"The site was always a beta site. We tried making piecemeal adjustments to the site, which was clearly not adequate. We now need to make major changes to the web site, so we haven't pulled the plug - we've suspended it while we make the major changes."

"To give you an example, Google announced only last week that they're taking their beta site into actual production. And they've been going on for, you know, five to ten years..."

Oh dear.

If I may paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen's famous rejoinder to Dan Quayle during the 1988 United States vice-presidential debate:

I know Google. Google is a friend of mine. 118800, you're no Google.

What has done for both of these services is mass public outrage at invasion of privacy.

A service is only a service if it is perceived as such. Google, despite having access to vast amounts of information about our personal web browsing habits, our use of social media, email and so on, is not perceived by most people as posing a threat to their privacy in the way that both Phorm and 118800 are.

Phorm, 118800 and their respective funders may well wish to work a little harder to emulate Google in future if they are to avoid similar embarrassments.

It comes with great sadness that I have to announce the imminent closure of SORBS. The University of Queensland have decided not to honor their agreement with myself and SORBS and terminate the hosting contract.

I have been involved with institutions such as Griffith University trying to arrange alternative hosting for SORBS, but as of 12 noon, 22nd June 2009 no hosting has been acquired and therefore I have been forced in to this announcement. SORBS is officially "For Sale" should anyone wish to purchase it as a going concern, but failing that and failing to find alternative hosting for a 42RU rack in the Brisbane area of Queensland Australia SORBS will be shutting down permanently in 28 days, on 20th July 2009 at 12 noon.

Later posts on the SORBS home page seem to offer a glimmer of a possibility that SORBS may yet survive. I hope it does.

While SORBS has not been an uncontroversial service, it remains the most effective first line of defence against spam here and it is undeniable that more spam will end up being delivered in the event that SORBS is shut down.

People who have found themselves on the wrong side of the $50 SORBS delisting fee will doubtless feel some sense of schadenfreude at the thought of SORBS' demise. To those people I will just restate what I have said before on that matter.

The fee is not extortion. It is an incentive to you to operate your mail server safely and responsibly. Spam is not inevitable. It is the result of the exploitation of vulnerable systems none of which needs to be vulnerable to abuse if managed effectively. Those charged with the duty to administer mail systems have a concomitant duty of care to the rest of us, email users. SORBS has simply (and effectively) sought to raise standards among the small minority of mail system administrators who are not up to scratch.

Long may it continue.

(Thanks, Bart, for drawing this to my attention.)

Around three million homes in the UK have broadband speeds of less than two megabits per second (2Mbps) according to research commissioned by the BBC.

The government has promised to provide all homes in the UK with speeds of at least 2Mbps by 2012.

The research revealed that so-called notspots are not limited to rural communities with many in suburban areas, and even streets in major towns.

There are some maps too, showing graphically where is hot and where is not. Let's pick one and zoom in to casa Linfoot.

There it is. A large blue blob squarely superimposed on my entire neighbourhood. Checking the legend and... Blue means slow, apparently - a notspot no less.

10Mbps not fast enough, then?

The problem seems to be that virtually every survey of broadband speed looks only at ADSL and a lot of people get broadband through other technologies, such as cable.

I don't think the situation is quite as dire as we are being led to believe.

We petition the Prime Minister to investigate the Phorm technology and if found to breach UK or European privacy laws then ban all ISP's from adopting it's use. Additionally the privacy laws should be reviewed to cover any future technologies such as Phorm

The UK's three largest ISP's, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk are all in talks with a view to introducing the Phorm technology. This would result in the browsing habits of the majority of the UK population being sold to a third party for advertising purposes. The opt out system for this technology is vague and unproven, even when opting out your every move on the Internet might be recorded. Surely this must be a breach of privacy laws, if not then the privacy laws need to be changed to cover such invasive technology.

Reasonably clear, I think.

Well, the government's response has just been published.

They not only pass the buck to the Information Commissioner's Office, they do so using an ICO document which is itself well over a year old - nearly as old as the petition itself.

How is this advancing the debate?

We are witnessing the birth of a new style of government - a combination of apathy, procrastination, abdication of responsibility, spin and impenetrable bureaucracy.

All we need now is a name for it...

Choices, choices.

(Thanks, Bart)

1. Thanks for clarifying that. I wasn't sure.
2. Ooopsy
3. That will reassure the folks on the service desk who have to deal with the hundreds of calls from concerned users
4. Did you mean technical support document?
5. Did you mean link?

Why mention this?

Well, I was recently the target of a LinkedIn Request for Expertise and the whole experience has left me with a rather sour taste in my mouth.

I have no objection to being asked my opinions on matters close to my areas of expertise of course. Not infrequently I give this advice completely free of charge (although if you are one of those people who has found my advice valuable in the past then do please consider supporting my charity), but LinkedIn offered payment:

If you qualify and complete the 16 minute questionnaire, LinkedIn is offering a £30 reward with options for: an Amazon e-certificate, PayPal transfer into your local currency or charitable donations of your choosing.

Well, I did qualify and I did complete the questionnaire. At the end of the questionnaire I was told:

Thank You

We know you'll enjoy the 30 GBP Amazon.co.uk® E-certificate you selected from your Folio. Your Amazon E-Certificate will be emailed to you in 5-15 Business Days.

I took 5-15 business days to mean 1-3 weeks.

A little over three weeks later I wondered where the promised reward was, so emailed the company contracted by LinkedIn to fulfil rewards to ask about it. I got this by return.

Thank you for contacting Incentive Logic Customer Care,

Your Amazon.com e-certificate will take 2 - 3 weeks from the order date to be delivered to your  Inbox.

Strike one. I just told you that I had waited over three weeks already.

Thank you for taking the time to contact Incentive Logic Member Services,

We have escalated your Amazon certificate inquiry to the Harris Poll Online department fulfilling this order. You can expect to receive a response from them in the next 3-5 business days.

So, it's not Incentive Logic's problem. It's Harris Poll's problem. I'll wait for another week and see what happens.

Nothing.

I chased again and got this.

Thank you for contacting Incentive Logic Member Services,

In order to better assist you please reply with a daytime phone# that you can be contacted at. This information will greatly assist us in resolving your request.

Strike two. Now they want to talk to me?

I wrote back with my telephone number and enclosed a copy of both the original email inviting me to take the survey and the final web page of the survey itself, containing a unique reference number and promising the reward.

The reply?

Thank you for getting in touch with ILinkedIn [sic] Research Network Rewards,

We apologize for any confusion from our previous e-mail. We have reviewed your inquiry and have manually resent your 30 GBP Amazon.co.uk® E-certificate. Your certificate should arrive in your InBox in the next 24 hours.

So, Harris Poll is no longer in the frame. But at least they'll now pay, right?

Wrong.

Well over a week has passed since that promise that the Amazon voucher's in the email, and (you guessed it). Nothing. Nada. Zlich.

Strike three.

In fact every subsequent attempt by me to contact both Incentive Logic and LinkedIn has met with no response at all.

I guess they won't be asking for my opinion again but that's OK. I wouldn't give it anyway because they seem quite incapable of honouring their side of the bargain.

What really irritates me about this?

It isn't the money - it's not that much anyway.

It isn't the waste of the time it took me to answer the survey.

It isn't even the procurement of my time on the basis of what turned out to be a false promise.

What really gets my goat is that setting up an expert network system like this is falling-off-a-log easy. Given the resources available to LinkedIn and its partners, I just don't understand how it is possible to implement something so obviously broken.

Update 28 Apr: Today, very nearly 240 hours after that promise that the Amazon voucher would be sent within 24 hours, the said voucher actually showed up. Perhaps the LinkedIn Research Network is not completely broken, though that was the most difficult £30 I have ever earned. Not an experience I intend to repeat.

If you want to see it done right you must come to this side of the pond and look at a UK company called Vanson Bourne.

Vanson Bourne operates an Expert Network called QNA. I have been participating in QNA research for a while now and:

It. Just. Works.

• They email a link to a survey.
• If I have the time and the relevant expertise to answer the survey, I click the link.
• After a few pre-qualification questions, the QNA system decides whether it needs my specific input or not.
• If it doesn't, I see a polite message to that effect.
• If it does, I continue and complete the survey.
• At the end, the system asks how I would like to take the reward (vouchers, charitable donations etc).
• And finally, usually within minutes, the reward or charitable donation is paid.

All of this happens without any human intervention. No emails to their service desk asking what went wrong. No fabricated excuses or hollow promises.

To readers who think they may be interested in this type of thing - one final word of advice.

Sign up at QNA and avoid the LinkedIn Research Network.

Update 29 Apr: Incentive Logic has now written to me personally to apologise for and explain the series of errors which led to this unfortunate episode. I am now reassured that my case was exceptional and that both LinkedIn and Incentive Logic are generally reliable and I therefore withdraw my exhortation to avoid the LinkedIn Research Network.

In those rare and all too brief lulls in the otherwise incessant media coverage of the inexplicable evaporation of global capital, at least one other story has actually had some press.

I refer, of course, to the British government plan to eavesdrop on all of our communication.

The Directive enforcing this new duty on ISPs to retain data about their customers' use of their services came into effect on 6 April.

There is a good article about it over at the Open Rights Group.

European legislation that came into force today requires internet service providers to retain details of user’s emails, net phone calls and other web traffic. This requirement, imposed on all all EU states, is a serious erosion of our fundamental human right to privacy.

Tucked away among the comments on that piece (which seem pretty unanimous in their dislike of the whole notion) there is a link to the Directive itself. 'Tis a brief document - at least for a governmental one - but it does contain definitions of the data required to be collected and retained by ISPs, to whit:

PART 3
INTERNET ACCESS, INTERNET E-MAIL OR INTERNET TELEPHONY
Data necessary to trace and identify the source of a communication

11.—(1) The user ID allocated.
(2) The user ID and telephone number allocated to the communication entering the public telephone network.
(3) The name and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom an Internet Protocol (IP) address, user ID or telephone number was allocated at the time of the communication.

Data necessary to identify the destination of a communication

12.—(1) In the case of internet telephony, the user ID or telephone number of the intended recipient of the call.
(2) In the case of internet e-mail or internet telephony, the name and address of the subscriber or registered user and the user ID of the intended recipient of the communication.

Data necessary to identify the date, time and duration of a communication

13.—(1) In the case of internet access—

(a) The date and time of the log-in to and log-off from the internet access service, based on a specified time zone,
(b) The IP address, whether dynamic or static, allocated by the internet access service provider to the communication, and
(c) The user ID of the subscriber or registered user of the internet access service.

(2) In the case of internet e-mail or internet telephony, the date and time of the log-in to and log-off from the internet e-mail or internet telephony service, based on a specified time zone.

Data necessary to identify the type of communication

14.  In the case of internet e-mail or internet telephony, the internet service used.

Data necessary to identify users’ communication equipment (or what purports to be their equipment)

15.—(1) In the case of dial-up access, the calling telephone number.
(2) In any other case, the digital subscriber line (DSL) or other end point of the originator of the communication.

Clear as mud.

I don't see too many ISPs successfully implementing all of that little lot.