I have mixed feelings on that. On the one hand, I do object when a restaurant adds the tip themselves: if the menu says £10, the bill should say £10 too, anything else would be dishonest advertising on their part. (I ate in one a few months ago which did this - something like 15% added at the end of the bill with a message like "if you don't want to pay this bit you can take it up with the manager". Not acceptable IMO.) On the other, I feel waiting staff do generally make an effort to provide a good service; the possibility of a tip encourages this, and I like the ability to tip as a way to reward that. Take that away and we have no way to reward good service. My take? Ban automatic "tips", since those aren't really tips at all - if they want a service charge, it should be included in the listed price. Require any sum paid in tips - whether cash, card or bartered in livestock - to go to the waiting staff, not the company or anything else. Don't ban the practice, though, it's a valuable feedback mechanism.

It's a shame those 084x ripoff numbers were ever created - why, when legitimate operations have almost all moved to 03xx numbers which don't rip people off, do the 08 numbers even still work by default?! If you had to specifically enable premium rate calls before those numbers were diallable - or at least had the option to opt-out of them - these [problem]s just wouldn't function. I thought there was already a ban on caller ID displaying these numbers - it had to be either a normal-rate or freephone number to show up? Maybe there's a loophole there somewhere. Glad Vodafone are blocking them, at least.

Not really - premium rate calls are hardly normal usage. For that matter, my bank does offer non-payment cards (which can only be used for cash machine withdrawals, not debit card purchases) - and the networks do allow disabling premium rate services on some but not all plans right now. Remember, they already have a mechanism in place to stop or filter spending in realtime (the basis of every PAYG service) - they just don't make extra profit by using that for customers' benefit. No windfall: to rack up £100 in 24 hours means premium rate or international calls, where nearly all the money is just passed through the mobile network to the recipient's telco. It wouldn't have to go far over the £100 mark for the extra amount to wipe out their cut of the first £100.

The limit is set at £100 in 24 hours - hardly typical use for most of us! If I suddenly spent a hundred times as much as normal on my credit card, buying from places I've never been before, I'd expect my credit card company to put a hold on transactions and verify in case there's something wrong, why can't phone companies? For that matter, I'd like a much, much lower spending cap: if I rack up £5, let alone £100, in a single day, something has gone wrong. I would like to stop premium rate numbers and text "short codes" working on my account entirely: anything beyond the standard calls, data and texts included in my contract should be blocked, even without the handset being stolen. If my mobile network offered that, they would have nothing at all to lose if my handset's stolen!

I've already read the Ofcom material on changing the pricing - changes I recall proposing myself years ago, as it happens (to industry contacts, I don't think any Ofcom staff were present at the time) - to something akin to "normal price plus 5p/min" - but those are totally different changes to the ones this thread concerns. Yes, Ofcom are changing the pricing structure - but this thread is about new consumer protection rules prohibiting companies from using 084 and 087 numbers for this purpose in the first place, whatever Ofcom may do with pricing. You seem to me to be missing the point about the difference between paying somebody for the privilege of talking to them and paying someone else for a service. If I take a taxi round to visit my GP, it might cost me £5. That's fine: I'm paying the taxi driver £5 to transport me there. Now imagine the GP charging me a £2 booking fee for making the appointment - or requiring all patients to get there by taxi, with the GP getting a cut of the taxi fares. Do you really think that would be accepted as readily, even though it's cheaper? I'd expect anyone suggesting it to be burned in effigy, if not in person! NHS24 is on an 0845 number - which as you pointed out, is not a revenue share number and is charged at standard call rates by BT anyway, meaning BT residential customers don't have to pay anything for the call at all, let alone pay the NHS for calling it. Moreover, government policy is to "actively encourage public bodies to use 03 numbers" - and the NHS Direct 0845 4647 number terminates by February next year, to be replaced by 111 - which is free to call, even from mobiles. Plenty of people have indeed complained at length about GPs using revenue-share numbers - to the extent the NHS prohibited GPs from using them as of the 2010/11 contract renewal, and is now cracking down on the remaining c 8% of GPs still using those numbers in breach of their NHS contracts. (My latest credit card gives both 0800 and geographic numbers, and I'm pretty sure the previous one did too; I'd probably have second thoughts about remaining with a bank which didn't.)

No, you're a step behind there. Many of the greedier companies already made the change you describe, when 0845 and 0870 were fixed as you mention: this is the next step, prohibiting all 084 and 087 numbers for this purpose. Companies will have to provide proper 01/02/03 numbers (or, presumably, 0800 if they wish): 0843, 0844 etc will no longer be permitted. Long overdue and very welcome, IMO. (Mobile networks also sometimes misuse 07 numbers for helpline purposes - as the terminating operator, of course, they keep all the termination fee, although technically this breaches current Ofcom regulations; I noticed today Three are using an 0843 number instead, perhaps because of that.) Remember, 0845 was supposed to be cheaper than standard geographic calls when introduced as 0345 and 0645, not to impose a surcharge which would be passed to the called party! I know companies have enjoyed the extra backdoor revenue from charging people to call them, but it's high time that stopped - and the government now seems to agree there. Customer wins, greedy company loses.

Yes - at the very least, it'll mean they aren't making a penny while they keep you waiting, just tying up one of their phone lines. They'll still have queues of course, but now everyone waiting in the queue will be costing them a tiny bit of money (by tying up lines they pay for) rather than being a source of income, they will feel very differently about having long queues!

Cryptolocker seems a particularly nasty case: most malware you can simply delete once you - or your AV software - know where it hides, but this one seems to use genuinely secure encryption to take your data hostage. Alarmingly professional work. The PCAdvisor article is off in dating the technique to 2004: I recall a DOS virus years before that which used basic encryption, but that was easily remedied thanks to that weak encryption.

Except for children under 16 ('DLA for children', as opposed to the old 'DLA' for adults), it's been scrapped now, so there shouldn't be any new applications for it in the first place! The article does mention DLA, but refers to it as "scrapped" - a slight exaggeration, it is just being phased out for under-65s - but that would explain why they don't mention the application process for it. Universal Credit seems like a nice concept in theory, but the government just isn't capable of buying working computer systems - look at the billions wasted on the failed NHS project a few years ago.

Some very welcome changes there - though I wish they'd take it one step further and simply end 084 and 087 numbers except for the original intended purposes (pay-as-you-go Internet and telephone services like the "Australia and Canada for 1p/min by dialling 0844..."). After a long time on the bank's 084 number trying to sort out an error on their part (they admitted it and provided three figure compensation, but the irritation of having the phone bill ticking up while explaining the problem to an Indian call centre didn't help) I'm disappointed to see this doesn't (yet) apply to financial companies, though: thumbs up to Barclays and RBS for apparently fixing this voluntarily, though.

It's high time the government cracked down on these outfits. I keep getting anonymous calls from companies - to my TPS-registered line - peddling these "government incentives". Perhaps it's time the government audited all these companies, fining all those using illegal cold-calling and barring them from the scheme?

I've been using Prime happily for about two years now - it all seemed perfectly clear to me from the outset, including how to cancel if I didn't want to keep using it. As the article comments note, Amazon are refunding the fee for anyone who claims to have subscribed to the service by mistake.

A strange list to be taking action over mobile roaming fees: Sky don't even offer mobile services in the first place, while BT and TalkTalk's mobile offerings both consist of reselling Vodafone's services, giving them little or no control over roaming charges! Three UK have taken action to eliminate roaming charges entirely for a list of countries (not just EU ones, either) where they have suitable agreements in place with roaming operators, though, which is welcome - perhaps following the lead of T-Mobile in the US, which eliminated them for almost all countries in October. Their rivals seem to be feeling the heat on roaming charges too, so hopefully Three won't be alone for long.