DAILY MIRROR AMY'S I COLUMN
SAMPLES OF AMY'S I, TECH COLUMN, THE DAILY MIRROR, 2001-2003
THE MIRROR - 22/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS
Amy's i: NET BILLS COULD DROP AT ANYTIME
FOUR million households could be in for an internet windfall after telecoms watchdog Oftel ordered BT to slash its prices.
BT was told to cut an astonishing 17 per cent off the unmetered prices it charges telecoms operators such as Thus and Energis.
They provide the backbone services that internet service providers including Freeserve and Demon use when you connect to them.
So if the operators are paying BT less, they can charge the ISPs less and they, in their turn, can charge you less, right?
Well, up to a point.
Energis, whose network is used by the UK's biggest ISP, Freeserve, refused to say yesterday whether consumers would see any immediate savings.
"We will be reviewing cost-saving implications with our customers on an individual basis," says a spokeswoman.
And Freeserve says: "It's difficult to say at the moment if we'll be reflecting these cuts as the immediate beneficiary will be Energis and we are waiting for a response from them."
Did the price cut really come as that much of a surprise? Not according to BT.
"This wasn't unexpected - it's been in the pipeline for at least a year and a half," says a spokesman. "Of course we're complying. It's going to cost us a lot but we're even backdating the payments to June 2002."
If only ISPs could come out and say the same thing.
That way, Anytime subscribers could be in line for back-dated windfalls of pounds 30.
More likely, the companies will deliberate for ages, slash a few pounds off the monthly subscription and have another go at BT for charging so much in the first place.
The current monthly cost of an Anytime connection ranges from pounds 13.49 for Virgin Net to pounds 15.99 for BT Openworld and AOL.
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THE MIRROR - 21/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: TIME TO SURF (EVEN) FASTER STILL think that getting Broadband means you've got a "fast" internet connection? That's so last year.
Cable firm Telewest is now touting a two megabit-per-second service, four times the speed of the 0.5Mbps connections offered by BT and others.
And it says the popularity of the service, the first in the UK, has surpassed all expectations.
In two months it has pulled in 5,000 subscribers.
And its little sister 1Mbps service, launched last summer, has now more than 30,000 customers.
"Not everybody wants a two meg connection," says Chad Raube, internet director at Telewest, "But clearly some people use the internet in different ways and want higher speeds.
"It's not 'Get what you're given' anymore, it's 'Get what you want.'"
Chad is pictured here with a saucy wetsuit and motorised surfboard, partly to help anyone who can't imagine what "faster surfing" might look like but mainly to prove that those Telewest kids are the wackiest funsters around.
Less wacky is rival cable company NTL which runs a 1Mbps service, while BT plans to launch something similar later this year.
These faster services cost upwards of pounds 35 a month, with Telewest's 2Mbps service setting you back pounds 50 a month.
But they do mean that small offices and homes can share a single broadband connection without noticing much slowdown.
And that may become more important as we all go out and buy internet-connected fridges and toilets for our homes of the future.
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THE MIRROR - 19/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: SPINGENIUS HERE'S a perfect question for Family Fortunes: If you had a robot around the house, what would you have it do?
Cooking and cleaning, right? Our survey said: Urgh urgh.
Now if you'd said dancing, or more specifically, waltzing, then you'd be walking away with the top prize of pounds 5, a trailer tent and a powerboat.
But why would you say that? Unless you were a hare-brained Japanese inventor wanting to revolutionise tea dances. This Waltzing Matilda can follow a human lead and even predict the dancer's next move through hand pressure applied to arms and back.
It has four wheels so it can move around in any direction but only has memory for five waltz steps. Salsa just ain't an option.
But why bother creating a robot just to dance? Unless it's part of a great masterplan towards cybersex. Come to mention it, the scientists at University of Tohoku, which developed it, did say they were also looking at robots that can move in synch with humans.
So much for adding a bit of culture to our lives!
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THE MIRROR - 18/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: TIME TO CALL EBAYWATCH RIPPED-off eBay users have started a campaign against fraudsters operating on the auction website.
Conmen have been lurking on eBay for years, and it seems that, despite tightened security by the auction giant and numerous new anti-fraud measures, many people are still being ripped off.
Lee Chivers, from the West Midlands, is a typical victim. "I've been conned out of pounds 1,400 after getting involved with a sale of a Sony plasma TV," he says.
Gary McLaughlin from Ealing, West London, is another. "I found a seller offering a Sony plasma screen but only for approved bidders," he says. "So I contacted him asking to be approved, and two days later my bid of pounds 600 was accepted. I wired money through Western Union and that was the last I saw of it - no plasma, no money, no compensation.
"What really annoys me is eBay's reporting procedures - you've got more chance of Spurs winning the league this season than getting through to them!"
Anna Cirillo from Rickmansworth, Herts, had similar problems.
"Once we realised we'd been had, we tried to contact eBay," she says. "To say that their customer support is fussy and non-user friendly is putting it mildly. They need a central phone line where you can report suspicious activity immediately."
eBay says it has beefed up security measures in the past year, hiring former White House cybersecurity adviser Howard Schmidt and installing better anti-fraud software.
A spokeswoman says: "Only 0.01 percent of listed items result in a confirmed case of fraud and reports of account takeovers are taken very seriously by eBay."
But Craig Muncaster from Redruth, Cornwall, thinks they're not doing enough.
He's started a campaign to raise awareness of the scams, telling people to beware of Italian shipping addresses, pre-approved bidders and wiring money through Western Union.
"The scam artists are making eBay a nightmare to use," he says, "and eBay can't do a thing about it."
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THE MIRROR - 17/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: LONG-DISTANCE MOBILE THROWN A NEW world record (unofficial) has been set for throwing a mobile phone.
Ukrainian Oleg Shvets threw his Motorola StarTAC an astonishing 93 metres (that's 305 feet to most of us...)
And, in a true test of the durability of mobile phones, the handset - miraculously - survived the huge hurl.
"Ninety three metres and it is alive!" said Oleg, which is presumably the Ukrainian way of saying it still worked.
For his feat he received a brand new Samsung V-200 and the chance of becoming an Official World Record holder. "Next time I throw 120 metres," he added.
Previously the record was held by Finnish phone-putter Petri Valta, who chucked a Nokia 5110 a mere 66.72 metres last September.
(The world record for throwing a cricket ball, by the way, is 128.6 metres, set in 1882.)
Whether Oleg's record will make it into this year's Guinness Book of World Record is still unclear.
A spokeswoman said: "There's lots of mobile records but not for this category yet.
"All he has to do is apply for the record and we'll check whether it's been done before and whether the competition was measurable and quantifiable."
The sport of mobile-chucking is slowly gathering momentum. Next month, on August 23, the fourth annual Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships will take place in Finland.
For more information or an application form visit www.fennolingua.fi/mobile.
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THE MIRROR - 15/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: GRAB FAIR SHARE OF THE INTERNET IT'S either the best way of making friends or the fastest way to lose them - sharing your broadband connection with your neighbours.
Thanks to new European legislation, wireless technology and a firm called MyZones, several households within 300 metres of each other can now share the cost of fast internet access.
Two homes sharing a 512 kbs connection, for example, will pay around pounds 17.62 a month each; three pay pounds 11.74 a month and four pounds 8.81 and so on.
But the more people using your network, the slower it gets. If four people are using it at once, the surfing speed is 128k.
Clive Mayhew-Begg, chief exec of MyZones, says: "Sharing broadband is just the start of a new generation of consumer-based internet services."
It starts on July 25 when MyZones will start selling pounds 150 starter kits.
These include a wi-fi wireless technology point and ADSL modem but not the wi-fi adapters you and your neighbours will need. These will cost an extra pounds 60 or so for each computer logged on to the wireless network.
We've not had a chance to test MyZones yet but the theory looks great and the company insists it's a doddle to set up.
Before you take our word for it, trawl through the small print on MyZones consumer unfriendly website (too much jargon), www.myzones.com and if any of it makes sense to you, why not give it a go?
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THE MIRROR - 16/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: 20 YEARS ON, PC IS OUR PAL IT'S been with us for more than 20 years and has finally wormed its way into our affections.
The home computer is now such an integral part of everyday life that most people say they can't live without one.
A study by Packard Bell and Mori found that more than half of UK computer users regard their machines as a "tried-and-trusted friend".
So it's no wonder we stress out so much when it breaks down or catches a virus.
Three out of four (77 per cent) use their PC to organise their homes and lives, while seven out of 10 (69 per cent) use it for home entertainment.
A driving factor in home PC use nowadays is photography, with three in 10 (31 per cent) of users storing digital pics on their computers.
Eighty-seven per cent agreed the PC was becoming increasingly important in our lives and would eventually organise everything.
"People see their PC as becoming the centre of their digital lifestyles, from monitoring the contents of their fridge to banking and shopping," says Graham Hopper, UK boss of Packard Bell.
So far so good, but the second part of the research - about laptops - is a little more worrying. It found that the laptop is a surrogate partner for single people, with one in four owners admitting to using them in bed.
We've got three words for them - get out more!
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THE MIRROR - 14/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: PLAYSTATION'S NEW DOTCOM DOT Evetts may not be Lara Croft but she's about to knock Tomb Raider off the top of the games charts.
Dot, 71, is the face of EyeToy, Sony PlayStation 2's new gaming sensation.
EyeToy is a nifty little webcam that puts you in the picture, allowing your own image to interact with lots of different games.
And, since its UK launch last weekend, EyeToy has already sold more than 200,000 copies.
Sony can't get enough of Dot, from Bracknell, Berks, who plays the dancing bag-swinging Granny in EyeToy's summer advertising campaign.
Dot (pictured right) is the first thing people will see when they buy an EyeToy - as she hosts the tutorial. She's also appearing in 7,000 lifesize cut-outs in shop windows and is touring Europe with Sony to demonstrate how easy it is to play EyeToy. We caught up with Dot in London at the launch of this brilliant new gizmo.
"It's been such fun," said Dot. "But the funniest thing is I'm the most untechnical person in the world.
"Sony gave me a PlayStation but I'm going to have to get my neighbours to set it up for me.
"I think that's why they picked me - because if I can play the game, then anyone can."
"I think it's fabulous and all that dancing is a great way to lose weight."
Dot, a Daily Mirror reader, normally struts her stuff at the more sedate tea dances held in Bradwell, Berks, and has only been acting for nine years.
Her biggest role until now has been playing a game of wheelchair-bound chicken with another granny on TV's Banzai.
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THE MIRROR - 12/07/2003,
WITH AMY VICKERS Amy's i: DIG IT! A NYONE can turn out a decent photograph with a digital camera.
Easier to use than a toaster, they almost all guarantee great snaps - but if you don't like the look of your first efforts, just take another one or touch it up on your computer in seconds.
Digital cameras are now on track to surpass sales of their film-based counterparts later this year.
Not only do they offer all the benefits of instant photography without the waste of film, but these days they're so cheap that everyone can afford one.
We've found two new entry-level pocket-sized digital cameras that do the business.
Oregon Scientific's Eyecam, a two megapix digital camera shaped like a credit card, and Aiptek's two megapixel PocketCam are both good enough for taking photo album quality snaps.
The Eyecam costs just pounds 99.99 and comes with a built-in flash, a preview LCD screen and a short movie function.
The only drawback is there's no slot for a memory card, so you'll only be able to scrunch 20 hi-quality pics on to the camera's 8-meg memory.
Aiptek's PocketCam on the other hand squeezes in a Compact Flash card slot, which vastly increases the number of shots you can take. It also does video and has an LCD display
The cheapest model, costing pounds 129.95, comes with a 16 meg CompactFlash card or you can splash out on a 64 meg card and camera for pounds 149.95 on Firebox.com
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THE MIRROR - 11/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: MP TOM BLINGS IT TO THE YOOF GIVE a politician a website and nine times out of 10 he'll embarrass himself.
But allow a politician to start writing a web log - an online diary - and he'll make an idiot of himself by becoming a cult Ali G-esque comedy figure.
Step forward Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East and blogger extraordinaire.
His bizarre scribblings on his website, www.tom-watson.co.uk, have earned him an unexpected amount of kudos among young voters.
"He's making fun of himself and fuddy-duddy old MPs," says Amy'si reader Jon Stoker, 20, from Nottingham. "But by turning the joke around, he kinda makes himself look cool. Well, cool-ish - even if we think he's a total prat now!"
Watson's infamous attempts at yoof-speak include: "Politics is cool, m'kay? Cut it with the bling bling and do something for the community, man."
And the classic: "Tom's well up on the Interwebnet, and he won't harsh your buzz or dis you down the line."
Now Watson has started a craze among MPs - Lib Dem Richard Allan also writes a daily weblog and next Monday there's a meeting at Westminster, chaired by VoxPolitics.com and Watson, to discuss how Weblogs can change politics.
Groovy.
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THE MIRROR - 10/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: HITTING BUYERS WHERE IT HERTZ POTENTIAL buyers of new technology are turned off by confusing terminology they don't understand, new research says.
It's something we've been trying to tell manufacturers for years - to no avail. Complex terms and baffling techno-babble abound in the world of gadgets and internet.
Nearly 50 per cent of respondents said they were holding off buying a digital camera because they saw them as too complicated.
The same goes for personal digital assistants (otherwise known as PDAs) and home computers, while 62 per cent said they're put off buying something if it looks impossible to set up.
Only three per cent of people correctly recognised all 11 questions in a test which asked people from all over the world to choose from multiple-choice definitions of terms such as MP3, Bluetooth MHz (megahertz), DVR (Digital Video Recorder) and web browser.
The average score was seven questions correct. The least understood technology terms were dpi, megahertz, MP3 and DVR - even among regular or long-time PC users.
"The technology industry must simplify its vocab so that consumers can better understand the benefits technology can bring to their lives," said Patrick Moorhead of AMD's Global Consumer Advisory Board which carried out the survey.
Can you tell your megahertz from your MP3? Take the test and see at www.amdgcab.org. Yours truly only managed 10 out of 11, screwing up on megahertz. Damn!
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THE MIRROR - 09/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NINTENDO HINT AT GAMECUBE 2 THE three big games firms began muttering about launch dates for their next-generation consoles a while ago.
And now Nintendo has upped the pace, rounding up senior execs and sending them out on a mission: hype up GameCube 2 - but don't give too much away.
Insiders are now hinting that GameCube 2, also known as N5, will beat rivals from Microsoft and Sony to market and come out in 2005.
But that won't guarantee victory if gamers can be persuaded to hang on for the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 2.
Older gamers will remember a similar thing situation with Sega's Dreamcast, crippled when Sony convinced consumers to wait for a killer console rather than buy the first on the market.
Sony is also playing the hype game, with its Computer Entertainment division boss Chris Deering ruling out any chance of the PlayStation 3 launching in the next 18 months: "All I can really say about the PlayStation 3 is that it definitely won't launch in 2004." Bah!
But he had good news for handheld fans.
"Aside from games," he said, "our portable console PSP will play music and movies and carry a price more comparable to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance [around pounds 90]."
And what about the Xbox 2? Its launch date has recently been the subject of much debate after a well-respected Japanese newspaper insisted they had Microsoft chief exec, Steve Ballmer, on the record stating a 2006 release.
They then said it was a typo and should have read 2005.
The upshot is that the next-gen race is still nowhere near being decided; get the timing wrong and the loser might go the same way as Sega.
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THE MIRROR - 08/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: HACKERS GET A SLAP IN DEFACE PARTICIPANTS in Sunday's controversial hacking contest succeeded in defacing a few hundred sites but failed to do any lasting damage to the web.
Worst affected by the flurry of hacking activity was a third-party website that would normally report on website defacements.
The Estonia-based Zone-H.org suffered a denial of service attack, a common way of knocking a website offline by flooding it with traffic, which made it inaccessible until late Sunday.
The widely-publicised Defacer's Challenge failed to vandalise any major websites, instead it was the internet's backwater of small, unsecured sites that took the brunt of the graffiti.
Several of these sites, such as www.hungry-man.ca, still carried their "You've been hacked" messages yesterday.
But most of the web had resumed normal service while security experts and the FBI were being laughed at by the web community for over-reacting.
Six fake defacements websites carried the message: "I panicked over the Defacement Challenge scare and all I got was this lousy defacement."
Was it a total wind-up? Who knows. No one has yet owned up to it and judging by the fact that groups of defacers publicly boycotted the bizarre contest, it certainly looks suspiciously mischievous. But does it really matter? Nothing bad happened, it provided great PR for net security firms and it gave the media a story (guilty as charged).
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THE MIRROR - 07/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: AVRIL WORMS WAY TO FAME GRUNGE pop singer Avril Lavigne has become an unlikely internet star.
The Ontario teenager has been crowned virus celebrity of the year after two email viruses bearing her name made the Top 10 Sophos virus chart (places six and eight).
Avril also topped a music download chart compiled by mobile company O2 following video over mobile customer trials. More than 4,200 tracks were downloaded, of which Avril's Complicated made up the majority.
Naming a virus after a celebrity carries a certain kind of kudos - ever since the Anna Kournikova virus brought servers to a standstill.
The two Avril Lavigne worms account for 5.5 per cent of viruses this year.
Other celebrities used and abused by virus makers include Catherine Zeta-Jones, Shakira, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Sandra Bullock. But Avril, a virtual unknown until a shrewd online campaign in 2002, seems to have caught the imagination of net users/virus writers.
It remains to be seen whether this is a good or a bad thing.
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THE MIRROR - 04/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: WEB AWAITS A HACK ATTACK PANIC set in among the internet community yesterday as government officials warned of an impending hack attack.
The so-called hack-a-thon is scheduled for this Sunday as part of the world's first global Defacers Challenge.
Lock down your servers because if the defacers succeed then the web's going to be in utter chaos this Sunday.
The rules are simple: the first to vandalise 6,000 websites (preferably big corporate sites) in a six-hour period wins.
If no contestant reaches that number, the closest will win. The prize is 500 megs of online storage space and a domain name, apparently.
Given that the element of surprise has gone, what with websites upping their security after government warnings, it might turn out to be tougher than expected.
"My hope is this will be the first of many challenges," says a message on www.Defacers-Challenge.com, before the site suspiciously disappeared.
Home net users who don't run their own websites shouldn't be affected, although they may notice a marked slowdown in website loading times.
That is, if they are allowed to get away with it. The FBI is hunting the organisers. "Hacking is a crime and those who participate in this activity will be brought to justice," said a FBI spokesman.
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THE MIRROR - 03/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: RUDENESS HAS RING OF TRUTH IT seems the mobile phone revolution has turned us into a bunch of lazy, rude and needy liars.
Research by Nokia has found 71 per cent of users are now consistently late for social events because of the option to rearrange via mobile.
Nearly 70 per cent said they often cancel at the last minute using a text message and 78 per cent admitted to copping out in awkward situations by texting rather than calling.
And that's not all. Seventy-four per cent of women said they would lie to their partners if they were in the pub when they should be home. Three in four of us now owns a mobile and Nokia believes they have become an emotional crutch for many.
Twenty-four per cent of users confessed to feeling left out if they didn't get two phone calls a day. For single people this shot up to 46 per cent, while women averaged 30 per cent and men 18 per cent.
A whopping 89 per cent of the survey said people need to adopt better mobile etiquette, such as sorting out ring and message tones so they don't disturb others and refraining from shouting and pacing up and down while on the phone.
Well, perhaps if we all tried to turn up on time there wouldn't be any need for pacing and shouting, eh?
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THE MIRROR - 02/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: MARCH OF THE SPAMBUSTERS POLITICIANS met the technology industry yesterday to declare war on the plague of unsolicited email.
Ecommerce minister Stephen Timms called for a new global body to fight spam and said governments in Europe, America and Australia were drafting laws to turn spammers into criminals.
"Spam is not just a UK or European problem," said Timms. "Most spam comes from outside. A lot of it comes from the US. Hopefully, it's possible for us to come up with an EU-US solution from our discussions today."
This was the first of many discussions planned to demonstrate to net users that the government is not going to let spam take over email.
Enrique Salem, chief exec of anti-spam software firm Brightmail, said: "It is a good step in the right direction. It's important to raise awareness of the problem and show that the government is working with the industry to solve the problem."
Spam now accounts for nearly half of all global email sent across the internet.
But there are problems over who pays for anti-spam technology and the different approaches in America and Europe.
Meanwhile, the direct marketing industry is keen to make sure that unsolicited email messages are not outlawed altogether.
Our solution: ban them all. It's far too much of a grey area to call some messages spam and others marketing when they all look the same to consumers nowadays.
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THE MIRROR - 01/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: HONEY'S THE PHONE BOXER FORMER world welterweight boxing champ Lloyd Honeyghan is going back into the ring... ring-tones that is.
The two-time undisputed champion has set up a business selling mobile phone ring-tones on the internet.
Honeyghan says he wants a piece of the multi-billion pound industry. "I didn't want to do just boxing on my website, TheEyeOf TheTiger.com.
"And mobile ring-tones is a pounds 3billion industry.
"I wouldn't mind a slice of that - hopefully it will set me up to buy my football team, Arsenal, one day."
Honeyghan boasts 1,400 ringtones on his site, including hits like Eye of the Tiger - the boxer's unofficial theme tune.
For fans of that particular Survivor track, the website also includes a complete breakdown of all the lyrics - should you want to sing along.
Altogether now... "Risin' up - back on the street..." Enough! The rest of Honeyghan's rather entertaining site is made up of photos of the champ, boxing news, pay-per-view small-hall professional boxing - and a rather odd message from John Leslie saying welcome to TheEyeOfTheTiger.com.
Honeyghan met Leslie at a dinner before Leslie story broke and says he put it up to drive more visitors to the site. It will certainly do that, Lloyd!
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THE MIRROR - 25/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: PCs PIPPED TO POST BY APPLE APPLE doesn't do things by halves. Yesterday the computing giant revealed no fewer than seven new products.
They included the fastest computer in the world, the best browser on any platform, a video-conferencing service and a brand new operating system called Panther.
Chief executive Steve Jobs said his latest Power Mac computers could outperform any PC in the marketplace. Even the 2GHz Power Mac can demolish a dual 3GHz PC, bragged Jobs.
The new Macs will use G5 chips, the successor to the ever-popular G4 chip currently used across Apple's entire range, and they'll cost between pounds 1,550 and pounds 2,300 when they're launched in August.
But while Jobs revealed a string of new software - such as the video-conferencing iChat and version 1.0 of the Safari internet browser - he also succeeded in widening the gap between Apple Mac buyers from a few years ago and those who've bought the recent souped-up machines.
This is because these new programs require users to upgrade their computers to at least Mac OS X and 128 megs of memory.
And keeping up with all the latest OS upgrades isn't for the faint-hearted - especially as the old software functioned fine and had drivers that worked with everything.
Even so, Jobs left his press conference on a high note by boasting that the Mac OS X platform and the iTunes online music service have been hugely successful.
He said that OS X now has seven million users and iTunes has hit five million downloads in just eight weeks.
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THE MIRROR - 24/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: IT'S STILL NOT SWELL AT NTL HELL hath no fury like an NTL customer scorned.
The cable company learned that the hard way when it stumbled across NTHellworld.com, a site set up to share NTL nightmares.
The firm was so troubled by the strength of anti-NTL vitriol that it bought the site last year and gave founder Frank Whitestone a job in customer service.
Fourteen months on and, as some predicted, it's all change. NTL has effectively pulled the plug on NTHellworld.com by setting up its NTL Community site, which, it says, will do "nearly the same thing".
"The goal is to create one of the UK's finest interactive customer service environments," reads the blurb.
Turning a blind eye to an NTL-run site with "hell" in the title clearly got too much for NTL's top execs, as, perhaps, did the criticism it was receiving.
Although NTL insists NTHellworld.com will "continue as an open discussion forum", the writing is most definitely on the wall.
Contributors to the forum were typically outspoken.
One said it "sounds like NTL is trying to shut this site by the back door" while another said the "vague" announcement was "a rather long suicide note".
But for those who wish to rail against the firm, hope is at hand... in the form of NTHellworld.co.uk, a virtually identical site, set up by former moderators of NTHell world.com
"It's completely independent," said a spokesman for the new site. "We're never going to sell out to NTL."
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THE MIRROR - 21/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: EBOOK EARLY JUST like Jeffrey Archer, ebooks have a love-hate relationship with the book industry.
Until now. An industry luminary is pushing for a universal standard that would pave the way to us all reading literary tomes on mini gizmos. If it looked like this little beauty from Matsushita we might just consider it.
The Sigma e-book is just out in China and can last up to six months on two AA-size batteries. The fact that it actually looks like a book and has a decent screen that doesn't flicker all the time might stand in its favour.
The price - pounds 200 - won't, however.
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THE MIRROR - 19/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Today's column edited by BEN RANKIN and KEVIN LYNCH Amy's i: GATES CLOSES ON SPAMMERS THE industry is finally waking up to the fact that the number one net turn-off is spam.
Microsoft is the latest to act, launching legal action against alleged email spammers in Britain and America.
The software giant, owned by billionaire Bill Gates, has accused 15 people and firms of sending unsolicited messages.
It's filed two lawsuits in the UK under the Misuse of Computers Act and 13 in the US under anti-spam laws.
The spam issue is such a big problem, some believe it threatens the viability of email in the future.
We wouldn't go that far, but anything that makes our inbox a bit clearer in the mornings is cool with us.
An estimated 40 per cent of all email is spam, and that number is expected to reach 50 per cent by the end of the year.
Microsoft has joined forces with Yahoo, Earthlink and AOL to come up with ways of defeating the spammers.
Several US states have passed, or are in the process of drawing up, tough legislation to crack down on spammers.
And new EU rules making spamming illegal are due to come into force in October.
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THE MIRROR - 18/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: COURT SETTLES SEX GIVEAWAY A SIX-YEAR dispute over ownership of one of the most lucrative web addresses on the internet has finally come to an end.
The US Supreme Court has thrown out a claim by cybersquatter Stephen Cohen that sex.com is legally his.
The court heard that Cohen faked the signature of the URL's original owner Gary Kremen on a letter transferring ownership to him.
Domain registrar Network Solutions, now Verisign, handed over the web address to Cohen without checking the letter or contacting Kremen.
Cohen used the web address to build a multi-million pound online porn empire - sex.com was reported to have raked in pounds 300,000 a month in ad revenue.
Now Kremen is free to build his own online porn empire but he won't be letting the lawyers go just yet.
He's chasing Cohen for $65million in costs - we wish him luck because the cybersquatter is holed up in Mexico.
And he's also launched legal action against Verisign for handing over the domain to Cohen in the first place.
Verisign says that domain names are not legal property and so it cannot be accountable for giving sex.com away.
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THE MIRROR - 09/06/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: BT'S BEN HAS A BROAD GRIN BT will be popping the champagne corks this morning to celebrate hitting 1 million broadband connections.
That's the target set by chief exec Ben Verwaayen the day he stepped through the doors at BT's HQ 18 months ago.
And coming so soon after the Dutchman's fat-cat salary package was revealed (pounds 450,000 to move house?), bods at BT reckon he is worth every penny. Mmm...
The seemingly impossible target was set last February when BT had a measly 145,000 broadband connections.
We all thought a million by summer 2003 was impossible - but BT, for once, has proved everybody wrong.
"It was a challenging target," said Verwaayen. "But we've made it - it's a great achievement." Yes, the Dutchman done good, turning around a company that until he joined saw broadband as a dirty word.
Price cutting, obviously, was a major factor, but so was making more of an effort upgrading antiquated exchanges.
Verwaayen has also announced a new target (bringing an old one forward by two years). He says 80 per cent of UK households will be able to get broadband by the end of the year.
Perhaps he should start a sideline as a clairvoyant? Not that he needs the extra money.
Verwaayen also - rather graciously - thanked the hoards of local campaign groups who fought to get their exchanges upgraded.
"I hope this news will be welcomed by the hundreds if local campaign groups who have paid a vital role in driving demand," he said.
So big fat smiles all round then.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63731997
THE MIRROR - 07/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: MUSIC BYTHE BEETLES IS it a car... is it an ash-tray... is it the most expensive keyring ever at pounds 100?
In fact it is none of these. The Music Choro-Q (pronounced Cherrokey) a digital music player, cunningly disguised as a miniature Beetle.
Obviously it's from Japan. Where else? And obviously Japanese youngsters are going barmy for them. What we can't tell you is when the Beetles be in shops over here.
Made by toy manufacturer Takara, the Music Choro-Q works when you slot in a Sony memory stick, which presumably you've first loaded with songs from a Sony music product.
As well as cars, Takara is also looking at making music players disguised as mini puppies, cuddly toys and dustbins. Worryingly, this carries all the hallmarks of cult collectomania.
The controls are on the base of mini Herbie while the memory stick slot is the front bumper.
While it errs a bit on the bulky side, you'll be pleased to know he weighs just 50g.
Not sure what happens when the wee fella gets a flat tyre though. Bless!
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63727139
THE MIRROR - 03/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: NET CHOKES ON A DIET OF SPAM IT was bound to happen: more spam is now being sent than legitimate email.
According to net filtering firm MessageLabs, 55per cent of email sent in May was junk mail, up from just under 40per cent in April.
As well as annoying the hell out of everyone who doesn't want to buy a Viagra substitute or make $$$$ from home, bulk emails are costing companies millions as they upgrade servers to cope with the increase in traffic and invest in anti-spam software.
And it calls into question the future of the communications medium, which is fast becoming unusable.
If growth continues at 40per cent each months, experts warn of an anti-email backlash.
"It will get much worse," says David Schofield, anti-spam technician at MessageLabs. "We're already at the point where users are killing off their main email addresses because they're only receiving spam."
In October the UK will implement a new European Union directive that bans sending unsolicited email.
But most spam comes from the US and the Far East, so this won't help much.
-TOMORROW: the Amy's i guide to limiting spam
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63711759
THE MIRROR - 02/06/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: TISCALI LEAVES YOU BILL IOUS OUTRAGED Tiscali customers have been getting in touch over the Italian ISP's latest billing fiasco.
They are, quite understandably, furious to have received threatening letters from a debt collection agency that is handling Tiscali's "debtors".
The ISP has apologised, blaming a cock-up at the agency. A spokeswoman says: "Some customers, who should have received a first-stage payment reminder letter, in fact received a debt collection letter."
But it turns out Tiscali is keeping its cock-ups in-house.
The reason it hasn't received any money from these customers is that, er, it forgot to set up their direct debits.
"As a new Tiscali customer," says George Manghan from Cornwall, "imagine my surprise when I received a letter from a debt collector, demanding pounds 59.92.
"After checking with my bank, it turns out Tiscali had somehow forgotten to set up my direct debit plan.
"It's incredible that one of Europe's largest ISPs has got one of the most inept bill collection departments."
Robert Parkin says: "I am worried that because of the incompetence of Tiscali I may end up on a credit black list."
Tiscali refuses to say how many recipients of debt collector letters had not paid because of their own cock-up.
The spokeswoman says: "We apologise to these customers for any concern caused and would encourage them to email us on billing.letters@uk. tiscali.com.
"We promise to call them back within 48 hours."
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63708307
THE MIRROR - 28/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: ERROR OF FAT CONTROLLER MICROSOFT has owned up to making mistakes when it launched its first gaming console, the Xbox.
In an interview with the Daily Mirror, Xbox vice president, J Allard, admitted: "We screwed up on pricing in Europe and we made the box too big and ugly - especially for the Japanese market."
"We can't change the box but we have adapted very quickly by phasing out the fat controller and making Controller X [the smaller one] standard."
"We've basically learnt how to listen."
Never thought we'd see the day when a top Microsoft exec ate humble pie.
But Allard, the father of the Xbox, is not your average Microsoft exec. He was writing his own games at 11 years old and was instrumental in getting Microsoft involved in the internet. His big thing now is the evolution of Xbox.
"At its heart it's a gaming machine but the challenge is to make gaming relevant to more people - that's where its digital entertainment capabilities come in."
So what next?
"We'll start thinking of games differently, more like TV programmes, when instead of taking 18 months to make a game we'll put out a pilot on Xbox Live (the online platform) and see what reaction we get."
"If people like it, we'll start broadcasting new episodes each month for people to download over the network rather than buying on disc."
Sounds like interesting times ahead.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63690247
THE MIRROR - 23/05/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: BROADBAND'S GOING FASTER THE magic two million figure has been reached for broadband internet connections in the UK.
It's a figure that looked impossible 18 months ago.
Attracted by price-cutting and more flexible packages, punters are now taking to fast internet in droves.
But the battle still rages about the lower-speed NTL 128k (now upped to 150k) service, which many still refuse to classify as broadband - even though regulator Oftel, the publisher of these latest figures, includes it in its two million tally.
Seeing as NTL has about 400,000 subscribers to its 150k service (broadband is generally classed as speeds no lower than 512k), not including those figures would take the shine of yesterday's announcement.
Instead, David Edmonds, director general of Oftel basked in the glory of broadband's success.
He said yesterday: "It took two years to reach one million connections, but only seven months to reach two million."
BT yesterday announced 936,000 subscribers to its broadband lines, many of them coming through rival ISPs such as Freeserve, as well as its own BT Broadband and BT Openworld.
So close to a million...
"There's no point trying to fiddle the figures," says BT spokesman Michael Wadley, "we're going to be there soon enough. Our best estimate is midish-June."
Whether BT will so easily reach its next big target of five million on broadband by 2006 remains to be seen.
Only 171,000 people have signed up to its no-frills, no-email BT Broadband service, as opposed to its more useful - and only slightly more expensive BT Openworld service.
BT is playing down the significance of this, but the smart money is on a price cut for BT Broadband when the big one million is announced in June.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63675599
THE MIRROR - 21/05/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS NTL has been ticked off again by the Advertising Standards Authority over broadband claims. But this time the cable company is fighting back.
The ruling, published today, says consumers could be confused by NTL's claim of being "the UK's number one broadband internet provider".
Especially given that 55 per cent of NTL's broadband subscribers are on the suspect broadband 128k package (recently increased to 150k).
NTL must now amend its advertisements to clear up the confusion but is allowed to carry on calling itself the UK's number one.
The initial complaint about this strapline, in case you're wondering, came from Freeserve, which also has an obsession with being numero uno.
Even so, it's a rebuke NTL is definitely not happy about. "We're appealing against the ruling," says NTL spokesman Malcolm Padley, "and have independent research that shows the decision was superficial and flawed.
"The complaint came from FS of course... none of our customers complained. They felt it was fast enough and were happy it was being described as broadband."
NTL's research does back this up, showing that just four per cent of customers expect broadband to be faster than 500k.
But in our experience, not many internet users actually know (or understand) what speed they access the net at.
A spokeswoman for the ASA said NTL was within its rights to appeal. She said: "We have an independent review panel set up to deal with such cases but it's not always successful."
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63668741
THE MIRROR - 15/05/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: SONY'S PLAYING GAMES WITH US THOUGHT gaming was all about sad anti-social geeks playing with themselves in the dead of night? Not any more.
Social gaming, community, online networks and mobility are the new buzzwords floating around the gaming world.
We trekked all the way to Los Angeles for the planet's biggest video games show - EUR3 - to find out what the biggest names in the business are up to.
Newcomer Microsoft was the most impressive, answering critics with the clearest long-term strategy of all the console makers and showing off a fine collection of games.
Sony surprised the crowd by announcing plans for a handheld games console, called the PSP or "our new baby" (Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment). This won't be out until the end of the next year and only the Sony top brass knows what it looks like.
All we know is the PSP will take mini 2.4in discs, have as fab a collection of games as the PS2 and "be the Walkman of the 21st Century".
Given Sony's background and the fact it will have the same computing power as the PSOne, we're inclined to believe the hype.
Nintendo was distinctly lacking in a coherent future vision, basing all its plans on elementary cross-overs between the GameCube and the GameBoy Advance. It may have some decent games up its sleeve (Mario Kart, Pikmin2, Resident Evil 4 and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes) but it's way behind Xbox and PS2.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63648751
THE MIRROR - 09/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: ANYTIME.. BUT NOT JUST NOW BT Openworld did it. NTL had a go. Freeserve wanted to but was scared of the backlash...
Imposing limits on the amount of time customers spend online is the surest way to upset the very people who pay your bills.
Yet Tiscali has become the latest ISP to cap its Anytime unmetered internet service at a measly 150 hours a month - and let customers find out via the back door.
In an email to "heavy users", Tiscali customer services said: "Your current level of usage is adversely affecting the service we can offer other users.
"Please ensure you significantly reduce your usage (below 150 hours a month) or we will have no choice but to terminate your AnyTime access account at the end of the month (May 2003)."
Jean Taylor from Hartwell, Northants, found out the hard way.
"If you go to their package details on the site there is no mention of a limit of 150 hours a month," she says.
"You have to go right into their terms and conditions, section 4.8, before you get a mention of it. The first I knew about it was from the email kicking me off!"
Clearly Tiscali had its head in the sand when BT Openworld and NTL made similar changes and caused the mother of all backlashes.
Steve Horley, Tiscali's ISP director, explained the move: "AnyTime offers flexible use but we have always been clear that it is not designed to be always on.
"Like other players in the market we have adopted 150 hours as a reasonable level, bearing in mind the average AnyTime customer uses under 50 hours per month."
But at least when BT Openworld changed Anytime to 150 hours (yes, there's so much wrong with that sentence) they fessed up first. They now specify exactly what you get when signing up: "you can surf for 150 hours with no internet call charges".
Tiscali, on the other hand, dispensed with these niceties, sneakily moving the goalposts when no one was looking. Naughty or just plain stupid? You decide...
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63628973
THE MIRROR - 08/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Internet Editor PAPER OF THE FUTURE IS HERE THINK about it. Limitless internet. Download the Daily Mirror or the latest Harry Potter instantly in bed. At the breakfast table. On the train. In the loo...
They way we read our newspapers and books is about to change for ever.
Scientists say they've finally cracked "electronic paper" - an ultra-thin screen that can be bent, twisted and even rolled up - yet still show sharp readable text.
The finished article is a few years off, but yesterday's announcement by American scientists heralds the greatest leap in publishing since Caxton invented the printing press.
It might be awful news for lumberjacks, but the E Ink electronic paper will also mean a reprieve for future generations of forests.
Scientists from the E Ink Corporation in Massachusetts, say that the key to their e-paper is a very thin stainless steel foil.
"We have cleared a big obstacle in electronic paper development," says Yu Chen, a research scientist with E Ink.
"This is the first flexible computer screen of its kind ... it's a major step forward."
Another industry expert put it more vividly.
"This will revolutionise everything we read - from newspapers to magazines to books. This has all the advantages of a computer screen crossed with ordinary paper.
"You can fold it, roll it up, stick it into your pocket. And at the same time it's like a computer. A very cheap computer
"Imagine being able to wake up, plug your e-paper on to the internet and load up your favourite newspaper. Then in the evening wipe it off and load up the latest John Grisham thriller.
"Add the ability to watch pieces of video and interactive graphics and you've got the product that will change publishing forever.
"Some say this is the death of newspapers - it isn't. It's their next evolution."
E-paper contains millions of tiny capsules loaded with black and white particles of ink.
When a negative electrical current is run through the circuits behind the capsules, the positive white particles move to the capsule's top; the opposite happens when a positive current is run through the screen.
That way the display can be precisely controlled, giving ultra sharp and quickly changing text.
"In its present form you can already receive images and read books through these display screens," adds Chen.
"But it is still too slow for video because of the switching speed of the electronic ink.
"What we have done is to use a very thin stainless steel foil, on which we actually embed a layer of electronic circuits."
At the moment the size of the flexi-paper can vary from a business card to a computer screen. It can even be made into a watch-sized mini-TV screen or - another idea for geeks who clearly don't get out much - is LCD wall hangings that are constantly changing, or even built into furniture and clothing.
Despite all this promise, today's E Ink e-paper has several limitations. Even though it's as thin as three human hairs (about 0.3 millimetres) it's still too thick to be folded in half without breaking it. And the colour and resolution is not great - at the moment it can only display in black and white or black text on a whitish-gray background.
But then remember how TV started? Or the early white-on- green computer monitors which have blossomed into 16million colours in less than a decade?
Robert Wisnieff, a senior manager at IBM's display lab, says E Ink's breakthrough flexible screen will make electronic screens part of everyday life. "This is a peek at the future," he says. "Eventually, we'll be using lightweight, thin screens as credit cards that could also display the available balance or recent purchases.
"Another possible use is a jacket with a screen sewn into the sleeve allowing the wearer to read email while on the run, check stock prices or access maps in an unfamiliar city."
One more use could be in public transport. Germany's Vossloh System-Technik, a IT company specialising in trans- port, is about to launch signs on e-paper in airports, railway and bus stations across Europe.
Their big advantage is low power consumption and low weight - and you don't need a light to read it.
And as far as passengers are concerned, e-paper displays should be brighter and easier to read because of the improved contrast.
ARIS Silzars, another expert in information displays, says the technology's first outings will most likely be in the form of a flexible ultra-thin, ultra-light laptop.
E Ink is one of several companies working on electronic paper. Philips has also been a pioneer in this area, as have Lucent, IBM and Xerox.
"The aim is to make electronic paper which is flexible and lightweight and can be rolled up and placed in your briefcase or pocket," says Philips spokesman Koen Joose.
"Ultimately, if the display gives enough light and enough contrast, you could have a roll-up television."
The biggest hurdle - making the paper flexible - was passed two years ago when Philips replaced silicon circuit boards with flexible plastic ones.
Since then, e-paper has come on in leaps and bounds.
It's now flexible enough to be rolled into a cylinder about a half-inch wide without losing its image quality.
The page itself can be updated every quarter of a second via a wireless link or the internet.
But the next step is to boost the speed at which the screen can read a new page so video can be screened through it.
Then the next big milestone ... turning a rather bland black and white sheet into a full range of colours.
Not quite time to stop buying your daily newspaper but the day when we beam your Daily Mirror to your e-paper every morning might not be as far away as you think.
Goodness knows what you're going to wrap your fish and chips in ...
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63626067
THE MIRROR - 06/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: SO SICK OF SPAM AFTER 25 YEARS EMAIL turned 30 last year, the internet was 33 and the humble CD celebrated it's 20th birthday.
Now one other major online anniversary has just passed - the 25th birthday of spam.
No, not the delicious tinned luncheon meat, but that irritating junk email that pops up in your inbox.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it was 25 years ago that some bright spark at a firm called Digital Equipment Corporation decided to send a message on Arpanet, the government-backed precursor to the internet.
The message, which went out in May 1978 caused uproar within the Arpanet community - partly because it broke the firm's "acceptable use" policy, but also because it was so badly written. So not much has changed there then.
However, it wasn't until March 1993 that the term spam was used to describe junk mail.
A Usenet messageboard administrator, Richard Depew, accidentally posted the same message 200 times, and was accused of posting "spam", based - yes, you guessed it - on the Monty Python sketch in which restaurant customers are offered spam with everything. The rest, as they say, is history.
Now spam makes up nearly 40 per cent of all email that is sent, which unfortunately means it looks like it's here to stay.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63619320
THE MIRROR - 01/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: MIDBAND'S TOO LIGHTWEIGHT SIX months ago, BT grabbed the headlines with a new idea for an internet service - a reasonably fast connection that almost all the country could sign up for.
"Midband" was hailed as a "ground-breaking" way to repackage the old BT 128k network, ISDN, and bring a version of "always on" internet to the 32 per cent of country too far from a broadband exchange to enjoy the wonders of high-speed surfing.
BT's Pierre Danon tantalised us by saying it would be "cheaper, but not much cheaper" than BT Broadband, which costs pounds 27 a month.
Fast forward six months and behold, BT Midband is not so much the poor cousin of broadband as the second cousin, twice removed.
Confusingly, it also seems to be a dressed-up version of BT Openworld's pounds 15.99-a-month narrowband product, Anytime.
There's no always-on email service because of "technical challenges", the default connection speed is 64k (and only gears up to 128k when large files need downloading) and - harshest of all - it will cost pounds 35 for just 150 hours a month.
Thank you BT.
However, we did give Angus Porter, managing director of BT's consumer division, the opportunity to explain how an Anytime lookie-likey can cost nearly pounds 20 a month extra.
"We'd love to have made it cheaper," he says, "but it's 10-year-old technology with limitations and shortcomings.
"We're not going to say it's bread sliced in a different way. It's designed to be better than narrowband but not quite as good as broadband.
"The pounds 35 includes two phone lines, BT phone line rental, which normally costs pounds 11.50, and Openworld Anytime, pounds 15.99; it's actually pounds 3.50 cheaper than the comparable price of BT Broadband."
So that's what Danon meant when he said it was "cheaper".
BT Midband launches on June 1.
Will you be signing up? Emails to Amysi@mirror.co.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63604077
THE MIRROR - 30/04/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: MAC TO OFFER ONLINE MUSIC APPLE has come up with one of the best music services on the net but there are two things holding it back - it only works on Macs and it only works in the US.
By the end of the year a European version should be ready, along with a PC version.
"There's no legal alternative that's worth beans," said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs.
"It's not free, but it's 99 cents a song - pretty close."
Apple has signed deals with the major record labels to give customers more than 200,000 tracks to choose from, and Apple's iTunes Music Store has already gained the support of the Recording Industry Association of America, which described it as "the Walkman of our age".
Speaking of which, the new service launches with two gorgeous, new, ultra-thin, extra-capacity iPods, Apple's trend-setting digital music player. But we're not going to show you these just yet - you'll have to wait until Saturday's gadgets page to see them in their full glory.
The only drawback to the service is lack of support for the new(ish) OS X Mac operating system elsewhere.
If you update your system to OS 10.1.5 to work with the Music Store, you may no longer be able to get online as most modem drivers haven't yet caught up with OS X.
Other than that, yesterday's announcement was great news for Mac owners, and gives yet another reason to choose Mac over PC.
And for manufacturers, it gives them a warning that they have to start taking Apple seriously.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63597580
THE MIRROR - 25/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: REVENGE OF THE PORN SPAMMER YOU don't have to spend much time online before you're offered penile enlargement, free credit, big breasted women and randy teens - anyone would think the web was the path to untold riches.
Sadly not.
It's the place where uninvited bogus offers flood through email inboxes, and spam disguises itself to con you into visiting pornographic websites.
Spam-buster Brightmail reports that porn spam now represents 19 per cent of all email, compared to 5 per cent a year and half ago. Spam itself represents about 45 per cent of all email.
ISPs such as AOL and BT Openworld are starting to address the problem, stopping spam, as well as viruses, at their servers rather than letting it get to subscribers.
Microsoft also says it will offer new anti-spam features in its upcoming 2003 versions of Word and Exchange.
Meanwhile, the spammers are fighting back. A group of Florida-based porn peddlers have filed a lawsuit against those seeking to stop them.
EmarketersAmerica.org
(love that patriotic name) are seeking to force anti-spam organisations to stop blocking their spam.
A move that has pointless and stupid (because they're admitting to sending spam and can be counter-sued) written all over it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63581035
THE MIRROR - 24/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: HOW TO GET ZERO FROM 3 MUCH as we'd love to say mobile phone newcomer 3 has got off to a cracking start, we can't.
In fact, judging by one colleague's experience, Britain's first 3G network hasn't even got to 1G.
Duncan Lovett, the Mirror picture desk's gadget freak, was offered what sounded like a perfect deal earlier this year.
Staff at 3 were asked to nominate mates who might like to try the whizzy phone network for a couple of months on a ludicrously cheap tariff. A friend of Duncan's suggested him.
The idea was that he would go and show off his fancy bit of kit in the pub, making us all so jealous that we would go out and buy one of our own - or maybe just nick his. Duncan duly signed up to the so-called "VIP" scheme, sent off his pounds 99 deposit, and waited.
His phone finally arrived, a month and a half late, last week. Are we jealous? No.
"I can make it turn on," says Duncan plaintively, "but I can't make any calls. And the battery keeps dying.
"I've spent the past nine days being fobbed off by customer services.
"They keep telling me to be patient as there are lots of problems but my patience is running thin.
"If I am a VIP customer, I'd love to know how their other customers are being treated."
Duncan's Dud 3G Diary starts tomorrow, and continues for as long as it takes to get his phone working. Anybody else having trouble with 3 should get in touch.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63580137
THE MIRROR - 18/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: CLICKING WITH COMICAL ALI THE web has gone mad for the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf.
The unlikely star of the conflict has become an internet hero with a number of websites and games devoted to him.
The first site - www.WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister. com - crashed within hours of it going up under the sheer weight of visitors.
"Within 12 hours we were getting one thousand visits a second," says Conn Nugent, maker of the site.
Since then, net users have been trading over-dramatic insults like "Wild donkeys", "Louts of colonialism" and "Infidels" via email thanks to www.yourcomicalali.com Making him catch burgers in a game on www.miniworld games .com/monkeymotel/ games/meccadonalds and blurring him into lookalike Bill Gates on http://endzone1.pwp. blueyonder.co.uk/godis great.htm
He may be dead (or maybe that's just another classic Comical Ali spin), but his unique tirades including "God is grilling their stomachs in hell" live on in cyberspace.
Google already has 6,670 listings for Comical Ali and 4,430 under his real name.
It seems people can't get enough of this one-man propaganda machine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63569045
THE MIRROR - 17/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: NOTHING LIKE A GOOD MYSTERY IT WAS an endearing conspiracy mystery that eagerly fed the imaginations of ordinary net users.
Even when the rather amateurish 8march2003.com revealed itself as a marketing hoax, we still appreciated the care and attention of the labyrinthine plot. Now, we wish we'd never bothered.
The "astounding discovery" to "change the world beyond belief" - promised by the website - has become the biggest let-down since green tomato ketchup.
In fact, it's probably the lamest ruse we've even come across.
We were hoping for a clever hoax promo for the new Matrix film. We wouldn't even have minded a massive paranoid conspiracy theory about the end of the world. Anything.
Instead we got a book - and not just any old book but some spiritual ramblings about what mankind has in store.
Thousands of people all over the world followed the far-fetched story unfold via 8march2003.com wondering where it would lead ... but little did they think it would end up being a "New Age, sci-fi adventure" book - The Shift Of The Ages by Jean Nemeyeth.
A new Jeffrey Archer novel or even a guide to watching paint dry would have been better received...
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63567931
THE MIRROR - 11/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's I: LYNCH MOB'S DOMAIN CHASE HOLLYWOOD may be drooling over Jessica Lynch's story but a new mystery surrounding America's best known PoW has been feeding conspiracy theorists on the net.
Six days BEFORE her unit was ambushed and she was captured two new domain names of her name were registered, jessicalynch.org and jessicalynch.net
Questions were asked about whether her kidnap could have been faked or whether this was just a spooky coincidence. Records show the sites were registered on March 17, but Jessica wasn't abducted until March 23.
While nothing has appeared on the pre-kidnap registered sites, an eerie message saying "coming soon" has been posted by the sellers, register.com
But before you start to panic, we have tracked down the registrar and can reveal it is merely a bizarre coincidence.
Shenan Reed Golimbu, who registered the web addresses, told us: "I'm the executive director of the Miss New York City Scholarship Organisation and as part of my contract I bought the domain names of our contestants to keep anyone from misusing them. My registering of these sites has nothing to do with Jessica Lynch the Pow."
So there you have it. However, since then, every other domain variation of Jessica Lynch (such as jessica lynch.info) has been registered by Hollywood marketing companies or other individuals clearly hoping to cash in.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63548051
THE MIRROR - 09/04/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: LOWDOWN ON DOWNLOADS.. MUSIC downloaded from the internet is to be recognised by a new official chart.
The official UK download chart will be run by Peter Gabriel's music website OD2 and be used by the Official Charts Company, which puts together Radio 1's weekly chart.
The new chart could eventually be made into a radio show, like the Official Singles chart every Sunday.
Ed Averdieck of OD2 says: "It's about time that downloaded tracks are counted, recognised and elevated from their 'second class' status.
"Digital downloads are taking off, and deserve a chart of their own until the day comes when they're part and parcel of the normal chart."
The first official download chart should be ready in time for Christmas.
If you haven't yet got into downloading music, today is Digital Download Day - a great time to start.
Record companies are giving away free music for a week, with 170,000 tracks from 7,500 artists - including Daniel Bedingfield, David Gray and Atomic Kitten - on offer.
Your free allocation will get you 30 downloads, 300 streams or three tracks to keep.
You've got until April 15 to visit www.digital down loadday.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63540753
THE MIRROR - 03/04/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: SEGWAY GOING DOWNHILL FAST IT was hailed as the transport revolution for inner-city congestion, something that would save the ozone layer and the world and become "bigger than the internet".
But the reality - of course - hasn't lived up to the hype.
One month after Segway, Ginger, IT, or whatever you want to call the Pogo stick on wheels, went on sale in the US, it doesn't look good.
It's proving about as appealing as Christine Hamilton on Viagra - a pointless object that terrifies people.
It's certainly not what inventor Dean Kamen, right, hoped for.
While it would be premature to call the most talked-about scooter in history a flop, all the signs are indicating it's a contender for the tech graveyard of fascinating failures.
Kamen was expecting to sell 10,000 a week, but the word is that sales are actually closer to 10 a week.
Wonder why? Well, several US states have banned their use from pavements, they only reach a top speed of 12.5 miles per hour, they can't travel more than 11 miles without an electric charge - and they cost pounds 3,200 each.
All of that said, I still can't wait to have a go on one.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63518962
THE MIRROR - 19/03/2003,
Amy Vickers FREESERVE'S NUMBER'S UP FREESERVE has become the latest ISP to upset customers over network problems and new connection software.
The UK's leading internet provider recently launched a new "Connection Kit" aimed at making life easier for those on its pounds 13.99-a-month Anytime package but complaints are pouring in.
Keith Clayton in Sheffield says: "When I had three free numbers I always got a good connection, and if downloads were slow, I could switch numbers and it would be better.
"Now the dialler always tries one number first, and it usually gets connected but downloads are so slow it's a waste of time. I can spend 30 minutes waiting for one page to download and often I can't check my Hotmail accounts (via Outlook Express) on the new number."
Colin Smith from Fleet, Hants, says: "I'd use the dialler if only I could get connected to download it in the first place. Even when the connection starts to provide some form of staccato service, it's a quarter the speed it used to be."
A Freeserve spokesman apologised and said: "The two problems are uncon- nected. We've had problems with the network since the start of the year but these have been separate problems that we've addressed. A few more tweaks on the Energis network will solve the issue."
Next Monday, Freeserve is putting up the price of AnyTime from pounds 13.99 to pounds 14.99 a month.
It will also be shortly contacting about 1,500 heavy users (about 20 hours a day) asking them to reduce the amount of time they spend online or upgrade to broadband.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63465567
THE MIRROR - 11/03/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: WEB STUNT IS SUB STANDARD WELL, it's been a long and frankly boring wait, but the mystery behind spooky website www.8march2003.com has finally been revealed.
Followers of the website had been expecting a shocking discovery along the lines of an alien hideout or George Bush's brain.
But it turns out that the "astounding discovery" that will "change the world beyond belief" is a badly mocked-up picture of a submarine on rails halfway up a mountain.
This is accompanied by predictions of "world floods", along with the claim that, "Obviously this is the second Ark built for the purpose of saving the human race."
A big clue that this is all a bit of nonsense dreamed up by someone in advertising after too much Columbian snuff comes at the bottom of the page, which helpfully provides a link to www.mountainsub.com.
This site is registered to an Australian PR company and says that the submarine-up-a-mountain story is designed to market a new product, which will be announced on April 15, if we haven't all died of boredom before then.
"Tell us in one word what this publicity event is about," says the site, "and you could be one of 100 winners of a free special gift.
"Is it for a game, beverage, toy, novel, cellphone, snack, movie, cruise, camera, show, CD, car, boat or vacation?"
But just when you thought you understood what was going on, the man behind the original site tells us that Mountainsub.com is a decoy set up to discredit his theory.
He says we should not to believe anything on the site.
Some big questions, then: who to believe? Whether to care? And how silly is this going to look when it turns out to be an ad for loo paper?
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63437240
THE MIRROR - 28/02/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's: SEARCH GIANT'S WAR OF WORDS THE web's most popular search engine, Google, has called in the lawyers over probably the most positive thing that ever happened to it... being made into a verb.
Net dictionary Wordspy.com has received a letter from Google lawyers demanding changes to the definition of new verb "to google", meaning: "To search for information on the web."
The word Google has become so synonymous with web searching that people (by people we mean mostly Americans) now say such things as: "I Googled your address."
And to make matters worse, the term "Googling" was used in an episode of ER the other night.
But instead of being flattered, as any other internet brand would, Google has taken umbrage.
"Our brand is very important to us, said a Google lawyer, "and, as I'm sure you'll understand, we want to make sure that when people use 'Google' they are referring to the services our company provides and not to internet searching in general."
The term "protests too much" springs to mind.
Trying to police the evolution of a brand name into popular culture is doomed to fail, look at Spam for example.
At first the manufacturers of the delicious and nutritious canned meat tried to fight the growing use of its name as a term of junk email, before it realised it was a losing battle and caved in.
Wordspy creator Paul McFedries has now acknowledged that "Google is a trademark of Google Technologies", and is waiting to hear if that's acceptable.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63401789
THE MIRROR - 25/02/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: NAPSTER'S SITE SET ON RETURN AND Napster just keeps on clinging to life.
The web service that won't say die is heading for a comeback at the end of the year.
And if that's not joy enough, whizzkid founder Shawn Fanning is back on board, telling new owner Roxio - which bought the site's assets for pounds 3.15million in November - how to make a success of the venture.
The file-sharing network which kick-started the MP3 digital music phenomenon will return as a fee-based site.
Roxio's Elliot Carpenter said the new service will be "easy and fun and have the broadest range of artists - and the right price".
Sounds almost too good to be true.
Whether those in charge of music rights will be prepared to work with a company carrying so much baggage is another thing entirely.
Meanwhile, a Dutch company called PGR is causing a few headaches for the record companies. Claiming it "will become to file sharing what the Swiss are to banking," PGR is to exploit a loophole in Dutch law that says ISPs and peer-to-peer file-sharing services cannot be held responsible for users' copyright infringements.
Therefore any illegitimate file-sharing business set up in Holland is exempt from prosecution. Theoretically.
"We intend to enforce our rights not just in the US, but worldwide," says Carys Sherman of the Recording Industry Association of America.
One to watch
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63388047
THE MIRROR - 18/02/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: IT'LL MAKE THE MIND BLOGGLE ONLINE diaries, aka blogging, are about to be catapulted into the mainstream thanks to Google buying Pyra, the web's biggest blog-making software.
Blogging, taken from the combination of "web log", has grown from a few private websites into one of the most popular online activities.
Google, the web's biggest search engine, will now be able to tap into the 200,000 or so blogs running on Blogger's platform, and its 1.1 million users.
It's also bound to encourage millions of users to start their own blogs and have their voices heard on the net.
They're free to start and don't require you to be too computer savvy - you just need to fill in a few details (on www.blogger.com) and press go. They'll even host your site for free for you.
What to put on it? Your views on war, news, kittens, knitting, anything - so long as it is subjective and contains links to other blogs, websites you like and interesting articles. People love reading other people's passionate views and, if you add a "comments" box, you'll soon be running your own online discussion forum.
The Google deal should see blogging become 2003's biggest net craze and put even more pressure on big corporate websites struggling to survive.
Increased numbers of blogs will change the dynamic of online news and info, as members of the net community end up spending all their time visiting each other's websites, rather than the corporate news sites.
To describe this deal as a watershed moment for the fledgling medium is a bit of an understatement, it is the making of a whole new "power to the people" medium. You just watch, this time next year we'll all be blogging.
Find good examples of blogs at www.gizmodo.com, www.nthellworld.com and www.mbites.co.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63363949
THE MIRROR - 17/02/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: HACKED OFF WITH CATH.. YOU have to feel sorry for Catherine Zeta-Jones (OK, not really).
First she was "violated" at her wedding, now she's being "violated" on the internet.
A virus bearing her name has surfaced on various file-sharing networks such as Kazaa, offering nude pics of the over-sensitive star.
But instead of a cheap thrill for net users, opening the file won't give you warts-and-all Zeta-Jones - it'll turn your computer into a target for hackers.
On this occasion, the actress's name has been used to hide a worm called Igloo. Opening this will allow other computer users to hack in and take control of your machine.
But unlike Anna Kournikova, whose popularity once crippled millions of computers all over the world, the Zeta-Jones virus hasn't set many pulses racing. The opposite in fact. Anti-virus experts said only a handful of users had fallen for the ruse.
"It is not widespread as yet but it's important to be on your toes," says Trend Micro.
It seems Zeta-Jones, Oscar-nominated for Chicago, no longer has the pull she once had. Famous names are now regularly used to trick net users into opening viruses, but this particular virus writer must have an ironic sense of humour - using supposed pics of Zeta-Jones just as she's in court fighting over unauthorised snaps.
Whether Z-J will see the funny side of her name being used without permission - and for a negative purpose - is highly unlikely.
She's bound to try to sue.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63361355
THE MIRROR - 10/02/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES TECHNOLOGY may be making our lives easier but it's also making them a lot more miserable.
New research shows that perhaps the Luddites were right after all.
It seems the more we rely on technology, the more stressed we become.
Mobile phones, email, handheld computers and laptops are all contributing to this new form of digital depression, the feeling of being overwhelmed by technology.
"People are now constantly available because the mobile phone follows them everywhere and people no longer switch them off," says Glynn Gatrix of Priority Management. "They get sucked into technology and allow it to control them.
"When it doesn't work for them they get stressed and then, when they try to take a break from it, they get stressed by withdrawal symptoms."
"It's a drug-like dependency that can only get a whole lot worse."
This type of work-related stress is currently costing the UK pounds 3.8billion each year because people are going off sick.
And up to one in three people blame technology for their rising stress levels.
I say smash 'em all up now.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63338144
THE MIRROR - 04/02/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: eBAY BANS SICK SHUTTLE SALES THE web's biggest auction house ebay found itself the unlikely home for scorched debris from the space shuttle Columbia over the weekend.
Within hours of the crash, several lots appeared on the site selling fragments from the doomed shuttle.
One item was described as "Columbia space shuttle debris" with a starting price of $10,000.
Ebay has spent the past two days frantically trying to delete any such lots.
And the FBI has warned that anybody who tries to flog pieces of the spacecraft will be prosecuted and could face up to 10 years in prison and a pounds 350,000 fine. Ebay said: "We have learned to keep an eye out for individuals who might want to list items once a tragic event has occurred, the best example being pieces of the World Trade Center."
"But we believe many items in this case were pranks."
Meanwhile, a hacker group known as Trippin Smurfs has been ostracised by fellow hackers for defacing NASA web servers with a rant about Iraq on the day of the disaster.
Fellow hackers called it "extremely poor taste" and suggested there wasn't a "court in the land that would have much sympathy for the hackers when sentencing."
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63319311
THE MIRROR - 28/01/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: WEB'S PUT IN THE SLAMMER THE net was in recovery mode yesterday following a stressful weekend fighting an extra-potent virus.
Slammer, which first reared its head on Saturday morning, attacked a six-month old security hole in Microsoft Windows' operating system.
The same system Microsoft has always assured customers was secure. (Providing, of course, they constantly download patches to plug gaping flaws).
Those who don't have time to download and install regular "security updates" found themselves hit at the weekend.
In South Korea the internet virtually ground to a halt, and major strains on net surfing were felt in most of South-East Asia, Japan and India.
At the height of the attack over here, one in five emails weren't getting through and downloading information from websites was taking one to two minutes instead of 10 seconds.
It was the most damaging attack on the internet in 18 months, but because it was the weekend it was brought under control quicker than most other big attacks, including Code Red and Nimda.
Unlike them, Slammer spread directly through network con-nections and didn't need email to carry it.
As the worm infected one computer, it then sought out other victims with thousands of probes a second sent out.
But the big question is, could this happen again?
Microsoft spokesman Rick Miller said: "We're working with network professionals to develop better tools, including ones to automatically scan systems for known vulnerabilities."
So that's a yes then.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63282807
THE MIRROR - 20/01/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: FRANK'S SITE IS CAT'S WHISKERS A WEBSITE all about an injured cat and one devoted to celebrity deaths have been voted two of the most popular sites of last year.
Millions of people logged on to cathospital.co.uk to monitor the progress of poor Frank, who was hit by a car.
Poppedclogs.co. uk has become cult reading each time a celebrity, er, pops their clogs.
The best sites of 2002 were selected from Yahoo's recommended list and then whittled down to 12 by a panel of experts.
Frank the cat is now fully recovered - though, as webcams showed, it was touch and go for a while. Here's the rest of Yahoo's best sites of the year: www.aardman.com, www.iusedtobelieve.com, www. rathergood. com, www.play.com, www.iamdyslexic.com, www.ad vertsongs.co.uk, http://film. guardian.co.uk, www.geoex plorer.co.uk, www. medium town.com, www.edu- cation.hs bc.com/ education.
Meanwhile, Yahoo is considering a move into internet access later this year after starting up successfully in the US.
Yahoo Europe boss Mark Opzoomer is looking for partners to share the load.
Yahoo and BT anyone? Or is this the perfect opportunity for Yahoo and Freeserve to get together?
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63218297
THE MIRROR - 06/01/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: HAPPY RETURNS TO THE NET.. AGAIN THE internet has celebrated its 20th anniversary - yet again.
The medium with more birthdays than the Queen is also - depending on who you listen to - 42 and 33 years old.
How is this possible? A major difference of opinion, as ever.
According to some, the most important part in the creation of the internet took place on January 1, 1983, when proper internet protocols were switched on.
The transition from NCP to TCP/IP (what our computers use today) may not have been the sexiest moment in computing history, but it was crucial in leading us to where we are today, surfing away merrily without a care for how it is done.
Until that fateful moment, fewer than 1,000 computers used the primitive protocol fudged together by the US Department of Defense.
Credited with this break-through is Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn.
They're not to be confused with the British father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, who found a way of linking pages together to create the World Wide Web.
Meanwhile, a case-sensitive crusader at the University of Pennsylvania has begun a campaign to resist capitalisation of the word "internet".
Spelling it all lower-case would, says Prof Joseph Turow, send a deeper message to the world, namely that the net is not a "brand-name experience" but as common and as accessible to all as air and water.
Never having spelt internet with a capital letter, Amy's i is right behind you, Joe.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63242450
THE MIRROR - 31/12/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: MORE PAIN BUT LITTLE GAIN IN 2002 T HE web in 2002 wasn't much of a party. Big sites fell by the wayside (again), MP3 swapping was outlawed and even getting online suddenly involved more daft rules than a reality TV show.
The year started with a big thud from the Public Record Office - a new all-singing, all-dancing census website whose only flaw was that it didn't work.
After crashing whenever more than a few people tried to log on at once, it was taken offline for most of the year.
Meanwhile email, once the thing that would make all our lives simple, became even more of a pain.
Some people simply found their mailboxes filling with spam. Others, including City worker Trevor Luxton and civil servant Jo Moore, found that the ability to send messages instantly and without thought cost them their jobs.
But while viruses continued to knock out individual computers for days on end, the doom-mongers who
said viruses would cripple the web in 2002 were disappointed.
All in all, it was a bad year for the consumer. Internet access
costs went up, websites and email services introduced subscription charges, record companies attempted to criminalise MP3 swappers and copy-protection technology was introduced to CDs.
Meanwhile ISPs continued their low standards of customer service, landing many people with huge phone bills by mixing up their numbers.
DVD players, games consoles and trendy mobiles flew out of shops as price wars resulted in some very cheap offers.
The Xbox got off to a shaky start in March when Microsoft decided to launch it at pounds 299 a throw.
Fast forward 10 months and they're as now going for pounds 160.
Even so, Sony's two-year-old PlayStation2 continued to dominated the market, helped along with must-have games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and The Getaway.
It was also supposed to be the year of next generation 3G phones, but even the hardest working company in this area - the aptly-titled 3 - couldn't sort out glitches and get its service off the ground.
Maybe next year, eh?
PERHAPS the only remarkable thing to have happened this year was BT seeing broadband sense.
Thanks to a new regime at the top, a new common sense attitude to broadband emerged... if you make it cheaper, they will buy it. It was about time, frankly.
Prices fell to an average of pounds 27 a month, demand soared and attempts to extend reach to more than 60 per cent of the country were made. People living in obscure rural exchanges now had hope of getting fast internet - via the demand tracker website.
Whether all that success makes up for the awful BT advertising campaign remains to be seen.
If you've got a net story contact AMY VICKERS at amysi@mirror.co.uk or phone 020 7293 2413
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63157461
THE MIRROR - 30/12/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: PUT YOUR FOOT IN IT AWARDS, 2002 SOMETIMES the things people say don't actually come out as hoped - or sometimes their comments come back to haunt them. We love a good clanger here at Amy's i so we've trawled back through the year to find all the suspect comments people in the hi-tech world made this year - and selected the gems. Remember, hindsight is a wonderful thing...
UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR
"I set a target to make the UK the best environment in the world for e-commerce by 2002. We haven't quite made it."
Tony Blair at the e-summit in November
SERVICES TO CYBER WAFFLE
"Britain has the potential to become a technological powerhouse."
Tony Blair, again at the e-summit. If you know what he was on about, please send your answers on a postcard
DESPERATE SINGLETON
"I would have been happy to marry anyone who came up with the cash."
Publicity stunt or genuine marriage proposal? Saddo Kay Hammond tried to get hitched via a QXL.com auction - and failed miserably. Hammond was jilted when a $1billion bid turned out to be a hoax
SUSPICIOUS LOVE-IN
"We're just mates. We're not sleeping together or anything."
Michael Wadley, BT press officer, when asked about BT's cosy relationship with Microsoft
THREATENING BEHAVIOUR
"Say something nice about the pigs, alright."
Damien Peachey, head of PR at BT Retail, trying to stop us saying the pounds 32million BT Broadband advertising campaign was utter crap.
XBOXED INTO A CORNER
"We are not planning a price adjustment."
Microsoft Xbox in January. Price of an Xbox then: pounds 300. Price now: pounds 160
E-COMMERCE COCK-UP
"Our most important consideration has always been the trust and goodwill of our customers. It's a great day for consumers. They are getting a great deal."
Kodak's head of the digital consumer business in Europe, Gareth Jones, makes a stunning u-turn following a long battle with customers who bought an "incorrectly priced" camera for pounds 100.
BACKTRACKER OF THE YEAR
"We can build a fully-integrated model like BSkyB, which makes and distributes programmes over its network."
BT chairman Sir Christopher Bland. A week later, he was forced to clarify this statement.
"We will not become a full vertically integrated media company, like BSkyB and News Corp."
CHECK YOUR FACTS BEFORE SPEAKING
"It couldn't be further from the truth,"
Sports.com PR man when asked to confirm that, a day before the World Cup started, the sports website was in administration. Sports.com is now in the big dotcom graveyard in the sky
DOTCOM TO DOTGONE
"Our attitude has been to be the last man standing."
Gavin Chittick, Sports.com boss
BLAGGER OF THE YEAR
"If you help me, then someday someone might help you when you need it. SO HELP ME and maybe someday, I'll be able to help you."
Cyberblagger New Yorker "Karyn" who persuaded gullible surfers to pay off her $20,000 (pounds 13,605) credit card bill on SaveKaryn.com. Will she turn into a good samaritan? We doubt it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63155049
THE MIRROR - 01/01/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST YESTERDAY, we struggled as best we could to remember what had happened in 2002.
Today, in a feat almost as impressive, we gaze into our crystal ball and tell you what lies ahead for the world of technology in 2003.
Making predictions is a mug's game, but there are always a few dead certs, especially when it comes to tech companies and the net.
Microsoft and BT will continue to dominate; BT will keep upsetting its rival ISPs - who will find 2003 particularly hard going - and spam and viruses will swamp the net.
The only cloud on Microsoft's horizon is the European Commission, which is close to finishing its four-year anti-trust investigation into the Bill Gates behemoth.
Expect a decision before July. But don't expect it to be too tough. Although the Commission has the power to fine Microsoft 10 per cent of its worldwide turnover if it finds it guilty of breaking competition law, no one should hold their breath.
So is Microsoft above the law? Well, duh.
In gaming, the battle for cyberspace will commence, with The Sims hitting the web and PlayStation2 and Xbox both launching online services.
Games companies have invested upwards of pounds 300million in going online, but will their customers follow them? Watch this space.
This will be the year that recordable DVD becomes affordable, putting the final nail in the coffin of VHS video.
It will also be the year of cool phones and cheap gadgets.
The first 3G next-generation phone - from a company calling itself 3 - will launch (our guess) on 03/03/03, March 3 (and we're not even highly-paid marketing geniuses).
Also in March, there'll be a lot of noise about Segway, a scooter that will set you back about four grand. But don't all rush at once - early buyers will face the wrath of local authorities banning their use on pavements, and road safety experts will call for them to be outlawed on roads.
One tech certainty for 2003 is that spam will reach the point where it kills all the fun in email. Many experts reckon that by July there will be so much spam that punters will demand their ISPs install filtering.
And ISPs will be struggling. Those surviving on already tight margins will fall over, while the big ones such as Freeserve, AOL and Tiscali will reel in cheap offers and go after all-important profits instead. Freeserve could even disappear altogether and re-emerge as Wanadoo. At least its TV ads might be better.
AOL faces a tough year. Troubles at home as US financial authorities comb through its accounts will be mixed with a potential whopping tax bill over here come July when new rules will require it to register as an EU company and pay VAT.
What else? Wireless gadgets and networks will take off in a big way. Americans will think of a way to tax the internet. The Matrix 2 will blow us all away. The net will get weirder. A government website will run smoothly and broadband access will come down to a tenner. Well, you never know...
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63160901
THE MIRROR - 27/12/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: TECH A LOOK AT OUR GONGS AT last, the results are in for the first Kelly's i/Amy's i Best (and Worst) Of The Year awards. We deliberated, cogitated and digested thousands of nominations from Mirror readers, spent days poring over your votes and opinions, and pulled out hair at the blatant vote-rigging by V21 and B3ta.com (naughty, naughty).
Yes, it's been a fraught coupla weeks. Some of the winners were clear, some not so. Some controversial, some obvious. So here it is: Part 1 of our reader-choice best and worst tech of the year. Part 2, gadgets, will be revealed in tomorrow's Kelly's i).
BEST ISP
Winner: NTL Runners-up: Virgin.Net, Vispa
NOT always the best service provider for telephone or TV (as Oftel will tell you) but when it comes to internet, NTL has many, many fans. Readers praised it for "excellent service and good customer care". Virgin.Net won plaudits for being cheap and having "good customer service", while Vispa "goes out of its way to sort your problem out... it felt as if Vispa was in my front room," says Romayne Grubb, of Bath.
WORST ISP
Winner: Karoo
THIS is an unexpected category - one we didn't even ask for. So, er, congratulations to Kingston Communications' Karoo... "a company that put the internet landscape back years," said long-suffering customers, who demanded we instigate a new award for this North of England ISP.
CHANCER OF THE YEAR
Winner: V21
FOR sticking the cheekiest blag ever on its website area - and thinking we wouldn't notice a vote-rigging scandal.
"V21 has been nominated to receive an award for the best UK ISP," it said. Sorry to spoil your party, V21 but, er, no you weren't. We asked users to nominate their own.
It continued: "If you would like to vote for us, all you have to do is click on the button below and your vote will be sent to the Daily Mirror."
Did they really think we wouldn't suss this?
BEST WEBSITE
Winner: www.google.com Runners-up: www.b3ta.com, www.bbc.co.uk
THERE could only be one winner - the most popular and useful website in the world, the one that practically everybody uses as their home page. Runner-up B3ta.com did well after a post on its messageboard led to a sudden spike in entries. But we allowed it to remain in the running,because of its sheer brilliance and simplicity. "It's like crack but more addictive," says reader Adrian Witchy. And the BBC... well, what can we say except pounds 250million of public money?
TECH VILLAIN OF THE YEAR
Winner: Bill Gates/Microsoft Runners-up: BT, Friends
Reunited
A CLOSE call between Microsoft and BT. Readers complained about BT customer service, BT senior execs, BT Openworld and BT "for, well, everything!"
But Microsoft pipped it - for making more money than anyone else yet introducing charges for Hotmail, a
strict 30-day expiry and constantly changing the rules.
Readers also complained about Microsoft's "ridiculously expensive software".
And lastly, Friends Reunited's honeymoon seems to be over. Readers nominated it as a villain for encouraging old enemies to reignite their hate campaigns and breaking up too many marriages.
NET CELEBRITY OF THE YEAR
Winner: Ellen Feiss
MANY, many contenders but there could only be one winner - US teenager Ellen... for her services to surreal net obsessions, Apple Macs and the best stoned expression since Ozzy Osbourne.
Don't miss tomorrow's Kelly's i for Part 2: Best and worst gadgets of the year
If you've got a net story contact AMY VICKERS at amysi@mirror.co.uk or phone 020 7293 2413
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63148299
THE MIRROR - 26/12/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's I: Websites of the year SO you've guzzled turkey until you're fit to burst, watched enough telly to make your eyes pop and drunk enough booze to pickle a gherkin. Time to sit back and fiddle with your mouse - your computer mouse - and send a Christmas message to Aunt Elsie in Australia. While you're at it, here are a few sites to have a play with. Your very own cut-out-and-keep guide to my faves of the year...
www.mirrorgameplay.co.uk
ONE of our own, and for today can we recommend the Sober Santa game. Register for free (you don't have to buy credits unless you're entering the money competitions). Use the arrow keys to help Santa eat and drink his way through Christmas without electrocuting himself on the trainline.
www.hungover.net
WELL it is Boxing Day after all. Festive relief for those who've burnt too many brain cells.www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com
BECAUSE everyone should have a nice cup of tea and a sit down every once in a while. And a biscuit.
www.quizyourfriends.com
BE YOUR very own Chris Tarrant and set impossible questions for your mates via email.
http://home.iae.nl/users/franklin
BRILLIANT homage to the classic boardgame Battleships. Turn up the sound for the full effects.
www.citycreator.com
CREATE your own city from pixelated bricks, walkways and people. Save your picture and make it into a mug.
Well, why not.
www.seethru.co.uk/zine/south_coast/helicopter_game.htm
BIT of a tricky one - fly your helicopter through the course without hitting anything. A lot harder than it looks.
www.whosaliveandwhosdead.com
SETTLE pub arguments with this unbeatable guide.
www.robertobaggio.com/games/index.html
SERIOUSLY addictive free- kick simulator.
Be warned, you could end up playing this for hours on end.
www.fhm.com/games/topgames/launch.htm
PICK from 100 different original online games. Something for everyone.
www.braball.com
RECYCLED feminism for the Noughties.
www.maylin.net/Fireworks2.html
MAKE your very own fireworks display - without the cost, the cold or the danger. Just use your mouse to light up the sky with rockets. Nice.
www.glennhoddle.com
NO, not a cheesy homepage for the cliched one, but a piss-take in the style of net legend Mahir "I kiss you" Cagri.
www.falafelgame.com/eng/falafelhome.html
ODDBALL kebab-based game.
If you've got a net story contact AMY VICKERS at amysi@mirror.co.uk or phone 020 7293 2413
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63146851
THE MIRROR - 27/11/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: COUNTING ON THE CENSUS ELEVEN months, three weeks and two days.
That's how long it has taken to fully resuscitate the 1901 Census website, after one of the most disastrous launches in the history of the web.
At last, families and historians can search the archive to find those who lived during that period in England and Wales - seven days a week, 24 hours a day
It's been an experience following the ups and downs - mainly the downs - of the beleaguered site.
Though to be fair, it has been searchable since late August - when it was switched on between 9am and 7pm, Monday to Saturday, and a queuing system introduced.
But since when was the web limited to shop hours? A spokesman said: "It's been 20 hours a day since August (eh?), now it's just going that extra four."
"It's been fully tested so we're not expecting it to overload this time."
Fingers crossed. So come on then, no holding back, give it a good thrashing at www.census.pro.gov.uk and see if all those millions of public money have been well spent.
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THE MIRROR - 26/11/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: BEEN AD BY BT OPENWORLD? BT OPENWORLD'S cheesy TV ad which showed punters raving about the AnyTime service has been banned.
Not for the pass-the-sick-bucket glowing testimonials (sadly) but for misleading people to believe they could use the service at any time without having to worry about costs.
No longer the case. AnyTime is now only 150 hours a month, and any time over that is charged at 4p a minute during peak hours.
Amy's i readers described the move as "scandalous". "I feel cheated," says Andrew Myers from Coventry. "I signed up after seeing those adverts thinking it sounded like an honest service.
"They changed it two weeks after I'd signed up."
BT Openworld's defence? It pulled the ads off-air on September 22 - a week before the terms and conditions were changed.
"The advert accurately described the AnyTime product which was on offer at that time," said an Openworld spokesman. "Any new TV ads will explain the new terms and conditions."
But the Independent Television Commission isn't impressed.
The watchdog has banned the ad from ever being shown again, on the grounds that simply saying "online session limitations apply" isn't giving potential customers enough warning.
But one massive inconsistency remains - the name. "No plans to change," we're repeatedly told. Isn't it about time somebody looking after Trade Descriptions told Openworld what "Any time" means?
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THE MIRROR - 20/11/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: EASE UP ON THE NAME, STELIOS WHAT'S in a name? When it has got "easy" in it, then everything, according to easyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou.
He has fought (and is still fighting) domain-name disputes with fellow easy companies - such as Easyart, Easycar, Easypeazy and Easygetaway - on the basis that "if somebody starts a business today called "easy" something, then it is an attempt to capitalise on our name." We can see his point.
But we can also see the point of easyodds.com, a three-year-old betting business that is willing to go to the High Court to keep its name.
After failing to grapple the name easyodds.com from them last year, easyGroup then applied for easyodds' company trademark.
Justification? "At one stage our easyValue was considering introducing a category comparing the odds of online bookmakers," said a spokesman. But it didn't, right? EasyGroup's other gripe is when easyodds started.
"It didn't register its domain name until after the beginning of 2000 - when we have a strong claim to rights in the 'easy' name."
But Tony Plaskow, director of easyodds.com, said: "We actively don't want to be linked with easyGroup or Stelios, and we have a disclaimer on our site saying that.
"Stelios has a blinkered view of what his brand stands for. We prefer not to be linked. We are certainly not trading off their brand name - our 26,000 members came to us because of our service, not the name."
NEVER underestimate the power of the TV. Punters hitting the red buttons on interactive TV raised pounds 668,000 for Children In Need this year, pounds 200,000 more than last year. Internet donations pulled in pounds 391,318.
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THE MIRROR - 08/11/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: A TOUCH BETTER THAN A LAPTOP TABLETS may be something you take when you're ill, but they're also the latest evolution in computing.
This week sees the launch of Tablet PCs from Toshiba, HP Compaq, Fujitsu Siemens, Research Machines and Acer.
They are a re-invention of a laptop with bells on.
They look like laptops, but the difference is they're touch screen, so you no longer have to fiddle about with a mouse.
Instead you can draw/write straight on to them and send handwritten emails for that more personal touch.
Handwriting recognition may not be quite there yet - Amy Was Here came out as A merralri, whatever that is. Also, the lack of application software - they use a special Tablet XP operating system - may also zap enthusiasm, but they are very pleasant to use.
The cost is set to be high at first - between pounds 1,500 and pounds 2,000 - but that will come down as more Tablets go on sale.
Pupils put the Microsoft Tablet PC to the test: Page 59
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THE MIRROR - 07/10/2002,
with AMY VICKERS Amy's i: Des Lynam and Super Mario SEPARATED at birth - Des Lynam and Super Mario. In the weirdest sponsorship we've seen, Nintendo has bought the rights to Des Lynam's furry moustache for a whole year.
This week Lynam proudly sported his new GameCube purple moustache for a photo call. Wonder how long before it's back to its normal colour and Des forgets all about his long-lost brother?
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THE MIRROR - 01/10/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: BT CAN SCREW YOU, ANYTIME BT Openworld's tenuous grasp of the English language has taken a turn for the worse.
The internet service provider's latest definition of "AnyTime" - having already changed it several times - is now a measly 150 hours of internet time each month.
Totally opposite to the meaning given by the dictionary, where the definition still suggests "AnyTime" means: "At any time".
Rivals of BT Openworld are baffled - as are we and as will be AnyTime customers when they check their inboxes this morning.
David Hobday from Telewest said: "Consumers could easily get lost in an internet fog and BT's not helping matters with its dunce-like behaviour.
"Perhaps it should go back to the classroom to learn the correct meaning of 'any time'."
Any plans to change the name then? None whatsoever, says Alison Ritchie, chief exec of Openworld.
"AnyTime means people can use it at any time but it's not an always-on product," she explained.
"It's a fair policy, which will only impact about three per cent of our users."
Thing is, when you have 850,000 subscribers, that's at least 25,500 extremely annoyed people you're sending right into the laps of rivals.
But when the bottom line is BT shareholders wanting to see profit, BT Openworld has to be ruthless.
BTO has been restricting daily usage for the past year, insisting "heavy users" ruin the network for everyone else. What they really mean is that "heavy users" should be paying an extra 14 quid a month for broadband or stop milking their profits.
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THE MIRROR - 24/09/2002,
Amy Vickers AMY'S i: FREESERVE ON THE LAW PATH NEVER a company to shy away from a good old scrap, Freeserve is getting its lawyers out this week in its ongoing battle with telecoms giant BT.
The UK's biggest internet service provider is hacked off at the way BT exploits its dominance of phone networks to further its own internet business.
It's a familiar tune, but this time the people at Freeserve are particularly peeved that BT is allowed to promote its new broadband product - "No Frills" BT Broadband - through the telephone bills it sends out to 20 million customers.
It claims it's against the law - and it's demanding the Competition Commission do something about it.
Monopolistic tendencies are unavoidable if you're a company that used to have a monopoly, but BT is supposed to be playing on a level field.
"BT enjoys certain unmatchable advantages because of its near-monopoly in residential telephony," said a Freeserve spokesman.
"Exploiting these advantages should be of utmost concern to the telecoms regulator, competition authorities and public policy makers."
The latest spat comes just as BT launches a pounds 10million advertising campaign announcing that "Broadband has landed".
Any campaign of this magnitude has to be a good thing, but having seen the concept - pigs on bikes - we're not entirely convinced.
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DAILY RECORD - 05/09/2002,
AMY VICKERS MONEY: NAPSTER FINALLY SILENCED INTERNET music service Napster finally sounded the Death March yesterday.
The firm's remaining 42 workers were fired after a US bankruptcy judge blocked the sale of assets to chief investor Bertelsmann.
German media and music giant Bertelsmann tried to buy the remains of Napster for pounds 5.8million, having already sunk pounds 55million into the company to keep it afloat.
But rival record labels objected vigorously, prompting Delaware Judge Peter Walsh to kill the deal over "conflicting loyalties".
Napster boss Konrad Hilbers said: "This can only mean liquidation for the entire company.
"I disagree totally with the judge."
The music-sharing network said goodbye to its fans through its website by drawing an image of the Napster cat on a tombstone next to the words "Ded Kitty".
The service was forced offline last year when major record labels brought a music piracy lawsuit.
One music industry observer said: "At least it means it won't be coming back as a paid-for service, which would have gone against everything that Napster stood for."
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THE MIRROR - 04/09/2002,
with AMY VICKERS Amy's i: APPLE'S GIRL IS AN ELL OF A HIT WHAT goes "beep, beep, beep", has a gigantic internet following and is said to be stoned?
It's Ellen Feiss - the "star" of the latest Apple Mac internet campaign to get people to switch from PC to Mac. And also the latest internet folk legend.
Never heard of her? One visit to www.apple.com/switch to watch her video and you'll soon be telling all your friends about her.
Devoted Ellen fans have already put together several websites (such as www.ellenfeiss.net) and even launched a range of merchandise.
Why has a seemingly normal American student become so famous, so quickly?
The boring bit is that her dad's computer ate her homework and she switched to Mac. She also agreed to make a 30-second ad about it. What she did during these 30 seconds has made her the hot topic of net messageboards all over the world and created 2,800 entries on Google.com
Ellen's popularity stems from two things - her slightly slurred speech and a glazed expression. Oh, and the cute way in which she imitates her "berserk" computer going "beep, beep, beep".
Hard to believe so much has come out of a 30-second ad, especially as it has never been aired on TV.
While interest in Ellen is still growing, she hasn't said a word - and Apple is trying to protect its hot property.
"She's just a teenager who loves her Mac," is all they'll say.
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THE MIRROR - 26/08/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: BT COURT OUT ON LINK ACTION IT was the court case that made BT the laughing stock of the internet community.
What's more, it was one that the telecoms giant admitted privately it could never win.
Yet, bullishly, BT still pursued its patent claim on hyperlinks for almost two years. During that time it wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds, not to mention the time and effort of a New York court.
Had BT won the case, it would have destroyed everything good about the web today, because hyperlinks (quick website links) are so fundamental to everything about net surfing.
Thankfully, judge Colleen McMahon saw sense and threw out the absurd patent infringement case BT brought against the American ISP, Prodigy Communications. McMahon said: "The patent claims revolved around a central computer - a single device in one location.
"The internet is an entirely different beast from the system described in the patent."
Officially, BT says it has not decided whether to appeal, but, unofficially, BT staff would rather put this embarrassing episode - which it inherited from former bosses Peter Bonfield and Iain Vallance - behind them.
When new chairman Christopher Bland arrived, he let the court case go ahead on the basis that "everyone sues in the States anyway".
They might all sue but not everybody wins, as we've finally seen.
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THE MIRROR - 07/08/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: CHALKING IT UP TO EXPERIENCE CONFUSED by all the talk about wireless networking and the new street internet craze called warchalking?
You're not alone. Wireless internet has been a long time coming yet, all of a sudden, it seems to be arriving - somewhere.
But it's still surprised the companies which have developed new wire-free networks to rid their offices of cable clutter. The problem is, their networks aren't fully secured so they leak on to the streets.
Cue freeloaders making the most of this waste, but the companies involved think it is theft.
Warchalking has already been called the Napster of internet access, so don't be surprised if it all ends up in court. What do you need to know about wireless? It's fast - broadband speed - internet without wires. It works like infrared. Just pop a pounds 70 wi-fi (Wireless Fidelity, although no one uses the full words) network card - such as the one pictured - in your laptop and do an automatic search for available networks (more info at www.warchalk ing.org). Hey presto, free internet access outdoors. Apple ibooks with Airport adaptors don't even need any extra bits as the wireless network card is already in their machines.
This is the future of the net - much to the annoyance of mobile phone groups who invested in 3G licences. The last thing they want is people preferring wi-fi to their next generation phones.
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THE MIRROR - 29/07/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: ONLINE CENSUS WATCH: DAY 208 LEST we forget, it's 208 days since the 1901 Census website appeared, then suddenly disappeared without trace.
Bad planning was blamed and we were told it would reappear in weeks. Nearly seven months on, and a new statement has finally appeared on www.census. pro.gov.uk.
But don't get too excited, it's yet another lame excuse: "Unfortunately we still cannot give a firm date when the 1901 Census Online Service will be fully functional ... blah blah blah ... continue to make technical improvements ... blah ...tests are completed ... blah ... hope to complete this public testing phase by mid to late August."
Don't hold your breath.
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THE MIRROR - 22/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS
Amy's i: NET BILLS COULD DROP AT ANYTIME
FOUR million households could be in for an internet windfall after telecoms watchdog Oftel ordered BT to slash its prices.
BT was told to cut an astonishing 17 per cent off the unmetered prices it charges telecoms operators such as Thus and Energis.
They provide the backbone services that internet service providers including Freeserve and Demon use when you connect to them.
So if the operators are paying BT less, they can charge the ISPs less and they, in their turn, can charge you less, right?
Well, up to a point.
Energis, whose network is used by the UK's biggest ISP, Freeserve, refused to say yesterday whether consumers would see any immediate savings.
"We will be reviewing cost-saving implications with our customers on an individual basis," says a spokeswoman.
And Freeserve says: "It's difficult to say at the moment if we'll be reflecting these cuts as the immediate beneficiary will be Energis and we are waiting for a response from them."
Did the price cut really come as that much of a surprise? Not according to BT.
"This wasn't unexpected - it's been in the pipeline for at least a year and a half," says a spokesman. "Of course we're complying. It's going to cost us a lot but we're even backdating the payments to June 2002."
If only ISPs could come out and say the same thing.
That way, Anytime subscribers could be in line for back-dated windfalls of pounds 30.
More likely, the companies will deliberate for ages, slash a few pounds off the monthly subscription and have another go at BT for charging so much in the first place.
The current monthly cost of an Anytime connection ranges from pounds 13.49 for Virgin Net to pounds 15.99 for BT Openworld and AOL.
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THE MIRROR - 21/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: TIME TO SURF (EVEN) FASTER STILL think that getting Broadband means you've got a "fast" internet connection? That's so last year.
Cable firm Telewest is now touting a two megabit-per-second service, four times the speed of the 0.5Mbps connections offered by BT and others.
And it says the popularity of the service, the first in the UK, has surpassed all expectations.
In two months it has pulled in 5,000 subscribers.
And its little sister 1Mbps service, launched last summer, has now more than 30,000 customers.
"Not everybody wants a two meg connection," says Chad Raube, internet director at Telewest, "But clearly some people use the internet in different ways and want higher speeds.
"It's not 'Get what you're given' anymore, it's 'Get what you want.'"
Chad is pictured here with a saucy wetsuit and motorised surfboard, partly to help anyone who can't imagine what "faster surfing" might look like but mainly to prove that those Telewest kids are the wackiest funsters around.
Less wacky is rival cable company NTL which runs a 1Mbps service, while BT plans to launch something similar later this year.
These faster services cost upwards of pounds 35 a month, with Telewest's 2Mbps service setting you back pounds 50 a month.
But they do mean that small offices and homes can share a single broadband connection without noticing much slowdown.
And that may become more important as we all go out and buy internet-connected fridges and toilets for our homes of the future.
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THE MIRROR - 19/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: SPINGENIUS HERE'S a perfect question for Family Fortunes: If you had a robot around the house, what would you have it do?
Cooking and cleaning, right? Our survey said: Urgh urgh.
Now if you'd said dancing, or more specifically, waltzing, then you'd be walking away with the top prize of pounds 5, a trailer tent and a powerboat.
But why would you say that? Unless you were a hare-brained Japanese inventor wanting to revolutionise tea dances. This Waltzing Matilda can follow a human lead and even predict the dancer's next move through hand pressure applied to arms and back.
It has four wheels so it can move around in any direction but only has memory for five waltz steps. Salsa just ain't an option.
But why bother creating a robot just to dance? Unless it's part of a great masterplan towards cybersex. Come to mention it, the scientists at University of Tohoku, which developed it, did say they were also looking at robots that can move in synch with humans.
So much for adding a bit of culture to our lives!
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THE MIRROR - 18/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: TIME TO CALL EBAYWATCH RIPPED-off eBay users have started a campaign against fraudsters operating on the auction website.
Conmen have been lurking on eBay for years, and it seems that, despite tightened security by the auction giant and numerous new anti-fraud measures, many people are still being ripped off.
Lee Chivers, from the West Midlands, is a typical victim. "I've been conned out of pounds 1,400 after getting involved with a sale of a Sony plasma TV," he says.
Gary McLaughlin from Ealing, West London, is another. "I found a seller offering a Sony plasma screen but only for approved bidders," he says. "So I contacted him asking to be approved, and two days later my bid of pounds 600 was accepted. I wired money through Western Union and that was the last I saw of it - no plasma, no money, no compensation.
"What really annoys me is eBay's reporting procedures - you've got more chance of Spurs winning the league this season than getting through to them!"
Anna Cirillo from Rickmansworth, Herts, had similar problems.
"Once we realised we'd been had, we tried to contact eBay," she says. "To say that their customer support is fussy and non-user friendly is putting it mildly. They need a central phone line where you can report suspicious activity immediately."
eBay says it has beefed up security measures in the past year, hiring former White House cybersecurity adviser Howard Schmidt and installing better anti-fraud software.
A spokeswoman says: "Only 0.01 percent of listed items result in a confirmed case of fraud and reports of account takeovers are taken very seriously by eBay."
But Craig Muncaster from Redruth, Cornwall, thinks they're not doing enough.
He's started a campaign to raise awareness of the scams, telling people to beware of Italian shipping addresses, pre-approved bidders and wiring money through Western Union.
"The scam artists are making eBay a nightmare to use," he says, "and eBay can't do a thing about it."
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THE MIRROR - 17/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: LONG-DISTANCE MOBILE THROWN A NEW world record (unofficial) has been set for throwing a mobile phone.
Ukrainian Oleg Shvets threw his Motorola StarTAC an astonishing 93 metres (that's 305 feet to most of us...)
And, in a true test of the durability of mobile phones, the handset - miraculously - survived the huge hurl.
"Ninety three metres and it is alive!" said Oleg, which is presumably the Ukrainian way of saying it still worked.
For his feat he received a brand new Samsung V-200 and the chance of becoming an Official World Record holder. "Next time I throw 120 metres," he added.
Previously the record was held by Finnish phone-putter Petri Valta, who chucked a Nokia 5110 a mere 66.72 metres last September.
(The world record for throwing a cricket ball, by the way, is 128.6 metres, set in 1882.)
Whether Oleg's record will make it into this year's Guinness Book of World Record is still unclear.
A spokeswoman said: "There's lots of mobile records but not for this category yet.
"All he has to do is apply for the record and we'll check whether it's been done before and whether the competition was measurable and quantifiable."
The sport of mobile-chucking is slowly gathering momentum. Next month, on August 23, the fourth annual Mobile Phone Throwing World Championships will take place in Finland.
For more information or an application form visit www.fennolingua.fi/mobile.
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THE MIRROR - 15/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: GRAB FAIR SHARE OF THE INTERNET IT'S either the best way of making friends or the fastest way to lose them - sharing your broadband connection with your neighbours.
Thanks to new European legislation, wireless technology and a firm called MyZones, several households within 300 metres of each other can now share the cost of fast internet access.
Two homes sharing a 512 kbs connection, for example, will pay around pounds 17.62 a month each; three pay pounds 11.74 a month and four pounds 8.81 and so on.
But the more people using your network, the slower it gets. If four people are using it at once, the surfing speed is 128k.
Clive Mayhew-Begg, chief exec of MyZones, says: "Sharing broadband is just the start of a new generation of consumer-based internet services."
It starts on July 25 when MyZones will start selling pounds 150 starter kits.
These include a wi-fi wireless technology point and ADSL modem but not the wi-fi adapters you and your neighbours will need. These will cost an extra pounds 60 or so for each computer logged on to the wireless network.
We've not had a chance to test MyZones yet but the theory looks great and the company insists it's a doddle to set up.
Before you take our word for it, trawl through the small print on MyZones consumer unfriendly website (too much jargon), www.myzones.com and if any of it makes sense to you, why not give it a go?
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THE MIRROR - 16/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: 20 YEARS ON, PC IS OUR PAL IT'S been with us for more than 20 years and has finally wormed its way into our affections.
The home computer is now such an integral part of everyday life that most people say they can't live without one.
A study by Packard Bell and Mori found that more than half of UK computer users regard their machines as a "tried-and-trusted friend".
So it's no wonder we stress out so much when it breaks down or catches a virus.
Three out of four (77 per cent) use their PC to organise their homes and lives, while seven out of 10 (69 per cent) use it for home entertainment.
A driving factor in home PC use nowadays is photography, with three in 10 (31 per cent) of users storing digital pics on their computers.
Eighty-seven per cent agreed the PC was becoming increasingly important in our lives and would eventually organise everything.
"People see their PC as becoming the centre of their digital lifestyles, from monitoring the contents of their fridge to banking and shopping," says Graham Hopper, UK boss of Packard Bell.
So far so good, but the second part of the research - about laptops - is a little more worrying. It found that the laptop is a surrogate partner for single people, with one in four owners admitting to using them in bed.
We've got three words for them - get out more!
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THE MIRROR - 14/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: PLAYSTATION'S NEW DOTCOM DOT Evetts may not be Lara Croft but she's about to knock Tomb Raider off the top of the games charts.
Dot, 71, is the face of EyeToy, Sony PlayStation 2's new gaming sensation.
EyeToy is a nifty little webcam that puts you in the picture, allowing your own image to interact with lots of different games.
And, since its UK launch last weekend, EyeToy has already sold more than 200,000 copies.
Sony can't get enough of Dot, from Bracknell, Berks, who plays the dancing bag-swinging Granny in EyeToy's summer advertising campaign.
Dot (pictured right) is the first thing people will see when they buy an EyeToy - as she hosts the tutorial. She's also appearing in 7,000 lifesize cut-outs in shop windows and is touring Europe with Sony to demonstrate how easy it is to play EyeToy. We caught up with Dot in London at the launch of this brilliant new gizmo.
"It's been such fun," said Dot. "But the funniest thing is I'm the most untechnical person in the world.
"Sony gave me a PlayStation but I'm going to have to get my neighbours to set it up for me.
"I think that's why they picked me - because if I can play the game, then anyone can."
"I think it's fabulous and all that dancing is a great way to lose weight."
Dot, a Daily Mirror reader, normally struts her stuff at the more sedate tea dances held in Bradwell, Berks, and has only been acting for nine years.
Her biggest role until now has been playing a game of wheelchair-bound chicken with another granny on TV's Banzai.
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THE MIRROR - 12/07/2003,
WITH AMY VICKERS Amy's i: DIG IT! A NYONE can turn out a decent photograph with a digital camera.
Easier to use than a toaster, they almost all guarantee great snaps - but if you don't like the look of your first efforts, just take another one or touch it up on your computer in seconds.
Digital cameras are now on track to surpass sales of their film-based counterparts later this year.
Not only do they offer all the benefits of instant photography without the waste of film, but these days they're so cheap that everyone can afford one.
We've found two new entry-level pocket-sized digital cameras that do the business.
Oregon Scientific's Eyecam, a two megapix digital camera shaped like a credit card, and Aiptek's two megapixel PocketCam are both good enough for taking photo album quality snaps.
The Eyecam costs just pounds 99.99 and comes with a built-in flash, a preview LCD screen and a short movie function.
The only drawback is there's no slot for a memory card, so you'll only be able to scrunch 20 hi-quality pics on to the camera's 8-meg memory.
Aiptek's PocketCam on the other hand squeezes in a Compact Flash card slot, which vastly increases the number of shots you can take. It also does video and has an LCD display
The cheapest model, costing pounds 129.95, comes with a 16 meg CompactFlash card or you can splash out on a 64 meg card and camera for pounds 149.95 on Firebox.com
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THE MIRROR - 11/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: MP TOM BLINGS IT TO THE YOOF GIVE a politician a website and nine times out of 10 he'll embarrass himself.
But allow a politician to start writing a web log - an online diary - and he'll make an idiot of himself by becoming a cult Ali G-esque comedy figure.
Step forward Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East and blogger extraordinaire.
His bizarre scribblings on his website, www.tom-watson.co.uk, have earned him an unexpected amount of kudos among young voters.
"He's making fun of himself and fuddy-duddy old MPs," says Amy'si reader Jon Stoker, 20, from Nottingham. "But by turning the joke around, he kinda makes himself look cool. Well, cool-ish - even if we think he's a total prat now!"
Watson's infamous attempts at yoof-speak include: "Politics is cool, m'kay? Cut it with the bling bling and do something for the community, man."
And the classic: "Tom's well up on the Interwebnet, and he won't harsh your buzz or dis you down the line."
Now Watson has started a craze among MPs - Lib Dem Richard Allan also writes a daily weblog and next Monday there's a meeting at Westminster, chaired by VoxPolitics.com and Watson, to discuss how Weblogs can change politics.
Groovy.
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THE MIRROR - 10/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: HITTING BUYERS WHERE IT HERTZ POTENTIAL buyers of new technology are turned off by confusing terminology they don't understand, new research says.
It's something we've been trying to tell manufacturers for years - to no avail. Complex terms and baffling techno-babble abound in the world of gadgets and internet.
Nearly 50 per cent of respondents said they were holding off buying a digital camera because they saw them as too complicated.
The same goes for personal digital assistants (otherwise known as PDAs) and home computers, while 62 per cent said they're put off buying something if it looks impossible to set up.
Only three per cent of people correctly recognised all 11 questions in a test which asked people from all over the world to choose from multiple-choice definitions of terms such as MP3, Bluetooth MHz (megahertz), DVR (Digital Video Recorder) and web browser.
The average score was seven questions correct. The least understood technology terms were dpi, megahertz, MP3 and DVR - even among regular or long-time PC users.
"The technology industry must simplify its vocab so that consumers can better understand the benefits technology can bring to their lives," said Patrick Moorhead of AMD's Global Consumer Advisory Board which carried out the survey.
Can you tell your megahertz from your MP3? Take the test and see at www.amdgcab.org. Yours truly only managed 10 out of 11, screwing up on megahertz. Damn!
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THE MIRROR - 09/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NINTENDO HINT AT GAMECUBE 2 THE three big games firms began muttering about launch dates for their next-generation consoles a while ago.
And now Nintendo has upped the pace, rounding up senior execs and sending them out on a mission: hype up GameCube 2 - but don't give too much away.
Insiders are now hinting that GameCube 2, also known as N5, will beat rivals from Microsoft and Sony to market and come out in 2005.
But that won't guarantee victory if gamers can be persuaded to hang on for the PlayStation 3 or the Xbox 2.
Older gamers will remember a similar thing situation with Sega's Dreamcast, crippled when Sony convinced consumers to wait for a killer console rather than buy the first on the market.
Sony is also playing the hype game, with its Computer Entertainment division boss Chris Deering ruling out any chance of the PlayStation 3 launching in the next 18 months: "All I can really say about the PlayStation 3 is that it definitely won't launch in 2004." Bah!
But he had good news for handheld fans.
"Aside from games," he said, "our portable console PSP will play music and movies and carry a price more comparable to Nintendo's Game Boy Advance [around pounds 90]."
And what about the Xbox 2? Its launch date has recently been the subject of much debate after a well-respected Japanese newspaper insisted they had Microsoft chief exec, Steve Ballmer, on the record stating a 2006 release.
They then said it was a typo and should have read 2005.
The upshot is that the next-gen race is still nowhere near being decided; get the timing wrong and the loser might go the same way as Sega.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63862113
THE MIRROR - 08/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: HACKERS GET A SLAP IN DEFACE PARTICIPANTS in Sunday's controversial hacking contest succeeded in defacing a few hundred sites but failed to do any lasting damage to the web.
Worst affected by the flurry of hacking activity was a third-party website that would normally report on website defacements.
The Estonia-based Zone-H.org suffered a denial of service attack, a common way of knocking a website offline by flooding it with traffic, which made it inaccessible until late Sunday.
The widely-publicised Defacer's Challenge failed to vandalise any major websites, instead it was the internet's backwater of small, unsecured sites that took the brunt of the graffiti.
Several of these sites, such as www.hungry-man.ca, still carried their "You've been hacked" messages yesterday.
But most of the web had resumed normal service while security experts and the FBI were being laughed at by the web community for over-reacting.
Six fake defacements websites carried the message: "I panicked over the Defacement Challenge scare and all I got was this lousy defacement."
Was it a total wind-up? Who knows. No one has yet owned up to it and judging by the fact that groups of defacers publicly boycotted the bizarre contest, it certainly looks suspiciously mischievous. But does it really matter? Nothing bad happened, it provided great PR for net security firms and it gave the media a story (guilty as charged).
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63894450
THE MIRROR - 07/07/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: AVRIL WORMS WAY TO FAME GRUNGE pop singer Avril Lavigne has become an unlikely internet star.
The Ontario teenager has been crowned virus celebrity of the year after two email viruses bearing her name made the Top 10 Sophos virus chart (places six and eight).
Avril also topped a music download chart compiled by mobile company O2 following video over mobile customer trials. More than 4,200 tracks were downloaded, of which Avril's Complicated made up the majority.
Naming a virus after a celebrity carries a certain kind of kudos - ever since the Anna Kournikova virus brought servers to a standstill.
The two Avril Lavigne worms account for 5.5 per cent of viruses this year.
Other celebrities used and abused by virus makers include Catherine Zeta-Jones, Shakira, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Sandra Bullock. But Avril, a virtual unknown until a shrewd online campaign in 2002, seems to have caught the imagination of net users/virus writers.
It remains to be seen whether this is a good or a bad thing.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63861393
THE MIRROR - 04/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: WEB AWAITS A HACK ATTACK PANIC set in among the internet community yesterday as government officials warned of an impending hack attack.
The so-called hack-a-thon is scheduled for this Sunday as part of the world's first global Defacers Challenge.
Lock down your servers because if the defacers succeed then the web's going to be in utter chaos this Sunday.
The rules are simple: the first to vandalise 6,000 websites (preferably big corporate sites) in a six-hour period wins.
If no contestant reaches that number, the closest will win. The prize is 500 megs of online storage space and a domain name, apparently.
Given that the element of surprise has gone, what with websites upping their security after government warnings, it might turn out to be tougher than expected.
"My hope is this will be the first of many challenges," says a message on www.Defacers-Challenge.com, before the site suspiciously disappeared.
Home net users who don't run their own websites shouldn't be affected, although they may notice a marked slowdown in website loading times.
That is, if they are allowed to get away with it. The FBI is hunting the organisers. "Hacking is a crime and those who participate in this activity will be brought to justice," said a FBI spokesman.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63817820
THE MIRROR - 03/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: RUDENESS HAS RING OF TRUTH IT seems the mobile phone revolution has turned us into a bunch of lazy, rude and needy liars.
Research by Nokia has found 71 per cent of users are now consistently late for social events because of the option to rearrange via mobile.
Nearly 70 per cent said they often cancel at the last minute using a text message and 78 per cent admitted to copping out in awkward situations by texting rather than calling.
And that's not all. Seventy-four per cent of women said they would lie to their partners if they were in the pub when they should be home. Three in four of us now owns a mobile and Nokia believes they have become an emotional crutch for many.
Twenty-four per cent of users confessed to feeling left out if they didn't get two phone calls a day. For single people this shot up to 46 per cent, while women averaged 30 per cent and men 18 per cent.
A whopping 89 per cent of the survey said people need to adopt better mobile etiquette, such as sorting out ring and message tones so they don't disturb others and refraining from shouting and pacing up and down while on the phone.
Well, perhaps if we all tried to turn up on time there wouldn't be any need for pacing and shouting, eh?
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63815071
THE MIRROR - 02/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: MARCH OF THE SPAMBUSTERS POLITICIANS met the technology industry yesterday to declare war on the plague of unsolicited email.
Ecommerce minister Stephen Timms called for a new global body to fight spam and said governments in Europe, America and Australia were drafting laws to turn spammers into criminals.
"Spam is not just a UK or European problem," said Timms. "Most spam comes from outside. A lot of it comes from the US. Hopefully, it's possible for us to come up with an EU-US solution from our discussions today."
This was the first of many discussions planned to demonstrate to net users that the government is not going to let spam take over email.
Enrique Salem, chief exec of anti-spam software firm Brightmail, said: "It is a good step in the right direction. It's important to raise awareness of the problem and show that the government is working with the industry to solve the problem."
Spam now accounts for nearly half of all global email sent across the internet.
But there are problems over who pays for anti-spam technology and the different approaches in America and Europe.
Meanwhile, the direct marketing industry is keen to make sure that unsolicited email messages are not outlawed altogether.
Our solution: ban them all. It's far too much of a grey area to call some messages spam and others marketing when they all look the same to consumers nowadays.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63811332
THE MIRROR - 01/07/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: HONEY'S THE PHONE BOXER FORMER world welterweight boxing champ Lloyd Honeyghan is going back into the ring... ring-tones that is.
The two-time undisputed champion has set up a business selling mobile phone ring-tones on the internet.
Honeyghan says he wants a piece of the multi-billion pound industry. "I didn't want to do just boxing on my website, TheEyeOf TheTiger.com.
"And mobile ring-tones is a pounds 3billion industry.
"I wouldn't mind a slice of that - hopefully it will set me up to buy my football team, Arsenal, one day."
Honeyghan boasts 1,400 ringtones on his site, including hits like Eye of the Tiger - the boxer's unofficial theme tune.
For fans of that particular Survivor track, the website also includes a complete breakdown of all the lyrics - should you want to sing along.
Altogether now... "Risin' up - back on the street..." Enough! The rest of Honeyghan's rather entertaining site is made up of photos of the champ, boxing news, pay-per-view small-hall professional boxing - and a rather odd message from John Leslie saying welcome to TheEyeOfTheTiger.com.
Honeyghan met Leslie at a dinner before Leslie story broke and says he put it up to drive more visitors to the site. It will certainly do that, Lloyd!
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63808233
THE MIRROR - 25/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: PCs PIPPED TO POST BY APPLE APPLE doesn't do things by halves. Yesterday the computing giant revealed no fewer than seven new products.
They included the fastest computer in the world, the best browser on any platform, a video-conferencing service and a brand new operating system called Panther.
Chief executive Steve Jobs said his latest Power Mac computers could outperform any PC in the marketplace. Even the 2GHz Power Mac can demolish a dual 3GHz PC, bragged Jobs.
The new Macs will use G5 chips, the successor to the ever-popular G4 chip currently used across Apple's entire range, and they'll cost between pounds 1,550 and pounds 2,300 when they're launched in August.
But while Jobs revealed a string of new software - such as the video-conferencing iChat and version 1.0 of the Safari internet browser - he also succeeded in widening the gap between Apple Mac buyers from a few years ago and those who've bought the recent souped-up machines.
This is because these new programs require users to upgrade their computers to at least Mac OS X and 128 megs of memory.
And keeping up with all the latest OS upgrades isn't for the faint-hearted - especially as the old software functioned fine and had drivers that worked with everything.
Even so, Jobs left his press conference on a high note by boasting that the Mac OS X platform and the iTunes online music service have been hugely successful.
He said that OS X now has seven million users and iTunes has hit five million downloads in just eight weeks.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63791259
THE MIRROR - 24/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: IT'S STILL NOT SWELL AT NTL HELL hath no fury like an NTL customer scorned.
The cable company learned that the hard way when it stumbled across NTHellworld.com, a site set up to share NTL nightmares.
The firm was so troubled by the strength of anti-NTL vitriol that it bought the site last year and gave founder Frank Whitestone a job in customer service.
Fourteen months on and, as some predicted, it's all change. NTL has effectively pulled the plug on NTHellworld.com by setting up its NTL Community site, which, it says, will do "nearly the same thing".
"The goal is to create one of the UK's finest interactive customer service environments," reads the blurb.
Turning a blind eye to an NTL-run site with "hell" in the title clearly got too much for NTL's top execs, as, perhaps, did the criticism it was receiving.
Although NTL insists NTHellworld.com will "continue as an open discussion forum", the writing is most definitely on the wall.
Contributors to the forum were typically outspoken.
One said it "sounds like NTL is trying to shut this site by the back door" while another said the "vague" announcement was "a rather long suicide note".
But for those who wish to rail against the firm, hope is at hand... in the form of NTHellworld.co.uk, a virtually identical site, set up by former moderators of NTHell world.com
"It's completely independent," said a spokesman for the new site. "We're never going to sell out to NTL."
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63790853
THE MIRROR - 21/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: EBOOK EARLY JUST like Jeffrey Archer, ebooks have a love-hate relationship with the book industry.
Until now. An industry luminary is pushing for a universal standard that would pave the way to us all reading literary tomes on mini gizmos. If it looked like this little beauty from Matsushita we might just consider it.
The Sigma e-book is just out in China and can last up to six months on two AA-size batteries. The fact that it actually looks like a book and has a decent screen that doesn't flicker all the time might stand in its favour.
The price - pounds 200 - won't, however.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63775924
THE MIRROR - 19/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Today's column edited by BEN RANKIN and KEVIN LYNCH Amy's i: GATES CLOSES ON SPAMMERS THE industry is finally waking up to the fact that the number one net turn-off is spam.
Microsoft is the latest to act, launching legal action against alleged email spammers in Britain and America.
The software giant, owned by billionaire Bill Gates, has accused 15 people and firms of sending unsolicited messages.
It's filed two lawsuits in the UK under the Misuse of Computers Act and 13 in the US under anti-spam laws.
The spam issue is such a big problem, some believe it threatens the viability of email in the future.
We wouldn't go that far, but anything that makes our inbox a bit clearer in the mornings is cool with us.
An estimated 40 per cent of all email is spam, and that number is expected to reach 50 per cent by the end of the year.
Microsoft has joined forces with Yahoo, Earthlink and AOL to come up with ways of defeating the spammers.
Several US states have passed, or are in the process of drawing up, tough legislation to crack down on spammers.
And new EU rules making spamming illegal are due to come into force in October.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63768700
THE MIRROR - 18/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: COURT SETTLES SEX GIVEAWAY A SIX-YEAR dispute over ownership of one of the most lucrative web addresses on the internet has finally come to an end.
The US Supreme Court has thrown out a claim by cybersquatter Stephen Cohen that sex.com is legally his.
The court heard that Cohen faked the signature of the URL's original owner Gary Kremen on a letter transferring ownership to him.
Domain registrar Network Solutions, now Verisign, handed over the web address to Cohen without checking the letter or contacting Kremen.
Cohen used the web address to build a multi-million pound online porn empire - sex.com was reported to have raked in pounds 300,000 a month in ad revenue.
Now Kremen is free to build his own online porn empire but he won't be letting the lawyers go just yet.
He's chasing Cohen for $65million in costs - we wish him luck because the cybersquatter is holed up in Mexico.
And he's also launched legal action against Verisign for handing over the domain to Cohen in the first place.
Verisign says that domain names are not legal property and so it cannot be accountable for giving sex.com away.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63764946
THE MIRROR - 09/06/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: BT'S BEN HAS A BROAD GRIN BT will be popping the champagne corks this morning to celebrate hitting 1 million broadband connections.
That's the target set by chief exec Ben Verwaayen the day he stepped through the doors at BT's HQ 18 months ago.
And coming so soon after the Dutchman's fat-cat salary package was revealed (pounds 450,000 to move house?), bods at BT reckon he is worth every penny. Mmm...
The seemingly impossible target was set last February when BT had a measly 145,000 broadband connections.
We all thought a million by summer 2003 was impossible - but BT, for once, has proved everybody wrong.
"It was a challenging target," said Verwaayen. "But we've made it - it's a great achievement." Yes, the Dutchman done good, turning around a company that until he joined saw broadband as a dirty word.
Price cutting, obviously, was a major factor, but so was making more of an effort upgrading antiquated exchanges.
Verwaayen has also announced a new target (bringing an old one forward by two years). He says 80 per cent of UK households will be able to get broadband by the end of the year.
Perhaps he should start a sideline as a clairvoyant? Not that he needs the extra money.
Verwaayen also - rather graciously - thanked the hoards of local campaign groups who fought to get their exchanges upgraded.
"I hope this news will be welcomed by the hundreds if local campaign groups who have paid a vital role in driving demand," he said.
So big fat smiles all round then.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63731997
THE MIRROR - 07/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: MUSIC BYTHE BEETLES IS it a car... is it an ash-tray... is it the most expensive keyring ever at pounds 100?
In fact it is none of these. The Music Choro-Q (pronounced Cherrokey) a digital music player, cunningly disguised as a miniature Beetle.
Obviously it's from Japan. Where else? And obviously Japanese youngsters are going barmy for them. What we can't tell you is when the Beetles be in shops over here.
Made by toy manufacturer Takara, the Music Choro-Q works when you slot in a Sony memory stick, which presumably you've first loaded with songs from a Sony music product.
As well as cars, Takara is also looking at making music players disguised as mini puppies, cuddly toys and dustbins. Worryingly, this carries all the hallmarks of cult collectomania.
The controls are on the base of mini Herbie while the memory stick slot is the front bumper.
While it errs a bit on the bulky side, you'll be pleased to know he weighs just 50g.
Not sure what happens when the wee fella gets a flat tyre though. Bless!
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63727139
THE MIRROR - 03/06/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: NET CHOKES ON A DIET OF SPAM IT was bound to happen: more spam is now being sent than legitimate email.
According to net filtering firm MessageLabs, 55per cent of email sent in May was junk mail, up from just under 40per cent in April.
As well as annoying the hell out of everyone who doesn't want to buy a Viagra substitute or make $$$$ from home, bulk emails are costing companies millions as they upgrade servers to cope with the increase in traffic and invest in anti-spam software.
And it calls into question the future of the communications medium, which is fast becoming unusable.
If growth continues at 40per cent each months, experts warn of an anti-email backlash.
"It will get much worse," says David Schofield, anti-spam technician at MessageLabs. "We're already at the point where users are killing off their main email addresses because they're only receiving spam."
In October the UK will implement a new European Union directive that bans sending unsolicited email.
But most spam comes from the US and the Far East, so this won't help much.
-TOMORROW: the Amy's i guide to limiting spam
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63711759
THE MIRROR - 02/06/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: TISCALI LEAVES YOU BILL IOUS OUTRAGED Tiscali customers have been getting in touch over the Italian ISP's latest billing fiasco.
They are, quite understandably, furious to have received threatening letters from a debt collection agency that is handling Tiscali's "debtors".
The ISP has apologised, blaming a cock-up at the agency. A spokeswoman says: "Some customers, who should have received a first-stage payment reminder letter, in fact received a debt collection letter."
But it turns out Tiscali is keeping its cock-ups in-house.
The reason it hasn't received any money from these customers is that, er, it forgot to set up their direct debits.
"As a new Tiscali customer," says George Manghan from Cornwall, "imagine my surprise when I received a letter from a debt collector, demanding pounds 59.92.
"After checking with my bank, it turns out Tiscali had somehow forgotten to set up my direct debit plan.
"It's incredible that one of Europe's largest ISPs has got one of the most inept bill collection departments."
Robert Parkin says: "I am worried that because of the incompetence of Tiscali I may end up on a credit black list."
Tiscali refuses to say how many recipients of debt collector letters had not paid because of their own cock-up.
The spokeswoman says: "We apologise to these customers for any concern caused and would encourage them to email us on billing.letters@uk. tiscali.com.
"We promise to call them back within 48 hours."
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63708307
THE MIRROR - 28/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: ERROR OF FAT CONTROLLER MICROSOFT has owned up to making mistakes when it launched its first gaming console, the Xbox.
In an interview with the Daily Mirror, Xbox vice president, J Allard, admitted: "We screwed up on pricing in Europe and we made the box too big and ugly - especially for the Japanese market."
"We can't change the box but we have adapted very quickly by phasing out the fat controller and making Controller X [the smaller one] standard."
"We've basically learnt how to listen."
Never thought we'd see the day when a top Microsoft exec ate humble pie.
But Allard, the father of the Xbox, is not your average Microsoft exec. He was writing his own games at 11 years old and was instrumental in getting Microsoft involved in the internet. His big thing now is the evolution of Xbox.
"At its heart it's a gaming machine but the challenge is to make gaming relevant to more people - that's where its digital entertainment capabilities come in."
So what next?
"We'll start thinking of games differently, more like TV programmes, when instead of taking 18 months to make a game we'll put out a pilot on Xbox Live (the online platform) and see what reaction we get."
"If people like it, we'll start broadcasting new episodes each month for people to download over the network rather than buying on disc."
Sounds like interesting times ahead.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63690247
THE MIRROR - 23/05/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: BROADBAND'S GOING FASTER THE magic two million figure has been reached for broadband internet connections in the UK.
It's a figure that looked impossible 18 months ago.
Attracted by price-cutting and more flexible packages, punters are now taking to fast internet in droves.
But the battle still rages about the lower-speed NTL 128k (now upped to 150k) service, which many still refuse to classify as broadband - even though regulator Oftel, the publisher of these latest figures, includes it in its two million tally.
Seeing as NTL has about 400,000 subscribers to its 150k service (broadband is generally classed as speeds no lower than 512k), not including those figures would take the shine of yesterday's announcement.
Instead, David Edmonds, director general of Oftel basked in the glory of broadband's success.
He said yesterday: "It took two years to reach one million connections, but only seven months to reach two million."
BT yesterday announced 936,000 subscribers to its broadband lines, many of them coming through rival ISPs such as Freeserve, as well as its own BT Broadband and BT Openworld.
So close to a million...
"There's no point trying to fiddle the figures," says BT spokesman Michael Wadley, "we're going to be there soon enough. Our best estimate is midish-June."
Whether BT will so easily reach its next big target of five million on broadband by 2006 remains to be seen.
Only 171,000 people have signed up to its no-frills, no-email BT Broadband service, as opposed to its more useful - and only slightly more expensive BT Openworld service.
BT is playing down the significance of this, but the smart money is on a price cut for BT Broadband when the big one million is announced in June.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63675599
THE MIRROR - 21/05/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS NTL has been ticked off again by the Advertising Standards Authority over broadband claims. But this time the cable company is fighting back.
The ruling, published today, says consumers could be confused by NTL's claim of being "the UK's number one broadband internet provider".
Especially given that 55 per cent of NTL's broadband subscribers are on the suspect broadband 128k package (recently increased to 150k).
NTL must now amend its advertisements to clear up the confusion but is allowed to carry on calling itself the UK's number one.
The initial complaint about this strapline, in case you're wondering, came from Freeserve, which also has an obsession with being numero uno.
Even so, it's a rebuke NTL is definitely not happy about. "We're appealing against the ruling," says NTL spokesman Malcolm Padley, "and have independent research that shows the decision was superficial and flawed.
"The complaint came from FS of course... none of our customers complained. They felt it was fast enough and were happy it was being described as broadband."
NTL's research does back this up, showing that just four per cent of customers expect broadband to be faster than 500k.
But in our experience, not many internet users actually know (or understand) what speed they access the net at.
A spokeswoman for the ASA said NTL was within its rights to appeal. She said: "We have an independent review panel set up to deal with such cases but it's not always successful."
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63668741
THE MIRROR - 15/05/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: SONY'S PLAYING GAMES WITH US THOUGHT gaming was all about sad anti-social geeks playing with themselves in the dead of night? Not any more.
Social gaming, community, online networks and mobility are the new buzzwords floating around the gaming world.
We trekked all the way to Los Angeles for the planet's biggest video games show - EUR3 - to find out what the biggest names in the business are up to.
Newcomer Microsoft was the most impressive, answering critics with the clearest long-term strategy of all the console makers and showing off a fine collection of games.
Sony surprised the crowd by announcing plans for a handheld games console, called the PSP or "our new baby" (Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment). This won't be out until the end of the next year and only the Sony top brass knows what it looks like.
All we know is the PSP will take mini 2.4in discs, have as fab a collection of games as the PS2 and "be the Walkman of the 21st Century".
Given Sony's background and the fact it will have the same computing power as the PSOne, we're inclined to believe the hype.
Nintendo was distinctly lacking in a coherent future vision, basing all its plans on elementary cross-overs between the GameCube and the GameBoy Advance. It may have some decent games up its sleeve (Mario Kart, Pikmin2, Resident Evil 4 and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes) but it's way behind Xbox and PS2.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63648751
THE MIRROR - 09/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: ANYTIME.. BUT NOT JUST NOW BT Openworld did it. NTL had a go. Freeserve wanted to but was scared of the backlash...
Imposing limits on the amount of time customers spend online is the surest way to upset the very people who pay your bills.
Yet Tiscali has become the latest ISP to cap its Anytime unmetered internet service at a measly 150 hours a month - and let customers find out via the back door.
In an email to "heavy users", Tiscali customer services said: "Your current level of usage is adversely affecting the service we can offer other users.
"Please ensure you significantly reduce your usage (below 150 hours a month) or we will have no choice but to terminate your AnyTime access account at the end of the month (May 2003)."
Jean Taylor from Hartwell, Northants, found out the hard way.
"If you go to their package details on the site there is no mention of a limit of 150 hours a month," she says.
"You have to go right into their terms and conditions, section 4.8, before you get a mention of it. The first I knew about it was from the email kicking me off!"
Clearly Tiscali had its head in the sand when BT Openworld and NTL made similar changes and caused the mother of all backlashes.
Steve Horley, Tiscali's ISP director, explained the move: "AnyTime offers flexible use but we have always been clear that it is not designed to be always on.
"Like other players in the market we have adopted 150 hours as a reasonable level, bearing in mind the average AnyTime customer uses under 50 hours per month."
But at least when BT Openworld changed Anytime to 150 hours (yes, there's so much wrong with that sentence) they fessed up first. They now specify exactly what you get when signing up: "you can surf for 150 hours with no internet call charges".
Tiscali, on the other hand, dispensed with these niceties, sneakily moving the goalposts when no one was looking. Naughty or just plain stupid? You decide...
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63628973
THE MIRROR - 08/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Internet Editor PAPER OF THE FUTURE IS HERE THINK about it. Limitless internet. Download the Daily Mirror or the latest Harry Potter instantly in bed. At the breakfast table. On the train. In the loo...
They way we read our newspapers and books is about to change for ever.
Scientists say they've finally cracked "electronic paper" - an ultra-thin screen that can be bent, twisted and even rolled up - yet still show sharp readable text.
The finished article is a few years off, but yesterday's announcement by American scientists heralds the greatest leap in publishing since Caxton invented the printing press.
It might be awful news for lumberjacks, but the E Ink electronic paper will also mean a reprieve for future generations of forests.
Scientists from the E Ink Corporation in Massachusetts, say that the key to their e-paper is a very thin stainless steel foil.
"We have cleared a big obstacle in electronic paper development," says Yu Chen, a research scientist with E Ink.
"This is the first flexible computer screen of its kind ... it's a major step forward."
Another industry expert put it more vividly.
"This will revolutionise everything we read - from newspapers to magazines to books. This has all the advantages of a computer screen crossed with ordinary paper.
"You can fold it, roll it up, stick it into your pocket. And at the same time it's like a computer. A very cheap computer
"Imagine being able to wake up, plug your e-paper on to the internet and load up your favourite newspaper. Then in the evening wipe it off and load up the latest John Grisham thriller.
"Add the ability to watch pieces of video and interactive graphics and you've got the product that will change publishing forever.
"Some say this is the death of newspapers - it isn't. It's their next evolution."
E-paper contains millions of tiny capsules loaded with black and white particles of ink.
When a negative electrical current is run through the circuits behind the capsules, the positive white particles move to the capsule's top; the opposite happens when a positive current is run through the screen.
That way the display can be precisely controlled, giving ultra sharp and quickly changing text.
"In its present form you can already receive images and read books through these display screens," adds Chen.
"But it is still too slow for video because of the switching speed of the electronic ink.
"What we have done is to use a very thin stainless steel foil, on which we actually embed a layer of electronic circuits."
At the moment the size of the flexi-paper can vary from a business card to a computer screen. It can even be made into a watch-sized mini-TV screen or - another idea for geeks who clearly don't get out much - is LCD wall hangings that are constantly changing, or even built into furniture and clothing.
Despite all this promise, today's E Ink e-paper has several limitations. Even though it's as thin as three human hairs (about 0.3 millimetres) it's still too thick to be folded in half without breaking it. And the colour and resolution is not great - at the moment it can only display in black and white or black text on a whitish-gray background.
But then remember how TV started? Or the early white-on- green computer monitors which have blossomed into 16million colours in less than a decade?
Robert Wisnieff, a senior manager at IBM's display lab, says E Ink's breakthrough flexible screen will make electronic screens part of everyday life. "This is a peek at the future," he says. "Eventually, we'll be using lightweight, thin screens as credit cards that could also display the available balance or recent purchases.
"Another possible use is a jacket with a screen sewn into the sleeve allowing the wearer to read email while on the run, check stock prices or access maps in an unfamiliar city."
One more use could be in public transport. Germany's Vossloh System-Technik, a IT company specialising in trans- port, is about to launch signs on e-paper in airports, railway and bus stations across Europe.
Their big advantage is low power consumption and low weight - and you don't need a light to read it.
And as far as passengers are concerned, e-paper displays should be brighter and easier to read because of the improved contrast.
ARIS Silzars, another expert in information displays, says the technology's first outings will most likely be in the form of a flexible ultra-thin, ultra-light laptop.
E Ink is one of several companies working on electronic paper. Philips has also been a pioneer in this area, as have Lucent, IBM and Xerox.
"The aim is to make electronic paper which is flexible and lightweight and can be rolled up and placed in your briefcase or pocket," says Philips spokesman Koen Joose.
"Ultimately, if the display gives enough light and enough contrast, you could have a roll-up television."
The biggest hurdle - making the paper flexible - was passed two years ago when Philips replaced silicon circuit boards with flexible plastic ones.
Since then, e-paper has come on in leaps and bounds.
It's now flexible enough to be rolled into a cylinder about a half-inch wide without losing its image quality.
The page itself can be updated every quarter of a second via a wireless link or the internet.
But the next step is to boost the speed at which the screen can read a new page so video can be screened through it.
Then the next big milestone ... turning a rather bland black and white sheet into a full range of colours.
Not quite time to stop buying your daily newspaper but the day when we beam your Daily Mirror to your e-paper every morning might not be as far away as you think.
Goodness knows what you're going to wrap your fish and chips in ...
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63626067
THE MIRROR - 06/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: SO SICK OF SPAM AFTER 25 YEARS EMAIL turned 30 last year, the internet was 33 and the humble CD celebrated it's 20th birthday.
Now one other major online anniversary has just passed - the 25th birthday of spam.
No, not the delicious tinned luncheon meat, but that irritating junk email that pops up in your inbox.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it was 25 years ago that some bright spark at a firm called Digital Equipment Corporation decided to send a message on Arpanet, the government-backed precursor to the internet.
The message, which went out in May 1978 caused uproar within the Arpanet community - partly because it broke the firm's "acceptable use" policy, but also because it was so badly written. So not much has changed there then.
However, it wasn't until March 1993 that the term spam was used to describe junk mail.
A Usenet messageboard administrator, Richard Depew, accidentally posted the same message 200 times, and was accused of posting "spam", based - yes, you guessed it - on the Monty Python sketch in which restaurant customers are offered spam with everything. The rest, as they say, is history.
Now spam makes up nearly 40 per cent of all email that is sent, which unfortunately means it looks like it's here to stay.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63619320
THE MIRROR - 01/05/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: MIDBAND'S TOO LIGHTWEIGHT SIX months ago, BT grabbed the headlines with a new idea for an internet service - a reasonably fast connection that almost all the country could sign up for.
"Midband" was hailed as a "ground-breaking" way to repackage the old BT 128k network, ISDN, and bring a version of "always on" internet to the 32 per cent of country too far from a broadband exchange to enjoy the wonders of high-speed surfing.
BT's Pierre Danon tantalised us by saying it would be "cheaper, but not much cheaper" than BT Broadband, which costs pounds 27 a month.
Fast forward six months and behold, BT Midband is not so much the poor cousin of broadband as the second cousin, twice removed.
Confusingly, it also seems to be a dressed-up version of BT Openworld's pounds 15.99-a-month narrowband product, Anytime.
There's no always-on email service because of "technical challenges", the default connection speed is 64k (and only gears up to 128k when large files need downloading) and - harshest of all - it will cost pounds 35 for just 150 hours a month.
Thank you BT.
However, we did give Angus Porter, managing director of BT's consumer division, the opportunity to explain how an Anytime lookie-likey can cost nearly pounds 20 a month extra.
"We'd love to have made it cheaper," he says, "but it's 10-year-old technology with limitations and shortcomings.
"We're not going to say it's bread sliced in a different way. It's designed to be better than narrowband but not quite as good as broadband.
"The pounds 35 includes two phone lines, BT phone line rental, which normally costs pounds 11.50, and Openworld Anytime, pounds 15.99; it's actually pounds 3.50 cheaper than the comparable price of BT Broadband."
So that's what Danon meant when he said it was "cheaper".
BT Midband launches on June 1.
Will you be signing up? Emails to Amysi@mirror.co.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63604077
THE MIRROR - 30/04/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: NET NEWS: MAC TO OFFER ONLINE MUSIC APPLE has come up with one of the best music services on the net but there are two things holding it back - it only works on Macs and it only works in the US.
By the end of the year a European version should be ready, along with a PC version.
"There's no legal alternative that's worth beans," said Apple chief executive Steve Jobs.
"It's not free, but it's 99 cents a song - pretty close."
Apple has signed deals with the major record labels to give customers more than 200,000 tracks to choose from, and Apple's iTunes Music Store has already gained the support of the Recording Industry Association of America, which described it as "the Walkman of our age".
Speaking of which, the new service launches with two gorgeous, new, ultra-thin, extra-capacity iPods, Apple's trend-setting digital music player. But we're not going to show you these just yet - you'll have to wait until Saturday's gadgets page to see them in their full glory.
The only drawback to the service is lack of support for the new(ish) OS X Mac operating system elsewhere.
If you update your system to OS 10.1.5 to work with the Music Store, you may no longer be able to get online as most modem drivers haven't yet caught up with OS X.
Other than that, yesterday's announcement was great news for Mac owners, and gives yet another reason to choose Mac over PC.
And for manufacturers, it gives them a warning that they have to start taking Apple seriously.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63597580
THE MIRROR - 25/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: REVENGE OF THE PORN SPAMMER YOU don't have to spend much time online before you're offered penile enlargement, free credit, big breasted women and randy teens - anyone would think the web was the path to untold riches.
Sadly not.
It's the place where uninvited bogus offers flood through email inboxes, and spam disguises itself to con you into visiting pornographic websites.
Spam-buster Brightmail reports that porn spam now represents 19 per cent of all email, compared to 5 per cent a year and half ago. Spam itself represents about 45 per cent of all email.
ISPs such as AOL and BT Openworld are starting to address the problem, stopping spam, as well as viruses, at their servers rather than letting it get to subscribers.
Microsoft also says it will offer new anti-spam features in its upcoming 2003 versions of Word and Exchange.
Meanwhile, the spammers are fighting back. A group of Florida-based porn peddlers have filed a lawsuit against those seeking to stop them.
EmarketersAmerica.org
(love that patriotic name) are seeking to force anti-spam organisations to stop blocking their spam.
A move that has pointless and stupid (because they're admitting to sending spam and can be counter-sued) written all over it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63581035
THE MIRROR - 24/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: HOW TO GET ZERO FROM 3 MUCH as we'd love to say mobile phone newcomer 3 has got off to a cracking start, we can't.
In fact, judging by one colleague's experience, Britain's first 3G network hasn't even got to 1G.
Duncan Lovett, the Mirror picture desk's gadget freak, was offered what sounded like a perfect deal earlier this year.
Staff at 3 were asked to nominate mates who might like to try the whizzy phone network for a couple of months on a ludicrously cheap tariff. A friend of Duncan's suggested him.
The idea was that he would go and show off his fancy bit of kit in the pub, making us all so jealous that we would go out and buy one of our own - or maybe just nick his. Duncan duly signed up to the so-called "VIP" scheme, sent off his pounds 99 deposit, and waited.
His phone finally arrived, a month and a half late, last week. Are we jealous? No.
"I can make it turn on," says Duncan plaintively, "but I can't make any calls. And the battery keeps dying.
"I've spent the past nine days being fobbed off by customer services.
"They keep telling me to be patient as there are lots of problems but my patience is running thin.
"If I am a VIP customer, I'd love to know how their other customers are being treated."
Duncan's Dud 3G Diary starts tomorrow, and continues for as long as it takes to get his phone working. Anybody else having trouble with 3 should get in touch.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63580137
THE MIRROR - 18/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: CLICKING WITH COMICAL ALI THE web has gone mad for the Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf.
The unlikely star of the conflict has become an internet hero with a number of websites and games devoted to him.
The first site - www.WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister. com - crashed within hours of it going up under the sheer weight of visitors.
"Within 12 hours we were getting one thousand visits a second," says Conn Nugent, maker of the site.
Since then, net users have been trading over-dramatic insults like "Wild donkeys", "Louts of colonialism" and "Infidels" via email thanks to www.yourcomicalali.com Making him catch burgers in a game on www.miniworld games .com/monkeymotel/ games/meccadonalds and blurring him into lookalike Bill Gates on http://endzone1.pwp. blueyonder.co.uk/godis great.htm
He may be dead (or maybe that's just another classic Comical Ali spin), but his unique tirades including "God is grilling their stomachs in hell" live on in cyberspace.
Google already has 6,670 listings for Comical Ali and 4,430 under his real name.
It seems people can't get enough of this one-man propaganda machine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63569045
THE MIRROR - 17/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: NOTHING LIKE A GOOD MYSTERY IT WAS an endearing conspiracy mystery that eagerly fed the imaginations of ordinary net users.
Even when the rather amateurish 8march2003.com revealed itself as a marketing hoax, we still appreciated the care and attention of the labyrinthine plot. Now, we wish we'd never bothered.
The "astounding discovery" to "change the world beyond belief" - promised by the website - has become the biggest let-down since green tomato ketchup.
In fact, it's probably the lamest ruse we've even come across.
We were hoping for a clever hoax promo for the new Matrix film. We wouldn't even have minded a massive paranoid conspiracy theory about the end of the world. Anything.
Instead we got a book - and not just any old book but some spiritual ramblings about what mankind has in store.
Thousands of people all over the world followed the far-fetched story unfold via 8march2003.com wondering where it would lead ... but little did they think it would end up being a "New Age, sci-fi adventure" book - The Shift Of The Ages by Jean Nemeyeth.
A new Jeffrey Archer novel or even a guide to watching paint dry would have been better received...
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63567931
THE MIRROR - 11/04/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's I: LYNCH MOB'S DOMAIN CHASE HOLLYWOOD may be drooling over Jessica Lynch's story but a new mystery surrounding America's best known PoW has been feeding conspiracy theorists on the net.
Six days BEFORE her unit was ambushed and she was captured two new domain names of her name were registered, jessicalynch.org and jessicalynch.net
Questions were asked about whether her kidnap could have been faked or whether this was just a spooky coincidence. Records show the sites were registered on March 17, but Jessica wasn't abducted until March 23.
While nothing has appeared on the pre-kidnap registered sites, an eerie message saying "coming soon" has been posted by the sellers, register.com
But before you start to panic, we have tracked down the registrar and can reveal it is merely a bizarre coincidence.
Shenan Reed Golimbu, who registered the web addresses, told us: "I'm the executive director of the Miss New York City Scholarship Organisation and as part of my contract I bought the domain names of our contestants to keep anyone from misusing them. My registering of these sites has nothing to do with Jessica Lynch the Pow."
So there you have it. However, since then, every other domain variation of Jessica Lynch (such as jessica lynch.info) has been registered by Hollywood marketing companies or other individuals clearly hoping to cash in.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63548051
THE MIRROR - 09/04/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: LOWDOWN ON DOWNLOADS.. MUSIC downloaded from the internet is to be recognised by a new official chart.
The official UK download chart will be run by Peter Gabriel's music website OD2 and be used by the Official Charts Company, which puts together Radio 1's weekly chart.
The new chart could eventually be made into a radio show, like the Official Singles chart every Sunday.
Ed Averdieck of OD2 says: "It's about time that downloaded tracks are counted, recognised and elevated from their 'second class' status.
"Digital downloads are taking off, and deserve a chart of their own until the day comes when they're part and parcel of the normal chart."
The first official download chart should be ready in time for Christmas.
If you haven't yet got into downloading music, today is Digital Download Day - a great time to start.
Record companies are giving away free music for a week, with 170,000 tracks from 7,500 artists - including Daniel Bedingfield, David Gray and Atomic Kitten - on offer.
Your free allocation will get you 30 downloads, 300 streams or three tracks to keep.
You've got until April 15 to visit www.digital down loadday.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63540753
THE MIRROR - 03/04/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: SEGWAY GOING DOWNHILL FAST IT was hailed as the transport revolution for inner-city congestion, something that would save the ozone layer and the world and become "bigger than the internet".
But the reality - of course - hasn't lived up to the hype.
One month after Segway, Ginger, IT, or whatever you want to call the Pogo stick on wheels, went on sale in the US, it doesn't look good.
It's proving about as appealing as Christine Hamilton on Viagra - a pointless object that terrifies people.
It's certainly not what inventor Dean Kamen, right, hoped for.
While it would be premature to call the most talked-about scooter in history a flop, all the signs are indicating it's a contender for the tech graveyard of fascinating failures.
Kamen was expecting to sell 10,000 a week, but the word is that sales are actually closer to 10 a week.
Wonder why? Well, several US states have banned their use from pavements, they only reach a top speed of 12.5 miles per hour, they can't travel more than 11 miles without an electric charge - and they cost pounds 3,200 each.
All of that said, I still can't wait to have a go on one.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63518962
THE MIRROR - 19/03/2003,
Amy Vickers FREESERVE'S NUMBER'S UP FREESERVE has become the latest ISP to upset customers over network problems and new connection software.
The UK's leading internet provider recently launched a new "Connection Kit" aimed at making life easier for those on its pounds 13.99-a-month Anytime package but complaints are pouring in.
Keith Clayton in Sheffield says: "When I had three free numbers I always got a good connection, and if downloads were slow, I could switch numbers and it would be better.
"Now the dialler always tries one number first, and it usually gets connected but downloads are so slow it's a waste of time. I can spend 30 minutes waiting for one page to download and often I can't check my Hotmail accounts (via Outlook Express) on the new number."
Colin Smith from Fleet, Hants, says: "I'd use the dialler if only I could get connected to download it in the first place. Even when the connection starts to provide some form of staccato service, it's a quarter the speed it used to be."
A Freeserve spokesman apologised and said: "The two problems are uncon- nected. We've had problems with the network since the start of the year but these have been separate problems that we've addressed. A few more tweaks on the Energis network will solve the issue."
Next Monday, Freeserve is putting up the price of AnyTime from pounds 13.99 to pounds 14.99 a month.
It will also be shortly contacting about 1,500 heavy users (about 20 hours a day) asking them to reduce the amount of time they spend online or upgrade to broadband.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63465567
THE MIRROR - 11/03/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: WEB STUNT IS SUB STANDARD WELL, it's been a long and frankly boring wait, but the mystery behind spooky website www.8march2003.com has finally been revealed.
Followers of the website had been expecting a shocking discovery along the lines of an alien hideout or George Bush's brain.
But it turns out that the "astounding discovery" that will "change the world beyond belief" is a badly mocked-up picture of a submarine on rails halfway up a mountain.
This is accompanied by predictions of "world floods", along with the claim that, "Obviously this is the second Ark built for the purpose of saving the human race."
A big clue that this is all a bit of nonsense dreamed up by someone in advertising after too much Columbian snuff comes at the bottom of the page, which helpfully provides a link to www.mountainsub.com.
This site is registered to an Australian PR company and says that the submarine-up-a-mountain story is designed to market a new product, which will be announced on April 15, if we haven't all died of boredom before then.
"Tell us in one word what this publicity event is about," says the site, "and you could be one of 100 winners of a free special gift.
"Is it for a game, beverage, toy, novel, cellphone, snack, movie, cruise, camera, show, CD, car, boat or vacation?"
But just when you thought you understood what was going on, the man behind the original site tells us that Mountainsub.com is a decoy set up to discredit his theory.
He says we should not to believe anything on the site.
Some big questions, then: who to believe? Whether to care? And how silly is this going to look when it turns out to be an ad for loo paper?
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63437240
THE MIRROR - 28/02/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's: SEARCH GIANT'S WAR OF WORDS THE web's most popular search engine, Google, has called in the lawyers over probably the most positive thing that ever happened to it... being made into a verb.
Net dictionary Wordspy.com has received a letter from Google lawyers demanding changes to the definition of new verb "to google", meaning: "To search for information on the web."
The word Google has become so synonymous with web searching that people (by people we mean mostly Americans) now say such things as: "I Googled your address."
And to make matters worse, the term "Googling" was used in an episode of ER the other night.
But instead of being flattered, as any other internet brand would, Google has taken umbrage.
"Our brand is very important to us, said a Google lawyer, "and, as I'm sure you'll understand, we want to make sure that when people use 'Google' they are referring to the services our company provides and not to internet searching in general."
The term "protests too much" springs to mind.
Trying to police the evolution of a brand name into popular culture is doomed to fail, look at Spam for example.
At first the manufacturers of the delicious and nutritious canned meat tried to fight the growing use of its name as a term of junk email, before it realised it was a losing battle and caved in.
Wordspy creator Paul McFedries has now acknowledged that "Google is a trademark of Google Technologies", and is waiting to hear if that's acceptable.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63401789
THE MIRROR - 25/02/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: NAPSTER'S SITE SET ON RETURN AND Napster just keeps on clinging to life.
The web service that won't say die is heading for a comeback at the end of the year.
And if that's not joy enough, whizzkid founder Shawn Fanning is back on board, telling new owner Roxio - which bought the site's assets for pounds 3.15million in November - how to make a success of the venture.
The file-sharing network which kick-started the MP3 digital music phenomenon will return as a fee-based site.
Roxio's Elliot Carpenter said the new service will be "easy and fun and have the broadest range of artists - and the right price".
Sounds almost too good to be true.
Whether those in charge of music rights will be prepared to work with a company carrying so much baggage is another thing entirely.
Meanwhile, a Dutch company called PGR is causing a few headaches for the record companies. Claiming it "will become to file sharing what the Swiss are to banking," PGR is to exploit a loophole in Dutch law that says ISPs and peer-to-peer file-sharing services cannot be held responsible for users' copyright infringements.
Therefore any illegitimate file-sharing business set up in Holland is exempt from prosecution. Theoretically.
"We intend to enforce our rights not just in the US, but worldwide," says Carys Sherman of the Recording Industry Association of America.
One to watch
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63388047
THE MIRROR - 18/02/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: IT'LL MAKE THE MIND BLOGGLE ONLINE diaries, aka blogging, are about to be catapulted into the mainstream thanks to Google buying Pyra, the web's biggest blog-making software.
Blogging, taken from the combination of "web log", has grown from a few private websites into one of the most popular online activities.
Google, the web's biggest search engine, will now be able to tap into the 200,000 or so blogs running on Blogger's platform, and its 1.1 million users.
It's also bound to encourage millions of users to start their own blogs and have their voices heard on the net.
They're free to start and don't require you to be too computer savvy - you just need to fill in a few details (on www.blogger.com) and press go. They'll even host your site for free for you.
What to put on it? Your views on war, news, kittens, knitting, anything - so long as it is subjective and contains links to other blogs, websites you like and interesting articles. People love reading other people's passionate views and, if you add a "comments" box, you'll soon be running your own online discussion forum.
The Google deal should see blogging become 2003's biggest net craze and put even more pressure on big corporate websites struggling to survive.
Increased numbers of blogs will change the dynamic of online news and info, as members of the net community end up spending all their time visiting each other's websites, rather than the corporate news sites.
To describe this deal as a watershed moment for the fledgling medium is a bit of an understatement, it is the making of a whole new "power to the people" medium. You just watch, this time next year we'll all be blogging.
Find good examples of blogs at www.gizmodo.com, www.nthellworld.com and www.mbites.co.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63363949
THE MIRROR - 17/02/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: HACKED OFF WITH CATH.. YOU have to feel sorry for Catherine Zeta-Jones (OK, not really).
First she was "violated" at her wedding, now she's being "violated" on the internet.
A virus bearing her name has surfaced on various file-sharing networks such as Kazaa, offering nude pics of the over-sensitive star.
But instead of a cheap thrill for net users, opening the file won't give you warts-and-all Zeta-Jones - it'll turn your computer into a target for hackers.
On this occasion, the actress's name has been used to hide a worm called Igloo. Opening this will allow other computer users to hack in and take control of your machine.
But unlike Anna Kournikova, whose popularity once crippled millions of computers all over the world, the Zeta-Jones virus hasn't set many pulses racing. The opposite in fact. Anti-virus experts said only a handful of users had fallen for the ruse.
"It is not widespread as yet but it's important to be on your toes," says Trend Micro.
It seems Zeta-Jones, Oscar-nominated for Chicago, no longer has the pull she once had. Famous names are now regularly used to trick net users into opening viruses, but this particular virus writer must have an ironic sense of humour - using supposed pics of Zeta-Jones just as she's in court fighting over unauthorised snaps.
Whether Z-J will see the funny side of her name being used without permission - and for a negative purpose - is highly unlikely.
She's bound to try to sue.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63361355
THE MIRROR - 10/02/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES TECHNOLOGY may be making our lives easier but it's also making them a lot more miserable.
New research shows that perhaps the Luddites were right after all.
It seems the more we rely on technology, the more stressed we become.
Mobile phones, email, handheld computers and laptops are all contributing to this new form of digital depression, the feeling of being overwhelmed by technology.
"People are now constantly available because the mobile phone follows them everywhere and people no longer switch them off," says Glynn Gatrix of Priority Management. "They get sucked into technology and allow it to control them.
"When it doesn't work for them they get stressed and then, when they try to take a break from it, they get stressed by withdrawal symptoms."
"It's a drug-like dependency that can only get a whole lot worse."
This type of work-related stress is currently costing the UK pounds 3.8billion each year because people are going off sick.
And up to one in three people blame technology for their rising stress levels.
I say smash 'em all up now.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63338144
THE MIRROR - 04/02/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: eBAY BANS SICK SHUTTLE SALES THE web's biggest auction house ebay found itself the unlikely home for scorched debris from the space shuttle Columbia over the weekend.
Within hours of the crash, several lots appeared on the site selling fragments from the doomed shuttle.
One item was described as "Columbia space shuttle debris" with a starting price of $10,000.
Ebay has spent the past two days frantically trying to delete any such lots.
And the FBI has warned that anybody who tries to flog pieces of the spacecraft will be prosecuted and could face up to 10 years in prison and a pounds 350,000 fine. Ebay said: "We have learned to keep an eye out for individuals who might want to list items once a tragic event has occurred, the best example being pieces of the World Trade Center."
"But we believe many items in this case were pranks."
Meanwhile, a hacker group known as Trippin Smurfs has been ostracised by fellow hackers for defacing NASA web servers with a rant about Iraq on the day of the disaster.
Fellow hackers called it "extremely poor taste" and suggested there wasn't a "court in the land that would have much sympathy for the hackers when sentencing."
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63319311
THE MIRROR - 28/01/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: WEB'S PUT IN THE SLAMMER THE net was in recovery mode yesterday following a stressful weekend fighting an extra-potent virus.
Slammer, which first reared its head on Saturday morning, attacked a six-month old security hole in Microsoft Windows' operating system.
The same system Microsoft has always assured customers was secure. (Providing, of course, they constantly download patches to plug gaping flaws).
Those who don't have time to download and install regular "security updates" found themselves hit at the weekend.
In South Korea the internet virtually ground to a halt, and major strains on net surfing were felt in most of South-East Asia, Japan and India.
At the height of the attack over here, one in five emails weren't getting through and downloading information from websites was taking one to two minutes instead of 10 seconds.
It was the most damaging attack on the internet in 18 months, but because it was the weekend it was brought under control quicker than most other big attacks, including Code Red and Nimda.
Unlike them, Slammer spread directly through network con-nections and didn't need email to carry it.
As the worm infected one computer, it then sought out other victims with thousands of probes a second sent out.
But the big question is, could this happen again?
Microsoft spokesman Rick Miller said: "We're working with network professionals to develop better tools, including ones to automatically scan systems for known vulnerabilities."
So that's a yes then.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63282807
THE MIRROR - 20/01/2003,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: FRANK'S SITE IS CAT'S WHISKERS A WEBSITE all about an injured cat and one devoted to celebrity deaths have been voted two of the most popular sites of last year.
Millions of people logged on to cathospital.co.uk to monitor the progress of poor Frank, who was hit by a car.
Poppedclogs.co. uk has become cult reading each time a celebrity, er, pops their clogs.
The best sites of 2002 were selected from Yahoo's recommended list and then whittled down to 12 by a panel of experts.
Frank the cat is now fully recovered - though, as webcams showed, it was touch and go for a while. Here's the rest of Yahoo's best sites of the year: www.aardman.com, www.iusedtobelieve.com, www. rathergood. com, www.play.com, www.iamdyslexic.com, www.ad vertsongs.co.uk, http://film. guardian.co.uk, www.geoex plorer.co.uk, www. medium town.com, www.edu- cation.hs bc.com/ education.
Meanwhile, Yahoo is considering a move into internet access later this year after starting up successfully in the US.
Yahoo Europe boss Mark Opzoomer is looking for partners to share the load.
Yahoo and BT anyone? Or is this the perfect opportunity for Yahoo and Freeserve to get together?
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63218297
THE MIRROR - 06/01/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: HAPPY RETURNS TO THE NET.. AGAIN THE internet has celebrated its 20th anniversary - yet again.
The medium with more birthdays than the Queen is also - depending on who you listen to - 42 and 33 years old.
How is this possible? A major difference of opinion, as ever.
According to some, the most important part in the creation of the internet took place on January 1, 1983, when proper internet protocols were switched on.
The transition from NCP to TCP/IP (what our computers use today) may not have been the sexiest moment in computing history, but it was crucial in leading us to where we are today, surfing away merrily without a care for how it is done.
Until that fateful moment, fewer than 1,000 computers used the primitive protocol fudged together by the US Department of Defense.
Credited with this break-through is Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn.
They're not to be confused with the British father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, who found a way of linking pages together to create the World Wide Web.
Meanwhile, a case-sensitive crusader at the University of Pennsylvania has begun a campaign to resist capitalisation of the word "internet".
Spelling it all lower-case would, says Prof Joseph Turow, send a deeper message to the world, namely that the net is not a "brand-name experience" but as common and as accessible to all as air and water.
Never having spelt internet with a capital letter, Amy's i is right behind you, Joe.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 63242450
THE MIRROR - 31/12/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: MORE PAIN BUT LITTLE GAIN IN 2002 T HE web in 2002 wasn't much of a party. Big sites fell by the wayside (again), MP3 swapping was outlawed and even getting online suddenly involved more daft rules than a reality TV show.
The year started with a big thud from the Public Record Office - a new all-singing, all-dancing census website whose only flaw was that it didn't work.
After crashing whenever more than a few people tried to log on at once, it was taken offline for most of the year.
Meanwhile email, once the thing that would make all our lives simple, became even more of a pain.
Some people simply found their mailboxes filling with spam. Others, including City worker Trevor Luxton and civil servant Jo Moore, found that the ability to send messages instantly and without thought cost them their jobs.
But while viruses continued to knock out individual computers for days on end, the doom-mongers who
said viruses would cripple the web in 2002 were disappointed.
All in all, it was a bad year for the consumer. Internet access
costs went up, websites and email services introduced subscription charges, record companies attempted to criminalise MP3 swappers and copy-protection technology was introduced to CDs.
Meanwhile ISPs continued their low standards of customer service, landing many people with huge phone bills by mixing up their numbers.
DVD players, games consoles and trendy mobiles flew out of shops as price wars resulted in some very cheap offers.
The Xbox got off to a shaky start in March when Microsoft decided to launch it at pounds 299 a throw.
Fast forward 10 months and they're as now going for pounds 160.
Even so, Sony's two-year-old PlayStation2 continued to dominated the market, helped along with must-have games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and The Getaway.
It was also supposed to be the year of next generation 3G phones, but even the hardest working company in this area - the aptly-titled 3 - couldn't sort out glitches and get its service off the ground.
Maybe next year, eh?
PERHAPS the only remarkable thing to have happened this year was BT seeing broadband sense.
Thanks to a new regime at the top, a new common sense attitude to broadband emerged... if you make it cheaper, they will buy it. It was about time, frankly.
Prices fell to an average of pounds 27 a month, demand soared and attempts to extend reach to more than 60 per cent of the country were made. People living in obscure rural exchanges now had hope of getting fast internet - via the demand tracker website.
Whether all that success makes up for the awful BT advertising campaign remains to be seen.
If you've got a net story contact AMY VICKERS at amysi@mirror.co.uk or phone 020 7293 2413
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THE MIRROR - 30/12/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: PUT YOUR FOOT IN IT AWARDS, 2002 SOMETIMES the things people say don't actually come out as hoped - or sometimes their comments come back to haunt them. We love a good clanger here at Amy's i so we've trawled back through the year to find all the suspect comments people in the hi-tech world made this year - and selected the gems. Remember, hindsight is a wonderful thing...
UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR
"I set a target to make the UK the best environment in the world for e-commerce by 2002. We haven't quite made it."
Tony Blair at the e-summit in November
SERVICES TO CYBER WAFFLE
"Britain has the potential to become a technological powerhouse."
Tony Blair, again at the e-summit. If you know what he was on about, please send your answers on a postcard
DESPERATE SINGLETON
"I would have been happy to marry anyone who came up with the cash."
Publicity stunt or genuine marriage proposal? Saddo Kay Hammond tried to get hitched via a QXL.com auction - and failed miserably. Hammond was jilted when a $1billion bid turned out to be a hoax
SUSPICIOUS LOVE-IN
"We're just mates. We're not sleeping together or anything."
Michael Wadley, BT press officer, when asked about BT's cosy relationship with Microsoft
THREATENING BEHAVIOUR
"Say something nice about the pigs, alright."
Damien Peachey, head of PR at BT Retail, trying to stop us saying the pounds 32million BT Broadband advertising campaign was utter crap.
XBOXED INTO A CORNER
"We are not planning a price adjustment."
Microsoft Xbox in January. Price of an Xbox then: pounds 300. Price now: pounds 160
E-COMMERCE COCK-UP
"Our most important consideration has always been the trust and goodwill of our customers. It's a great day for consumers. They are getting a great deal."
Kodak's head of the digital consumer business in Europe, Gareth Jones, makes a stunning u-turn following a long battle with customers who bought an "incorrectly priced" camera for pounds 100.
BACKTRACKER OF THE YEAR
"We can build a fully-integrated model like BSkyB, which makes and distributes programmes over its network."
BT chairman Sir Christopher Bland. A week later, he was forced to clarify this statement.
"We will not become a full vertically integrated media company, like BSkyB and News Corp."
CHECK YOUR FACTS BEFORE SPEAKING
"It couldn't be further from the truth,"
Sports.com PR man when asked to confirm that, a day before the World Cup started, the sports website was in administration. Sports.com is now in the big dotcom graveyard in the sky
DOTCOM TO DOTGONE
"Our attitude has been to be the last man standing."
Gavin Chittick, Sports.com boss
BLAGGER OF THE YEAR
"If you help me, then someday someone might help you when you need it. SO HELP ME and maybe someday, I'll be able to help you."
Cyberblagger New Yorker "Karyn" who persuaded gullible surfers to pay off her $20,000 (pounds 13,605) credit card bill on SaveKaryn.com. Will she turn into a good samaritan? We doubt it.
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THE MIRROR - 01/01/2003,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST YESTERDAY, we struggled as best we could to remember what had happened in 2002.
Today, in a feat almost as impressive, we gaze into our crystal ball and tell you what lies ahead for the world of technology in 2003.
Making predictions is a mug's game, but there are always a few dead certs, especially when it comes to tech companies and the net.
Microsoft and BT will continue to dominate; BT will keep upsetting its rival ISPs - who will find 2003 particularly hard going - and spam and viruses will swamp the net.
The only cloud on Microsoft's horizon is the European Commission, which is close to finishing its four-year anti-trust investigation into the Bill Gates behemoth.
Expect a decision before July. But don't expect it to be too tough. Although the Commission has the power to fine Microsoft 10 per cent of its worldwide turnover if it finds it guilty of breaking competition law, no one should hold their breath.
So is Microsoft above the law? Well, duh.
In gaming, the battle for cyberspace will commence, with The Sims hitting the web and PlayStation2 and Xbox both launching online services.
Games companies have invested upwards of pounds 300million in going online, but will their customers follow them? Watch this space.
This will be the year that recordable DVD becomes affordable, putting the final nail in the coffin of VHS video.
It will also be the year of cool phones and cheap gadgets.
The first 3G next-generation phone - from a company calling itself 3 - will launch (our guess) on 03/03/03, March 3 (and we're not even highly-paid marketing geniuses).
Also in March, there'll be a lot of noise about Segway, a scooter that will set you back about four grand. But don't all rush at once - early buyers will face the wrath of local authorities banning their use on pavements, and road safety experts will call for them to be outlawed on roads.
One tech certainty for 2003 is that spam will reach the point where it kills all the fun in email. Many experts reckon that by July there will be so much spam that punters will demand their ISPs install filtering.
And ISPs will be struggling. Those surviving on already tight margins will fall over, while the big ones such as Freeserve, AOL and Tiscali will reel in cheap offers and go after all-important profits instead. Freeserve could even disappear altogether and re-emerge as Wanadoo. At least its TV ads might be better.
AOL faces a tough year. Troubles at home as US financial authorities comb through its accounts will be mixed with a potential whopping tax bill over here come July when new rules will require it to register as an EU company and pay VAT.
What else? Wireless gadgets and networks will take off in a big way. Americans will think of a way to tax the internet. The Matrix 2 will blow us all away. The net will get weirder. A government website will run smoothly and broadband access will come down to a tenner. Well, you never know...
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THE MIRROR - 27/12/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: TECH A LOOK AT OUR GONGS AT last, the results are in for the first Kelly's i/Amy's i Best (and Worst) Of The Year awards. We deliberated, cogitated and digested thousands of nominations from Mirror readers, spent days poring over your votes and opinions, and pulled out hair at the blatant vote-rigging by V21 and B3ta.com (naughty, naughty).
Yes, it's been a fraught coupla weeks. Some of the winners were clear, some not so. Some controversial, some obvious. So here it is: Part 1 of our reader-choice best and worst tech of the year. Part 2, gadgets, will be revealed in tomorrow's Kelly's i).
BEST ISP
Winner: NTL Runners-up: Virgin.Net, Vispa
NOT always the best service provider for telephone or TV (as Oftel will tell you) but when it comes to internet, NTL has many, many fans. Readers praised it for "excellent service and good customer care". Virgin.Net won plaudits for being cheap and having "good customer service", while Vispa "goes out of its way to sort your problem out... it felt as if Vispa was in my front room," says Romayne Grubb, of Bath.
WORST ISP
Winner: Karoo
THIS is an unexpected category - one we didn't even ask for. So, er, congratulations to Kingston Communications' Karoo... "a company that put the internet landscape back years," said long-suffering customers, who demanded we instigate a new award for this North of England ISP.
CHANCER OF THE YEAR
Winner: V21
FOR sticking the cheekiest blag ever on its website area - and thinking we wouldn't notice a vote-rigging scandal.
"V21 has been nominated to receive an award for the best UK ISP," it said. Sorry to spoil your party, V21 but, er, no you weren't. We asked users to nominate their own.
It continued: "If you would like to vote for us, all you have to do is click on the button below and your vote will be sent to the Daily Mirror."
Did they really think we wouldn't suss this?
BEST WEBSITE
Winner: www.google.com Runners-up: www.b3ta.com, www.bbc.co.uk
THERE could only be one winner - the most popular and useful website in the world, the one that practically everybody uses as their home page. Runner-up B3ta.com did well after a post on its messageboard led to a sudden spike in entries. But we allowed it to remain in the running,because of its sheer brilliance and simplicity. "It's like crack but more addictive," says reader Adrian Witchy. And the BBC... well, what can we say except pounds 250million of public money?
TECH VILLAIN OF THE YEAR
Winner: Bill Gates/Microsoft Runners-up: BT, Friends
Reunited
A CLOSE call between Microsoft and BT. Readers complained about BT customer service, BT senior execs, BT Openworld and BT "for, well, everything!"
But Microsoft pipped it - for making more money than anyone else yet introducing charges for Hotmail, a
strict 30-day expiry and constantly changing the rules.
Readers also complained about Microsoft's "ridiculously expensive software".
And lastly, Friends Reunited's honeymoon seems to be over. Readers nominated it as a villain for encouraging old enemies to reignite their hate campaigns and breaking up too many marriages.
NET CELEBRITY OF THE YEAR
Winner: Ellen Feiss
MANY, many contenders but there could only be one winner - US teenager Ellen... for her services to surreal net obsessions, Apple Macs and the best stoned expression since Ozzy Osbourne.
Don't miss tomorrow's Kelly's i for Part 2: Best and worst gadgets of the year
If you've got a net story contact AMY VICKERS at amysi@mirror.co.uk or phone 020 7293 2413
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THE MIRROR - 26/12/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's I: Websites of the year SO you've guzzled turkey until you're fit to burst, watched enough telly to make your eyes pop and drunk enough booze to pickle a gherkin. Time to sit back and fiddle with your mouse - your computer mouse - and send a Christmas message to Aunt Elsie in Australia. While you're at it, here are a few sites to have a play with. Your very own cut-out-and-keep guide to my faves of the year...
www.mirrorgameplay.co.uk
ONE of our own, and for today can we recommend the Sober Santa game. Register for free (you don't have to buy credits unless you're entering the money competitions). Use the arrow keys to help Santa eat and drink his way through Christmas without electrocuting himself on the trainline.
www.hungover.net
WELL it is Boxing Day after all. Festive relief for those who've burnt too many brain cells.www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com
BECAUSE everyone should have a nice cup of tea and a sit down every once in a while. And a biscuit.
www.quizyourfriends.com
BE YOUR very own Chris Tarrant and set impossible questions for your mates via email.
http://home.iae.nl/users/franklin
BRILLIANT homage to the classic boardgame Battleships. Turn up the sound for the full effects.
www.citycreator.com
CREATE your own city from pixelated bricks, walkways and people. Save your picture and make it into a mug.
Well, why not.
www.seethru.co.uk/zine/south_coast/helicopter_game.htm
BIT of a tricky one - fly your helicopter through the course without hitting anything. A lot harder than it looks.
www.whosaliveandwhosdead.com
SETTLE pub arguments with this unbeatable guide.
www.robertobaggio.com/games/index.html
SERIOUSLY addictive free- kick simulator.
Be warned, you could end up playing this for hours on end.
www.fhm.com/games/topgames/launch.htm
PICK from 100 different original online games. Something for everyone.
www.braball.com
RECYCLED feminism for the Noughties.
www.maylin.net/Fireworks2.html
MAKE your very own fireworks display - without the cost, the cold or the danger. Just use your mouse to light up the sky with rockets. Nice.
www.glennhoddle.com
NO, not a cheesy homepage for the cliched one, but a piss-take in the style of net legend Mahir "I kiss you" Cagri.
www.falafelgame.com/eng/falafelhome.html
ODDBALL kebab-based game.
If you've got a net story contact AMY VICKERS at amysi@mirror.co.uk or phone 020 7293 2413
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THE MIRROR - 27/11/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: COUNTING ON THE CENSUS ELEVEN months, three weeks and two days.
That's how long it has taken to fully resuscitate the 1901 Census website, after one of the most disastrous launches in the history of the web.
At last, families and historians can search the archive to find those who lived during that period in England and Wales - seven days a week, 24 hours a day
It's been an experience following the ups and downs - mainly the downs - of the beleaguered site.
Though to be fair, it has been searchable since late August - when it was switched on between 9am and 7pm, Monday to Saturday, and a queuing system introduced.
But since when was the web limited to shop hours? A spokesman said: "It's been 20 hours a day since August (eh?), now it's just going that extra four."
"It's been fully tested so we're not expecting it to overload this time."
Fingers crossed. So come on then, no holding back, give it a good thrashing at www.census.pro.gov.uk and see if all those millions of public money have been well spent.
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THE MIRROR - 26/11/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: BEEN AD BY BT OPENWORLD? BT OPENWORLD'S cheesy TV ad which showed punters raving about the AnyTime service has been banned.
Not for the pass-the-sick-bucket glowing testimonials (sadly) but for misleading people to believe they could use the service at any time without having to worry about costs.
No longer the case. AnyTime is now only 150 hours a month, and any time over that is charged at 4p a minute during peak hours.
Amy's i readers described the move as "scandalous". "I feel cheated," says Andrew Myers from Coventry. "I signed up after seeing those adverts thinking it sounded like an honest service.
"They changed it two weeks after I'd signed up."
BT Openworld's defence? It pulled the ads off-air on September 22 - a week before the terms and conditions were changed.
"The advert accurately described the AnyTime product which was on offer at that time," said an Openworld spokesman. "Any new TV ads will explain the new terms and conditions."
But the Independent Television Commission isn't impressed.
The watchdog has banned the ad from ever being shown again, on the grounds that simply saying "online session limitations apply" isn't giving potential customers enough warning.
But one massive inconsistency remains - the name. "No plans to change," we're repeatedly told. Isn't it about time somebody looking after Trade Descriptions told Openworld what "Any time" means?
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THE MIRROR - 20/11/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: EASE UP ON THE NAME, STELIOS WHAT'S in a name? When it has got "easy" in it, then everything, according to easyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou.
He has fought (and is still fighting) domain-name disputes with fellow easy companies - such as Easyart, Easycar, Easypeazy and Easygetaway - on the basis that "if somebody starts a business today called "easy" something, then it is an attempt to capitalise on our name." We can see his point.
But we can also see the point of easyodds.com, a three-year-old betting business that is willing to go to the High Court to keep its name.
After failing to grapple the name easyodds.com from them last year, easyGroup then applied for easyodds' company trademark.
Justification? "At one stage our easyValue was considering introducing a category comparing the odds of online bookmakers," said a spokesman. But it didn't, right? EasyGroup's other gripe is when easyodds started.
"It didn't register its domain name until after the beginning of 2000 - when we have a strong claim to rights in the 'easy' name."
But Tony Plaskow, director of easyodds.com, said: "We actively don't want to be linked with easyGroup or Stelios, and we have a disclaimer on our site saying that.
"Stelios has a blinkered view of what his brand stands for. We prefer not to be linked. We are certainly not trading off their brand name - our 26,000 members came to us because of our service, not the name."
NEVER underestimate the power of the TV. Punters hitting the red buttons on interactive TV raised pounds 668,000 for Children In Need this year, pounds 200,000 more than last year. Internet donations pulled in pounds 391,318.
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THE MIRROR - 08/11/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: A TOUCH BETTER THAN A LAPTOP TABLETS may be something you take when you're ill, but they're also the latest evolution in computing.
This week sees the launch of Tablet PCs from Toshiba, HP Compaq, Fujitsu Siemens, Research Machines and Acer.
They are a re-invention of a laptop with bells on.
They look like laptops, but the difference is they're touch screen, so you no longer have to fiddle about with a mouse.
Instead you can draw/write straight on to them and send handwritten emails for that more personal touch.
Handwriting recognition may not be quite there yet - Amy Was Here came out as A merralri, whatever that is. Also, the lack of application software - they use a special Tablet XP operating system - may also zap enthusiasm, but they are very pleasant to use.
The cost is set to be high at first - between pounds 1,500 and pounds 2,000 - but that will come down as more Tablets go on sale.
Pupils put the Microsoft Tablet PC to the test: Page 59
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THE MIRROR - 07/10/2002,
with AMY VICKERS Amy's i: Des Lynam and Super Mario SEPARATED at birth - Des Lynam and Super Mario. In the weirdest sponsorship we've seen, Nintendo has bought the rights to Des Lynam's furry moustache for a whole year.
This week Lynam proudly sported his new GameCube purple moustache for a photo call. Wonder how long before it's back to its normal colour and Des forgets all about his long-lost brother?
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THE MIRROR - 01/10/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: BT CAN SCREW YOU, ANYTIME BT Openworld's tenuous grasp of the English language has taken a turn for the worse.
The internet service provider's latest definition of "AnyTime" - having already changed it several times - is now a measly 150 hours of internet time each month.
Totally opposite to the meaning given by the dictionary, where the definition still suggests "AnyTime" means: "At any time".
Rivals of BT Openworld are baffled - as are we and as will be AnyTime customers when they check their inboxes this morning.
David Hobday from Telewest said: "Consumers could easily get lost in an internet fog and BT's not helping matters with its dunce-like behaviour.
"Perhaps it should go back to the classroom to learn the correct meaning of 'any time'."
Any plans to change the name then? None whatsoever, says Alison Ritchie, chief exec of Openworld.
"AnyTime means people can use it at any time but it's not an always-on product," she explained.
"It's a fair policy, which will only impact about three per cent of our users."
Thing is, when you have 850,000 subscribers, that's at least 25,500 extremely annoyed people you're sending right into the laps of rivals.
But when the bottom line is BT shareholders wanting to see profit, BT Openworld has to be ruthless.
BTO has been restricting daily usage for the past year, insisting "heavy users" ruin the network for everyone else. What they really mean is that "heavy users" should be paying an extra 14 quid a month for broadband or stop milking their profits.
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THE MIRROR - 24/09/2002,
Amy Vickers AMY'S i: FREESERVE ON THE LAW PATH NEVER a company to shy away from a good old scrap, Freeserve is getting its lawyers out this week in its ongoing battle with telecoms giant BT.
The UK's biggest internet service provider is hacked off at the way BT exploits its dominance of phone networks to further its own internet business.
It's a familiar tune, but this time the people at Freeserve are particularly peeved that BT is allowed to promote its new broadband product - "No Frills" BT Broadband - through the telephone bills it sends out to 20 million customers.
It claims it's against the law - and it's demanding the Competition Commission do something about it.
Monopolistic tendencies are unavoidable if you're a company that used to have a monopoly, but BT is supposed to be playing on a level field.
"BT enjoys certain unmatchable advantages because of its near-monopoly in residential telephony," said a Freeserve spokesman.
"Exploiting these advantages should be of utmost concern to the telecoms regulator, competition authorities and public policy makers."
The latest spat comes just as BT launches a pounds 10million advertising campaign announcing that "Broadband has landed".
Any campaign of this magnitude has to be a good thing, but having seen the concept - pigs on bikes - we're not entirely convinced.
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DAILY RECORD - 05/09/2002,
AMY VICKERS MONEY: NAPSTER FINALLY SILENCED INTERNET music service Napster finally sounded the Death March yesterday.
The firm's remaining 42 workers were fired after a US bankruptcy judge blocked the sale of assets to chief investor Bertelsmann.
German media and music giant Bertelsmann tried to buy the remains of Napster for pounds 5.8million, having already sunk pounds 55million into the company to keep it afloat.
But rival record labels objected vigorously, prompting Delaware Judge Peter Walsh to kill the deal over "conflicting loyalties".
Napster boss Konrad Hilbers said: "This can only mean liquidation for the entire company.
"I disagree totally with the judge."
The music-sharing network said goodbye to its fans through its website by drawing an image of the Napster cat on a tombstone next to the words "Ded Kitty".
The service was forced offline last year when major record labels brought a music piracy lawsuit.
One music industry observer said: "At least it means it won't be coming back as a paid-for service, which would have gone against everything that Napster stood for."
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THE MIRROR - 04/09/2002,
with AMY VICKERS Amy's i: APPLE'S GIRL IS AN ELL OF A HIT WHAT goes "beep, beep, beep", has a gigantic internet following and is said to be stoned?
It's Ellen Feiss - the "star" of the latest Apple Mac internet campaign to get people to switch from PC to Mac. And also the latest internet folk legend.
Never heard of her? One visit to www.apple.com/switch to watch her video and you'll soon be telling all your friends about her.
Devoted Ellen fans have already put together several websites (such as www.ellenfeiss.net) and even launched a range of merchandise.
Why has a seemingly normal American student become so famous, so quickly?
The boring bit is that her dad's computer ate her homework and she switched to Mac. She also agreed to make a 30-second ad about it. What she did during these 30 seconds has made her the hot topic of net messageboards all over the world and created 2,800 entries on Google.com
Ellen's popularity stems from two things - her slightly slurred speech and a glazed expression. Oh, and the cute way in which she imitates her "berserk" computer going "beep, beep, beep".
Hard to believe so much has come out of a 30-second ad, especially as it has never been aired on TV.
While interest in Ellen is still growing, she hasn't said a word - and Apple is trying to protect its hot property.
"She's just a teenager who loves her Mac," is all they'll say.
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THE MIRROR - 26/08/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: BT COURT OUT ON LINK ACTION IT was the court case that made BT the laughing stock of the internet community.
What's more, it was one that the telecoms giant admitted privately it could never win.
Yet, bullishly, BT still pursued its patent claim on hyperlinks for almost two years. During that time it wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds, not to mention the time and effort of a New York court.
Had BT won the case, it would have destroyed everything good about the web today, because hyperlinks (quick website links) are so fundamental to everything about net surfing.
Thankfully, judge Colleen McMahon saw sense and threw out the absurd patent infringement case BT brought against the American ISP, Prodigy Communications. McMahon said: "The patent claims revolved around a central computer - a single device in one location.
"The internet is an entirely different beast from the system described in the patent."
Officially, BT says it has not decided whether to appeal, but, unofficially, BT staff would rather put this embarrassing episode - which it inherited from former bosses Peter Bonfield and Iain Vallance - behind them.
When new chairman Christopher Bland arrived, he let the court case go ahead on the basis that "everyone sues in the States anyway".
They might all sue but not everybody wins, as we've finally seen.
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THE MIRROR - 07/08/2002,
Amy Vickers Amy's i: CHALKING IT UP TO EXPERIENCE CONFUSED by all the talk about wireless networking and the new street internet craze called warchalking?
You're not alone. Wireless internet has been a long time coming yet, all of a sudden, it seems to be arriving - somewhere.
But it's still surprised the companies which have developed new wire-free networks to rid their offices of cable clutter. The problem is, their networks aren't fully secured so they leak on to the streets.
Cue freeloaders making the most of this waste, but the companies involved think it is theft.
Warchalking has already been called the Napster of internet access, so don't be surprised if it all ends up in court. What do you need to know about wireless? It's fast - broadband speed - internet without wires. It works like infrared. Just pop a pounds 70 wi-fi (Wireless Fidelity, although no one uses the full words) network card - such as the one pictured - in your laptop and do an automatic search for available networks (more info at www.warchalk ing.org). Hey presto, free internet access outdoors. Apple ibooks with Airport adaptors don't even need any extra bits as the wireless network card is already in their machines.
This is the future of the net - much to the annoyance of mobile phone groups who invested in 3G licences. The last thing they want is people preferring wi-fi to their next generation phones.
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THE MIRROR - 29/07/2002,
AMY VICKERS Amy's i: ONLINE CENSUS WATCH: DAY 208 LEST we forget, it's 208 days since the 1901 Census website appeared, then suddenly disappeared without trace.
Bad planning was blamed and we were told it would reappear in weeks. Nearly seven months on, and a new statement has finally appeared on www.census. pro.gov.uk.
But don't get too excited, it's yet another lame excuse: "Unfortunately we still cannot give a firm date when the 1901 Census Online Service will be fully functional ... blah blah blah ... continue to make technical improvements ... blah ...tests are completed ... blah ... hope to complete this public testing phase by mid to late August."
Don't hold your breath.
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