Have you ever heard of a guy called Don Fanucci? You are well educated if you have. If you haven't then I'd suggest you watch the Godfather part 2.
He's a nice Italian chap who runs this great little scheme whereby people have to pay him protection money. If they refuse, he beats them up. It's a brilliant idea. It's also how most big corporations operate.
Take Microsoft for example. We have to pay them obscene amounts of money for the privilege of using their products. During that time we get millions of free patches to download; patches that are necessary because their products are rubbish and full of bugs.
Of course, as soon as one of their products becomes obsolete, these patches pretty much stop because Microsoft isn't interested in supporting them any more. The other thing that happens is the product mysteriously stops working properly.
For instance, I use an older version of Office and I have no reason to upgrade at the moment. The only programs I use are Word, Outlook and Access. I don't use Excel because it's annoying and assumes, always incorrectly, what I want to do before I've done it and I don't use PowerPoint because I'm not an imbecile.
Recently, however, since later versions of Office have been released, Outlook and Word have started to freeze on a regular basis. I can barely move the cursor without it hanging and forcing me to wait 5 minutes before I can compose an email. I often get a message saying Outlook can't open Microsoft Word because it is busy. Well pardon me Mr Gates but I'm the one who's bloody well busy, not Word!
It's the same with Apple and the iPhone. I took out a 2 year contract back in June 2009. It has been brilliant. I've become one of those annoying people who, every 5 minutes, gets the phone out and fiddles with it for no reason whatsoever.
Anyway, recently the thing has started to run a bit slow. The Internet connection is the worst. I can't remember the last time I got a 3G connection and it fails to connect to my email accounts or Facebook on a regular basis. It often takes ages to catch up with itself when I'm composing a text message and there have been a number of occasions where people have tried to call me and it has gone straight to voicemail.
Of course you might argue that the phone is 2 years old and is getting tired. This is very possible but I find it a little strange that it started happening just as my contract came up for renewal. Call me cynical but do you think this could be a deliberate ploy to force me to buy a newer model?
The thing is I, along with everyone else, put up with this because there isn't much in the way of choice. Both companies monopolise their respective markets. Like Don Fanucci, they expect me to wet their beak because I'm just a little punk with no respect.
Of course, Don Fanucci's little business empire collapsed after he annoyed Vito Corleone. So I'm going to take a leaf out of his book. I'm off out to buy a pony and a hacksaw. I'm then heading down to the o2 shop to make them an offer they can't refuse...
Friday, 17 June 2011
Friday, 27 May 2011
Cookie rules are taking the biscuit
Despite having been in the business for over a decade, I still get a sense of enormous satisfaction when I solve a programming conundrum or come up with a fantastically original and pretty design for a website.
However, when I’ve spent a day struggling over a technical issue that stubbornly refuses to do what I want it to, or I’ve been sat in a meeting, I’m left feeling rather deflated.
This is because I like to feel I’ve been productive. People whose roles are defined by sitting in meetings and talking bollocks should be drowned in their own aftershave. Bureaucrats who sit around making up jobs for themselves by coming up with nonsense regulations in a vague attempt to justify their existence are among the worst kind of prat.
Take Christopher Graham. He is an “Information Commissioner”. What the hell that means I have no idea. He has recently made amendments to the “Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations” or PECR for short. The irony of that acronym sounding like the word “pecker” is not lost on me.
Anyway, he is a guy with a receding hairline, silly spectacles and a face that just screams “punch me”. He has taken it upon himself to force websites to ask for consent when they place things called “cookies” on a user’s browser.
Now I’m not talking about biscuits here. Cookies are temporary text files that get written to a user’s computer when they visit a website. They are written when the website needs to remember user preferences. For example, our Webshop app uses a form of cookie when a customer adds items to their shopping basket. The system needs to remember what that customer has added so it stores it in something called a “session” where it stores all their shopping data until they have either bought the item or left the shop. It is the same when that user logs into their account to purchase the items. The system needs some way of remembering who they are so it stores a temporary record on the user’s computer. These files usually expire after about 20 minutes of inactivity.
So what are all these websites expected to do? Will they now have to ask the user’s permission every time they perform an action? Does this mean that every time someone adds something to their basket a message has to pop up saying “Are you sure you want to add this item to your basket? Your computer needs to be aware of this.”? Whenever someone logs in does a message asking “Are you sure you want to log in?” have to appear? These kind of patronising dialogue boxes are bad enough on Microsoft products. I personally don’t want them appearing on all websites.
And what about web stats? Objects like Google Analytics effectively track a visitor’s activity on a website. Is this spying? Not really. It’s called gathering useful information so the owner of the website can use the data to improve the user experience in the future. Or put simply, good business.
What these idiotic and uneducated EU morons need to realise is not all cookies are invading privacy. They can be used for granting authentication, storing useful data, storing site preferences to make the user’s experience on the site better and gathering useful data about their visiting trends to, again, make their experience better on their next visit.
Sure websites that place invasive or malicious objects on computers should be targeted but then any good anti-virus or anti-spyware program should solve that. Also, anyone viewing websites that install those kinds of Trojans are obviously looking at porn and deserve to be hacked.
So Mr Graham, do you actually know anything about computer programming? Do you even know how to use the Internet? No you don’t do you? You’re just a pointless EU bureaucrat with a very small PECR.
However, when I’ve spent a day struggling over a technical issue that stubbornly refuses to do what I want it to, or I’ve been sat in a meeting, I’m left feeling rather deflated.
This is because I like to feel I’ve been productive. People whose roles are defined by sitting in meetings and talking bollocks should be drowned in their own aftershave. Bureaucrats who sit around making up jobs for themselves by coming up with nonsense regulations in a vague attempt to justify their existence are among the worst kind of prat.
Take Christopher Graham. He is an “Information Commissioner”. What the hell that means I have no idea. He has recently made amendments to the “Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations” or PECR for short. The irony of that acronym sounding like the word “pecker” is not lost on me.
Anyway, he is a guy with a receding hairline, silly spectacles and a face that just screams “punch me”. He has taken it upon himself to force websites to ask for consent when they place things called “cookies” on a user’s browser.
Now I’m not talking about biscuits here. Cookies are temporary text files that get written to a user’s computer when they visit a website. They are written when the website needs to remember user preferences. For example, our Webshop app uses a form of cookie when a customer adds items to their shopping basket. The system needs to remember what that customer has added so it stores it in something called a “session” where it stores all their shopping data until they have either bought the item or left the shop. It is the same when that user logs into their account to purchase the items. The system needs some way of remembering who they are so it stores a temporary record on the user’s computer. These files usually expire after about 20 minutes of inactivity.
So what are all these websites expected to do? Will they now have to ask the user’s permission every time they perform an action? Does this mean that every time someone adds something to their basket a message has to pop up saying “Are you sure you want to add this item to your basket? Your computer needs to be aware of this.”? Whenever someone logs in does a message asking “Are you sure you want to log in?” have to appear? These kind of patronising dialogue boxes are bad enough on Microsoft products. I personally don’t want them appearing on all websites.
And what about web stats? Objects like Google Analytics effectively track a visitor’s activity on a website. Is this spying? Not really. It’s called gathering useful information so the owner of the website can use the data to improve the user experience in the future. Or put simply, good business.
What these idiotic and uneducated EU morons need to realise is not all cookies are invading privacy. They can be used for granting authentication, storing useful data, storing site preferences to make the user’s experience on the site better and gathering useful data about their visiting trends to, again, make their experience better on their next visit.
Sure websites that place invasive or malicious objects on computers should be targeted but then any good anti-virus or anti-spyware program should solve that. Also, anyone viewing websites that install those kinds of Trojans are obviously looking at porn and deserve to be hacked.
So Mr Graham, do you actually know anything about computer programming? Do you even know how to use the Internet? No you don’t do you? You’re just a pointless EU bureaucrat with a very small PECR.
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
As easy as 123
Last year when a bunch of new faces took over running our server farm, they helpfully forgot to renew our SSL and then informed us that we would have to sort it out ourselves in future. So I did a bit of searching and found that one of the companies we have registered domain names with in the past offer secure certificates at a reasonable cost.
Despite my misgivings about using them because I think their website is rubbish and their control panel is badly designed and unintuitive, I nevertheless ordered one from them.
That in itself was easy. The only problem was it didn’t work. I emailed their technical support and they informed me that I had purchased an Auto CSR and should have used manual CSR. They refunded the money and I purchased what I was told was the correct one. This was fine apart from the fact that the manual CSR didn’t work either.
To cut a long story short, a number of emails between me and their “support” team yielded no results so I requested a refund and went and bought one elsewhere. Having heard nothing but silence for over 2 weeks, I eventually got an email back stating that they couldn’t refund our money because the money back guarantee expires after 7 days. They then marked the job as “complete” on the support page.
I could have kicked up a fuss but I have more important things to do than deal with petty thieves so I left it alone. But today I received an email stating that the certificate expires in 14 days. It says we will not need to do anything because it will automatically be renewed 14 days prior to the renewal date.
The funny thing was that the email was sent to us less than 16 days prior. Well, when I say 16 days, it was actually sent on Saturday at nearly midnight so I couldn’t actually read it until the day they threatened to take the money out of our account. Money for something we never had in the first place because they couldn’t be bothered to do their job.
Now, I’m not going to be petty and name and shame this company because that would be unprofessional and might get me into trouble. So I will just advise anyone who is thinking of buying anything from a company with such a hideously grotesque website should think twice before doing so.
Despite my misgivings about using them because I think their website is rubbish and their control panel is badly designed and unintuitive, I nevertheless ordered one from them.
That in itself was easy. The only problem was it didn’t work. I emailed their technical support and they informed me that I had purchased an Auto CSR and should have used manual CSR. They refunded the money and I purchased what I was told was the correct one. This was fine apart from the fact that the manual CSR didn’t work either.
To cut a long story short, a number of emails between me and their “support” team yielded no results so I requested a refund and went and bought one elsewhere. Having heard nothing but silence for over 2 weeks, I eventually got an email back stating that they couldn’t refund our money because the money back guarantee expires after 7 days. They then marked the job as “complete” on the support page.
I could have kicked up a fuss but I have more important things to do than deal with petty thieves so I left it alone. But today I received an email stating that the certificate expires in 14 days. It says we will not need to do anything because it will automatically be renewed 14 days prior to the renewal date.
The funny thing was that the email was sent to us less than 16 days prior. Well, when I say 16 days, it was actually sent on Saturday at nearly midnight so I couldn’t actually read it until the day they threatened to take the money out of our account. Money for something we never had in the first place because they couldn’t be bothered to do their job.
Now, I’m not going to be petty and name and shame this company because that would be unprofessional and might get me into trouble. So I will just advise anyone who is thinking of buying anything from a company with such a hideously grotesque website should think twice before doing so.
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