So we didn’t win the 90 million pound Euromillions jackpot the other week. Man that was unexpected, I felt sure of a win. Ahh well. In the absence of that life carried on as normal. It was valentine’s day this week, so that involved the traditional sharing of cutsey gifts. Funnily, the traditional shops such as Thorntons were all crammed full of much more people than normal. I could not explain this.
In other events, I have been looking at the BBC IPlayer [www.bbc.co.uk] as I thought it might be a neat way of watching missed stuff, but it seems that it uses the same hidden PTP technology as the 4OD stuff does, and numerous folk have said that it uploads the content even when you have turned off the IPlayer, using up all your bandwidth and CPU. There is a configurable options page that tells the system not to share files, but it doesn’t seem to do anything so you have to work around it like this chap did.
The whole thing is troubling. I mean, I like the idea of the content on demand, and peer-to-peer seems a reasonable distribution method, but you have to allow the users to control the sharing. Simply having the service take over the computer at its whim is not acceptable. I hope this gets sorted for future, better, releases - but seeing as how it hasn’t been sorted in the time frame between 4OD and IPlayer I won’t hold my breath.
There is a page about the IPlayer etc. and links to how to remove the kservice here.
Not quite sure why I got on to that rant, but there you go 
