British Telecom’s invitation to grab a free 2GB of on-line storage, see The Register, came at just the right time for us. Not a bad offer because we aren’t currently BT customers. It’s not every day BT show such largess, so we both grabbed at it as soon as our mice could click us there.

Since the 1990’s dealing with large files has become second nature to most in the design and print industry. Colour pre-press jobs often have to be transported on multiple DVDs or removable hard disks, just as they used to be when Syquests and others were the rage. Except in those days, 48MB seemed an awful lot. It’s no wonder that Apple abandoned the floppy disk over 10 years ago – there was just no use it could be put to and was too unreliable for anything but the smallest files. Nowadays we work on computers with a terabyte of storage and even that fills at an alarming rate.

The real problem comes when trying to distribute large files by electronic communication. Email could be the solution but the current protocols really don’t encourage sending anything larger than 10MB. If the recipient hasn’t emptied their mailbox, that’s 10MB bouncing straight back. We have occasionally received 50MB attachments, photographs from studios in the Far East usually and luckily we have an understanding ISP.

FTP used to be the best solution for transferring and with the rise of broadband, is easy to set up on individual computers rather than a monolithic mainframe. The only problem is that lately Microsoft appear to have gone slightly off-track and made their FTP software not completely adhering to standards, or at least not as easy to set-up to conform to standards other than Microsoft’s. This is of course, nothing unusual but the fact is the older the FTP server software, the less problems we have communicating with them. Unless they are running on *nix that is, when all is plain sailing.

For some years we’ve used Apple’s cheap .mac idisk. For about £60 a year it supplies various goodies including, email, web space, collaborative groups and 1GB on-line storage. This is accessed by webDAV, not the world’s best known file transfer protocol but very easy to use and presumably BT uses similar for File Vault. We upload our huge file to be transferred and the intended recipient then downloads the file at their leisure – useful when dealing with different time zones and especially countries in the Arctic Circle who close down for six months at the end of summer.

It looks as though BT have trumped Apple because for an extra £60 a year you can have 20GB storage space at File Vault, if you have use for such space. Even with maxed-out broadband, it would take at least three days to send 20GB to file vault at 700kbps. BT’s view is that a kid in London can set up their own music label on the cheap and start selling digital rights protected content (by BT naturally) from their File Vault. It all sounds a bit like the man on the Clapham Omnibus flogging cheap goods from his lock-up.

But that’s exactly how Alan Sugar started.

Long ago in an operating system far, far removed from anything we use nowadays, Symantec made a piece of software that generated a severe dependency bordering on addiction. As soon as an unexplained glitch hit, usually QuarkXPress – which is nothing unusual even today – out would come Norton’s Disc Doctor to check for all those “B-Tree errors” and bad “Volume Header Blocks”. And it usually helped. Problems were solved and work resumed. So good was Disc Doctor that it became de rigeur for all Mac troubleshooters to run it before doing anything else.

Then Apple had a change of gear, dumped a decade of work on their new OS and bought in Next Step instead along with with its BSD Unix underpinnings. Symantec, publishers of Norton’s Tools, saw the writing on the wall and ceased production of their Mac version. There just wasn’t any need for their offering because free Unix software does exactly the same job and runs automatically every time the computer starts. Even the disc de-fragmentation utility in Norton’s Tools was rendered obsolete because de-fragging occurs routinely every time a file is opened and saved.

To Symantec’s chagrin, their other Mac offerings were little needed as Unix included a very efficient firewall and the Permissions-led access to the System left only small openings for virus writers to exploit. Besides, the move to Unix made all the free firewalls and anti-virus programs available. McAfee, another publisher of Mac anti-virus software was also left high and dry, especially when Apple themselves dumped McAfee’s Virex and shifted to a free open source scanner called clamXav.

So what did Symantec and McAfee do next? They whinged about their loss of a market and spread FUD about how dangerous it is to practice unsafe computing without one of their prophylactics.

Now wonder then that they are watching Vista with extremely rheumy eyes, moaning that Microsoft is shutting them out of their market place because it won’t give them the API’s they need and is competing with them by supplying it’s own brand of anti-virus. David Sykes, VP of Symantec, is quoted in APC as saying Microsoft is using bully tactics to make implementing third-party antivirus software more difficult. “As a result, computers running Vista will become more vulnerable.” In other words, more FUD.

It is strange, though, that anti-virus software will not be built into Vista, touted as Microsoft’s most secure operating system yet, and instead only be available at extra cost. One wonders whether, if it were up to the anti-virus publishers, Vista would never become secure and attract every computing cough and sniff in the world. But then I’ve always questioned exactly who it is that releases so many diseases in the computer world. Is it really young “hackers” who get a buzz out of writing them? Or should suspicion fall on the firms who generate a large income from preventing the infections in the first place? Maybe just paranoia… but you never know.