And when people don't pay up....
Presumably following their model of crowd sourcing anyone that defaults on a loan will get a visit from another giffgaff user asking them to pay up or they take the telly?
What could possibly go wrong!
Posts by Sam Machin
9 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2007
giffgaff riff-raff hacked off with lift-off of cash spaff
Tata says USA rejecting HALF of Indians' work visa requests
BAN THIS SICK FILCH: Which? demands end to £1.50-per-min 'help' lines
Monday 9th September 2013 12:45 GMT
Re: British Airways
If calling BA's 0191 number you can dial 141 first to withhold your number then they don't bounce your call, works a treat for making sure the calls are included in my O2 inclusive minutes.
Can do the same with skype although 141 doesn't work so you have to go into your account and turn off your CallerID which is a pain.
Google's Android celebrates fourth birthday
Thursday 20th September 2012 15:55 GMT
Re: Inquiring Minds Want To Know
The first 2 versions of Android were known as Astro & Bender,
Andy Rubin is a big robot fan and wanted to name each version after a famous robot but most of those names are trademarks so Google Legal veto'd it, otherwise we'd have probably had C3PO instead of cupcake.
The same reason why none of the current names will be brands otherwise it would have been Jello instead of JellyBean.
Apple Oz offers refunds for confused 4G iPad owners
iPhone thieves collared by Jobsian GPS
Broadband big boys waiting on data pimping
Friday 29th February 2008 12:34 GMT 
DNS
I'm not sure how they are doing this but I'm pretty sure that putting a proxy inline to monitor all your traffic wouldn't be viable, the sheer volume of broadband traffic for the possible payoff in ad revenue would destroy the business case before it got off the ground.
Other possibilities are that they are doing some kind of port spanning (think wire tap) of all traffic to some big servers that store & mine all this information offline but that would still be very expensive.
My guess is that they are using information from DNS, (For the non geeks: when you type www.cheesecake.com into a browser firstly your computer asks the ISP what the address of the site is (a very small amount of data) and then you connect to that site and download the huge volume of data)
If they were logging these DNS lookups that would tell you which user (IP address but they can map that back to an account) Requested what site and at what time. This is quite a lot of valuable information without having to add massive amounts of hardware.
So the simple answer is not to use your ISP's DNS (If thats how they are doing it) I recommend opendns (http://opendns.org) its often faster and has some nice value added features all for free.
Note: opendns make their money by feeding you through their link to google for search rather than direct but I'm far happier to trust them than most ISP's.
'Happy slapping' vids prompt Brown to push net filters
Tuesday 4th September 2007 14:33 GMT
Teaching the Kids some tech skills
About time the government did something to get some decent IT skills among our children. At least this way installing filters on their web browsing will force the kids to learn useful skills such as SSH tunneling and anonymous proxies ;-)
Censoring the net using technology will never work!
Nokia swallows Skype on tablet deal
Thursday 12th July 2007 11:10 GMT
No Video
The skype client for the N800 doesn't seem to support Video! I purchased one of these on the promise of skype support and seeing as they've included a video camera for 'internet calling' I think it's reasonable to expect Skype to use it!
Instead I'm stuck with only the proprietary nokia video call client which means I can only call people with Windoze who've installed yet another communications client, Skype is by far the best video conf app out there as it works across multiple platforms and behind whatever kind of horrible hotel NAT & firewall you may come across, Come on Nokia stop giving us half arsed products.
</rant>
Biting the hand that feeds IT
