Category: billblog

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]

The 12 year old daughter of a friend of mine is being pestered by a fellow pupil who sends her text messages and emails saying she is horrible. She has also been harassed over Microsoft Messenger, and the bully even went to the trouble of taunting her on Myspace and Bebo, encouraging other pupils to join in.

Cyber bullying like this is becoming more and more of a problem for children, and schools and parents are finding it hard to cope.  Monitoring what happens in the playground can deter physical aggression and name-calling, and bus monitors can help on the trip to and from school, but different strategies will be required online, as we’re never going to find enough teachers to monitor every online interaction even if we wanted to.

Continue reading “Stopping the Cyber Bullies”

My article on Apple’s attempt to lock users into their music ecosystem has attracted the sort of comment you might expect from the Apple fans out there, most notably someone who glories in the name of Daniel Eran Dilger, apparently a ‘tech consultant and writer in San Francisco, California. I ride a motorcycle and I like to work on art projects’.  Sounds peachy.

He  blogs at ‘roughlydrafted’, and   his rant and the comments are here, but I’ve reproduced the whole thing here with my notes – he doesn’t need the hits, I’m sure.

 Will Apple Fall from the Tree?

Continue reading “Excitable Apple zealots fight back”

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website.  It’s already had me accused of being ‘a sort of hairier, but at least as dense, UK version of John Dvorak’ on MacDailyNews… I suppose I should feel proud 🙂 ]

Microsoft was humiliated by the European Union’s Court of First Instance on Monday when it rejected almost all elements of the software giant’s appeal against the 2004 rulings made by the competition commissioner.

The court found that Microsoft had abused its monopoly power in pushing an embedded Windows Media Player out with Windows XP and Vista, and that the lack of detailed technical information about the programming interfaces and data formats for Windows Server products was an illegal barrier to competition.

Continue reading “Time for Apple to face the music?”

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

When BBC reporter Michael Buerk brought us film of the starving children of Ethiopia in 1984 it motivated the country to action.  In 1985 Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s Live Aid raised millions of pounds, and the attendant publicity put humanitarian aid onto the agenda of the senior politicians of the day, forcing Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and  her Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe to take seriously an issue which they had not, hitherto, seen as a high priority.

Twenty years later Geldof was at it again, though the cultural and political impact of Live 8 was diminished for many by the sight of too many millionaire rock stars seeking to revive their careers on the back of the world’s poor.

But something else had changed.  In 2005 we didn’t need the Six O’Clock News to bring us pictures from Darfur or Bangladesh, and we didn’t need the journalistic talents of Buerk and others to tell the stories in a way that made it impossible to respond.

Continue reading “What happens when our friends start dying?”

I had an email from a reader who likes to get the billblog posts via RSS but isn’t interested in the del.icio.us-created link posts, so I’ve dug a little into WordPress and discover that there are separate feeds for each category if you want them.

https://thebillblog.com/billblog/index.php/category/billblog/feed/ will get you just those posts marked ‘billblog’ – and similarly for the other categories I use.

[As ever, this is on the BBC News website]

As a radio addict I often find myself with 5 Live burbling away in the background as I sit at my keyboard in the early morning, taking advantage of that first caffeine hit of the day to get some serious work done.

Every now and then the traffic report comes on, and I feel the smugness that comes from knowing I don’t have to negotiate the M6 or fight my way across the roundabouts of Slough in order to get to work.

Yet from time to time I hit my own traffic jam, one that never makes it onto the drivetime news.

Continue reading “Time for net traffic reports?”

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website for your delectation and delight]

In the late 1970’s the United States was still recovering from Watergate, the scandal that forced President Richard Nixon to resign after revelations of a dirty-tricks campaign against his political rivals which involved illegal surveillance.

Partly in response to the crisis Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, limiting the president’s freedom to monitor US citizens without a warrant while providing a fair degree of freedom to bug foreigners or the agents of foreign powers when they were on US soil.

Continue reading “Watching me, watching you…”

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

When the United Nations website was defaced by a group of activists who replaced a statement from the Secretary General with the slogan “Hey Ysrail and Usa dont kill children and other people Peace for ever No war” it was hard for the organisation to keep it secret.

The hack was clearly visible to everyone who visited the site, and although it was quickly removed the story rapidly spread and screenshots have been widely circulated.

Continue reading “Show and tell”

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]

When I started work as a professional programmer, writing in the C programming language, I sometimes wrote very bad code. It worked, but it wasn’t what you’d call ‘industrial strength’, largely because it didn’t do nearly enough checking.

As a result my programs would crash if you gave them unexpected input by typing a word into a field where a number was required, or because they failed to check whether a variable had been properly initialised before doing a calculation.

Continue reading “The Ghosts in the Voting Machines”

[As ever, this is also on the BBC News website]

Microsoft has stirred up debate in the open source community by announcing that it will be submitting two licenses to the Open Source Initiative for approval.

Like the steps to sainthood, the process of having a license recognised can be long and hard, but fortunately it does not require proof of miraculous intervention, only conformity with the open source standards laid out by the OSI.

Continue reading “Can Microsoft Open Up?”