Zentelligence

With an invitation to No10 this morning, I’m on my best behavior today. No jokes about transport and stress that my name has an “S” on the end, Moores, no relation to the other one. I'm tempted to ask whether Intel's new processor, Prescott, is named after the great man but even I'm struggling with the connection.

Yesterday I chaired the afternoon of the LondonOne Conference at the TUC Congress centre. LondonOne represented the first real coming together of agencies and minds to focus in on the interactive Digital Television (dTV) revolution and it was considerably cheered by the previous day’s cost-cutting news from British Telecom, which at last made broadband a viable proposition for the cash-strapped content providers and champions of public service digital TV.

Baroness Dean, chairman of the Housing Corporation, who you may remember as Brenda Dean of the print union, SOGAT, took the rather clinical sounding Broadband Britain slogan and changed it into the much more cuddly “Brenda Agenda”; encouraging everyone involved to find new and user friendly ways of delivering content and information to the people in society who need it most. Of course we have three different digital divides to worry over these days:

Those who don’t have Internet access at all
Those who have dial-up access
And
Those who have or can afford broadband

These Statistics of disadvantage were illustrated by my good friend, Bill Edwards, Director of Communication at The Office of the e-Envoy who closed the conference. While 43% of the population may be on-line in one form or another, another 47% aren’t, some 23 million people who live mostly in places like Scotland or Yorkshire, outside the warm embrace of the M25 where the Internet doesn’t seem quite so important to their lives.

Eight million digital Television boxes are now out in the country and the Government’s own awareness campaign, through UK-Online, generated the single largest response to an advertisement that Sky had ever seen, which must give a whole new slant to that well worn expression, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.

Digital Television (Public) services, driven by local and central government are now seen as one of the best mechanisms for delivering information and education to people who might normally fall through the net. In Sheffield, an NHS pilot project demonstrated that the people using Digital TV services through the NHS were markedly different from those who might use the Internet. Young mothers with children or older men from low income neighborhoods. So while many would criticize government’s efforts in using new technologies as little more than attractive political sound bites, the evidence suggests that the UK-Online vision, through 6,000 kiosks and now, digital television may actually start to produce the results that government had in mind for the programme.

However, I can't resist letting my cynical side escape. Prime Minister Clement Atlee once said that “If you open Pandora’s box, a Trojan horse jumps out”. I suspect that we can’t even imagine where all this enthusiasm for Open Government will take us and what services people will expect from the public sector in future. God forbid, it may even lead to freedom of information!

Somewhere between the vision and the dream sits BT's well overdue announcement that it plans to slash the cost of Broadband (wholesale) to under £15.00 a month to ISPs. Of course that suggests that over 40 Service Providers, the likes of BT Anytime and Freeserve will soon be offering it out to surfers at close to the £25.00 to £30.00 mark at a guess, making it an achievable option for the man on the street.

Pipex has announced that it plans to go below the £25.00 mark and other are muttering that even this figure is too expensive and I agree it has to go lower still if the Digital Dive problem is really going to be solved. By this I mean those with no access, 43 million people according to government figures, those with dial-up access and the new elite... those with broadband.

BT's CEO Ben Verwaayen, believes that broadband will be the De Facto connection in 40% of homes in two years and at these prices, who is to say he's wrong. It is after all, just what the country needs and the Prime Minster wants if the dream of Britannia is going to become anywhere near a reality before 2005; The PM's date for 100% capability for the delivery of central government services on-line, UK Online

I rather think that like the Net's beginnings, Broadband acceptance will be driven by the really important things in life. Live soccer and a heady mixture of sex and music. With Napster looking respectable, there are the Grid alternatives like Kazaa. Downloading an MP3 file is really tedious over a 56 Kb modem conection and broadband's high speed will prove irresistible to the Internet porn industry with its latest in pay per view webcam offerings, "Live from Amsterdam" or so I'm told!

Just one other thing bothers me though when I add-up my communications bills. A lot of things really not least of which is security, the imps of Satan trying to hack your PC through an open broadband connection, which I won't go into here, but look at my last column for an idea of the problem.

First the BT bill. My last one came in at £220 for the quarter. Of this £170 reflected line rental, special deals, equipment rental etc. - I have three lines. BT of course are incapable - They've give up or as the very nice customer service girl said to me "We're rubbish" - trying to consolidate my bills to include my Internet Anytime bill. This now comes separately, so that's an extra £15.00 a month. And if your broadband connection fails? God help us. Have you ever tried reporting a residential fault to BT?

Then there's the two mobile phone bills for me and my wife. Let's say £50.00 a month

Next comes Sky Television. With terrestrial TV now too awful to contemplate 90% of the time - it's either cooking or gardening or decorating - or all three - There's the Sky subscription at £30.00 a month. (The basic package for me, the Disney Channel without the football and the PLayboy TV options)

Finally, there, the TV license. Extortion at £109 a year for a BBC I rarely watch. Worse still most of the good BBC stuff is now on Sky through BBC Knowledge, which I'm paying for anyway and for that money, they still can't get the decent sports events, which go to Sky's "Pay per View".

So in total, the cost of being a member of this digital society is already over £100 a month. I have a Mb link here at the office and a perfectly good dial-up connection at home - two in fact because you need a reserve when BT Anytime become BT no time at all at peak period - Am I ready for the broadband experience? We'll see but for now, I'm planning to sit on the fence. And you, what will you do?

I was playing with the idea of writing a quick column retracting all the acid remarks once made about Windows XP and confessing that I rather liked it. Well Ithat was the idea until yesterday morning when a little "Windows Update" icon appeared on my PC.

Dutifully following the instructions from Redmond Central, I allowed both my PCs, my desktop and my laptop to install the updates over the web automatically. The result? Pain and wasted time although I will confess that Microsoft have been helpful but that's really because I'm that really difficult Simon Moores. I doubt it would be so easy if I was Joe Soap on the street.

"Charlie don't surf". That famous line from Apocalypse Now".

"Windows (XP) don't crash". Microsoft's equally memorable equivalent. Not quite the case after my Windows Update. Working on a Word (XP) document, there's a flash - no bang - and it disappears. No recovery option it's gone, all the way gone and all that remains is the file that I started with on the hard disk.

It's a mystery to us say Microsoft.

A ****** catastrophe say's I, "it's happened three times now and by the way, funny things are also happening on my laptop, with VB script errors".

Send us the application log files asks the nice girl from Microsoft support. Not a problem on the desktop but the laptop now tells me that I don't have the privileges to do this and besides, when I try and attach the installation history details to the email to Microsoft support, I'm told I'm out of system memory and should reboot!

And please.. don't even ask me what's happened since I downloaded the latest MS Messenger update. I can't get my Hotmail and more besides!

Progress. I love it - and Windows XP of course!

It's no surprise to me that the eGovernment monitor reports that "most local authority websites are failing to provide meaningful assistance to their users". Research commissioned by web navigation company Q-go revealed that the majority of council websites "lacked the basic functionality needed to direct customers to service and payment information quickly". Although most of the sites surveyed offered keyword search facilities, the information delivered was often irrelevant or over complex. The Sites were also often "dull and outdated" lacking online help or links to e-mail addresses.

It's easy to criticise the public sector and particularly Local Authorities (LAs) that aren't "on message", when it comes to using the Internet in the way that central government has mandated. Trouble is, as a number of LA mangers pointed out to me at an eGovernment conference in London at the end of last year, "most of us have day jobs" and "funds are invariably in short supply". It's not just a gap between ambition and execution, it's more likely to be a gulf once you leave the big city authorities behind. What we need I suspect, is a single standard, a single template and a consistent source of funding that is directed towards a problem which is not seen as a priority by many. Perhaps the huge income now being generated by armies of traffic wardens should be part-directed towards better Local Authority websites or even more policemen?

Anyone disagree?

It's evolutionary Darwinism at its finest! Personal Internet security that is. You either have it or you don't. In my case, I've seen five attempts to compromise my home PC this weekend alone. Since I started preaching the message over a year ago, I put in Zone Alarm and now Symantec's 'Personal Firewall', which picks up the attempts to place sneaky cookies on my PC and blocks attempts like those below, still only an hour old!

Date: 24/02/2002 Time: 18:06:00
Intrusion attempt detected from address 213.120.39.69 by rule "Default Block Backdoor/SubSeven Trojan horse".
Blocked further access for 30 minutes.

Date: 24/02/2002 Time: 17:16:35
Intrusion attempt detected from address 213.118.255.5 by rule "Default Block Hack 'A' Tack Trojan horse".
Blocked further access for 30 minutes.

The most interesting attempt in the last hour was an attempt to access the SmartPass program on my PC, which is the link to my office Server. The how and why part I can't quite grasp and it's quite probably a random sweep of some kind through my ISP but the evidence can be seen below.

Date: 24/02/2002 Time: 18:54:42
This one time, the user has chosen to "block" communications. Details:
Inbound TCP connection
Local address,service is (hp(213.122.166.209),ftp(21))
Remote address,service is (128.131.167.130,4722)
Process name is "C:\PROGRAM FILES\V-ONE\SMARTPASS 4.1.2\SMARTPASS.EXE"

For more information on this kind of exploit, I might use Tiger Surf to try and work out where this particular imp of Satan is coming from but with so many on a weekly basis, it's hardly worth the effort.

It does make you think though. If I wasn't using a personal firewall on my home PC, would the photographs I took of my daughter in Richmond Park this morning be stolen and find their way into some hacker's digital photo collection?

It gets worse of course, so for heaven's sake, if you don't have a personal firewall do get one, particularly if you are ever tempted to click on one of those tempting little spam links to Nadia with her unusual collection of rubber toys and her personal 24*7 webcam in Prague. If you do, it's just asking for trouble and at least the firewall wraps your connection in the computing equivalent of a digital condom. If you don't, you may well catch something nasty and find that someone else, maybe one of Nadia's friends, happens to be using your connection for some other purpose, long after her fuzzy image has faded from your memory!

So be safe and if your PC is not wearing a condom, then at least hide behind a firewall before you turn anything on...!

Let me start by saying that I’m not in debt and neither do I need parts of my anatomy enlarged or medicated.

If you know what I mean, then you’ve been spammed too and it gets much worse, thanks to the wonders of rich content and the imagination of the girls and boys who appear to work a twenty-four hour shift in a server room, a hidden basement somewhere in the red light district of Amsterdam.

It’s getting worse and quite suddenly too. Like me, you probably have several email addresses. The business address and perhaps a Yahoo or Hotmail address too. My own address is given out sparingly and I never register on anyone’s site unless I really have to. So why SAP should suddenly think I’m customer 1023420 is anyone’s guess. My exclude list of 250 addresses in my Hotmail account filled up months ago but the tide of filth and special offers from predominantly US-based finance companies continues unabated.

Yesterday, I had the bizarre experience of having an email argument with an arrogant female ‘spammer’ from a so-called Digital Test Lab. For some unknown reason, any attempt to unsubscribe from her distribution list caused my Outlook client to crash. I threatened to name and shame in this column but was promptly told “You should not use a magazine that employs you to pursue your own personal vendetta's. I own an online magazine and it reaches about 2,000, 000 people - don't send me threats”. – So there!!

Like me, you’re probably thinking that this is all getting rather silly and I agree. These days I dread going on holiday because my front door won’t open against the weight of junk mail from credit card companies and my email is overflowing with rubbish. Now I’m guessing, that on average, I spend at least five minutes a day dealing with junk email and yet, the UK has decided that spamming is OK as long as the mail includes an ‘Opt out’ button. Locking the stable door perhaps! Let me see if I can follow the reasoning should one per cent of business in the English speaking world, decide to buy one of the CDs that claim:

“With a database of over 235 million potential customers, we can reach your clients anywhere in the world. Your potential client will not miss your message”
Just imagine the length of the queue and the time you are going waste deleting offers of Filipino brides and herbal Viagra.

You can’t avoid Spam because most of the reptiles are outside Europe. But two years ago, I suggested to government, that at the very least, the UK should have an email exclude list, much like the one that prevents companies wasting my fax paper, as they used to. After all, if government is going to give companies the right to drown us in junk email, we should have the right to choose not to, with a single simple entry on a central web site. Perhaps it should be called UK-Offline? And if you don’t agree, please tell me why

Having read Andrew Sullivan's story on 'Blogging' in the Sunday Times, this is as good enough a place to start investigating what it's all about. To be honest, typing this first entry, I really don't have much of a clue beyond grasping that this is a really clever way of web posting. However, I'm supposed to be a vaguely witty futurist and someone who knows about such things, so I'm going to use Blogger as an opportunity to comment on the stories and the technologies that catch my attention.