One million people have mapped their mobile – have you?

A million people have flocked to Map Your Mobile, a free mobile checker, to help avoid dropped calls, sluggish data and patchy signal, Ofcom has revealed today.

Ofcom’s mobile checker service lets users enter their postcode to get a map of which networks are available in that particular area, alongside a score showing which company performs best in their postal district. You can check your coverage in seconds at ofcom.org.uk/mobile.  

It allows anyone to see which mobile network is best where they live, work or travel, helping people choose the right provider before signing up or switching, so they can get the best possible value for money from their contract.

With mobile phones now essential for everything from banking to booking GP appointments, it’s become a must-use consumer tool.

www.ofcom.org.uk

MPs call for review on motorcycle road tax

Led by Bromsgrove MP Bradley Thomas and countersigned by 26 other members of parliament, the letter to Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves asks for an ‘urgent review’ on the way in which Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) is worked out for bikes.

Currently road tax is calculated by engine capacity, with a year’s road tax for small capacity bikes (up to 150cc) costing £27, rising in brackets up to £125 per year for machines over 600cc. The group argues that motorcycles are among the lightest and least damaging vehicles on public roads, and that using engine size is not the correct way to calculate tax – especially as cars are assessed on CO2 emissions and heavy goods vehicles on their weight and impact on road wear.

The letter, which is signed by six former cabinet members, including hardcore motorcyclist Steve Barclay, MP for North East Cambridgeshire, argues that ‘… the current system is anomalous within the Government’s own framework. VED for cars is linked to environmental performance. VED for HGVs reflects road impact. VED for motorcycles reflects neither. Engine size is not a reliable indicator of emissions, road damage or mileage, and its continued use as sole determinant of motorcycle VED lacks a coherent policy rationale.’

My bike weighs 200Kg, and takes up the space of a quarter of a car. As we can & do filter - motorcyclists have much less road space impact compared to any sort of 4 wheeled car. Yet - for road tax - I pay as much as & in many cases more than a car. Robbers! 

www.carolenash.com

Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise

Every Artificial Intelligence lab is losing money serving your company right now. They know it. And they are doing it on purpose.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and the rest are running an industry-wide loss-leader program at a scale that has no precedent. They are selling enterprises filet mignon at gas station hot dog prices and calling it a business model. The gap between what your company pays for AI subscriptions and what it actually costs to serve those seats is not a rounding error. It is a gulf. And every organization that has built workflows, products, or entire business units on top of these subsidized prices is standing right on the edge of it.

This should be front of mind for every CTO, CFO, and head of operations reading this. Because when the pricing corrects, and it will, the companies that treated AI as a permanently cheap utility are going to wake up to bills that make their current SaaS spend look quaint.

www.thestateofbrand.com

A reading for today: God the builder, or architect

I find I must borrow yet another parable from George MacDonald. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him - for we can prevent Him, if we choose - He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.

By C. S. Lewis

From Mere Christianity

Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis

Remove wired cable barriers from England's highways

Cable barriers, particularly the posts that hold them, present a danger to motorcyclists. Due to these upright posts with protruding parts and jagged edges, they are more likely to seriously injure or kill motorcyclists. 

Northern Ireland has recognised this threat and is currently in the process of removing their remaining cable barriers, while countries such as Norway have banned their use. Their removal will improve road safety outcomes for motorcyclists – a vulnerable road user group.

We are calling for the removal of 143 miles of cable barriers still present on England's strategic road network by the end of the decade. Replacing them with a standard guardrails and or/concrete as is appropriate for the given road environment. Please sign this petition to remove this danger from our roads - thank you!

www.change.org

Computer Misuse Act reform to move forward in National Security Bill

The long-awaited reform of Britain’s outdated Computer Misuse Act of 1990 – which has hamstrung the work of the nation’s cyber security professionals and researchers for years – is to be included in a new National Security Bill.

Announced today by King Charles III in his speech at the State Opening of Parliament, the National Security Bill is chiefly designed to make the UK a harder target for hostile foreign states and other dangerous groups to attack.

It comes partly in response to the 2024 Southport terror attack, and more recent incidents targeting Britain’s Jewish community, and will create offences around creating and disseminating harmful material online, and according to Westminster will close gaps within the nation’s state threats legislation and align it more closely with anti-terror laws.

Ultimately, the stated goal is to enhance the UK’s ability to counter the full spectrum of threats ranged against the UK by enhancing the powers available to law enforcement and the security services.

The government said that by reforming the legal cyber landscape within this, cyber cops will gain updated powers and capabilities to “remain effective in the digital age”.

It intends to create a Cyber Crime Risk Order that can be applied to control the behaviour of cyber criminals, and new abilities to search people believed to be concealing evidence on behalf of suspected offenders.

“It will also unlock the power of cyber security professionals to better enable them to secure computer systems. It will also seek to tackle the pervasive threat to the UK economy and businesses, posed by ruthless cyber criminals,” said the government.

www.computerweekly.com

Double U, Double U, Double U - Eh?...

 

Viz says: When giving a web address, why do people insist on saying the letters `www', with 3 syllables per letter? What they stand for — World Wide Web — is six syllables shorter!

The World Wide Web (also known as WWW, W3, or simply the Web) is a global interconnected information system that enables content sharing over the Internet. It facilitates access to documents and other web resources according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system". Documents and other media content are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers. Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through a character string called uniform resource locator (URL).

Don sez: "Often us techies refer to it as dub-dub-dub - often non techies look blankly at us!"

www.wikipedia.org