According to a report on the Telegraph yesterday (10th November 2009)

All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.

Despite widespread opposition to the increasing amount of surveillance in Britain, 653 public bodies will be given access to the information, including police, local councils, the Financial Services Authority, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.

So what do you think about this Big Brother move, if you have nothing to hide does it matter? Or is it a violation of your privacy rights?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments box.

To read the full article on the Telegraph website please click here

As some of you may know, Google has been quietly tweaking its search engine in attempts to make it even better. Though Google won’t change on the surface to the everyday user the changed behind the scenes will improve its indexing speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

Though we don’t know when the new version will roll out (code name ‘Caffeine’) and how long it will take to make it to the UK, according to the splash page it will begin soon. We’ll keep you posted with any information as we get it.

Well today is the day that Vista gets replaced by something better: Windows 7.

The interest for the new OS from Microsoft has been huge, making Windows 7 the biggest pre-order item in the history of Amazon UK and a perpetual trending topic on Twitter. The reactions from users and reviewers have been mostly positive, but after the lukewarm it’s-ok-but-why-should-I-switch-from-WinXP attempt that was Vista, the fact that people can’t wait to get their hands on Windows 7 is hardly a surprise.

And, for the most part, it’s true. Annoying security features such as UAC have been fixed in Windows 7 (you can now manually set its annoyance level), its reported that the system feels speedier and more responsive (although it really isn’t that much faster when you actually measure it, for example, boot time on both systems is pretty much the same), but it feels that way, and that’s all that matters, compatibility issues have been fixed. In short, it’s more of a really, really good service pack for Vista than a new OS, but it’s definitely enough to switch from the eight year old Windows XP.

If you’re interested in making the switch, the price is £159.99 for Windows 7 Ultimate, and $147.99 for the Professional version. Windows 7 Home Premium will set you back £99.99, and an upgrade from either Vista or XP will cost you £58.95.

We haven’t managed to get our hands on a copy yet to play with it, but the moment we do we’ll post a review.

Have you experienced Windows 7 yet? Let us know what you made of it and if you’d recommend it?

A week ago we reported the end of the url shortening service cli.gs and asked what would happen to all the cli.gs urls and who would step up to take over all their traffic? Well it seems with a little help from Twitter a url shortening King has emerged. Since Twitter made Bit.ly its default shortener its traffic has sky-rocketed.

The numbers taken from Compete showing the change in U.S traffic for the major url shortening services can be found below:

- Bit.ly: 6.43 million U.S. visitors, +12.65% growth from August to September

- TinyURL:5.55 million U.S. visitors, -1.47% growth from August to September

- is.gd: 631,000 U.S. visitors, -13.66% growth from August to September

- Tr.im: 416,000 U.S. visitors, -39.87% growth from August to September

- Ow.ly: 1.41 million U.S. visitors, +9.45% growth from August to September

With such large numbers and an impressive growth it seems as though Bit.ly is now positioned to dominate the url shortening service.

We’re already using it and it seems most of you are too.

Well a lot has happened in 10 years, some of us are a little taller, wider and have a little more grey hair, while some of us (me) have aged like a fine wine, but this post is about the Internet or Broadband to be more precise. It is 10 years since broadband was first made available to the public in the UK, when 0.5Mbps cost £39.99 a month! And a lot of the World Wide Web as we know it didn’t exist, no Facebook (not that surprising) but not iTunes or LinkedIn! How our life has changed.

To celebrate a website has been launched with loads of information on the last decade of broadband, to view it click here

Cligs URL shortener to shut down!

Unfortunately news has been released that another URL shortening service is due to come to an end. These services are becoming a major part of the Internet, especially with social media sites such as Twitter, but as the owner of Cligs testifies;

“Short URLs are a feature, and are definitely not a business on their own.”

A post on the Cligs Blog yesterday (October 4th, 2009) read;

“It is with great sadness that I have to shut down Cligs. On Sunday, 25 Oct 2009 at 12:00:00 GMT, the service will stop accepting new short URLs and will stop logging analytics.

The forwarding data will be retained so that forwarding can continue for at least till the end of November; after that, there are no guarantees as to how long the service will continue to forward the short URLs to their destinations.

Shortly (in a few days), I’ll be deploying a mechanism to export your data. It is almost done and just needs a bit more testing before I’m comfortable releasing it.”

(to read the full blog post click here)

So what does this mean for the users of Cligs? Another shortening URL service will soon receive a large number of subscribers and traffic, are they ready? Can anyone make a business out of shortening URL’s?

We’re not sure what the answers are, but one things for certain, we’re sad to see the end of Cligs and now have to choose another URL shortening service.

On 31st July 2009 Mozilla FireFox was downloaded 1,000,000,000 times and counting! As the milestone mark approached a twitter account was created with regular tweets of the latest download count, to view the latest figure click here

Firefox downloads pass 1 billion

So as Windows 7 is being released without any Internet Browser being pre-installed in Europe the question one must ask is, is this a sign of Firefoxs market dominance as user numbers continue to grow? As I have mentioned on this blog, I have always been a supporter of Microsoft, but sadly IE8 was just to slow on my machine and I converted to Firefox and have never looked back!

It is the opinion of Trevor Harris, a lecturer in the Department of Film and Media at Lampeter University, that the title ‘Father of the Internet’ should be given to Welsh scientist Donald Davies.

It was back in 1965 that Donald Davies developed ‘packet switching’ a system that enabled computers to communicate with each other by sending information in small segments which were then reassembled in the right order. Without packet switching, it is unlikely any of us would ever have heard of the likes of Google or Facebook.

Trevor Harris said: “I never met Donald Davies, but for those that knew him, he was thought of as an unassuming man but one who deserves as much as anyone to be thought of as the father of computer communication.

“While working at the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory, Donald’s invention of packet switching made the internet, and ultimately the world wide web, possible.

“In any dispassionate analysis of the development of today’s pervasive personal computer technology and its impact on our lives today then Donald Davies, a humble man from Treorchy in the Welsh mining valleys, is one of the most outstanding figures in that history.”

So there we have it, once again Wales can lay claim to being part of, if not the founder of something we all use and take for granted today.

Other amazing things to come out of Wales (aside from IT Pie) include Artificial Rain, the Hydrogen Fuel Cell, X-Rays, Mail Order Shopping and our favourite…The Equals Sign

We just found this on-line thanks to Perry Belcher (http://twitter.com/PerryBelcher) hosted on www.slideshare.net.

It’s an excellent presentation by an American/Canadian firm Espresso (http://brandinfiltration.com/) highlighting the power and importance of Social Media.

Take a look at the presentation and let us know your thoughts. The figures make you realise how important Social Media is, and why you need to be part of it! Need help, then drop us an e-mail or pick up the phone and give us a call (enquiries@itpie.co.uk or 02920711607)

Well I’ve been thinking about tweeting for some time and to be honest I’m still not entirely sure of its value to our business (though I do recognise that it can be almost invaluable to certain industries) and I will blog on this later, but for now I want to anounce our arrival on Twitter and let you in on a little secret – I have a plugin which should update my Twitter account (This is a test) meaning that as I blog I Twitter, hitting two social media tools in one go and generating links back and forth between blog and Twitter.

I’ll post soon on my experience of setting up Twitter and the plugin used for my blog. But got to do some more testing first.

Oh yeah follow us here http://twitter.com/itpie