Technorama

Someone on the Mark Thomas mailing list highlighted this to me a while ago.

The media often indicate average salaries are 24k gross. BBC has an article Just what is average? -- the real Median Average is only 19.6k! 19% less, a big difference.

Labels: UK

Microsoft say Firefox, Chrome have bugs for years longer than IE. They're right!

This is the big problem with these free software projects, as I've highlighted before.

Labels: FreeSoftware

Heard back from Ofcom recently about my request for them to investigate a UK company making junk calls to my land line number (which is TPS registered) from withheld numbers.

The calls get through Ofcom loop-hole by pretending to be market research, which then leads on to the real hard-sell for debt finance etc. Even the Withheld number is not an issue they are able to investigate.

Ofcom replied indicating that it is legal for companies to extrapolate my ex-directory TPS registered land line number by simply counting the numbers between the number range that they have.

Ofcom indicated they don't have any resource to investigate any of these cases, so they simply record statistics for the complaints they are not investigating. Nice! I wonder what this uninvestigated count is running at? Probably 1000s per month. Although many more probably go un-reported because they get fobbed off with the idea that TPS is the regulator (even that expires after a couple of years, so the big marketers can making junk calls too).

I'll add this to the list of regulators not regulating due to lack of remit, and budget (ICO, FSA, OFT and many others are just as bad). Is it going to get any better with the Con-Dem coalition government cutbacks of ~15% (in real-terms) over the next 5 years?

Labels: DataProtection, UK

Just heard back from the Information Commissioner's office some answers to questions I asked quite some time back. Unfortunately both are not what I was hoping for. Thought I would share the info, party for info, partly to save peoples time if they are thinking to contact ICO office -- it's not worth the effort.

A) M&S can get me to sign purchase form which says "see online for full terms", they are allowed to get people to sign and ICO says that is okay, because they can check the terms after. Only when checking to discover the online terms link says they are opted in to direct marketing at their email address and postal now (unless write in by snail.. and wait 8 weeks I think it was.)

B) Amex (American Express) are allowed in their online sign up to have no way to not be opted in to marketing, and ICO says that is fine, because we can each write in.. and wait the 8 weeks to be removed (or what ever it was)

Bit of a shame. ICO doesn't seem to have much of a remit. Think I'll wait for them to get some new powers before from an updated data protection act before I query specific cases again.

Labels: DataProtection