The claimed benefits were:

Nominet to check registrant details properly - an admission that their previous practise was rather casual.

Websites to be scanned for malware on a regular basis - at what additional cost? UK registrar 123reg offer a service "Site Scanner", 5 pages for £3.50 a month (or you can use Google webmaster tools and get free site-wide malware scans).

Registrants to be entitled to use a "Nominet approved" quality mark - along with all the other "approved" badges and labels that appear all over the web - and are universally disregarded

The shorter name is "more convenient" - delivering the fantastic benefit of 3 fewer keystrokes... but certainly more confusing, everyone is familiar with .co.uk

"The new names make it easier to choose a suitable domain name" because more become available - not true. If someone owns great-example.co.uk and someone else registers great-example.uk it only leads to confusion and they could be guilty of "passing off". Just try buying a name like tesco.cx (one of the few not already owned by Tesco, .cx is Christmas Island), I can confidently predict you'd be hearing from their lawyers not long afterwards even if you made no use of the name. SMEs simply can't afford the cost of registration under all top level domains never mind the legal fees to defend them.

Trade mark holders will be given priority - so if I've been legitimately using great-example.co.uk for ten years but a third party has great-example as a trade mark, they'll get priority for the great-example.uk name over me.

Having demonstrated that the claimed "benefits" are illusory at best, let's consider the disadvantages:

The annual fee is substantially higher, the wholsale price was to be "under £20 p.a." (compared with a the current .co.uk wholesale price of £5 for 2 years). Registrars can charge whatever they want as the retail price. In short, registrants can expect to pay a much larger annual fee.

Presumably there will be an additional charge for malware scanning and for DNSSEC.

As mentioned above the owner of great-example.co.uk name might find that a third party has registered great-example as a trade mark and will get priority for the great-example.uk name. The implication could be a great revenue earner for the legal profession. Alternatively it could go to the Nominet dispute resolution process (£££). A trade mark is not unique, more than one organisation can have a trade mark on a word as long as there is no risk of confusion, i.e. they are operating in different business sectors. Apple was example being the trade mark of the Beatles shop and of a computer company. For many years both had rights to use "Apple" as a trademark as long as the computer company didn't enter the music business and the Beatles didn't start selling computers. (Subsequently the computer company paid the Beatles to drop their trade mark).

There will be a "sunrise period" - presumably this will follow precedent of charging a substantial premium for sunrise registrations. (With the possibility of fraud as alleged by some sunrise applicants for EU domains). And if you don't "defend" your existing name with a sunrise application but someone else buys it (then or at cheaper landrush stage), you're stufffed.

Who benefits? Nominet is a "limited by guarantee" company, however that doesn't mean that employees can't benefit from generous remuneration packages, the average staff salary in 2011 was around £60k. The total financial benefit package for the highest paid director was over £250k.

Domain name registrars are Nominet members, paying an annual fee and a small fee for each domain name. They stand to do very well out of the new arrangement.

Those with deep pockets - SMEs on tight budgets just have to cave-in when they see the likely legal cost of a passing-off dispute

The corruption starts here: It's interesting that Nominet didn't use their mailing list of 10M domain name registrants to publicise the consultation - but doubtless all the registrars were contacted. No point in asking the turkeys to vote for Christmas, let's just get Bernard Matthews opinion.

If Nominet were serious about he alleged benefits then they could offer all but the shorter name acknowledged by a "Nominet approved sticker" as an add-on for .co.uk names with the associated DNSSEC, security scanning and some kind of legitimacy check - like that busineses are registered at companies house, genuine address on file not an accommodation address, accounts up to date, no credit reference agencies alerts.

Got one already...

Well almost. I've got a hot glue gun, the main difference I can see is that the glue stick is replaced by something that sets faster. Apart from that: the feed is from a reel; the plastic may come in different colours; the melt temperature may be different; the nozzle size may be different - but all those are relatively minor issues, a glue pen with different feed material, maybe different nozzle & temperature shouldn't cost much more than a standard glue pen, mine was £15 including a decent supply of glue sticks.

New legislation required - or Darwinism in action?

I never cease to be amazed at people showing me a shiny new and expensive mobile phone, for example, and telling me they got it free while not mentioning that it's on a 2 year contract at £40 a month.

I want all such offers to be required to include a "total contract minimum spend" statement. So that free mobile phone would have to state "total minimum contracted spend £960 over 2 years". That would also prevent the supplier ramping up the monthly fee during the contract. No, silly me, they'd still ramp the fee and hope nobody reported them to ASA - for no meaningful action to be taken, just an instruction not to do it again...

In similar vein are "free trials" where you are required to cancel by a specific date to prevent having initiated an ongoing subscription involving future payments. Same for 0% finance (subject to paying off the balance after 12 months otherwise the loan continues for another 2 years at a high interest rate).

On the other hand I'm getting to be such an old cynic that I'm inclined to think: "there are those of us who are numerate and smart enough to work it out for ourselves, meanwhile the mugs are paying over the odds and subsidising my better considered choices. This is Darwinism in action."

"Many people use the Telephone Preference Service to opt out of cold calling, which works well enough for calls originating in the UK"

Complete bollox. TPS may reduce the number of cold calls but I still get plenty. I made an FOI enquiry to see what happens if you complain. In summary if they get a lot of complaints about the same company they'll send them a "please stop doing that" letter. Although there is legislation allowing fines of up to £5000 for each offending call made that power has never been exercised.

The marketing industry lobby extensively to claim this is a legitimate means of marketing and say "what's the problem, if you gat a call you don't want, just put the phone down"

If you tell a caller this is a TPS registered number the response is one of: they put the phone down; they say they'll add you to their do not call list; they'll claim they do use the TPS but "you need to renew your registration every year" (not true); They'll claim you (or someone in your household) has ticked a box on an enquiry form or competition entry to agree to accept calls from them. The response I got from an Indian sounding gentleman, he asked "Can I speak to the householder" I said "Who is calling" to which his response, anticipating that I was an awkward customer, was "F! off you C!", a phrase I suspect he had learnt from making other such calls.

Indeed (despite being on TPS) I get several unwanted "sales" calls a week, if the caller sounds Indian he risks an abusive response - my Bank uses Indian call centres and so has fallen foul of this policy...

I don't pick the phone up for "number withheld" calls but let them go to answerphone but that too results in losing some legitimate callers.

I think Telcos should automatically provide CLI and not charge extra for it.

One partial solution might be for a telco to offer a filtering service, rather like the expensive truecall device/service. You can have a personal database of legitimate callers, and a blacklist, others get an answerphone. Blacklists could be aggregated and repeat offender numbers identified and shared.

There's even a problem now with CLI numbers, it is possible to send a fake CLI. There are legitimate and approved uses for example a Doctor wishing to call a patient from his domestic line can have his surgery number displayed as CLI . Abuses are often obvious fakes like 1111111 but can be the real number of another organisation who will then risk becoming the recipient of TPS complaints and abusive calls.

Keep me alive as long as possible...

Most deaths are down to heart or cancer. Fix that and we can all look forward to years of undignified and costly dementia and incontinence. Thanks.

UK emergency SMS

Register here first: http://www.emergencysms.org.uk/ although originally for the deaf it's OK for others to sign up too.

Try a voice call first but in poor signal areas SMS will retry till it gets through, I believe it only needs 50 milliseconds of connection time.

Message should be along the lines of:

"ambulance. Hiker has broken leg. Madwomans stones, Kinder Scout SK137880, moving casualty towards Jaggers Clough and Haggwater Bridge A57”' - That fits into 140 characters.

The message should indicate what service is needed, nature/severity of problem, location expressed in more than one format (i.e. map grid ref and named landmarks) and anything else relevant (as in this example, casualty is being moved and in what direction).

As you cannot confirm the message has been received you should continue self rescue efforts. Taking the phone to a higher location might help to get a connection.

Teachers do their usual thing - find fault

I remember when schools got the BBC Micro, some were never unboxed or access was so controlled that kids never got much out of it.

The lesson we should take is not from schools but from that generation when at home, inspired and prepared to spend hours - yes sometimes those hours were spent working out how to break copy protection - and in the process getting heavily into machine code.

In a 40 minute classroom session nothing much can be achieved - unless it's an inspiring and innovative teacher, then the kids will want to do more in their own time. Yes you can whine about the additional cost of a monitor, keyboard, mouse, memory card but who's not got left over keyboard and mouse from an old PC - or can get them cheap - charity shop or even new they don't cost much. Lots of domestic TVs have an HDMI socket (or converters are available). Next someone will point out that there are households where the additional cost of even a memory card is out of the question - that may be true but ask first how many of those have the latest 50 inch TV and Sky+, then look at the plus side of how many homes there are where the kids CAN make good use of a RasPi.

Don't waste time with kids that don't give a monkey's, we don't need the entire nation to be IT wizards, just a handful more Berners-Lees. No we don't need a nation of coders, we need a reasonable number of people with a level of understanding of what's possible to maybe design a software system, build a prototype and outsource the coding donkey-work to donkeys.

I welcome the fact that RasPi is doing better for home sales. The vast majority of schools are just clueless when it comes to IT that's the historic problem and it's not going to go away. Very few teachers can claim any credit for the success of the BBC and Sinclair generation, it always was and still is the case that keen kids know a lot more about IT than their teachers. My lad had to help out with using Excel. His "design a web site" project was rejected, he'd used CSS/Javascript for interactive navigation buttons teacher didn't understand and made him redo them in Flash. The school used and hence recommended Dreamweaver, so he wanted a copy at home - have you seen the price? So he suggested we get a pirate copy... Don't get that problem with RasPi.

The knee jerk response of teachers to such an anecdote is to dismiss it as "an isolated instance" - the problem is that there are thousands of such isolated instances. I'd turn it around to asy there are isolated instances of IT teachers who do make a decent job of teaching IT an many more who make it about as exciting as learning about the legislature of ancient mesopotamia.

RasPi gives kids access to an almost "disposable" tool, programming is only part of the story, add-on circuitry is part of the attraction. Think of it as meccano. A good xmas gift for a kid with the aptitude to make good use of it, wasted on uninterested kids. And as with Meccano dad may need to help - a second benefit of getting kids and parents working together.

fat phone

Just a comment on one throwaway line in the story...

"Were punters happy with ever-fatter phones ... but they’re not - they want thin, pocket-friendly devices."

Is that true? A fat phone would be able to include a better camera and a bigger battery - doesn't sound like a bad thing to me. My digital camera goes everywhere in a shirt pocket and needs to be fat to accommodate a good lens. My Android with GPS and data turned on dies after about 4 hours, not much use for route finding on a day's hiking in the hills. Maybe what I need is a camera that works as a phone (and gps) rather than a phone that acts as a camera?

Power from Norway and Iceland?

Both have proposed projects. Iceland has plenty of geothermal and some HEP. When I visited an Icelendic HEP station there was talk of disposing of their surplus by running an undersea cable to UK. Norway has/had a pumped storage proposal - ship surplus power (like wind generated peaks at times when the grid doesn't need it) to Norway for pumped storage in high altitude dams. Both projects demand much longer cables than Scottish Islands. Are they complete non-starters or is the Scottish costing model wrong? Is this just another case of "why invest your own money if you can make a case for Government to stump up".

Are there any viable alternatives - use the power to create chemical compounds that can be shipped and the energy released? I'm not up to doing the science but naive ideas starting with simple substances like sodium, phosphorous, calcium carbide?

Can't blame them if it's a massive DDOS...

... at least they got it fixed within an hour - I host a couple of hundred domains on dedicated servers with them. I could access the server intermittently. It was showing load averages barely above 0%. I got (almost) straight through to support OK at 11:20 (call queue for less than 30 seconds).

Unplanned downtime is a regrettable fact of life - International Banks, Gmail and most if not all major hosting companies all get problems - for what I pay I've historically had very high levels of server availability at Web Fusion, I guess better 99.99% taken over 10 years. When one of my dedicated servers suffered a fatal component failure at 10pm on Christmas day 3 or 4 years ago they swapped in a replacement within a couple of hours.

Just do a search for [name any big organisation] on El Reg and see how many entries relate to service outages or successful hacks - e.g. HSBC gives:" HSBC UK systems major outage Customers can't use cards, online banking or ATMs" 4 Nov 2011. And believe me service loss to a Bank HSBC means a lot more than a blog about your new kitten.

I do have gripes with Web Fusion - primarily I'd like to move to a more powerful server and their sales people said they'd transfer most of the data for a few hundred quid but I'd have to copy across email account settings and any non-default DNS settings myself - try doing that for 100 accounts...

That's the only reason I've been looking for an alternative host (but so far failed to find one I'm happy with).

Admittedly their support has gone downhill since they moved some of it to India. A recent trivial example: domain name renewal paid, email some days later from Nominet to say "not renewed" so we assumed payment to 123reg had gone wrong so paid (again) they did renew - and promptly took the payment twice. India said "non-refundable". (Got it escalated and sorted in the end but at the cost of time, incredulity and anger). But show me anyone that doesn't outsource support somewhere cheap and incompetent.

So if anyone does have a better solution at the same level of cost I'm interested but I'm not holding my breath...

Choice would be a good thing...

There may be a place for a "computer skills" course which is about learning to use applications or one a bit more management oriented covering stuff like systems analysis, writing system specs etc.

Then "The IT course" could be the kind of mentally stimulating exercise many of an older generation of IT workers got from their ZX80, BBC micro, Archimedes etc. Every student gets a Raspberry Pi as base hardware they can expand on hardware and get into coding. Frankly I think our schools system couldn't cope, it would be better done as an Open University type scheme but maybe a bit of a hybrid so in school there is a facilitator, who also participates in the learning and keeps an eye on individuals activities.

My kid started an IT A level at what has been called "the best state school in Sheffield". It was deadly dull, the teachers seemed to know little about what they were teaching and probably misunderstood the syllabus. At the end of year one all but one kid failed the AS level so the school withdrew the option to do year 2.

Hope they've solved the software bugs

I got an earlier model with the record to SD function years ago, 200 quids worth. Trouble is it eats D cells so fast it's only affordable on mains and it gets "blue screen of death" every few weeks and needs a reboot. I did read that they have a software fix but email to their support desk gets no response.

Plus the record function is too basic. Something like a sky+ setup to schedule recordings and give a replay menu would be useful. I bet the "24 hours recording" is a single file you have to listen to from the start, no skip to 1hour 30 mins, far less "skip to [start of my favourite program]". I'm afraid Roberts have lost the plot, need to keep up with technology. Things like integrate radio with WiFi/ethernet connection into domestic LAN and integrate to desktop software or maybe some Bluetooth and smart phone/tablet integrations. Maybe mute when the phone rings for example - or even pause program...

You may ask why bother with a discrete radio at all? My answer is that I can wander round the house and garden doing my chores and carrying the radio, big speaker and decent amplification so I can hear it above noisy background without resorting to earphones/headphones which I hate.

Put the boot on the other foot...

Drug companies have to prove their claims. If the bottled water industry wants to make health claims surely it's their responsibility to prove them at their expense, not the EU to disprove them.

The "drug testing trials" would be interesting - 100 patients were treated with water, while 100 were allowed none. Those denied water all experienced premature death - case proven...

Makes the situation worse...

My proposal is that UK domains should be £10 one-off setup admin fee - but in addition Nominet hold a £100 bond from the owner for each domain, refundable at any time.

Nominet is then funded on the investment income from all those £100s.

Name speculators will be more selective about what to hoard.

£100 shouldn't be enough to discourage small biz. I don't recall the reg fee I paid at the point Nominet was set up - £100 or £200, and that was to buy the name not "lease it". (Rather annoyingly 10 years later Nominet tried to reclaim it saying they had no record of our ownership so we weren't entitled to use the highly sought after name - until we proved them wrong (like a 10 year old letter from Nominet relating to the domain name and signed by Willy Black) - and agreed to start paying biannual renewal fees) .

Businesses or individuals no longer needing a name would be more inclined to reliquish it to get their bond refunded.

New businesses looking for a suitable name would once more stand a chance of getting something meaningful rather than finding loads of suitable ones all held by speculators with unrealistic valuations. Or else be driven into the hands of a less desirable TLD.

The only losers from this approach would be domain name speculators and domain name renewal scammers.

Renewal after 10 years will lead to more accidentally lapsed domain names. Business ownership, phone numbers, email and physical addresses could all have been changed.

Whereas a lapse of registration of the primary domain name like yourcompanyname.co.uk would be spotted immediately, secondary names (like your-company-name.co.uk and your-main-product.co.uk) pointing at the same underlying internet properties (web/email) may well go unnoticed. But even when the lapsed registration becomes evident, will anyone know how to get it back? Business has been bought, moved to new premises, maybe even changed name, changed employees, can they even prove they are entitled to renew?

Finally I predict that the domain name scammers will be in action any day now. You will get an official looking mailshot announcing "Your UK domain name can now be renewed for 10 years", the scammers will offer to provide this service for you. You pay, they collect as much as they can then abscond without paying nominet.

CSS or Flash

My lad was in deep s**t when he made navigation buttons for his ICT website using CSS instead of Flash - the teacher didn't understand CSS. Apart from that it was largely learning how to use MS Office - but not at a very deep level.

An earlier generation of IT developers was largely self-taught on the BBC micro. What's required isn't teaching but the availability of an easy to use toolkit that delivers interesting results fairly easily but has scope to dig deeper (like transitioning from BBC Basic to inserting bits of machine code).

Successful teaching is stimulating a desire to know more. Stick the teacher with a strictly defined curriculum and learning goals and the task of "inspiring" goes out of the window.

I played along

...with the call from "windows support" having "demonstrated" that "Oh my god your machine is badly infected with a polymorphic virus" (on the basis that there were errors listed in the windows error log file).

Next they sent me to logmein.com (which, shamefully, doesn't give any security warning that naive users would understand WHY NOT, I emailed LogMeIn asking, no reply) so a "technician" could investigate the problem.

I played along...

...with the call from "windows support" having "demonstrated" that "Oh my god your machine is badly infected with a polymorphic virus" (on the basis that there were errors listed in the windows error log file).

Next they sent me to logmein.com (which, shamefully, doesn't give any security warning that naive users would understand) so a "technician" could investigate the problem.

Obviously that's where I stopped but looking around the web, there's people who've been scammed out of $200 - that makes an annual salary from this scam of $50,000 if they get one "success" a day.