The worst thing about music piracy is the people who look at their online thievery as a political gesture… as striking a blow to an imagined man. If they just said “Everyone likes a freebie don’t they?”, it wouldn’t be half as bad.

However, it has become something of a political hot-potato thanks to governments wading in to try and stop people robbing music. They’re doing this by waving a bit of paper around with DIGITAL ECONOMY BILL IS GONNA GETCHA written on it in permanent marker.

The debate over illegal file-sharing and how to combat it has seen sensible people stood in the middle, abuse and red tape flying over their heads. They must be wishing both parties would just piss-off and die in a bus-shelter or something.

One thing that the majority agree on is that the Digital Economy Bill is a steaming dung-pile which is neither use nor ornament. The latest person to say so is the boss of British Telecom (who isn’t exactly a nice guy, let’s be honest).

BT chief executive, Ian Livingston, says illegal file-sharers should be fined rather than having their accounts cut off. He and other industry figures have written to the Financial Times asking for changes to the bill.

Livingston says plans to suspend internet access for file-sharers goes against natural justice and that, instead, fines or a scrap in court would be much fairer.

He said this alternative approach would “create a fund” and “you get some good, rather than getting some hurt out of people infringing copyright”.

Feel free to point out BT shortcomings in the comments.

[BBC]

A telephone, yesteryear.

Scores of you nominated BT in our recent Worst Company In Britain 2009 competition, and the widely loathed company have just snuck out another reason for you to nominate them at the end of 2010.

From April 1^st, the beginning of the period when customers can make free evening calls will move back an hour, from 6pm to 7pm in a move that is bound to enrage millions of BT customers.

According to The Guardian, the announcement will be tucked away at the bottom of a letter and email sent out to customers this week entitled “Important information about your BT service.” You know, the sort that most of us rarely bother to read. Those who don’t bother to read it will find out all about it post-April when their plumped-up bills arrive full of charges for calls made between 6pm and 7pm.

But we don’t want you to think that BT are a gang of cack-eyed time thieves because they’re not. They’ll be pushing back the free evening call period, which will now end at 7am instead of 6am. Great news for those of us who like to wake up at 6.05am and ring up a chum for a good natter.

In a weak attempt to justify the cash-grabbing move, a BT spokesman blah-di-blahed “We’ve looked into it and 6pm to 7pm is a busy time for calling, but it’s the time when people make short, organisational calls. It’s between 8pm and 9pm when they sit down to have a chat.”

Oh. That’s alright then.

EDIT: There was a colossal, White Lightning-fuelled cock up which saw Barclays incorrectly put through from round two instead of Royal Mail. So we’ll have to start again. We’re extending the voting time until noon tomorrow. Apologies for any upset, confusion and loss of sleep you may suffer from because of this technical error. (Thanks to keen-eyed avid reader Digital E)

It’s now semi-final time in Bitterwallet’s Britain’s Worst Company of 2009 voteathon. From the original 32, we’re now down to the eight shittiest companies according to you, our avid readership.

We’re altering the format slightly for the semis and over the next two days you’ll have the choice of four companies per day for y’all to direct your rage towards. The top two from each showdown will make it into next week’s pre-Christmas final.

Today’s quartet of consumer crapulence are eBay, BT, Phones4U and Barclays Royal Mail. Ugh – just typing out their names makes us want to vomit chunks into a pail.

You’ve got until midnight tonight noon tomorrow to cast your vote and you can check out the pretty-bloody-close-actually outcome of yesterday’s final second round tussle between T-Mobile and Orange here. Ooh, it was a tight one.

There’s also a rundown of all of the results so far here. Check back tomorrow for the second semi-final. Tense doesn’t even begin to describe it all…

It’s day two of the second round of Bitterwallet’s Worst Company In Britain 2009 marathon, and today sees a veritable Battle Of Britain as British Gas and BT go toe to toe in a bid to hoover up your votes of hate.

Which of them have bothered you the most over the past year? Tell us, and the shabbier of the lousy pair will make it through to the quarter finals of the competition that is directly responsible for The X Factor being axed before this weekend’s grand final owing to lack of interest.

As usual, you’ve got until midnight tonight to decide who you hate the most. While you’re pondering that, find out who made it through between Halifax Bank Of Scotland and eBay, check out all of the results so far or print out this small, free poster, which will give you an easy guide to who’s made it through to round two.

Sir Michael Rake, seen here thinking about his broadband

It’s a PR gaffe up there with Gerald Ratner calling his stock ‘crap’ and Virgin’s Richard Branson revealing that he wasn’t actually a ‘virgin.’

It’s BT chief Sir Michael Rake, who, it has emerged, is the only gay in his village. Hang on, that’s not right, and we’d like to wholeheartedly apologise to Sir Michael and gays everywhere.

No, the truth of the story is that Sir Michael is the only person in his village of Hambleden (on the Oxfordshire/Buckinghamshire border) who has broadband. So what, you might roar. Perhaps the other inhabitants of the sleepy village are living in the 1950s and the idea of broadband is as alien to them as Grange Hill or Fatboy Slim.

Sadly, that isn’t the case. The grim reality is that BT chairman Sir Michael Rake is the only person in his village with broadband because everyone else has been told they can’t have it. Oh. That’s not good. Is it?

Former BT chairman Buzby. Died before broadband was invented.

But before you all get irate, there’s a perfectly good reason for this tawdry-looking state of affairs. BT are desperate to bring broadband to the good people of Hambleden and Sir Michael is a mere guinea pig in a trial that his company are carrying out. Because they often use staff in their trials you know, and that’s all Sir Michael is – an honest to goodness member of staff.

One of Sir Michael’s pissed-off neighbours is recruitment firm head Gary Ashworth – he’s been waiting for fast-access internet for the past five years and Sir Michael’s BT told him it would cost him a fairly-hefty £168,000 to make. Yes people, that’s £168,000.

Mr Ashworth told Sky News that Hambleden wasn’t on the original list of villages that were included in the trial – the trial that Sir Michael Rake is now taking part in at the expense of his fellow villagers.

That, people, is what’s known as a perk of the job. A metric fuckton of a perk.

Now this is a little scary. TorrentFreak is tonight reporting that lawyers in the UK have been granted court orders which “force ISPs to hand over the details of individuals who they say have been monitored sharing hardcore pornography”. According to the site, up to 30,000 individuals – as many as 25,000 BT and 5,000 customers of other ISPs – will be receiving “shock letters demanding big payments” during the coming weeks.

Last week at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, a firm called ACS:Law made applications for orders that force ISPs to hand over the names and addresses of subscribers that are claimed to have infringed their client’s rights. TorrentFreak states the orders related to around 30,000 IP addresses in relation to nearly 300 movie titles.

These aren’t the first such orders to be published – there’s plenty more reading on the topic at TorrentFreak and the website BeingThreatened (which provides advice to innocent parties receiving letters from ACS:Law).

It’s another day, and here’s another pair of companies who have cheesed off enough of you for them to make it on to the shortlist of Bitterwallet’s Worst Company In Britain 2009 competition.

Today’s pairing sees United Utilities square up against the shitty might of BT – which of them will progress into the second round?

Your votes will decide and you have until midnight to make your voice heard.

During their recent annual shareholder meeting, BT announced it would be moving a significant number of customer service roles back to the UK from India. The news was met by a standing ovation – BT has hardly been the poster boy for customer care in recent times.

The roles aren’t expected to be repatriated until next year, but in the meantime if you’re struggling to get anywhere with your complaints, you can turn to Twitter. According to BT employees who have spoken to Bitterwallet, the company dipped a toe in the waters of Twitter with a single employee answering customer queries and ensuring they were dealt with. That was so successful that BT have now put together a team of ten staff at their Enniskillen customer service centre for dealing with residential customer complaints.

Not only do they answer queries put to them directly on Twitter, but the team are continuously sifting through all the Twitter messages looking for individuals complaining about BT and offering to help them resolve the issue. According to our contacts, the probability of having your complaint successfully dealt with is astronomically higher through Twitter than by calling Customer Services.

Smart. You’ll find BT on Twitter at @btcare – let us know if you try them out and how you get on.

It started out as a twisted Valentine’s Day present in the form of an announcement by Phorm, a U.S. digital technology company. Phorm announced on Feb. 14 that it had signed deals with UK ISPs Virgin Media, Carphone Warehouse, and BT to place Phorm’s technology on their networks, where it would access users’ datastreams, unless the users opted out.

Yesterday, it appeared that Phorm’s romance with the three ISPs came to an end, with BT’s announcement that it was, for the time being, abandoning the idea of partnering with Phorm to sell clickstream data to advertisers.

The EU and various Internet privacy groups raised a ruckus over the plan that Phorm would use so-called deep packet inspection in a behavioral ad targeting service, where advertisers would pay for the datastream information so that they could more accurately target online advertising. Phorm would split the advertising revenue with the ISPs that it signed deals with.

In April, the EU took the UK to task over its implementation of some of the EU rules on confidentiality of communications, threatening to take the UK to court if they did not alter their laws on the matter. But it isn’t just European countries that believe Phorm to be in, well, bad form.

Even though the company swears that all data collected is anonymous, last August, Congressional hearings in the U.S. caused cable TV giant and ISP Charter Communications to drop its plans to use NebuAd, a company with techniques similar to Phorm’s. NebuAd folded earlier this year.

Part of the squeamishness various governments and privacy groups have experienced has to do with the fact that Phorm, which is based in Delaware in the U.S., used to be called 121Media, an adware company. While privacy groups considered their product to be spyware, 121Media always hotly denied this.

According to Financial Times, after BT’s announcement Monday, shares in Phorm dropped by 40%. For its part, Phorm simply said they were in a position where they were not dependent on any one market or ISP, and so would continue their endeavors overseas.

What is your reaction to BT’s announcement Monday? And, on a lighter note, if an entity like Phorm used your clickstream info to target ads, what kinds of ads do you think would start showing up when you surf?

BT Openzone are rolling out wifi everywhere they can squeeze it in at the moment, and a new deal will see it dispensed from cash machines along with your reddies. The Register reports they’ve struck a deal with Cashbox, those folks that supply stand-alone machines in shops, bars and neighbourhoods where carrying a wallet isn’t an option you’d naturally consider.

These cashpoints already have a broadband connection to handle customer transactions, so carrying data from wifi customers is no great technical feat. A trial involving ten cash machines will initially take place before both companies look to roll out the service to over 2,000 sites across the country.

BT is fast becoming a dominant player in providing wifi access in the UK; a recent deal with Starbucks replacing T-Mobile sews up over 650 locations and any business with a BT business hub can offer wifi to customers, for free or by selling access, plus BT Openzone already provide blanket coverage in a dozen cities as well as partnering several major UK businesses.

But with the likes of 3G access becoming prevalent on smartphones and the popularity of broadband dongles for laptops, why is BT so keen to roll out wifi across the nation? Wouldn’t they be better playing to their strengths and providing digital technology for home customers? Perhaps not; maybe the likes of BT are playing a long-game that will in time provide a rich revenue stream – not from consumers (although the cost of BT Openzone access is still outrageously steep), but from mobile service operators.

As 3G usage by smartphones and laptops increases, service providers may struggle to cope with demand – shifting some of that usage to wifi would help relieve the strain. The likes of O2’s deal with BT Openzone to allow unlimited wifi access for iPhone owners is presented as a perk for the consumer, but given how data-rich the iPhone experience is, it no doubt helps out O2 as well.

£22 billion was shelled out by operators when the 3G spectrum was auctioned off in 2000, and there’s likely to be a shake-up of spectrum and further auctions next year. If the likes of O2 and other operators can count on reliable wifi coverage across the majority of the population, that would significantly alter their strategy for delivering data services, and may mean using BT Openzone becoming an everyday occurrence for consumers.

Consumers have been complaining for an age about internet service providers throttling their broadband usage; for the most part, those shouting loudest have been fans of illegal downloading, where throttling has slowed their enjoyment of Dollhouse and Lost down to a trickle. But now the biggest supplier of online content in the country has waded into the fight; the BBC.

BT Broadband is the villian of the piece, which happens to have debuted on the BBC news website. BT are accused of throttling speeds on their basic package from 8 Mbps to less than 1 Mbps at peak times. The reason the BBC are getting the arse is because of the effect it has on on their iPlayer – the throttling forces users to use the iPlayer at its lowest connection speed of 500 Kbps.

“While customers listening to audio and lower quality video streams would be unaffected, we are concerned that at peak times some customers’ higher quality video streams may be interrupted by buffering before falling back to a lower-quality version,” said a spokesperson at the BBC. “This would suggest that traffic identified as BBC iPlayer traffic is being throttled back, thereby limiting the bandwidth used up by the service on slower connections.”

The BBC says their data showed that speeds for BT’s iPlayer users was reduced to 700kbps at peak times, a fact not explained by BT when customers sign up. BT responded by denying the claim, and laying blame at the foot of the BBC: “We believe there is a real issue that content owners like the BBC need to address and we are currently in discussions with the BBC executive to ensure that our customers get the best possible experience in the future.”

The iPlayer poses a serious problem for all service providers, not just BT; 60 servers are required to produce the seven petabytes of data currently transferred by ther iPlayer every month, and that number is rising. We just had to look that number up; it’s equal to approximately one quadrillion bytes, or 1000 terrabytes. In other words, it’s chewing up masses of bandwidth quite legitimately. While it’s easy for providers to justify throttling when the problem is perceived to be kids messing about with the likes of Bit Torrent, it’s a little more tricky when it’s the publicly funded BBC kicking in your door.

It’s not a great day for business today, as companies announce their profits from the past twelve months. Except this year, those profits are as scarce as grumble at a monastery. Step forward former bastion of telephony BT, which has reported an annual loss of £134m, and announced it’ll cut up to 15,000 jobs over the next 12 months. That’s on top of the 15,000 jobs lost in the past year, which was already 5,000 more than expected.

The biggest losses were suffered by its global services unit, which operates large-scale IT services for the likes of the Government, and is expected to contribute losses of £1.5 billion. All this after BT posted profits of £2 billion last year. Clumsy.

Meanwhile Sony celebrated the launch of their new Walkman X series yesterday, but then reported its first annual loss in 14 years, of £685 million. It’s almost as if the good news were announced to eclipse the bad news, or something. Anyway, compared to the jillions Sony rakes in from dozens of divisions every year, two thirds of a billion pounds is relatively small potatos. The worry is a drop in worldwide sales of 13 per cent, and whether those sales will return; will you be buying the new Walkman?

Hey you! Yes, you! Are you a corporate whore? Can you not get through the day without a cup of overpriced coffee and your over-priced, under-performing iPhone pushing nonsense into your brain? Then good news! The Register reports that beginning this week BT will be begin replacing T-Mobile as wifi providers for Starbucks in the UK and Ireland.

The deal will run for five years, with over 650 hotspots forming part of the BT Openzone network. Thanks to an existing wifi deal with O2, iPhone users will be able to get access at Starbucks, at faster speeds available than currently offered by 3G. Once the rollout has been completed, O2 dongle subscribers will also get bundled Openzone access.

A win for both BT customers and O2 network users then, and iPhone users will be able to put their Go Grande app to good use, too. It’s like all your Christmases come at once.

[The Register]

Broadband faster than a blazing comet with a rocket up its jacksie is another step nearer today after BT’s new 100Mpbs, Ultra-Fast network was approved by Ofcom.

The green light for the roll-out will mean that BT can now crack on with the laying of fibre optic cable that will make the dream a reality and dwarf Virgin Media’s current 50Mbps cable speed.

But it won’t be cheap – the project will cost roughly £1.5 billion over three years and BT are permitted to make a profit from leasing out its lines to other ISPs once it’s all up and running.

So, we predict a future filled with offers of 100Mpbs broadband that in truth only delivers about 30Mbps unless you live within spitting distance of a local exchange, and all for a monthly charge of £50. Hope we’re wrong though.

[Electric Pig]

If you’ve enjoyed free broadband from Sky for the past couple of years, the honeymoon is over. A letter has been sent to customers using Sky Broadband, notifying them that the monthly cost will increase by £5 from 1st March next year.

If you use Sky Broadband Base, you currently pay nothing, so a fiver a month works out to be a rise of infinite per cent. Outrageous. Sky has the answer though – sign up for Sky’s phone subscription service Sky Talk Freetime… for free! Then you’ll get broadband for free, or if you use the Mid or Max broadband packages, you won’t pay an extra £5 a month.

So what’s in it for Sky? Why are they offering you free broadband and a free call package? Because they’d really quite like it if you’d also signed up to Sky Talk line rental through them, too. The letter claims it’s cheaper than BT (£10 per month vs £11.75 a month) and half-price for the first six months.

So, to recap: if you use Sky Broadband, you need to sign up for Sky Talk Freetime for free to avoid a £5 increase from March. You don’t have to sign up to Sky Talk line rental to get the deal, but the cynic might think that a) they’ll start charging for Sky Talk Freetime in the near future unless you sign up for the line rental, and b) signing up to all three services means prices of any one service can be tweaked to increase revenues without anyone getting too upset; if you’ve everything tied up through Sky, you’re less likely to to move to another provider.