Mary & I were both overcharged on a recent jaunt around London. The barriers beeped and didn't let me out, so the station staff opened the barrier to let me through. The barriers did let Mary out, but it turned out she had been charged two lots of the we-didn't-see-you-touch-out-so-we'll-take-four-pounds.
(Oyster is London's RFID-based ticketing system. You can put travelcards on them, but I use it as a pay-as-you-go card. It charges you for each journey and they promise not to charge you more than the equivalent travelcard. In practice this goes wrong a bit: it's a very complex system, and the software must be a nightmare.)
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I've always been quite wary of the Telephone Preference Service (and its sibling the Mail Preference Service). It makes me nervous that the do-not-spam list is held by an organisation that promotes direct marketing.
After getting more marketing calls, and this weekend a spam text message from Firezza (a local pizza firm, no link-love from here), I finally signed up for the TPS for my mobile number and our home number.
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So, Google are shutting down their DRM-backed video sales and rental service. Instead of giving customers the video they 'bought' or a proper refund Google are giving them a "bonus" voucher to spend through Google Checkout, which rusts in 60 days.
Back in the day, we understood the simple cases of:
- you have bought this
- you have borrowed this
- and, you have rented this
DRM intends to make the middle case go away, and skew the first to be a wierd and different thing. If we choose to build technology that breaks these norms, we're going to need much clearer language than 'download-to-own' and 'buy' to cover all of the new possibilities for worse-than-before media.
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Chris pointed at a piece in the NYT where they say:
Streaming video, unlike downloads, never resides on a viewer's computer. It usually cannot be replayed as a downloaded file can be, which is another reason that content creators like it.
Pay attention, especially any lawyers hanging around at the back.
Here's the important difference between streaming and downloading:
- when you download something you are sent a bag of bits in any old order
- when you stream something you are sent a bag of bits and can start watching them before they've all arrived
That makes streaming harder to do, as a server, and theoretically nicer for the end user. The down-side is that once you have that harder performance problem of sending enough bits quickly enough it gets tricky. You can buy yourself better performance by distributing some (or all) of the information from a central server, but that gets expensive.
The next thing you can do is just to use fewer bits, that makes it both cheaper, and the technical problem gets easier. The consequence is to make the quality suck, to the point of being unwatchable for me. Content owners are well placed to compete on quality, right now they're losing to the ad-hoc torrent people.
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While using my Halifax Visa card online recently, I bumped into the Verified by Visa programme.
It's a nice idea, in theory, but the implementation I saw was woeful. It was depressingly similar to a phishing attack, warmly assuring me about security by chatting about it in the Web page, while hiding the parts of my browser that can tell me that more sensibly.
Like most geeks, I try and educate my less geeky family and friends about how to behave safely with technology. Things like this make that job harder.
Update at 22:51 BST, 21st April 2007 – Follow-up: Guardian coverage
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