Letters You know how it is. You have a mobile phone. You use it regularly, so you keep it in your pocket, where it is easily accessible. Then it goes yellow. You what? We can only wonder: what has it got in its pocketses?

My understanding of the position is that you have a contract of sale with the company which provided the phone (in this case Carphone Warehouse) and a separate contract with the network as well as a warranty from the manufacturer.

The great thing about a consumer contract of sale is the implied terms under section 14 paragraph 2B of the Sale of Goods Act 1979; (http://www.lawteacher.net/Contract/Contents/Terms%20Lecture%202.htm)

Under these provisions the customer is entitled to a repair/replacement from the seller where the product is not free from minor defects or has imperfections in finish. If the seller won't provide this you are entitled to buy another phone from somewhere else and sue for the cost (which can conveniently be done at home by visiting https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/csmco2/index.jsp).

Generally though just threatening to sue will be enough to make the seller capitulate and give you a new phone.

And don't forget, the cost of the proceedings is the maximum you're liable for, in the small claims track you don't pay the other sides costs so it's in the companies interests to settle before the hearing rather than pay a lawyer to turn up.

It might also be worth going to your local citizens advice bureaux and getting them to write to the manager of the store which you purchased it from outlining the position (it's free and it shows you mean business).

Hopes this helps any fellow reg readers out there who are fed up with getting messed about by mobile phone companies.

Rupert

I wonder if he is a smoker? I remember, many moons ago, when I did desktop support. We used to see lots of the 'Classic MS mice' going an indelible yellow colour, after much hmming and harring we managed to work out that it was the smokers who suffered this problem - even though they had to go out to smoke...

Fraser

Re Mellow Yellow Chocolate phone. What? No references to the Milky bar kid?

Dave

Fancy a life of crime? How about starting by designing some security software. Seems that could put you on the wrong side of the law, these days...

Re: New British law on "hacking".

Congratulations. Now we know that the British Parliament is almost as dumb and ill-informed as the US Congress. However, I think the US Congress is more mean-spirited and evil than the British Parliament. We have a much greater number of laws that are designed to hinder progress and make criminals out of the good while protecting the evil, not only in the field of computer software. Another proof that giving legislative power to the uninformed and greedy is a sure way to stop innovation and prove again the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Jim

I wrote to my MP before this was passed with some other possible applications of the "likely" test.

Given the increasing prevalence of botnets, the many vulnerabilities of Microsoft Windows XP which open it to such compromise, and the consequent targeting of that operating system, a reasonable wholesaler of copies of Windows would have to believe it likely that some of those copies would be used in DoS attacks.

Or how about compilers? On the extremely probable hypothesis that nearly all malicious software is written in a human-readable programming language, a reasonable man must believe that some malicious software is developed with popular compilers such as Microsoft Visual C++ and the GNU C Compiler.

Subsection (3) of the new section 3A of the Computer Misuse Act explicitly defines "article" to include software: it is not considered necessary to state that it also includes hardware. On a strict reading therefore it could also be an offence to be a computer wholesaler, or to manufacture cable modems.

All in all, not good news for the IT industry.

Peter

"The Home Office believes that likely is more than 50 per cent, so you have to have a trial within a trial to decide if it is more than 50 per cent likely that distribution is more likely than not to result in an offence being committed," said Clayton. That may be one of the longest single sentences I have ever seen that translates down to "we know bugger all about what we're doing."

Morely

Sophos probably shouldn't be overly complacent.

"We don't believe it likely that any information relating to a computer threat supplied by us would be used to commit an offence. "

Well, never mind the virus database; what about the anti-virus software itself? Malware authors always scan their new programs using anti-virus software to ensure it can't be detected; by continually scanning the malware, then tweaking the code to try and avoid the detection. The AV software can be said to be a highly useful development tool that is an integral part of the malware development process.

The truth is, that although the law will catch everyone and everything, it will be inequitably applied for political and commercial reasons, as happens with all catch-all laws.

Large firms will be granted effective impunity - "Oh, we know Sophos' anti-virus can be and is used by malware authors, but they're the good guys so we won't prosecute" - while small firms and individuals will be ruthlessly suppressed. Sometimes at the behest of the large firms trying to manipulate the law to their own commercial advantage, sometimes at the behest of politicians or lawmakers who want to gain free publicity and votes.

This is an appalling law. Ill-conceived and incompetently drafted, it will leave a trail of miscarriages of justices, ruined businesses and shattered lives in its wake.

And of course it won't catch a single malware author, because it isn't nearly so easy to track down anonymous skiddies in foreign countries who don't publicise their activities or widely (if at all) distribute their tools, as it is to persecute a hobbyist security researcher who conceals nothing and has no malicious intent.

cheers, DaveK

Ecademy's self depopulation caught your attention:

It's not the first 'night of the long knives' at Ecademy, a similar thing occurred around this time last year.

The management team made a misleading claim in a BBC interview and when [it was] picked up on it decided to shoot the messenger.

In fact you'll find that practically anyone who ever questions Ecademy management get's the boot sooner or later. What's perhaps most worrying about this latest lot of 'bannings' is the number of smart women who've been given the chop, perhaps one of the founders can't cope with other women in her limelight.

Anyway if you want the other side of what happened pop over to www.firstmonday.com and introduce yourself. There's plenty of people will tales to tell over there.

Andy

We also heard from the chap who was the messenger referred to in the note above. He sent us a copy of his dismissal letter, which we'll share with you:

Dear Jim

I have removed your account from Ecademy. I am no longer tolerating the desire of some of our members to limit our growth. You clearly have intent to bring Ecademy into disrepute.

I have been travelling a great deal, listening intently to our International Members and I have made a commitment to ensure that the members on Ecademy that chose to limit the growth, reduce the desire for others to recommend us and basically bring the Front Page down to a negative level will not have a place on Ecademy anymore.

Jim, this is a private business, the pain, the risk and the passion that has gone into it is so immense, last nights Radio Program was one of our biggest highlights. After nearly 8 years we achieved some significant PR. Many members have mailed us, commented positively on the FP, yet you choose to pick up on a point and turn this into a painful experience, yet again.

For the record, this was an edited program, he interviewed Glenn and I for 90 minutes. I was talking in the context of subscribers. I would now like you to move on, find another community that you feel suits your values and your personal communication style.

Please never attempt to join Ecademy again.

I wish you every success Jim, I have given you the benefit of the doubt for too long, I am sure you are a good man, but this is not the place for you.

With warm regards Penny Power

You kindly offered your thoughts on the mathematics of paper-based storage systems. And noted that they'd been suggested before. Yes, well, hanging files, surely? No?

I thought its definitely suspect .. anyway i wanted to give a closer look. so i took a piece of paper for my crude calculations. Here it goes > it should be easy to clearly print out a at 100 pixels per inch with a good printer, so we have 10,000 pixels per square inch. that amounts to approximately 1 million pixels on a A4 sized paper (approximated as a 10"x10"). 100 ppi isnt all that difficult to be accurately scanned and read (given that the really good scanners claim 5400ppi) along with 24 bit color or 8 bit monochrome. 8 bit monochrome means 256 shades and 24 bit would mean 16 million color shades. so 1 million pixels with 16 million shades per pixel means 16 peta states. each storage bit can take two states. so that is equivalent to 8 peta bits or 1 peta byte per A4 paper! sounds crazy! In terms of storage density that is (10,000 pixels per square inch) X (16 million color shades per pixel) / (2 states per bit) = 80Gb per sq. in. WOW ! thats close to our present day hard drives!

P.S. something is still bothering me .. are u convinced? what do u think?

Raja

The maths may be worse than you think!

Let's suppose we can build a device that can write and read in 24-bit colour at 1200 dpi, then: Foolscap = 17 x 13.5 inches at 1200 dpi and 3 bytes per dot - that's almost 1GB. So you'd need 12000 dpi to get up to 100GB.

Methinks there's some compression algorithm involved here (or someones got their MB and GB confused) ...

Chris

If each 'pixel' on the paper is originaly considered to be 1 encoded bit of storage (on/off) per pixel then by going to a 4 grey scale option per pixel (still in black/white) that gives you 2 encoded bits per pixel. If you then take this to three colour RGB also in 4 levels each then you get 6 encoded bits per pixel. This is a density increase of 64 times over the base storage capacity for the simple on/off pixel example. Further increasing the number of encoded bits per pixel would allow for even higher densities but at the expense of a lot more complexity and probably even error correction being needed as higher grey scale values are reached. The use of shapes, etc. is not required as even a few extra pixels would allow for more variations that almost any list of recognisable shapes would give.

Thus, in theory, the concept holds true. Turning this into a practical device operating at the pixel density used for DVD or CD using multiple levels and multiple colours would probably be slightly more of a challenge though.

Richard

RE: "Paper based storage systems" - it's been done. Google "Cauzin Systems" - in the mid-80s Byte Magazine was printing source code listings in a bar-code format that could be read by a little gizmo that looked something like a flashlight with a flat side. Saved hours of typing, supposedly. Never really caught on. Everything old is new again!

Monte

We also had a large response to a letter in Tuesday's round up. The writer suggested that Open Source software owed a debt of gratitude to Microsoft, because many of its products were based on reverse engineering the hard developed code from Redmond's finest. Pretty much all the letters responding to this said the same thing, so we'll keep it short:

Your correspondent Don says "A rag-tag group of academics and hackers simply could not create software like this on their own, primarily because they simply do not know the requirements". A few comments:

1.Open source developers may include the above, but they also include a large number of professional programmers and people with all levels of programming and software experience. Including using it in the real world.

2.Sun Microsystems bought Star Office 5 from the German commercial developers and gave it to the FOSS community for further development. Much of which they also funded.

3.OO.o is similar to MSO because includes the same functions and it uses the same GUI. That is the primary purpose of having a GUI. Other rival product are also similar.

4.Microsoft didn't create Office, it bought the component parts and glued it together. The main reasons Microsoft's development process is so expensive is a) because they can afford it with a 90% profit margin on the product, and b) their programmers are mostly scrip kiddies with no previous programming or commercial experience. (This is also why XP looks like Tellytubbies.)

Paul

> Linux and the OSS do in a sense owe Microsoft. Even aside from patents, there has been > such an enormous amount of reverse engineering that has enabled the open source > movement to create software without spending billions on R&D.

Oh lordly no, most things are invented by academics and small firms and are simply taken by Microsoft. their R&D budget is spent on champagne.

Martin

Next, a silly response to a serious article about banking:

Hi, I'm sure you're article on banking details was fascinating. However Some bint from BT was all over the place obscuring your words, so I just closed it. I notice that as I'm writing this, there is the freaky Siemens man waving at me like he's trying to entice a boy into his car

Adrian

Speak to the government. They keep rejecting our application for charitable status, and people get really funny about money being distributed in brown envelopes these days...

Attention all restaurateurs. Guinea pig is flavour of the month with Reg readers:

That's a mighty fine looking dinner! If any of your readers sent in preparation tips, I'd be interested in seeing them posted. I run a small ranch, and have been looking into some form of small animal for occasional devouring. Goats and rabbits are rather troublesome, but guinea pigs... splendid!

The previous submitter seemed to have left out "hungry" from the "heartless, soulless bastard" phrase.

Andrew

And finally, we have to reference this story by its title: UK ISP mislays domains beginning with 'C'

Bunch of incompetent unts, the lot of them.

Alex

Well played, Alex, well played. ®