Matthew Revell

I’ve largely ignored the Phorm storm because other people are doing a great job of covering it.

I’m pleased to say that my new ISP of choice - Enta - are staunchly opposed to Phorm and a senior Enta manager is reportedly behind a site called the Anti Phorm League. Admittedly, right now I’m still with Virgin Media - one of the three planning to sell customer data to Phorm - but shall be leaving soon.

Anyway, Political Penguin - Wolves LUG member, local Labour activist and blogger - has been covering Phorm in quite some detail. Once he’s got hold of a subject, Gareth digs deep. He’s asked a great many relevant questions of Phorm - and received some replies - and also gives a great explanation of why Phorm is bad for you and me.

England has some of the most varied accents and dialects of any country in the world. In fact, the British Isles as a whole are blessed with colour and variety in their spoken languages. Multiple invasions and migrations over the centuries have given us truly regional forms of speech.

The tax funded British Library has put together an audio archive of these accents and dialects. Why, then, do they restrict access by making them available only in the proprietary WMA format? To make it worse, you can only stream the audio!

Jonathan Robinson is the curator in charge of the collection; time to write an email, I think.

Via Ray Girvan.