If they wanted to be at all relevant, they should have tested their development version against the development versions of the other browsers. At the moment they're comparing where they are now, where Opera was in March where and Mozilla was in January. Fair.

And aside from that there is some major JS abuse going on here: all the links have hrefs along the lines of javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$MainContent$Threads$ThreadsRepeater$ctl00$LinkButton1','').

I wonder if they ever stopped to think what on earth the URI was invented for. To me this makes their technical incompetence quite clear.

A property this post has in spades.

The question is: who on earth does this help? The BBC are a public organisation, so it's not like they were losing money over it, and corporate rightsholders were perfectly happy beforehand. On top of that, it's DRM, so it's not exactly going to stop any copying in the long run, just annoy a few people and cost a shedload of money for the BBC.

I imagine this must be a decision pushed through management, because the BBC's IT department seems very savvy indeed and probably all hate DRM.

Another +1 for Avira.

The paid version always scores superbly (i.e. it is almost always in the top three) in the AV-Comparatives tests 1, 2 (although its award status often suffers due to a slightly higher than average number of false positives). If the quality of the paid versions has any bearing on that of the free versions, Avira absolutely smashes AVG and Avast!.

Are there any?

If only someone big, like Google, would set up a real alternative. (I reckon they would make a point of not blocking people's accounts for no reason, though I'm not sure if I want them controlling any more of my life)

No, I'm not in America.

You practically have to be a pirate to navigate through this many comments.

That is the beginning of a much better solution.

But do WOW, Hulu or Netflix shut down instantly and remove your progress even for a small blip in service?

Yes, I agree with you apart from 2), which is probably a bit tenuous. I regard it as important that I am able to pirate things if I need to, just in case (i.e. 1 or Ubisoft goes bust and shuts down its must-be-connected-to-at-all-times DRM servers)

Whether she was innocently infringing or not isn't really the point because it's fairly obvious that no teenager on the planet who pirates music doesn't know that it's illegal.

The problem is that she's in court for downloading 16 songs. Randomly attacking people who will find it difficult to defend themselves legally isn't the right way to go about reducing piracy.

Especially seeing as what you're doing by providing wifi is essentially wobbling stuff on a very small scale.

(Yes, I know, don't tell me how wrong this is as an explanation of EM radiation.)

My pessimism has been proven wrong!

Yes, sorry, I can't think of anything intelligent or witty to say. I'm too happy.