Last week, BT and the Movie Studios returned to court to discuss the terms of the newzbin2 injunction. The judgement is a pretty much a victory for the Studios. BT must use Cleanfeed to block notified sites, they must use it to block all addresses notified by the applicants, the proposal that only sites that ‘predominantly’ induce copyright infringement should be blocked was rejected, they can’t turn the blocking off for operational reasons without the permission of the applicants, they can’t terminate the injunction in circumstances where the applicants don’t injunct BT’s competitors in a reasonable time frame, BT have to pay for the enforcement, BT have no right to claim damages against the studios for consequential liability, BT have to pay the studio’s court costs to the point of the initial newzbin2 injunction, costs incurred after the injunction are born be each side. …
Defeat ripped from the jaws of victory or what do you call two ex monopolists?
After last night’s triumph in replacing my home hub with a third party gateway, I was musing about BT’s ability to support their Hub and my suspicions that there is a DHCP bug on the home hub and how large organisations really need to understand the software they use and how open source products make skills acquisition easier; although BT have no excuse, since the hub is a Linux derivative, hence open source but they outsourced the development, and for months have denied any knowledge or responsibility for its functionality. …
Un-Unlimited BT Internet
I have an “Unlimited” download contract with BT Broadband and I received a Fair Usage policy warning in November. It seems that if their “Unlimited” customers look likely to exceed 100Gb download per calendar month, they receive a warning letter, but if they exceed the limit for two months in a row, they’ll restrict the download speed to 1 Mbps for a further month during peak times. (This is 1/7th of the speed I usually get.)
This seems a bit disproportionate to me since online games, and streaming content from the TV companies replayer sites become unusable. What do the think a residential site uses broadband for? Anyway, I rang them to discuss this, and have posted my notes at a new page called BT Broadband, which discusses the fairness, transparancy and management measures. It also has a link to Ofcom’s site. (Further thoughts and notes are held on the BT Home Hub page. ) …
iMail and BT Connect
I couldn’t get these to work together and so am using Thunderbird. …
Back Online with BT Boadband
Since I need a new broadband connection, I have been struggling with BT’s home hub since last Wednesday, which is why this blog has been unavailable. I finally discovered that I had not correctly configured the bliki host’s gateway and dns server addresses. So despite being exceptionally cross with BT because no-one would help me, it turns out that it was all my fault, particularly since I ignored at least two people’s advice to check it. I used this site to organise my notes and asked for help at BT’s forums on a thread called port forwarding/http service. …
The duty to publish bites
I have been talking to some customers about Sun’s policy to publish Solaris as CDDL, and found that some of their staff are ‘balls out’ fans of the GPL; this places a duty to publish your source code if you have used GPL code and publish your binary. This is a very serious duty, and I am not sure these fans are getting management or their legal departments approval. The register reports that British Telecom have decided to publish their home appliance code because they feel that otherwise they may be in violation of the GPL since their home hub appliance uses Linux which is published under the GPL.
They are being hunted by http://gpl-violations.org/, whose page states
The ultimate goal is to make vendors of GPL licensed software understand that GPL is not public domain, and that there are license conditions that are to be fulfilled.
ooOOOoo
Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished here in June 2016. …
Food for Thought
I was invited to Martlesham to visit BT’s innovation Lab; there were some inspiring presentations and technologies on display which at the time of posting this article are a bit dated, since this is another post copied from the sun/oracle blog in March 2016, To see the original on Innovation see here, and on WiFI and Health see here. Other posts on the existential nature of networks, intelligent infrastructure, the analogue/digital interface, bio-feedback systems, and telematics, were posted here. …
Open Source, friend or foe
The Register today, has an article, headlined “US in open source backlash” arguing that the US is a late, slow and distressed adopter of open source compared with Europe and Latin America. This prompted me to write up notes from a BT conference to which we had been invited. The notes were originally published on my sun/oracle blog, and I created this article on the blog as part of the exercise in unifying the blogs in March 2016. The original article looks at comments from MySQL & Google staff, and finishes with a review of Simon Phipps presentation to the meeting which I repeat here. …