Barcodes are a part of everyday life, and their utilitarian design reflects this through and through.

Barcodes need not be so drab and humdrum however, as these custom barcodes from Japanese firm D-Barcode show.  All these barcodes work, and as companies need to find new and interesting ways to be competitive, whose to say that charming barcode art might become common place?

Source: Gizmodo

Isn’t broadband wonderful?  Back in the days of dial-up, always on, high-speed internet, that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg seemed a long way off.  But as tends to happen with computers, things moved very quickly and now in 2010, internet speeds of tens of megabits are pretty much the norm.  Well, that’s how it is for most people anyway, but for some people in the UK, broadband internet is still a tricky thing to get.  In more remote areas of the UK, dial-up is the best you cam hope for, and the provision of at least basic broadband has become a hot, although minor, issue for politicians.

The current government target is for every household in the country to have access to broadband of at least 2Mbps by 2012, which is considered the minimum requirement for watching videos online, but the current opposition, the Conservatives – who have a very good chance of taking the reins of power this year – have proposed a new and much more ambitious plan for the county.  Under the Tory plan, the ‘majority’ of homes in the UK – a vague term at the best of times – will get access to broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps by 2017.

Perhaps I’m just a pessimist, but this sounds like a pipe dream to me.  The government’s target speed may be a little on the low side, but it at least sounds feasible, whereas constructing the infrastructure for speeds of up to fifty times that in just seven years, especially without a solid plan to finance it – the Conservative plan calls for ‘private investment’ with the contributions from the BBC license fee making up any shortfalls – seems like a promise that the conservatives simply won’t be able to keep.  The other parties in the House of Commons didn’t fail to spot this either, with both Liberal and Labour MPs attacking the idea and its ill-defined funding plan.

The internet is a big part of my life, both personally and professionally, and so I recognise the value of a more connected world, and a country buzzing along at 100Mbps is a very appealing idea, but the Conservative plan is going to need a lot of refinement before it becomes feasible.

Several large net-based US corporations have written a letter of support for the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality push.

Amongst the signatories to the letter are the chief executives of Google, EBay, Amazon, Sony Electronics and Facebook, adding their voices to the FCC’s opposition of the tiered internet structure proposed by some ISPs.

The letter makes the argument that an open internet allows sites to compete on content alone and reads:  “An open Internet fuels a competitive and efficient marketplace, where consumers make the ultimate choices about which products succeed and which fail.”

“This allows businesses of all sizes, from the smallest start-up to larger corporations, to compete, yielding maximum economic growth and opportunity.”

ISPs and Telecommunications companies disagree with this assessment however, arguing that a tiered service is the only way that a reliable service can be assured for the future.

Obviosuly, as a company whose life blood is the internet, we’re vehemently against any form of preferential treatment for those with deeper pockets.  If the infrastructure of the net needs a little boost, as they seem to suggest it does, we’d rather they found some other way to fix it.

Source: BBC

A recent poll has shown that the majority of Britons oppose the idea of an internet ban for filesharers.

The poll, conducted on the website YouGov, showed that nearly 70% of those polled opposed the idea of filesharers being ‘cut off’ by their ISPs, instead favouring trials by courts for those accused, making government plans to push ahead with such a plan suddenly seem quite intractable.

Despite ministers insistence that disconnection would be a last resort, the poll showed that the idea could potentially sway elections, with 31% of those polled saying that they would be much less likely to vote for a party that endorsed the idea.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, the organisation that commissioned the YouGov poll, called the government’s plans extremist: “Clearly Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, is out of step with public opinion and should think again.”

However Sion Simon, the minister for the internet, insists that the government will not allow arbitrary disconnection.  Speaking in the Birmingham Post, he said: “As a first step, where rights holders identify unlawful activity, ISPs will be obliged to notify accountholders that their account appears to have been used to infringe copyright.

“ISPs would also be obliged to keep anonymised records of the number of times individual subscribers are identified breaking the law,” he continued.  But in the weight of such overwhelming disapproval for the idea, will the government be able to stick to its guns on this difficult issue?

Source:  The Guardian