Now that the so-called broadband tax has been scrapped (along with the controversial Budget announced tax hike on cider) as Parliament gets ready to dissolve itself in the run up to a General Election, are those of us who follow the politics of technology meant to breathe a sigh of relief and go about our business? I don’t think so.

The Tories were against the 50p per month tax on everyone with a telephone landline, and indeed had said they would scrap it if it were voted in and then Labour was voted out. But for Labour it was a core element worth around £170 million a year towards the funding of that much publicised promise to get super-fast broadband to everyone. Has the broadband tax gone away for good then? The answer to that one would appear to depend on how the country votes on May 6th it would seem, with the Tories having no plans to bring it back while Labour would almost certainly seek to do so as a matter of some urgency.

So why was it scrapped, seeing as the Government could have rushed it through as part of the bundles of laws that are being bullied and hurried through Parliament so as to make the statute books before it dissolves? Now that’s an interesting one, and I suspect the answer can be summed up in three words: Digital Economy Bill. OK, some might suggest it was more to do with getting the Budget passed nice and quick, but I can’t help but wonder if there was an element of distraction involved, a tidbit to feed the geeks and take their mind off the Digital Economy Bill. If it was meant to be a distraction, it didn’t work. Indeed, only MPs appeared to get distracted and do something else other than attend the important second reading of the thing.

After a rather drawn out and tediously lightweight ‘debate’ in the House of Commons last night, the Digital Economy Bill has now passed a second reading and is due to be voted upon this week to determine if it becomes law or not. The debate, and I use that word with a lack of enthusiasm that can only be matched by the lack of enthusiasm shown by the Commons, was nothing short of a shambles. At one point there were only 15 MPs in the chamber, and at the peak of the thing no more than 40, while thousands of people who understand the technology and the impact that this duff bill will have on ordinary users and Internet businesses alike took part in a much more informed and reasoned debate online on Twitter for example.

You might have thought that, post the expenses scandal, MPs would start listening to the electorate and at least look like they give a damn about our opinions.

You might have thought that, with an election just around the corner, the views of the voters would take on a new sense of urgency.

You might have thought that the draconian measures being introduced to supposedly crack down on piracy would be exposed as a sledgehammer to a nut or, to put it in the perspective of other ill-judged knee jerk legislation rushed through Parliament, the erosion of our personal freedoms in order to calm irrational fears about domestic terrorism.

But, alas, no. It was the same old, same old. With very few, and as it turned out rather honourable mentions (Tom Watson MP take a bow) MPs just took the opportunity to stand up and rant about something they know precious little, and in some cases apparently absolutely bugger all, about. Even those such as Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Culture Secretary, who appeared to understand that the Bill was flawed stood and declared it should be passed anyway. WTF?

No wonder MPs are despised more than traffic wardens and tax inspectors these days…

Could tomorrow’s Budget be the most broadband friendly in history? The odds are looking good for some pre-Election bribery in the form of Super-Fast Broadband for All it would seem. Gordon Brown has already announced plans for every citizen to get a government services web page of their very own, accessed by super-fast broadband which the PM refers to as the electricity of the digital age.

Of course, there’s the small matter of how you pay for all of this. Which is where the Budget on Wednesday comes in. It looks likely that there will be an element of taxation in the form of a land line levy of around £6 for every land line, which is already being referred to as the broadband tax. It’s also expected that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair ‘eyebrows’ Darling, will announce that savings of billions made by closing down existing government offices will contribute to the funding purse, along with the creation of some 250,000 new jobs over the next 10 years as a result of the speedy web access.

But how do the main political parties in England view the Digital Britain road map, and how their plans to deliver that digital economy vary? Thinkbroadband has been analysing the different approaches and come up with the following:

Labour

A ‘Universal Service Commitment’ of 2Mbps by 2012 to virtually everyone in UK funded by surplus money from the Digital Switchover fund.

Next Generation Broadband available to 90 percent of UK by 2017 funded by 50p +VAT per month levy on fixed phone lines which is expected to raise £1bn over seven years. This will fund next gen broadband to the final third where the market is unlikely to deliver a service without some intervention.

In his speech, Gordon Brown said that proposals for online delivery of government services “depend on reaching 100 per cent” coverage of next generation broadband and that by 2020 he expects “to make Britain the leading superfast broadband digital power creating 100 per cent access to every home”.

Conservative

Supports the 2 Mbps universal access by 2012 funded by surplus from that Digital Switchover fund.

Next Generation Broadband of 100Mbps to majority of homes by 2017 funded possibly by using a proportion of BBC license fee at any point beyond 2012. Funds would be used as loans or on a matched funding basis.

Thinks that BT should open up access to underground ducts and overground telegraph poles so competitors can lay their own fibre like they do in France and Singapore for example.

Wants a change to the rating system for fibre networks to remove all current disadvantages suffered by new operators.

Believes intervention may be necessary in due course for next-generation broadband, but market should be given a chance first.

Liberal Democrats

Supportive of government USC plans for 2Mbps by 2012 funded by digital switch over surplus, essential to have a minimum standard of service but 2Mbps is an unambitious target.

Thinks universal service funding should be combined with a project for rollout of next generation broadband, so those who can’t get broadband would get next generation broadband sooner.

Thinks that mobile broadband could have a role to play in hard-to-reach areas. Effective use of spectrum is important.

Would like to see vast majority of the country being able to access 40Mbps+ by 2017.

Wants immediate intervention to target areas unlikely to be reached by next generation broadband by the market, the final third. Would adopt an outside in approach (start funding the most rural of areas first) but admits “it won’t be possible for absolutely everyone to receive next generation access” immediately.

Opposes the Conservative policy to top-slice the BBC license fee.

Supports 50p/month levy “if applied properly and with exemptions for the least well off”

Welcomes BT decision to open up ducts.

Sees a need to encourage more services that make use of high speed broadband, including national and local government services, to drive demand.

Thinkbroadband, however, believes therefore that the key question will be what percentage of homes and businesses will have access to 100Mbps by 2017? The challenging target will be in the 80-100 per cent range. “The main political parties all accept the importance of securing a strong digital future with super-fast broadband, but each has made vague promises, leaving out some crucial factors that would allow us to hold them to account if they form part of the next government” says Sebastien Lahtinen, co-founder of Thinkbroadband, concluding “we see some differences in the plans for how next generation broadband will be funded, in particular the level and timing of government intervention, but we don’t have clarity from any party on both the question of what ‘next generation’ broadband means in terms of speeds, and how universal will access to this high speed broadband be? In other words, will they guarantee that every single household will get it?”

We have already been looking forward to the Nexus Two here at IT Pro, but it seems that the Nexus One hasn’t actually done as well as the Google publicity machine would have us believe.

Despite all the hype and the almost Apple-alike media circus that followed the launch of the Nexus One, sales have not exactly set the world on fire. As Vodafone reports that it delivered an impressive 50,000 iPhones to customers on the first day of sale here in the UK, so we can reveal that market analysts are claiming Google could only shift an estimated 20,000 Nexus One units in the first week.

OK, I appreciate that this is not apples and apples being compared here, if you’ll excuses the pun, but the argumental swing is surely in favour of Google on this occasion. After all, the iPhone is nothing new, and has been available in the UK for an absolute age. All that is new here is that someone other than O2 is selling it. For Vodafone to shift 50,000 units into an already pretty well saturated market in just 24 hours is nothing short of miraculous.

For Google, on the other hand, to launch what was widely expected to be an iPhone killer into an eager market of early tech adopters keen to get their hands on the first ever real Google phone and then only shift 20,000 units in a whole week is dire. In fact it is more than dire, it is a bloody big FAIL.

Flurry, the market analyst making the sales figure claims on the back of monitoring Android app usage, blames a lack of true wow factor as well as the distribution/marketing model. “Google chose to market and sell the device to consumers directly through its own website” Flurry explains, concluding “while this distribution strategy is among the most innovative facets of the Nexus One launch, and a threat to carrier control of the consumer relationship, a series of customer service and other mistakes reveal Google’s lack of retail experience”.

Google has yet to confirm or deny the sales figures.

Eye catching headlines are everything in the world of blogging just as they are in marketing. So imagine my joy when I spotted a press release proclaiming “Online condom sales rise despite stiff competition from retailers”.

It hits so many buttons that it could almost be used as a training aid for online marketers, no matter what line of business you happen to be in. Everyone looks twice when some harmless sexual innuendo is concerned, many look again when that innuendo is actually done intelligently and without causing any obvious offence. I say obvious, as some people will find that offence in pretty much anything to be fair.

But what struck me most about this particular headline was the accuracy as it summed up the fact that online sales of condoms had increased compared to the same period last year, and in the face of aggressive offline retailer promotions.

So well done to the Yorkshire based marketing company behind the campaign, VAC Media, which gets my best press release headline of the year award for 2010. I know it is early days yet, but you know I just cannot see anyone bettering that, can you?

Online news sites rely heavily on incoming traffic from search engines and aggregator sites to attract visitors, so it might seem a little odd that Rupert Murdoch (a mogul in denial) would decide that these are bad for business. Yet that is exactly what appears to have happened in the case of Times Online which has banned leading UK news aggregator service NewsNow from linking to any content it publishes.

The blocking itself would appear to be a simple robots.txt protocol implementation, but the reasoning behind the action is a little more complex. After all, it is not as if NewsNow is scraping content or stealing stories to publish as its own for profit. All NewsNow does, in this case, is grab the headline of the story and link to it. Those links are then presented to anyone, for free, who visits the NewsNow site.

For one thing, such linking is a recognised and effective way to drive traffic to the publishing sites. here at IT Pro our stories, including this one, get linked to by NewsNow and if they are popular enough to get featured in the top ten section, for example, the additional traffic driven in this direction can be quite substantial. To prevent this linking would be the equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I’m also rather concerned that to prevent such linking is actually eroding a rather important freedom that, as a journalist, I do not want to see damaged in any way: the freedom to quote sources in stories, to link to those sources in stories and to comment upon the views of others reporting the news. This action by Murdoch smells bad to me, it stinks of an attempt to further restrict the rights of those reporting the news. Of course, the fact that Times Online journalists quote other stories, and link to them, cannot have escaped the irony detectors of everyone outside of the News International family.

According to a statement from NewsNow Managing Director Struan Bartlett, two million visitors to the NewsNow site each month will now no longer find headlines and links to Times Online content in their news search results. “It is lamentable that News International has chosen to request we stop linking to their content and providing in-bound traffic and potential subscribers to the Times Online and right now it looks as though NewsNow has been singled out” Bartlett says, adding “we note that no other major search engine has been blocked by NI in this manner. NewsNow is not fundamentally different to other news search engines that are part of the Internet infrastructure, such as Google News and Yahoo. Why block us and not them?”

Good question, and one can only assume it is in order to test the waters on a relative small fry before tackling the big fish which have some seriously heavyweight legal resources to draw upon. NewsNow had already pulled links to newspaper websites which were covered by the Newspaper Licensing Agency from its subscription based service last month, after a change in policy required permissions to be sought and fees paid for circulating such links. That policy change has been, Bartlett says, to the Copyright Tribunal.

Oddly, News International was not involved in the NLA scheme but it has seemingly taken a similar stance albeit through this selective blocking process. As Bartlett concludes “the question remains whether News International, in arbitrarily blocking individual search engines, is trying to use its muscle to gain unreasonable control over the public’s freedom to choose the way they access information and news online”.

I’d be keen to hear what IT Pro readers think of this move, and in the meantime for more information you can visit the Right2Link campaign.

Despite Amazon making it known that the ‘most gifted’ product bought from the US online store was the Kindle e-book reader with around half a million sold during the Xmas rush, I’m still not convinced that print is dead. Wounded, and perhaps seriously, but certainly not dead just yet.

Now I’m not mad, and I realise that when the likes of Rupert Murdoch start ponder how to monetise online news then things have reached a certain tipping point as far as publishing goes. But just because Amazon customers apparently bought more e-books than paperbacks and hardbacks on Xmas Day, the first time that the online retailer has reported such a thing, does not mean that no print sales were made.

Print is on the back foot in some markets, and news is almost certainly the main one amongst them for very good reason: the Internet is the obvious place to get your news from. Not only does it have the immediacy that news stories demand, in terms of both production of the story as well as consumption of it (I can access breaking news with equal ease at my desktop or on my iPhone) but it also bestows the kind of interactivity upon that news that even digital TV finds hard to match.

Yet when I buy a book I do not, I have to admit, do so in electronic format despite my owning a number of hardware devices capable of delivering that novel digitally. Why is this? Simply, and it’s the same argument that suggests to me that print will not die any time soon, because I do not feel comfortable reading a novel on my iPhone, netbook or even a Kindle. An eBook can deliver in terms of nerdy satisfaction, knowing that I can carry around a veritable library of titles in my pocket, but it cannot deliver in terms of reading enjoyment.

Reading a book on-screen is, to me, a flat and dull experience. I crave the smell and feel of the paper, I want to turn the page physically back and forth, I need to be able to crease a corner as a bookmark. Silly, I know, but I am most certainly not alone. Sure, as a published author (21 books and counting in my 20 year writing career) I have a vested interest in keeping print alive, not least because the royalties remain better than those offered for electronic product right now, but as a technology evangelist I also have a vested interest in moving with the times. Trouble is, it seems to me that technology has still not yet moved far enough to make eBooks a compelling purchase for the dedicated reader. Unfortunately, not only is the technology incapable of delivering that touch and feel experience that I, and others, crave but it fails to do so at a cost way in excess of buying the printed book.

Even if you remove the hardware cost from the equation, you still have the cost of the book itself. I’ve seen eBook versions of best sellers being sold at more than twice the cost of the hardback version for example, and that is just madness.

So congratulations Amazon, you have a runaway success with your Kindle. And congratulations Amazon, to sell more eBooks than print books is also amazing. But global media, let’s not forget that those sales were only on a single day and to extrapolate from that ‘print is dead’ is stretching credulity just a tad, no? Amazon is claiming no such thing, of course, after all it has loads of printed books to sell…

Have you ever been stuck in the middle of a giant supermarket desperately trying to find that ‘Bombay Bad Boy’ Pot Noodle but were just too embarrassed to ask an assistant for help? Well there’s an app for that.

Just last month Apple rejected the Tesco Store and Product Finder app due to a technical issue with the way it handled being denied access to the iPhone’s location service. Well, OK, if it could not find your location it assumed you were at the Tesco.com head office in Welwyn Garden City instead. That glitch has now been rectified, and the Tesco Finder has hit the App Store.

Assuming that you are a Tesco customer, of course, then it’s actually a pretty nifty little application for the iPhone. It knows where you are and will find your nearest store, providing the street address and telephone number along with a one-click ‘directions finder’ using Google Maps. Very nice indeed. If you are already inside a Tesco, it knows that as well.

What it doesn’t seem to be able to do, at least not for me, is allow you to use the Town/City search function to locate a store that is not near to where you currently are. I just get a “Sorry: I couldn’t connect to Google.com Please check your network connection or try again later” error every single time. Not so nice.

However, once you have located a Tesco store the real star feature of this little app comes to the fore: the product search. Type in a product, any product at all, and it will tell you if the store you are in stocks it or note. But that’s not all, it will also tell you exactly where in that store it is located. How cool is that? No more cowering before the wife as you explain that you just couldn’t find the tampons (again) - they are on aisle 03 on the right side counting 11 units along from the 7th shelf up from the floor. Interestingly, the app uses exactly the same technology that Tesco.com pickers use to shop for customers’ online orders in store.

What it doesn’t tell you, and where Tesco has missed a trick, is the current in-store price and in-store stock levels. Now if it did that, how cool would it be? Very cool is the answer and you bet that Tesco is working on functionality upgrades. Indeed, Nick Lansley, the Head of Research and Development has hinted at some pretty interesting upgrades coming real soon. “one of Tesco Finder’s hidden talents is that you can search on a 13-digit barcode” he says “Just read any barcode from a grocery product and type it in”. The best is yet to come, as Lansley drops very string hints that ‘Red Laser’ functionality (another app which turns the iPhone into a barcode scanner and price comparison service rolled into one) could be coming in “a short time” to enable you to just point your iPhone at a barcode to capture it.

Oh, and just for the record, the Bombay Bad Boy Pot Noodle is on Aisle 15 on the left side counting 9 units along then the 2nd shelf up from the floor at my local store. And the beef is on aisle 18 on the left side counting 10 units along then the 7th shelf up from the floor.

With most of the media coverage from the Black Hat Las Vegas conference covering the Apple iPhone SMS hacking story there is always a danger that some other really rather important news gets rather buried away. Such as the small point that security researchers at Black Hat were demonstrating some really rather worrying vulnerabilities that impact upon that most sacred of security protocols, the Secure Sockets Layer.

Moxie Marlinspike showed how man-in-the-middle attacks can fool web browsers and email clients into thinking a fake site was legit, courtesy of flaws in SSL by intercepting traffic by way of a null-termination certificate. Marlinspike has adapted his SSLSniff tool to get spoofed SSL pages and log all incoming and outgoing traffic instead of it going via an encrypted channel. While Firefox 3.5 is protected against the attack, earlier versions are not, nor is Chrome or IE8 although because the latter has code signing certificates as an additional security layer it is harder to pull off.

Dan Kaminsky, yes the same Dan Kaminsky who uncovered the biggest DNS flaw ever last year, was also presenting on SSL insecurity. Along with Len Sassamna he managed to fool one Certificate Authority into issuing a certificate for a domain he did not own by using a naming trick that exploits a vulnerability in the X.509 protocol for generating SSL connections.

Recession, what recession? That seems to be the message that Internet shoppers are giving loud and clear. Online spending is growing by £2.4 billion this year, with e-Retail spending set to hit £20.9 billion by the end of the year. That’s a growth rate of some 13.3 percent over the previous year.

A new report from Verdict Research admits that Internet sales are actually starting to slow and become more competitive as a market, online retail is still set to hit £31.2 billion by 2013 which would be a 10 percent slice of the total retail spend.

Verdict says that through 2009 the overall total retail growth will contract by 0.6 percent courtesy of consumer spending being ravaged by the recession. During the same period the online market will continue to expand, driven by a continued increase in Internet shoppers with a higher expenditure per head. This follows on from the trend of 2008 when there was a 1 percent increase in Internet users and an 18.1 percent increase in online shoppers, both spending an average of 5.8 percent more than in 2007.

It should be noted, however, that while online growth in 2008 represented a substantial out performance of wider retail it was not all good news historically speaking: this was the smallest rise in the channel’s sales since bursting of the dotcom bubble back in 2002. Verdict reckons the growth rates will continue to fall over five years as penetration of the population begins to level out.

“The key for individual retailers is to formulate two clear strategies, one for succeeding through the recession and one targeting growth beyond this, as the online channel begins to approach maturity,” says Malcolm Pinkerton, Senior Retail Analyst at Verdict Research and author of the report. “Those with less money to spend are turning to the internet to search out bargains on branded items like electricals,”says Pinkerton. “Additionally, the more affluent groups, who do still have money to spend, continue to appreciate the internet for its convenience, making the channel doubly resilient to the downturn.”

That said, there is some evidence that those with the least money are turning to cheap and chavvy high street alternatives such as Primark, Matalan, Poundland for their clothing and lower priced household items. “But overall this is being more than outweighed by increases in bargain hunters looking for larger, branded items and the loyalty of those most financially comfortable consumers who continue to value convenience over price” Pinkerton concludes.

With the holiday season fast approaching, many of us are starting to consider doing the Xmas shopping. For an ever increasing number of people that means avoiding the high street crowds and high street prices by heading online instead. Unfortunately, while the shopper is saving money the same cannot be said for the employer if that shopping is done on work time. A new set of surveys reveals that the average cost to business this Xmas could be as high as