Barence writes "The deplorable speed of British broadband connections has been revealed in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that 42.3% of broadband connections are slower than 2Mb/sec. More worryingly, the ONS statistics are based on the connection's headline speed, not actual throughput, which means that many more British broadband connections are effectively below the 2Mb/sec barrier. Better still, a separate report issued yesterday by Ofcom revealed that the majority of broadband users had no idea about the speed of their connection anyway."

An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Government's plan to Censor the Internet is producing problems for ISPs, with filters causing speeds to drop by up to 86% and falsely blocking 10% of safe sites. The Government Minister in charge of the censorship plan, Conservative Stephen Conroy, has been accused of bullying ISP employees critical of his plan: 'If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.'" Read on for more, including an interesting approach to demonstrating the inevitable collision of automated censorship with common sense.

Abtin Forouzandeh asks: "Having used Vista for a few months, something keeps nagging me about the user account control. For the UAC to be useful, the user needs to have a fair amount of knowledge about: what the UAC is; what application it is blocking; the consequences of blocking the action; and an alternate approach if the blocked action did something useful. Anyone who has ever worked with end-users can tell you that they are generally disinterested in learning anything about computer usage beyond how to use word and make a spreadsheet. Frankly, even as a highly technical user, I nearly always approve the UAC dialog, even if I don't know the consequences. Since users lack knowledge, and Vista keeps asking esoteric/ambiguous questions, then users will always approve UAC dialogs. Since the UAC so clearly fails in its goal of making computing more secure, and substantially increases complexity, why is it common wisdom that turning off UAC is 'not recommended'? For 99% of users, is there any true downside? Has the community come up with ways to make UAC useful?"

Several readers let us know about a program in which a US FBI agent and employees of the MPAA led a seminar for Swedish police officers in methods of finding and stopping illegal downloading from the Internet. The writer at zeropaid.com says, "I bet the Swedish people are going to love to find out that the US government and a US lobbying group now have a hand in training their police personnel. So much for the notion of national sovereignty." Reader Oxygen provided a bit of translation from an article in Swedish on IDG.se: "According to Bertil Ramsell, responsible for the course, the purpose of the visit was to give the invited speakers a chance to explain to the students what their organization's purpose was. But in a report from the IIPA, the purpose was to educate students in anti-piracy."