+Extract is a free piece of software that is designed to extract/rip free-to-air (FTA) programmes from your Sky+ or Sky HD box. You need to take your hard drive out to do it (Sky put a USB socket on their boxes but it doesn’t do anything!) but otherwise it’s a bit of a breeze.

Anyway, the author was hoping to make some money from it in the form of donations and has, well, been disappointed. As a result he’s given up further development and has closed down his forum.

The chap who writes Copy+ is a friend of the author and he even hangs out on the Copy+ forum as well, so I took the plunge last week and asked him if he’d be interested in us taking +Extract over. And he agreed.

Now, we won’t be doing any more development (although the source code is for sale!) but we can make all the downloads available from our site and dedicate some forum space to support (amongst other users – we can’t provide any official support ourselves). It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing!

Therefore +Extract can now be found on the Copy+ site on it’s own dedicated page. Plus you can discuss it on the forum. Huzzah!

Thanks to Neil for letting us do this. And that might go some way to explaining why I’ve been getting the servers upgraded

After more reports of personal data being lost, I’ve been left confused.

Where I work, only those who need laptops get them. And when they do, they don’t keep data ON the laptop, but on a remote server. When away from the office you have to sign in with a secure password, etc, to access any data, etc. If the laptop is stolen, you get nothing.

Most laptops these days come with built-in hardware security including finger-print readers, TPM chips and, if you have Windows Vista, technology such as BitLocker.

Additionally, you can prevent PC’s (whether desktop or laptop) from accepting USB devices, floppy-drives, writeable CD’s, to ensure that data doesn’t go wandering.

Now, I’m not a security expert (I leave that to friends) but why (and this isn’t just aimed at government who are not the only people losing personal data) is this happening?

I believe in the US they come down hard on companies who lose personal data such as this and we should do the same here. And that includes government departments. There really isn’t an excuse.

After whinging in the ear of my host, Streamline.net (poor quality but, erm, cheap), they have moved my MySQL database to a different server – a better one, they say.

Well, they didn’t have to, so I have to thank them for that. Both this blog and the Copy+ site has been updated appropriately – time will tell if it will help.

Longer term it’s still my intention to move to Memset.