Relationships between the BBC and internet industry have plunged to an all-time low, after the BBC’s internet chief Ashley Highfield used a blog post yesterday to tell ISPs to get stuffed – and even threatened to name and shame them.
The cost of carrying iPlayer traffic has been a sore point for ISPs, who must absorb steeply rising traffic costs. Regulator OFCOM’s Market Impact Assessment estimated the P2P version of iPlayer would create up to £831m in extra costs for the internet industry. In the first month of the “low bandwidth” iPlayer, ISPs saw streaming costs rise 20 per cent.
But Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the £4bn-a-year corporation, said the BBC won’t help them out.
“I would not suggest that ISPs start to try and charge content providers,” he scolds.
“They are already charging their customers for broadband to receive any content they want. If ISPs start charging content providers, the customer will not know which content will work well over their chosen ISP, and what content may have been throttled for non-payment of a levy.”
Highfield instead advises them to pass the increased costs onto their customers in the form of tiers of service (ie price increases).
And if ISPs didn’t follow his “advice”, and dared to traffic shape their networks to manage their bandwidth hogs, Highfield threatened that the BBC would name and shame them.
“Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content worked best on (and which to avoid). I hope it doesn’t come to this, as I think we (the BBC and the ISPs) are currently working better together than ever.”
Being put on the BBC’s List of Shame could have serious commercial repercussions for internet providers.
(Highfield also raised eyebrows with his assertion that “The best technical solution is usually Moore’s law”. An oddly ignorant thing to say, since the capacity and price of copper and fibre connections have very little to do with the density of transistors on a semiconductor die. Earth to Ashley: Ceci n’est pas une pipe.)
It’s a lose-lose situation for the ISPs. If they refuse to carry iPlayer material, they lose customers and go out of business. If they do carry iPlayer material, and traffic shape their networks, the BBC will shame them, and they go out of business. Who’d be an ISP?
Highfield’s heavy-handed intervention may undo much of the conciliatory work undertaken by iPlayer boss Anthony Rose. As we reported recently, the BBC is exploring building its own Content Delivery Network (CDN) to ease the delivery costs for ISPs.
One executive at a major ISP stormed back at Highfield:
“Relying on the customer’s failure to read the small print is not the basis for a digital content strategy.”
Source:The Register
Windows 7 could be arriving much sooner than anticipated, according to none other than Bill Gates.
When asked about the progress of Windows Vista during a speech at the Inter-American Development Bank, Gates told the audience: “Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version,” according to a report on CNet.com.
It’s not clear whether Gates was referring to the full commercial launch of the new operating system or merely a beta version, but either way it seems the development of Windows 7 is progressing rapidly. Last month it was revealed that Microsoft had sent a test version of Windows 7 to the US government, indicating that the operating system is already in a working state.Microsoft has previously stated that Windows 7 would launch three years after the 2007 release of Vista.
And Gates gave further encouragement to those who are hoping for an upturn in fortunes, after the muted response to Windows Vista. “I’m super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways,” he said of Windows 7.
Microsoft has remained tight-lipped on what features can be expected from the next version of Windows, leading some to speculate that the company is attempting to follow Apple’s practice of divulging little about new operating systems until launch.
A Wishlist of potential Windows 7 features was leaked last November, although Microsoft refused to confirm or deny that any of the 61 features would make it into the final code.
Source – PC Pro
In a sudden about turn, analysts at Forrester Research have decided AJAX technology is not the best solution to rich Internet applications after all.
In a report, Forrester has recommended businesses should resort to vendor-specific platforms such as Adobe Systems’ AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight because AJAX can’t deliver the performance demanded by so-called “power users”.
The recommendation seems odd given that only a month ago, Jeffrey Hammond, one of the co-authors of the report, asserted in an article that AJAX was “the best bet for experienced development shops” and can offer plenty of performance.
“AJAX can deliver speedy performance. Vendors of commercial AJAX frameworks like Backbase and JackBe invest considerable resources tuning their AJAX frameworks for speed because their clients have tiny footprints and download to browsers so quickly that there’s no perceptible lag in app performance,” he wrote.
Hammond’s article is actually a re-iteration of a case he originally put forward in an earlier Forrester report published in December 2006 – part of a generally supportive stance on AJAX by Forrester.
The distinction between “open” AJAX frameworks and vendor alternatives is probably going to be irrelevant fairly soon given that Microsoft has become progressively more open since it joined the OpenAjax Alliance last year and Adobe has been loosening its grip on AIR and Flex.
Source: the register
Leopard has been hacked in under two minutes using a flaw in Safari, while Vista and Ubuntu continue to stand firm.
The competition took place at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, and pitted hackers against three laptops running Vista Ultimate SP1, Leopard OS X 10.5.2 and Ubuntu 7.10 to discover which was the most vulnerable.
A MacBook Air running a fully-patched version of Leopard succumbed in under two minutes, hacked by security researcher Charlie Miller who used a technique similar to a phishing attack, which involved clicking a link to a website containing malicious code, which allowed him to remotely access the machine.
Miller had been working on the exploit in the three weeks following the announcement of the challenge. He previously made a name for himself hacking the iPhone, though the Leopard exploit was far more lucrative bagging him a £5,000 prize from sponsor Tipping Point, who has notified Apple of the flaw.
At the time of writing both Vista and Ubuntu have yet to be compromised.
Source – PC Pro
BT Wholesale is close to launching an inexpensive new device that could radically improve the speed of ADSL broadband connections.
The telecoms giant claims that electrical interference from household objects – including televisions, set-top boxes and even Christmas tree lights – can reduce a broadband connection to a crawl.
Faulty or leaky power supplies from the electrical equipment interferes with the “Bell Wire” running around the home, creating excessive noise on the line.
However, BT has been trialling a device called an Interstitial Plate – or iPlate – that will slot into the master telephone socket and largely eliminate the noise, providing a significant boost for broadband speeds.
BT Wholesale demonstrated the technology to journalists today at its Gatwick headquarters. It showed how an ADSL connection running at 3.8Mb/sec was reduced to just 700Kb/sec when a nearby fluorescent lamp with a faulty power supply was turned on. When the iPlate was fitted to the master socket, the connection returned to its normal speed.
BT says it’s been trialling the device with around 1,000 customers with connection problems and has been very pleased with the results. “We’ve seen huge increases in speed,” claimed Ashley Pickering from BT Wholesale’s broadband access solutions team. On average, it makes one and a half megs of difference.”
Pickering says he expects the device to be launched within the next few months, with a retail price of around £10. The device can be fitted without the services of an engineer, simply by unscrewing a plate in the master socket and slotting the iPlate in. BT says it expects ISPs to distribute the device freely to customers with connection problems, saving on the expense of support calls and engineer visits.
Source – PC Pro
