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The_Phazer

Listed below are comments made by The_Phazer between Wednesday, 7th October 2009 and Thursday, 12th November 2009.

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Round up Thursday 12 November 2009 3:06pm on 12 Nov 2009 "Why don't the BBC accept that the public do not want DRM on Freeview and stop trying to go against us?"

Who are "the public"? I'm the public, and I'd much rather have a broadcast flag on Freeview than lose shows that I'd otherwise get to see or the BBC hence have to pay a heap of extra money for.

And I very much suspect that a vote of the entire population of those options, given 99.9999% of people will just be buying boxes from Dixons which will hence give them no issues whatsoever, would agree with me by an enormous margin.

It's the iPlayer arguement all over again. iPlayer (even streamed) can be considered DRMed up to the hilt much more than this proposal. People here said it was doomed to failure. They were wrong. And if you asked the public if they'd rather have an £800 licence fee, or much less (i.e the BBC make a tenth of what it does now for the same price) content, or have the iPlayer window restricted to seven days using any technical measures the BBC can, then they will pick the technical restriction measures.

Phazer
Round up Thursday 12 November 2009 10:51am on 12 Nov 2009 Sadly an awful lot of my replies to Cory Doctorow's articles and lack of factual rigour are deleted by the Guardian. That piece of his was remarkable in that it gets very nearly every fact in it wrong.

Phazer
BBC iD on blogs update 12:37pm on 06 Nov 2009 "And just to answer the Phazer, the bugs you identify are not in fact problems with the BBC iD system itself."

I'm sorry, but they rather are, by definition - if you implement a new ID system that doesn't work with the existing software, most people would say it's the new system at fault, not that the existing software wasn't somehow able to predict shoddy future coding in advance.

And I see no way in which the intermittent endless BBC ID login cycle of death, given there are reports of it on the blogs and the message boards, can't be a BBC ID bug(s).

"They're being worked on but they won't hold up the roll out of BBC iD."

Again, that seems hard to believe when they have been, frankly, willfully ignored for eight to ten months when the BBC are quite aware that DNA and the ID system don't work together properly and never have.

Phazer
BBC iPlayer Standard Products on TV Platforms 09:30am on 03 Nov 2009 I think it is a practical and commercial mistake to go proprietary.

Commercial mistake??? You do seem to be glossing over the fact that without timed expiry the BBC would inccur several billion pounds in extra rights licencing costs, so the licence fee would have to multiply...

Phazer
Welcome to BBC iD 11:36pm on 02 Nov 2009 "There have been some specific issues with only around two of the blogs - one of them being the PM blog."

Exactly the same issue has been happening to posters on the iPlayer messageboard since it adopted the new ID system, and complained about by many of us. So no, sorry, but it isn't. The infinite login loop is painfully familiar to most of us.

Please pull this system until it reaches pre-alpha status.

Phazer
Welcome to BBC iD 11:33pm on 02 Nov 2009 "The guys who build the iPlayer messageboard have been looking into that."

For eight to ten months with no word?

How long will the fix take? 1.3x10^23 years?

"For most people (including me and most other people we've tested) its working fine."

No, sorry - I can go and look at the discussions pages for other people on the iPlayer messageboard too, remember? It doesn't work for 100% of the posters I've checked. That would require a lottery winning level of statistical improbability.

As we've said, we're about to begin moving all our messageboards to BBC iD for login, so we'll be making very sure it works properly.

Well... no. Sorry, but if you were checking it worked properly you'd have rolled back to the old ID system months and months ago and stop breaking the iPlayer board.

"It would be interesting to know if you have any similar issues on the Strictly Come Dancing messageboard as it runs on exactly the same system, and also uses BBD iD."

As has been pointed out by jazz'n'jivebunny above, it happens to all posters on all boards that use the new ID system, because the new ID system does not work properly and is being rolled out despite major bugs that have been known for nearly a year and not even acknowledged, never mind fixed.

I would have said it was impossible to make dna a worse platform technically than it already was, but somehow this ID system managed it.

Phazer
Welcome to BBC iD 10:37pm on 30 Oct 2009 "@Russ we're doing all we can to respond to any bug reports or issues we get at the moment - especially during this rollout ;-)"

Then how come not one of the bugs apparent from the iPlayer message board appear to have been fixed in eight months while we've had My Discussions screens that don't work and endless infinite loops while trying to log in?
Welcome to BBC iD 4:47pm on 29 Oct 2009 "They'll also be aware of some of the teething problems we've had."

i.e. The entire system has been irredeemably broken and nigh unusuable for nearly eight months and nothing has been done or said about it.

I'm afraid I'm not really ready to take it on trust that it suddenly works now. Certainly, for instance, if I go into "My Discussions" on the POV boards and look at threads I've posted in on the iPlayer messageboard every message in the thread remains marked as new - even if I was the last poster in the thread and I read it four seconds ago. Given this basic bug that has existed since the system's launch is still there you'll forgive me for being slightly skeptical that the problems are "ironed out".

Phazer
BBC Online and social media 11:15pm on 11 Oct 2009 Oh god - I can't think of anything worse than wasting licence fee money moderating comments on every BBC News story. It'd be like extending the festering pit of idiocy that is Have Your Say a thousand fold.

There are plenty of places on the web for people to write innane dribble. The licence fee is much better spent on actual original, professional content like better journalism in the first place.

Please, please don't do this.
BBCHD and DRM: A Response to Cory Doctorow 1:56pm on 07 Oct 2009 "I'd rather you not buy major Hollywood movies if you think we should pay for you to encrypt."

You /= all licence fee payers.

Who bluntly if it meant they got to keep seeing films and saved them considerable amounts of rights money would be quite happy to see a contract that included a condition that the BBC had to set every user of open source software in the country on fire.

Phazer

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