In a move that is surely showing the flailing business model of Twitter, the free micro-blogging site has axed the use of text message updates to most of it’s UK users, in a bid to cut costs.

An estimated $1,000 per year is the cost to Twitter for every UK user. And they’re not prepared to find a way to make money from these users - it seems easier to just cut everyone off.

As most of us know, Twitter has been suffering huge infrastructure problems with what seems like daily outages of some form another, with many users finding the service increasing frustrating. If it’s not the IM features, it’s the text or website blogging features that are down - every user of Twitter knows all too well the classic whale picture when things aren’t working as they should. With this recent cost-cutting exercise, is it too little too late? Or is it the sign of a system desperately trying to find a way out of a badly scaling web app?

During the writing of this article, twitter is displaying for UK users a box stating “important changes to our SMS service” on the left, above the twitter comments - which is a little ridiculous, as the infamous “We’re working to restore IM services to all users. Thanks for your patience!” message is showing the underlying problems of the site to the right of the page. Patience is getting very thin now guys - I know lots of people that have already gone elsewhere purely due to the frustration these problems are causing.

Terry Childs, who I recently reported had been accused of locking the “FiberWAN” system for San Francisco’s local goverment, has given up the password to allow people back in. I guess the pressure just got to him in the end - I have visions of government workers with towels and jugs of water working him over to spill the beans!

What started out as a bit of a “misunderstanding” quoting his lawyer, has been resolved. We will wait and see what the court decides as punishment - which hopefully won’t be on the same level as the ridiculous $5 million bail.

Being a sysadmin, I know the power our profession wields. I also know that there are a lot of unscrupulous people. The combination of the two are very rare, in my experience, but with this story it’s strange how badly this guy’s employers got it.

City worker, Terry Childs, was employed five years ago. He had spent time in jail, and also had counts of aggravated burglary and aggravated assault. He was put into a position of power with the City of San Francisco’s new FiberWAN network - a system which holds 60% of the city’s data. After a falling our with the head of security, Terry Childs allegedly decided to lock the system down with a master password - which only he knew. When confronted with the problem, he gave up a password which didn’t work. He was then arrested. As if this wasn’t disconcerting enough for the City, it also appears he has been paid his wage whilst sat in jail!

According to the mayor of the city, the city is still able to function - although they have called in experts from Cisco to hopefully sort the problem out. Childs remains in jail on bail of $5 million.

Steve Balmer stated publicly that he wants people to comment on XP, voicing to Microsoft that they shouldn’t give up just yet on the OS. Now it appears the OEM’s are starting to revolt too for the corporate customer’s sake.

And I’m with them, and other corporate customers! Vista is good - it has lots of bells and whistles, and has lots of nice graphical add-ons, but what really counts in an OS in the corporate environment is something stable, easy to use, “in keeping with windows” and above all easy to support. I don’t think Vista is any of those. Things have never been so different and difficult - Windows XP has been a progression of 2000, which in turn, although based on the NT codebase, was basically in-line with Windows 98’s features, which was built on the back of Windows 95. These were all logical progressions. Vista falls short - Maybe it should have been called Windows 7 Beta?

And it appears that my worries supporting Vista in the workplace are not misplaced. Lenovo are going to continue to supply it’s customers with XP well into 2009 - joining the ranks of Dell & HP in their post-June support. Hopefully support will continue until the release of Windows 7. Please Microsoft don’t mess up the next one!!

In a response to BT’s comments that ISPs need to do more to make it clear when selling “up to 8Mb” broadband, Tiscali I think have got a hold of the wrong end of the stick - probably on purpose.

Tiscali’s PR person, Jody Haskayne is quoted as saying “I think the point is that most of the major isps are doing very similar things in terms of marketing.” This comment is of course true. However, firstly, I’m not entirely sure if this practice or comment justifies misleading customers and secondly, if this is even what BT means by ISPs “doing more.”

I think BT are trying to make the point to the ISPs that if you don’t over sell your broadband, then you won’t have problems with your “up to 8Mb” broadband services. It appears to me that lots of factors are blamed for poor broadband - most of which are only in a very rare number of cases. Bad equipment, interference, distance from the exchange. Of course these things do play a part in how fast your broadband will be, but I don’t believe for a second that good old congestion isn’t the real issue with the vast majority of customers. If it wasn’t down to congestion then why after people swap service provider to somebody else (that is usually more expensive) all of a sudden they magically get a usable broadband service? Look on any of the broadband forums and you’ll see story upon story of woe turned to joy once users have moved from the cheap broadband providers to the more expensive ones. [SHOW ME]

A lot of people have asked me - why does my 40Gb hard drive, when formatted only show 38Gb? And I normally explain that hardware manufacturers don’t use the same Gigabyte that the rest of the world uses. They make certain assumptions about a Megabyte or a Gigabyte that aren’t true. But to say Seagate have actually mislead the public, sounds a little harsh. I think, in Seagate’s defense, that they were really only trying to keep things un-complicated for the end user. After all, it’s easier to say "Can I have a 200Gb drive please?" rather than "Can I have a 190.7Gb drive please?" Seagate rounded up to inflate their product, but the rounding is there because that’s how we communicate with each other - the whole numbers being more important than the fractions.

Getting back to the story, however, Seagate have been found to be misleading customers with their claims of storage sizes and are now being asked to pay damages to the customers - on 6.2 million hard drive sales!! Seagate are offering either a cash refund (which equates to 5% of the original cost - according to court documents), or free backup & restore software. However, as you have to provide evidence that you bought it & where, including receipts, there are going to be virtually no claims as far as I can see. It does however send a wake-up call to Seagate and any other manufacturers that they make sure they don’t over-inflate their capacities. This can only be good for me - people will no longer ask me why the capacity is different in windows.. [SHOW ME]

40 people have been arrested from Cisco today, in Brazil, when the authorities alleged Cisco had imported $500 Million worth of equipment illegally into the country. The amount owed includes the costs of fines, unpaid duty and interest. Somebody needs to be fired for this massive mistake (which you can only assume that’s what it is) if only for the tumble the stock is going to take because of the news. It will be interesting to see if Cisco appeal and what happens at the courtroom. [SHOW ME]

Three men are fined a third of a million dollars (collectively) for inflicting spyware and malware for the company "Media Motor." According to sources, their efforts generated approximately $3.6 million worth of revenue.

Is this a joke? Why are these people still walking the streets? Surely what they did amounts to fraud? Apparently the FTC in the US don’t see it as that big of a deal that millions of people are ripped off of hard earned cash, and subjected to privacy invasions with internet usage statistics obtained without their permission and software obtrusively installed on their systems. Maybe somebody should take the ruling members of the Federal Trade Commission’s PCs and stick this spyware on it, without them knowing - like the rest of us. Perhaps when they write up a report to justify this ridiculous ruling they’ll be inundated with porn pop-ups. Or maybe the malware will initiate it’s attack when their children are trying to surf the internet. Maybe then they’ll understand the misery these people inflict on innocent people. [SHOW ME]

Here we go again.. More laptop batteries are up for recall. This time they number about 1,400 and are all associated with Toshiba Satellite (A100 & A105) & Tecra (A7) laptops. If these companies were more concerned over the customer, rather than their bottom line, maybe we wouldn’t have this situation.. But then that’s like asking Sony to release a PS3 at a competitive price.. [SHOW ME] & [SHOW ME MORE]

Reported by techdirt, it appears that there’s another nail in the coffin for the AACS copy protection for the next generation formats HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.

It is reported that another one of the secret keys that are used by the player hardware to decrypt the protected content on the DVDs has been discovered with a simple hex editor. Even though the company responsible for the scheme is saying they can easily change the secret key, they don’t explain how that will be possible for the countless machines already out in the wild. And that means those machines won’t be able to watch the latest movies. It all seems like they’re side-stepping around the problem without actually admitting that AACS is fundamentally flawed. [SHOW ME]