As an example, they probably could have called it ‘Exploited Children’s Online Protection’. Or something.

Mind you, it just goes to show how little thought went into CEOP in the first place, doesn’t it?

Surprisingly, it’s not being mentioned or promoted by CEOP, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection bunch of muppets Centre. Not a thing.

Wouldn’t you think that – if CEOP were actually any fucking use at all – they’d support and cross-promote this Safer Internet Day? Or even have created the concept themselves.

Yep, another case of CC: instead of BCC:

Of course, it’s not a Full Corbett, because the Met has actually apologised, and will write to the people involved, explaining what happened. Let’s hope they use BCC this time…

As an overview in the BBC story says,

West Midlands Police seem sure this initiative will help cut gun crime and give officers more confidence heading into unpredictable situations.

Despite this being a pilot there is a belief that if successful this will be rolled out to other UK cities.

But it’s not going to cut gun crime.

These sensors work on the sound of a gunshot. So they’re maybe – maybe - going to detect that a gun’s been fired, and roughly where. (A 25m (80-odd feet) radius in a city is a pretty big location) But the gun’s got to be fired before it can be detected.   It has issues (obviously) detecting gunshots from inside a building, or where a silencer is used.

And the detection method? Again from the BBC story,

The £150,000 system records an audio clip and sends police a GPS location.

A police officer trained to listen to the clips then makes a judgement on what they have heard before deploying officers.

So the sound has to be detected/recorded, then sent to the control room, then listened to by a trained officer, then the police get deployed.

Not really preventative at all then, is it?

Synapse Phones will take your order for a customised smartphone (running Android 2.2) and ship it in Q1 of 2011

Think about for what you use your smartphone and what you will do with it. For example if you are someone who loves to take thousands of pictures, you can choose the 12MP camera and a xenon flash for taking pictures at night or under bad lighting conditions or if you want to store your whole music collection on your smartphone just choose a high amount of memory.

Seems like a good idea – and the prices aren’t epically unreasonable either. I hope it works out as a good business.

So it’s really sad news today that xMarks has 90 days to live. I don’t know of a better service for synchronising bookmarks (and passwords) in the way that xMarks does, and it’s been awesomely useful for a very long time.

For me- and it’s a point they raise in that blog post – I would’ve happily paid for the service. Not loads – but £10 – £25 a year, certainly.

A very sad day.

When Herself’s mother got an iPhone recently, I planned to do the same thing using Zyb, but I couldn’t. Because Zyb.com is no more.

A couple of years back now, Vodafone bought out Zyb, because it was such a good service. At the time they said it would carry on being available, and they’d got no plans to shut it down. Now though, they’ve closed down Zyb, and relaunched it (kind of) as part of Vodafone 360°. It’s nowhere near as good, fast or useful as it was as Zyb.

I’m really annoyed by this – despite having been a subscribed/signed-up user to Zyb, I didn’t get any notifications about the service closing down. It’s only having done other research about it that I find Zyb closed on 31st July.

As yet I haven’t found a decent replacement for Zyb that was as smooth and painless (and fast) as Zyb. Vodafone 360 took nearly three hours to sync things, and even then it’s not as good. Any suggestions?