Help me out here. One ISP publicly washes its’ hands of monitoring their networks for naughty people stealing music. In a move reminiscent of Pontius Pilot, TalkTalk are playing the “we’re just the conduit card and the security of your digital property is nothing to do with us” card. Okay, well I can sort of accept that especially since the music industry doesn’t seem to be coughing up the requisite greenbacks to fund an army of net-watches.

And yet here we have BT spying on all of our browsing habits in order to target us with specific advertising. That’s the same bloody thing isn’t it? Oh now I see what i missed – one of them costs money and the other one makes it. So it is fuck all to do with ethics, corporate responsibility or even the protection of people’s livelihoods. It’s about making more cash, abusing the privilege of net privacy and applying a moral code forged in the crucible of capitalism.

I would respect TalkTalk’s position more if they’d just ponyed up with “look there is no money in this for us, link it with some advertising revenue and maybe we can do a deal”. As for BT, well they’ve been fucking people over since Mercury had the temerity to target a tiny percentage of their market share. I’d trust Max Mosely over those slippery wankers*.

Loosely related is the Government’s headline splash on a technological solution to pedophiles stalking children on social networking sites. What a masterstroke because anyone who has spent five seconds in the digital age cannot, of course, create a disposable email address. It’s worse than doing nothing because it creates a false sense of security for anyone dumb enough to believe anything these attention seeking worthies put out.

And if we’re talking useless organisations today – after constant chasing – we received “We are not returning your call. The person you need is on holiday. We hope to be able to provide an update next week” from the seller’s solicitors. This is an except copy of the last time they could be bothered to reply, except the date has moved on two weeks. Fax all use frankly, so sadly it looks like Cabbage-Land will not be for us.

Frustrating is not the word. Well it is because I cannot easily convey a digital copy of the noise a head makes repeatedly smacking a keyboard. Let’s try “gfljklsgjklsfhnklhdsjihdsjhjisioas”. That’s what is tattooed on my forehead 🙁

* possibly not an ideal choice of phrase. If what is alleged turns out to be true 😉