BT, a major broadband ISP in the UK, has 2 million broadband customers, and is gunning for 5 million. And they’re saying content is going to be a key to achieving the goal. WHich makes sense, the whole point of broadband is being able to experience content – in all its multimedia forms – faster and better. BT’s initiative is interesting:

“The group plans to take on the pay-TV industry with a new service enabling everyone from broadcasters to local interest groups to supply broadband users with shows and films of DVD-like quality. It has developed a complete digital rights management suite that will allow video to be distributed for a fee, and will announce a number of content partners early next month. “

Well, he’s at least reading your email, or will be if the Government gets some legislation changes through.

Couple of stories about phishing in the last few days. Phishing, if you don’t know, is where naughty people send you an email, ostensibly from your bank (or some other such institution), telling you that you need to ‘reconfirm’ your user name and password for online banking, or somesuch. When you click the link, you arrive at a web site which looks exactly like the bank’s. Except it isn’t. And if you do enter in your details, the naughty people then use those to clean your account out.

Phishing was up 50% in January, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

More phishing scams surface

Anti-phishing solution hopes to make its mark

Phishing scams get more sophisticated

Virgin’s the next one in the increasingly crowded music download marketplace. They’ve announced they will offer music downloads from August. “iPod users will find no joy in the announcement as the format supported will be Windows Media Audio or WMA.”

Spam is 10 years old. Happy birthday. Yay.

I can remember back in the days when we’d receive the occasional fax at the office, sent from Nigeria, offering us shares in untold wealth. All we had to do was hand over our company bank account details. Of course this was the famous 419 scam, named after the country code for Nigeria. In more recent years the scam was moved online. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that 419 is now one of the top export earners for Nigeria, and the success is born out by this article which says:

“More than 120 Britons have been tricked out of a total of £12.6m by so-called 419 scams in the past 15 months. “

You can read more about 419 here.

Of course, we would all say we’d never be sucked in by this one – clearly it’s a too good to be true issue. But, as always, human nature is by default greedy, or at least that’s the conclusion you inevitably reach after seeing how many people have decided 419 is the real deal.

A gallery owner in the US has been charged with flogging half a million dollars worth of fake paintings via eBay and online. The works included pictures supposedly produced by Degas, Avery and de Kooning. Sure hope the National Gallery of Australia and our other august institutions are not using eBay to spend their acquisitions budget.

“federal investigators had recovered 45 pieces of art, including paintings, drawings and pastels. Investigators have confirmed so far that 36 were counterfeits and expect the rest also will be fake”

“This is just a small part of what’s out there. It’s easy to believe we are talking hundreds of victims, nationally and internationally”

Apparently they’ve been getting away with it since 1999. Makes you wonder why it took so long for someone to notice.

The Federal Government has launched a “broadband strategy to help more people access high-speed internet…which aims to coordinate all layers of government to deliver better broadband services across Australia”. Except in true government style it doesn’t appear to have any actual actions associated with it. Which is why the strategy has been condemned by the Opposition and at leastr one state government. You can read the whole thing – if you like wading through bureaucratic waffle – here.

My partner is in Adelaide this weekend for the festivals, and filing stories for our web sites, so internet access was an issue to be considered. Of course, dialup is always available, but as she has a wireless enabled laptop, I thought I’d check out some wireless hotspots she could tap into. A quick bit of research, and I fell over an article which points out that Adelaide CBD is one big wireless hotspot.

“A network of 50 wireless access hot spots are peppered around central Adelaide – on lamp posts, traffic lights, under the canopy in the main shopping precinct of Rundle Mall, at the ultra cool Cibo coffee bar and the historic Adelaide City Council chambers. Each has a line-of-sight range of about 200 metres, and the resulting WLAN cable-free network, called citilan, is believed to be the largest in the world.”

Unfortunately it’s all pretty new, and as far as I can tell, only available at present to subscribers to either one of two Adelaide ISPs which are handling the technology end.

But what a fantastic idea. Basically, if you have a wireless enabled laptop or PDA, you can be online from anywhere in the CBD. Now that’s connectivity. And brilliant for small business, no longer having to worry about or pay the cost to organise broadband connections in an office. Or what about someone needing to make a presentation to a client – perhaps an architect or designer. Now you can say ‘meet you over coffee’ in a cafe, and be online and show your wares.

Wireless is a real opportunity, and with the cost now very low (after some high prices a couple of years ago), it’s a really viable idea. It certainly solved our network issues at home. Our home network (separate to our office down the street) now includes three laptops, a Mac G4, a wireless printer and all shared over a wireless network with broadband ADSL connection. Visitors do laugh, but that’s what happens when you both need computers for work, and have a daughter with a laptop. Cost to network – about $500. Including the wireless access point and wireless network cards for the laptops. That’s well within the budget of a small business. And our latest toy, an HP all in one printer/fax/scanner, cost less than $700 and is connected wirelessly as well, so it too can move around the house.

When oh when oh when will our erstwhile policy makers and bureaucrats GET THE MESSAGE. This story, albeit in the context of the USA, is just as relevent to Australia, where broadband speed and access is just as miserable.

“The U.S. lags far behind global leaders such as Korea and Japan, where broadband is far faster and cheaper, thanks to more focused national policy, less cumbersome regulation, and more densely populated regions. For a little more than $50 a month, consumers in Korea can purchase a 20-megabit-per-second Internet connection. That’s 10 to 40 times faster than a typical U.S. connection. In Korea, people use the service to watch TV in a window of their Web browser while they work on a memo in their word processor. Their access to movies and games on demand grows by the day. Such online services are available to few consumers in the U.S., where a 3-megabit connection costs about $45.”

I like the bit about a 3meg connection being available in the US for $US45. The best speed you can buy from Australia’s largest ISP, BigPond, is 1.5meg. And that costs $AUD149.95 a month.

I can only dream of a 20meg connection. We have a 1meg/1meg connection at our office, and our bill nudges $1,000 a month.

So why does Korea get the speed:

“This is less about technological prowess and more about policy. For one thing, Japan and Korea made the deployment of such services a national priority. What’s more, the Korean government deregulated what had been a monopolistic phone system and opened the market to competition. That set off a race among providers to wire up the nation. Moreover, they weren’t hamstrung by the regulations found in the U.S. All of the above led to the deployment of faster DSL and even a limited rollout of fiber-to-the-home. Finally, Korea is more densely populated than the U.S., cramming 48 million people into an area about the size of Indiana. Koreans tend to live in big apartment buildings located near phone company facilities, making it much easier and cheaper to deploy high-speed broadband.”