellchecker. I paid for the software and I'm back to using W.blogger again.
I have been out and about across the England and Scotland recently. I have actually been to more places up north that ever before. My Flickr account is full of pictures from different places. I also need to find the time to sort out all my pictures.
Wireless has been patchy in some places and after a day of working and night of socialising, I actually do need to grab some sleep.
When I'm at home, i've been preparing to go somewhere else the next day or so and the broadband has simply been a nightmare due to Demon's restrictions (more about this later).
Last of all, when I do find the time to blog, the blog is down because Resin has shut its self down on the server. I then spend a little bit of time trying to work out what the problem is instead of blogging. This has been a real pain and I know your as pissed off as myself about this. I'm totally lost why after months of perfect service, why this has just started happening.

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Giving F.A.C.T the finger

There’s nothing I hate more than sitting down for a film at a cinema only to have that horrendous F.A.C.T. screen come up to threaten me about what could happen to me if I take a photograph or record the film. Thank you for threatening me right after I’ve bought a ticket and sat down to watch a film and RE-FUCKIN’-LAX for goodness’ sake!

I'm just loving the post Aral post about F.A.C.T and Pete's comment in the same blog post. Here's some quotes.

FACT do a hugely important job in fighting the perpetrators of IP and copyright theft crimes, and these ads are a necessary evil. There are people out there – many of them on this blog apparently that seem to think that its ok to download or purchase DVD’s from unofficial sources. The plain fact is IT’S ILLEGAL. Ok so you know that … but amazingly enough there are people out there who dont know this. Its is these people that the ads are aimed at. Come on it’s only a couple of minutes and hardly worth loosinganysleep over. Just ignore it for f**ks sake … concentrate on your bag of pop-corn or something if t bothers you that much. It really isn’t that bigger deal.

How different is it realy from the speed signs by the side of the motorway – we all KNOW what the limit is… but people need reminding from time to time

– Pete from F.A.C.T

How would you like it if you had to sit through “just a couple of minutes” of video telling you that stealing food is illegal (hey, IT’S ILLEGAL) every time to opened your fridge? How about a message about how stealing music is illegal (hey, IT’S ILLEGAL) every time you started up iTunes. Come on man, it’s just a few minutes, don’t be so anal about it! Oh yeah, and you’d probably love sitting through two minutes of a message telling you that copying other people’s work is illegal every time you start up MicrosoftWord(hey, IT’S ILLEGAL). In fact, if you actually believe what you’re saying you shouldn’t mind sitting through two minutes of legal lecture whenever you start *any* software application that deals with data or IP (which is, pretty much, any software application.) Would even you — a “paid up member of FACT” stand for this? If not, how hypocritical of you.

– Aral

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Practical attention thoughts

I was reading Tom Morris thoughts about attention. First up I thought damm I missed another Beers and Innovations (I actually need to pay attention to the upcoming events calendar in Outlook more often). But more deeply Tom's thoughts about some attention bundler.

I've just installed the Attention Trust tracker in Firefox, which is churning out (not particularly well-formed) XML of everything I browse (there is a button to toggle if I don't want it to record my clickstream).

It would be trivially easy to write an attention tracker which would turn this XML file in to RSS, OPML, RDF etc. I'm excited by the new features in XSLT 2.0 that allow grouping (xsl:for-each-group).

An application I'm thinking of building would be called my “attention bundler”. What it would do is take everything I've been browsing, pull other data that I've been producing (last.fm, del.icio.us, Flickr, my blog etc.), mix it all up, produce some interesting results and upload them. It'd be a desktop application – perhaps just a button on my Dock which I could hit from time to time and all sorts of magic would happen.

Is this too geeky? Of course. But that's one way in which we can research how others can use it. We piece together geeky stuff, then test it out, and if we like it, make user-friendly versions of it.

I've been tempted to install the attention tracker too but I use Touchstone which doesn't exactly do the same thing (small picture attention) but kind of does (larger picture attention). One of the biggest things I like about Touchstone is the APML file which gets created. Its an aggregate of your attention instead of a log of your attention which isn't so useful. It also creates a RSS which is uploaded every hour or so to the internet(known as the pebble output adapter). I don't know how the relevencey and attention engine is working but its finding some good stuff and highlighting it to me.

However I wouldn't mind if Touchstone or something else could read my user generated feeds (couldn't think of a better name) as Implicit Concepts. Using a attention bundler it would be trivial to pull in all my user generated feeds and then do some transforming so they were put into the APML file which Touchstone uses. So simple if I got time I might have to set it up as a local cocoon pipeline. I would prefer to do this remotelyonmy server but getting the server to effectively pick up my local APML file and write it back is not trivial. If Touchstone could remotely read and update a APML file it would be much easier. (any thoughts Chris Saad?) Ether way, it would be cool to just build a prototype to get a feel how hard it would be to write, I could certainly do some local syncing to Jungledisk and Jungledisk will sync it to Amazon S3 a bit later.

Time to crank open Synctoy then.

One last word of caution about Attention. This time from the backstage presentation. The attention engines around me are so good at filtering out stuff I'm not interested in, that I didn't know about a major train crash till someone told me about it a couple of days afterwards as I was getting on a train. Epic is here? Funny enough, I found out more about the football and world events by my taxi rides recently that anything else. Is that a good thing or bad,hummm don't know.

meta-technorati-tags=epic, attention2.0, attention, apml, attentiontrust, touchstone, epic2015, xml

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