Four ISPs have agreed to censor the internet on behalf of the British government. Sky, BT, TalkTalk and Virgin have all signed up to the agreement to automatically block “adult content”, requiring customers to specifically ask for the block to be removed.  The agreement has come about following a report from the religious pressure group, [...]

Time for another geek interlude - tel: versus callto: Taking WAP out of the equation because it’s so old as to be irrelevant, there are two ways to mark up telephone numbers in HTML.  The tel: URI (Universal Resource Indicator – it tells your browser what it can expect to find at the destination of your link) [...]

Sky has been told that it may lose its exclusive rights deals with 6 film companies which allows it to show new films first to introduce more competition and give consumers more choice. This is, of course, what they said about directory enquiries.  Before the replacement of the 192 service with 118 number, it cost [...]

I’m away on a training course this week and staying in a rather nice two-bedroom apartment in an old manor house-type thing (I think it might be Edwardian judging by the windows)  on the bank of the Thames with a colleague. The place is covered with wi-fi which is pretty essential if you’re away from [...]

While I am a political animal nowadays, I am, first and foremost, a geek and I’ve been indulging my inner geek this last couple of weeks by installing Linux on a couple of laptops. I haven’t played with Linux for about 7 or 8 years so I went for one of the most popular distros. [...]

St Andrew’s Day … St David’s Day … St George’s Day … Now I can guess what the excuse will be – St George’s Day has been postponed until the 2nd of May by the church because it clashes with Easter and Easter is more important in the religious calendar than a saint’s day – [...]

Talking to a colleague at work about his problems with Orange (pretty much the same we’re having at Chez Wonko), I decided to phone Orange again to see what the score was following my phone call on Saturday.  The person I spoke to actually seemed to be doing something so thinking I was on a [...]

The Orange rip-off saga continues unabated.  I eventually got Orange to disconnect my phone after a prolonged battle with customer services eventually got me talking to their network support people.  But I haven’t escaped Orange yet. When I left Orange I changed to Three and it all went well for a couple of months until [...]

I’m beginning to think we’re jinxed when it comes to mobile phones. Last week I posted about the dilemma I have now that Three have turned off the mast closest to my house.  I left Orange because it was so unreliable so staying on Three when I can only pick up Orange on my Three [...]

A couple of months ago I achieved a small personal victory against Orange who finally admitted that their network is struggling and terminated my contract early.  They’ve since agreed to pay me a quite reasonable amount of compensation for unreasonably keeping me in contract when they knew they couldn’t provide me with the service I [...]

Bloody buggering Sky, I swear there’s a conspiracy to piss me off. Two months ago they buggered up my internet connection and then buggered up my phone fixing my broadband. I spent several days arguing with them over the phone that the problem was at the exchange, not my equipment or my phone, the micro [...]

Oh dear, looks like the fuck up fairy has visited Google!

For the last few months the service I’ve been getting on my Orange mobile phone has been getting progressively worse. A few months ago I couldn’t make phone calls at all for about half a day and nor could I receive any.  #1 son’s phone was the same, so was Mrs Sane’s and so was [...]

Google appears to have finally found some balls and has told the Chinese government that it is no longer willing to censor search results. The announcement – and the associated threat to pull its operations out of China altogether – was prompted by the hacking of two Google email accounts used by Chinese human rights [...]

I was on the phone to Orange customer services today to see if there was a cheaper way of getting my son a small amount of internet access. I was disappointed to find that not only was £5pm the cheapest option for data, but new customers would only receive 250mb for their £5pm, rather than [...]

It’s amazing how much we’ve come to rely on t’interweb in our household. Mrs Sane phoned me at work yesterday to say she couldn’t get on the internet so I popped home at lunchtime to see what the problem was.  I checked the modem status page and it said the ADSL link was down so [...]

After complaining on Sunday that Google decided to mark Remembrance Sunday with a picture of the Cookie Monster rather than a poppy, it was suggested that we should give Google the benefit of the doubt and see if they use a poppy logo on Remembrance Day itself. Well, today was Remembrance Day and guess what?  [...]

Facebook have decided that after more than a year and a half of being in existence, the England page I started on Facebook breaches their terms and conditions and has been locked. As of tonight 13,920 people have declared themselves fans of England through the Facebook page.  The only England fan page on Facebook with [...]

A 17 year old girl has been murdered after meeting a predator on Facebook. The girl agreed to meet a man who claimed to be a 16 year old boy who allegedly then murdered her. The usual criticisms of social media have been rolled out by the usual suspects along with the traditional warning of [...]

Orange has this clever feature when you ring customer services where you enter your password on your phone keypad – 2 for abc, 3 for def, etc.  It’s a great idea, assuming you don’t have one of these: You’ll note that, unlike regular mobile phones, the number keys don’t have a set of letters on [...]