Data Circle

Around this time last year, I made some technology predictions for 2008. You can read the full details in the original post, but I have summarised how true (or false!) the predictions turned out to be here.

What will happen

Huge surge in demand for online video: The BBC’s iPlayer service has already been causing consternation amongst ISPs who complain that the popularity of the service is increasing the demands for bandwidth from customers. From the statistics I’ve seen, iPlayer is still small fry compared with general file sharing, but that could all change in the next twelve months as more and more content becomes available through the major media players.

I also predicted that other channels would follow the BBC’s lead in providing online access to at least part of their programming schedule. This hasn’t happened yet, mainly due to the endless bickering over Project Kangaroo and whether it impedes competition or not. With the credit crunch taking a particularly heavy toll on media companies, we may well see Channel 4 pull out altogether in order to save costs.

Crunch time for Digital Rights Management: I predicted that DRM would face a backlash and be on its way out by the end of 2008. Unfortunately this hasn’t happened, though there have been some positive moves in this area.

Victory in the format war: The format war ended in February this year, with victory for Blu-ray after Toshiba dropped its support for HD-DVD. I didn’t call for either side in my prediction, though Blu-ray did appear to have slightly more support to begin with. I still expect it to be some time before Blu-ray overtakes the current DVD format, partly because many people already have large DVD collections and also because of the cost of Blu-ray players has yet to come down to a sensible value. Combined with the credit crunch, which is affecting the sales of electronic devices, I suspect it will be several years before Blu-ray overtakes DVD as the standard format for releasing films. Finally, the last VHS manufacturer has only just stopped creating tapes, so DVDs may well be around for a similar length of time.

What won’t happen

Linux on the Desktop: As I predicted, Linux still hasn’t captured a significant (which I rather arbitrarily defined as 10%) proportion of the desktop market. However, Ubuntu and Fedora have both made huge strides towards making Linux a platform which is accessible to everyone, so perhaps we’ll see more people switching in 2009.

Super-fast broadband in the UK: The argument is still raging in the UK about whether we should have fibre to the home and who should pick up the tab for installing it. BT is understandably concerned about making a return on its investment if it has to build the infrastructure and then be forced to share it with competitors at small profit margins, and Virgin Media is only likely to install fibre in areas with dense populations where it can sign up sufficient subscribers to recoup its costs. For the moment, it looks like the UK will remain a first world country with second rate access to the Internet, lagging far behind our competitors across both the Channel and the Atlantic.

That just about wraps it up for 2008—I’ll be posting predictions for 2009 in the next couple of days.

Further reading

• Inquiry into Project Kangaroo (Competition Commission)
• Pull out of Project Kangaroo, broadcasters told (Guardian)
• High definition optical disc format war (Wikipedia)
• Last major VHS supplier ejects from tape biz (The Register)
• UK behind in global rush to broadband (Guardian)

In an unexpected move, France’s competition regulator has ordered Apple to allow companies other than Orange (which currently has exclusive distribution rights within France) to sell the coveted iPhone handset in the country. Whilst I find this somewhat ironic, coming from a court in a country which is well known for maintaining state monopolies in many industries, it’s pleasing to see that regulators can occasionally do their job and intervene to protect competition within a market.

Hopefully this decision will be followed in other countries, including here in the UK where o2 currently has exclusive rights to distribute the iPhone. There’s no guarantee that this will happen, and the French case isn’t binding on UK courts or regulators (though I’m sure it would be taken into account) but it’s a positive move nevertheless.

Personally, I find it a bit ridiculous that your choice of handset should determine your operator, or vice-versa. Consumers should be free to mix and match whichever combination they want and to switch without being penalised (other than the cost of a contract or new handset of course). That’s by far the best way to drive down prices and ensure that customers get a good deal, knowing that they can switch to another provider or handset if they’re not happy with their current situation.

Of course, even if you could use the iPhone on any operator, you do have to wonder whether it is worth forking out hundreds of pounds and possibly signing up to an expensive contract for the dubious privileges of being able to worship Saint Steve and being a target for muggers. But hey, it’s the principle of fair competition which counts.

Further reading

• France strips Orange of its exclusive iPhone rights

It’s been some time since the last major WordPress release, but version 2.7 is now out and I’ve just finished upgrading my various blogs.

The dashboard is quite different is the new version and takes some getting used to, though all the same functionality is there. Personally I preferred the old design, but I think that may be largely down to familiarity and I think after a few weeks I’ll be using the new dashboard without any problems. Looking at the new design also reminded me that I’m still running the same boring default theme, so I probably change that at some point, perhaps after my thesis has been handed in.

As always, I’d advise upgrading as soon as possible—for the security fixes if nothing else. I’m not convinced by the new features yet, although the automatic upgrade sounds like a useful addition (assuming it works—naturally I can’t try it until the next release) and something which will hopefully help increase security generally.

If you’re still running Internet Explorer, you should probably be aware of a critical security update which Microsoft released yesterday, which you can get either via their website or through Windows Update. If you have automatic updates enabled, the patch may be downloaded and applied the next time you switch off your machine, though with something like this you might want to double-check anyway. All the cool kids are running a more secure browser now, but even if you don’t use IE but still run Windows I’d strongly recommend patching your browser.

Linux – Stop holding our kids back at Blog of helios

Some people shouldn’t be allowed access to computers…

For those of you running WordPress blogs, you might be interested to know that version 2.6.1 has been released. The highlighted improvements for additional languages, IIS users and installations with lots of plugins don’t provide much benefit to me personally, but it’s good to see that development is still pressing ahead at a decent speed. As always, a full list of changesrent a car bulgariaландшафт is available, and my advice would be to upgrade as soon as possible.

On the company’s blog today, Twitter announced that they would be ceasing all SMS updates in the UK. As usual, TechCrunch UK was hot off the mark with a report, and I’m sure that plenty of other opinions will fly around the Web over the next few days.

Quite frankly though, I’m amazed that the service has lasted this long. Twitter appears to lack a viable business model, and each time you update your status it could be sending that out, via SMS, to tens, hundreds or even thousands of recipients. Even if Twitter received a small amount for each incoming SMS, this would be dwarfed by the number of outgoing messages. The more popular Twitter gets, the more they will lose. The sensible option would be to charge users for receiving texts—which is fairly simple to do—but it looks like the site is run by a bunch of techies who have been blinded into thinking that providing a service which costs money to run without a long-term source of revenue is somehow a good idea. Then again, they’re running a Web 2.0 site, where having basic accountancy skills on your CV will ensure that you never get hired.

From a personal perspective, I’m actually quite pleased to see this happening. Over the past couple of years, I’ve seen companies pour millions of dollars into these web 2.0 companies, which have produced virtually no returns and are an appalling waste of capital which could be put to far better use elsewhere. Perhaps now investors will look again at opportunities to “invest” in companies like Twitter, Facebook et al and see them for what they really are—a highly speculative bet on the success of a company with no assets, no business model and virtually no revenue.

For those of you who were not able to make it to OpenTech 2008, or want to listen again, audio recordings of many of the talks are now available from the OpenTech website. I’m not sure if other talks are going to be uploaded soon (the session I was chairing was definitely recorded, though the microphones were a bit iffy) but the ones which are already online are well worth listening to.

Phishing, the art of obtaining information from users by pretending to be from a reputable known source, is surprisingly effective, despite attempts by numerous organisations (particularly banks) to educate users about this issue. Recently, the University of Manchester, where I’ve been a student for nearly five years, was hit by a barrage of emails pretending to be from IT Services (the department which runs most of the University’s email, amongst other things) which encouraged students and staff to reply with their username and password. Unbelievably for an organisation which supposedly consists of intelligent people who are working towards obtaining one of the highest qualifications in the country, more than seventy people replied with their login details. As a result, millions of spam messages were sent from University accounts, causing some major mail providers, including Hotmail, to block all incoming mail from manchester.ac.uk addresses and their subdomains.

Phishing relies upon the fact that it doesn’t matter if only one in ten thousand people are completely lacking in common sense (given the University’s size, it’s probably actually more like one in five thousand)—spam enough of them and you’ll eventually get some hits. It amazes me that people still fall for this trick, because to me it seems so painstakingly obvious that a bank would never ask for information such as your PIN, but it would appear that the message has still not got through to everyone.

Following on from its first survey in 2007, well-known web magazine A List Apart is launching a 2008 survey for those of us in the web business (design, programming, development etc.) . An analysis will be published in a later edition of the magazine, and the anonymised raw data will also be made available so that anyone can run their own analysis too. I’m not sure how useful the end result will be, but as a freelance web development myself I’m certainly interested in seeing the final analysis and statistics.