Of course there were very good reasons to do things contrary to American method in color-tv!

Unfortunately it issues warnings all the time, especially for google and twitter.
They occur so often that you (or at least me) get the habit of accepting them without further checking, to be able to continue working.
This largely defeats the usefulness of this add-on.

It appears that google twitter use different certificates on different servers around the world, and you get those warnings when
the loadbalancing mechanisms direct you to another server you were using last time (for the same domain name).
Either that, or their communications are intercepted by the local security agency who acts as a man-in-the-middle.

How would you know?

Highspeed rail in the Netherlands. We have a small country, so when a highspeed rail
is constructed every city wants a stop along it, and cities are only 30km apart here.
Furthermore, when they ask me "would you take the highspeed rail to Paris" I probably
would answer yes, but it would not be more often than once every 2 years or so. Not a
basis for a regular train service.
So what we got was a highspeed rail with a surcharge, nobody using it so they had to
stop the regular service to force the users over to it. There was a special train built for
"local" service, but it had so many defects that it was removed from service and there
now is a big dispute with the manufacturer.
The problem with trains is that everything is so close here, and people who can afford
the ticket price normally can afford to travel by car and have the advantage of door-to-door
travel. E.g. the highspeed rail would be ideal for government officials to travel to Brussels,
but I'm sure they use their car-with-driver instead.

Even those ideas for mass transit that did work out are not always a success.
It appears to be difficult to predict the usage of such a network.
We got a highspeed rail line but nobody is using it. Existing connections had to
be terminated before some people forcefully started using this train (at higher tariffs).
And specially built trains that were ordered for a lower priced service were a total disaster.

I had already blocked all ads served by openx servers (by URL regexp) long before this, after a couple of bad happenings on ad sites running openx.
It apparently is an unreliable platform. This finding only proves that.
However, I also think the ad platforms should make 5 steps back to become credible and acceptable again.
An ad server should be called from some customer-specific URL on the website and then serve a JPG or PNG with the ad. Period.
All the hoopla with javascripts fetched from different places, iframes, active content (like flash) etc has made it into an unreliable
piece of junk that just asks for being blocked. When I block it, they should not blame me but blame themselves.

For some time I plotted the jitter of reception of DCF-77 (a similar transmitter in Germany) and I found there was a clear cycle of increase and
decrease of the jitter of the pulses output by my receiver (measured over one minute) over the day.
At daytime the jitter is around 20us, at nighttime it is more like 200us.
This is most likely explained by path length variations that apparently are depending on propagation.
(although texts about such transmitters often boast that there is no propagation effect like the one seen at shortware at those frequencies)

The claimed accuracy is of course at the source, and maybe when you started receiving WWVB years ago and perform some kind of averaging
over a long interval, you could eventually get an accuracy like that, but there is no way it can be achieved over short intervals, let alone for
individual second pulses.

Actually, companies like Siemens recognized even in those days that lowercase is easier on the eye than UPPERCASE and many
of their telex machines printed only lowercase.

You query for a location+timestamp and you get a timezone rule back that includes a timestamp range it is valid for.
This information you cache locally, and before making more DNS queries you check of you have locally cached info for that location for which the requested timestamp is within a previously returned timestamp range.
That does not sound too difficult. It is much like the operation of the existing library, which uses a static table instead of DNS queries but still needs to have
separate information for different timestamp ranges.

Of course this is true when you see a clock in the picture, but when I tune to the BBC and press the info button on my remote, I still see the overlaid clock in local time.
And when I press the EPG button to see their schedule, I see the schedule expressed in my local time. So "the nine o'clock news" airs at 22:00.

This is possible because this data is all transmitted relative to UTC and my receiver translates it to local time. And it only works because I cared to set
the timezone for my receiver when it went through its initial setup wizard.

What they probably are worried about is the viewers/users who do not have things like this correctly set.
After all, when your PC clock is not correct and you are on internet, you must have done something wrong. Probably set the timezone incorrectly.
(home versions of windows are by default synchronizing their clock to time.windows.com and Apple stuff probably is no different)

Right now their problem is that people with their clock incorrectly set will see an incorrect time.
They probably don't want to change that into a situation where people with their timezone incorrectly set will see an incorrect time.
(as that will probably largely be the same group of people)

In a recent programme on local TV, some investigative journalist reported that they had found many
NAS devices online. A certain brand of NAS comes with sharing enabled by default, with a default password.
You just need to unpack your NAS and connect it to your local network and all the data you put on it
is accessible to the world. It uses UPNP to overcome the NAT problem.

The journalist found several NAS boxes with backups of very private data on it.
Another issue is the HP all-in-one printer/scanner devices, which also are internet connected by
default (even via WiFi). So you can access them from your smartphone, how convenient.
But they found people who had left private documents like account activation letters on the scanner,
and could remotely start a scan and read the document.
The users who were contacted were not aware of any problem.

So, it is a big security risk. But to have this work in the case you know what you are doing and
purposely want to share your data or your device, you need the possibilty to contact your port 80.
So it is no good if the provider blocks this with no way to unblock it.

That is forbidden here. A provider must give transparent access when the customer wants that.

How terrible!
And how do you access your own NAS or printer over the net?
These days, more and more devices come with their built-in webserver that enables the owner to contact home from his smartphone or tablet.
It is a security nightmare, but that is a different topic.

In the Netherlands, it is forbidden to filter internet other than for security or customer-opted convenience reasons (e.g. spam filtering).
Many providers also offer fixed or semi-fixed IP as standard feature.

Fortunately I entered an invalid e-mail address on my Twitter account.
Every time I log in they bug me about "e-mails to your address to not get delivered, please update your address"
but after all it was good that I never did that. Why would I want to receive e-mail from Twitter?? Or from any other
party they choose to share my info with?

Fortunately the BBC also transmits DVB subtitling.
However, the typical cable company does not relay it to the clients yet.
Maybe this changes in the future?
Right now, I can enable subtitles on my satellite receiver, but not on Ziggo digital cable.
(on analogue cable you are probably out of luck - DVB subtitling cannot be converted to teletext)

One of the alleged problems of teletekst is claimed to be that everything has to be in a 24x40 character frame,
of which in practice only 24x39 is usable, and of course all the standard headers and footers further subtract
from that to leave maybe 20x39 available for each news item.

But while that is limited space and the youngsters undoubtedly would want more space to express the content,
those youngsters invented twitter and use text messaging, with even shorter messages!

I think it actually is a strength of teletekst. The editors are forced to condense their items into very compact and
factual text. Of course this shows the capabilties of the editors, which makes the NOS Teletekst so much
better than the competition from RTL or worst: SBS.