BT site failure

SamKnows aren't the only website to have experienced an outage today - as the same has happened all day (and at time of writing is still happening) to BT's:Again, not a very friendly user experience. The page in question can be found here.

BT to open up access to ducts

BT appear to be hedging their bets over who will be the next government by announcing that they are working with Ofcom on a regulatory regime where they will provide access to their ducts for others to lay fibre - just a week after the Tories called for this to happen.

Chief Executive Ian Livingston said:

"We told Ofcom last year we're willing to provide open access to our ducts ... and we are working with them on how to achieve it.

Open access to all ducts, not just ours, might help BT and others extend coverage and so we would like to see a future government support such a move."

The last statement is clearly a reference to Virgin Media's cable network.

Aussie government calls for piracy code of conduct

Australia's Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy has called for ISPs and studios to sit down and agree a code of conduct for dealing with piracy in the country in the wake of iiNet successfully defending a court case brought against them by the big movie and TV studios last week.

Bemoaning the 'lack of dialogue' over the issues in the country compared to others that are in the process of passing laws to deal with piracy (such as the Digital Economy Bill here), Conroy said:

"I would hope to encourage the [internet service providers] and the movie industries to sit down and try and come up with a code of conduct and let's see where that goes before we start leaping off down that path [legislation changes].

I think that a mature approach by both the movie industry and the internet industry sitting down, having a conversation, and coming up with a code of practice is the absolute preferable outcome. The problem is at the moment in Australia there is no agreement, there is no discussion, there is no dialogue and people resorted to court."

Given how legislation happy Conroy and his government are (remember their great firewall plans?), no doubt they won't hesitate to introduce new laws if agreement cannot be reached.

Openreach apologises for FTTC gaffe

BT have apologised after an engineer from their Openreach access division refused to install a FTTC service for a customer of provider AAISP - incorrectly claiming that only BT's own retail division and TalkTalk sold the service.

The engineer told the customer:

"Only BT Retail and Carphone Warehouse were capable of doing FTTC."

TalkTalk/Carphone Warehouse have not launched a FTTC service yet, and AAISP have pioneered the provision of it to consumers.

To make matters worse the installer told the customer that he must have been lied to by AAISP, and that he needed to speak to BT Retail sales ... and also that he couldn't do an install without the customer having a Home Hub.

In response a red faced Openreach spokesperson said:

"Openreach apologises for this isolated misunderstanding; we are speaking to the engineer in question and have identified a need for further training on the new procedures surrounding FTTC installation."

Oops!

Google's Super Bowl ad

Google broke with tradition and nabbed one of the notoriously expensive commercial slots in an advertising break during the Super Bowl overnight, promoting their search engine (yes, I happened to know they had one too) with a very cute ad about an American in Paris:



This is the latest foray from Google into advertising - in the last year they have been using the traditional methods to heavily promote their Chrome browser.

SamKnows outage

Looks like a significant outage of the SamKnows website this morning, with a less than friendly error message!

95% of user generated content is bogus

Web security firm Websense reports that 95% of user generated content (UGC) content is spam or malicious, which in the main are posted via botnetted PCs that the bad guys control.

They also reveal that 71% of sites that do contain malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised, highlighting the importance of keeping servers patched for the latest security updates.

More than half of malware directs to sites in the US.

Carphone "not seeking offers" for TalkTalk

The Carphone Warehouse have stated that they are not looking to sell off their TalkTalk telco business after the two demerge into separately listed entities next month.

The provider, which has grown into the largest ISP in the country via the acquisitions of AOL and Tiscali along with aggressive marketing and pricing tactics, is thought to be of interest to both Vodafone and Sky.

Finance director Roger Taylor made their intentions clear though

"We're not out there seeking offers for the (TalkTalk) business."

Which is worded carefully by the looks of it to emphasise that they might consider offers if they did come in - just that they're not soliciting them at the moment.

If Sky did buy them it would make them a truly huge provider with over 6m punters, but would no doubt face some very detailed regulatory scrutiny.

FBI calls for US interception programme

As reported recently, the UK government is going ahead with their controversial £2bn Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), where UK ISPs will be required to retain information of web usage of their subscribers - a step up from the information that they already keep around e-mail transmissions and telcos are required to keep for phone calls.

The content of the conversations aren't kept - simply the transmission data so that, upon presentation of the appropriate court order, information on who contacted who can be released to the police.

Now the FBI is advocating something similar happens in the US, with the retention of web usage data for two years proposed - and citing child abuse investigations as an area where it would assist them.

They are asking for ISPs to retain "origin and destination information" which would be handed over when a court order is presented, and are also realising the technical challenges that ISPs will face in implementing such a scheme from scratch.

I suspect there might be some security cleared UK consultants rubbing their hands together at the thought of some lucrative contracts!