July-September
“I love this town.” - Phil “The Power” Taylor
The start of July saw Blackpool’s Opera House announced as the 2009 venue for the Royal Variety Performance. The show would be in December. We also saw Labour crushed in the European elections as the British National Party secured two seats in the European Parliament. Their victory rally would be held in Blackpool a few weeks later prompting an invasion of Unite Against Fascism.
This is a continuation of my previous trials and tribulations with Virgin Media’s business arm in relation to a simple query.
I spoke to a bird called Gemma at Virgin Media a month ago and based on the fact we’d been paying £100 per month too much on our contract with them for 4 or 5 years she agreed to give us a discount on future bills. She promised to send a contract through which we were to sign, and then we’d be saving this £100 a month. Great.
Megalomaniacal psychopath
Today it seems our illustrious Government have decided to bring forward proposed legislation to block file sharing protocols on the internet.
Previously scheduled to come in in 2012, there is now some kind of urgency to get the laws in place. No, I’ve no idea why either, but I’m sure large amounts of cash were involved.
I had two of these routers lying around and needed a router quickly, so I tried one and it continually crashed under any kind of minor load on the LAN ports, so much so that it appeared to be dropping packets and then eventually just locked up and was un-pingable. I tried the other one, it also did it.
More ISP madness and lobby group loving!
I’ve just read on TorrentFreak that another UK ISP, Karoo, has been disconnecting users on request of third parties such as the BPI.
I’d not heard of Karoo before, but it is owned and operated by Kingston Communications in the Hull area. Kingston is, if I recall, run by Hull City Council and was wholly owned by them until they floated it on the LSE. According to the article on TorrentFreak and accompanying one on the BBC website, Karoo have been partaking in some quite unpleasant practises in relation to allegations of distribution of intellectual property for which the user is not the copyright holder. Whilst Virgin Media sends letters to its users on behalf of the BPI, Karoo just disconnects you because you’re deemed to be instantly guilty. What’s worse is the only way you can get your connection back is to sign a form admitting guilt, and in Hull there is only one ISP – Karoo.
Just found this. It doesn’t sound too good, but perhaps it only applies to O2 Mobile Broadband. I would check their terms and conditions but the site appears to be down at the moment.
According to the Evening Gazette, Blackpool’s “broadband connection” is about to become “one of the best in the country”.
These opening words in the article left me a bit confused. Is journalist Nick Hyde telling us that Blackpool is so behind the times that it has only one broadband connection? Or maybe, just maybe, he is a lousy reporter that has been fed by Virgin Media’s publicity machine and knows absolutely nothing about the subject he is writing about.
Lord Steve Carter and Ben Bradshaw have revealed their plans for “Digital Britain”.
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