• Bill Thompson on Lord Stephen Carter’s interim Digital Britain report, and why peer review beats Peer dictatorship every time.
• Peter Wilby’s cover piece for this week’s New Statesman on the financialisation of British society.

I provided three emails satisfying this criteria. I did what most people would do and sent an email with the subject ‘test’ which was not delivered and sent this to BT. Their response was that emails with the word test in the subject line would be spam filtered, and you cannot access to the mails they have filtered. Since we are a company that performs tests, I asked if this could be removed? BT said that they could not do this. OK, so can BT just whitelist all mails within our domain? Again, no.

BT also cannot provide email lists. Think about that. The flagship British technology company is incapable of providing your business with an email list. That is so poor, I’m speechless.

All in all, BT don’t seem capable of providing reliable email service and are also not willing to help fix problems when they occur. And their online management interface sucks as well. Avoid.

When you add in phorm to this, I see no reason to ever use a BT product if you can avoid it.

It is a well-known fact that, despite the oft-lauded opportunities for self-development through digital creativity offered by the online virtual world Second Life, many people still use it exclusively to explore the more adventurous side of their sexuality. Although I’m not a regular S’Lifer myself (my excuse is that my laptop does not have the appropriate graphics card) it came as no surprise to me when, dining with a Second Life enthusiast last year, I was informed of the competitive market for penises in-world.

Apparently, the creative ingenuity of the businesses supplying avatar add-ons is so great that models intended to attract admiration become obsolete within months. If nothing else, this conversation resulted in the coining of what I still consider would make the world’s best band name: Last Month’s Penis.

On 27 July, the BBC is to launch its controversial iPlayer…

Read the rest here.

Over half (53%) of the value of all royalty and license fees paid in 2002 were received in one territory: the United States. Large proportions of these fees were also received in Japan and the United Kingdom.

These fees are the payments made by someone who wants to use an idea, invention or artistic creation that legally belongs to someone else. To receive these fees a copyright or patent is needed, which may remain active for years after the initial invention…

Read the rest here.

I’ve been trying without success to get the widget in del.icio.us working so I can post links direct to this blog. In the meantime, here are a couple of titbits:

• Lawrence Lessig on net neutrality and municipal broadband in Wired
• Unsigned punk band make top 40 (health warning: they are represented by the PR company Quite Good, who were responsible for all the noise about Sandi Thom last year)

Imagine my surprise, then, when late on Sunday night I heard this broadcast. It’s a niche show called In Business, and this week’s episode was completely dedicated to companies which use and produce open source software. It’s worth listening to just to hear the wonderful voice of presenter Peter Hall endlessly repeating the words “source code”. Download it here.

“‘Look at the debates that there have been on intellectual property since the arrival of the internet. They have been loud and shallow. They have been between people who say everything’s free and you shouldn’t pay for anything and people who say everything’s mine, and you should pay for everything. And actually neither of them are right.’ Andrew Gowers is sitting in a back room of the British government’s vast Treasury building. It’s just a few hours after the launch of his year-long review of the framework governing intellectual property, a text he hopes will change the nature of the debate not just in Britain, but internationally.

“The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property has been broadly welcomed by copyright campaigners…”

Read the rest here.

If politicians would like a clear view of how popular an extension of term is going to make them, they need look no further than the bevvy of responses to Mick Hucknall’s incredibly ill-advised piece on Comment is Free last week. Even if you ignore the ad hominem stuff, the reaction’s pretty damning.

Boingboing may be reporting this as a victory, but the battle isn’t over yet. The government will need to agree with Gowers, and as we know, a lot of high-level lobbyists have been side-stepping the independent review and going straight to the top. This week is the week to be making noise about why copyright terms shouldn’t be extended. My column in the New Statesmen this week is dedicated to the issue.

If you live in the UK and you haven’t signed ORG’s Release the Music petition yet, get to it. So far the media have gone with the “Poor Cliff” angle, but the other side of the story needs to be told too. Can you write a blog post/write to your MP/Give a Testimony that will let the UK government know that Gowers has got it right?