…of the Year

Thursday, December 30th, 2010

“And, ladies and gentlemen, our person of the year is…”. The camera moves from face to face for the interminable close-ups, in time with the drum rolls. False tension being the bread and butter of all cookery competitions and finals for sports personality, dog breeder, amateur dancer, whatever. Who will it be in British IT for 2010?

Easy money will be on designer, Jonathan Ive, who must be immensely grateful his bog standard designs were rejected by Ideal Standard. He must have won as many awards as his boss and fellow black t-shirt wearer, Steve Jobs, who is Person of the year for the Financial Times. Not, however, the New York Times who prefer Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.

You can see the similarities: one is the founder and leader of the world’s most innovative manufacturers of consumer electronics whose company is currently the richest in the world on Nasdaq; the other is the creator of a social networking site, the basis for which many argue he stole from three Harvard seniors.

I just wish I could have bought Apple shares when they dropped to $12. I tried, but HSBC share dealing service wouldn’t handle them so I bought a new Mac instead. Banks… pah! What do they know about money?

Julian Assange is likely to be on many …of the Year lists including the CIA hit-list, which many Brits hope David Cameron and Nick Clegg are on as well. Time Magazine dug deep to nominate the Chilean miners. Lady Gaga, Liu Xiaobo and Aung San Suu Kyi are sure bets, all with funny names but only one preferring a pseudonym to her real Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.

Crashing to Credence
Brighton in the 60s and 70s had two types of purveyors of fine music. HMV with its arched booths covered with painted hardboard that looked like an Aertex vest. There you stood previewing your chosen Mungo Jerry and T Rex recordings, sharing the headphones with your friend.

Meanwhile, adjacent to the Clock Tower in the centre of town, another company offered record buyers a circular crash pad, covered in cushions and reeking of joss sticks and other exotic combustibles. This was the place to chill, listen to Hendrix or the Stones’ latest. Music sales were propelled into the 20th Century. Move ahead 40 years to find the same company has shoved another British industry forward into the 21st Century.

My nomination for Of the Year will be Jon James and his boss who has a penchant for dressing in drag to advertise his businesses. That is, Virgin Media’s Executive Director of Broadband and the big Dick, or Richard Branson as he is affectionately known.

While British Telecom have been struggling to get broadband speeds to an average 5.8Mbps, Virgin have been quietly getting on with the job. In towns where their cable network stretches, speeds of over 50Mbps are easily achieved with subscribers sending data up the line, faster than BT can often send down. Virgin will be offering 100Mbps services across much of the UK in 2011 and are already looking at 400Mbps services.

Back in the slow lane, BT has their Infinity Service which hardly anyone can get and then often at only 2Mbps. Most ADSL users will also tell you, even a ADSL2+ line is unlikely to receive at more than 5 or 6 Mbps with a miserly less-than 1Mps up. BT even hope we will be prepared to pay an annual surcharge on our telephone lines to develop the infrastructure. As someone who has just been charged nearly thirty quid to leave it, this does not hang well.

To be fair, BT is hampered by antiquated networks, unable to compete with fibre optic’s bandwidth. They also have to share their network, with private companies allowed to install proprietary circuitry into BT exchanges. The proposed BT fibre optic network by 2015 will also have to be shared with competitors. This is the price BT pay for government subsidies and protection.

Meanwhile Virgin are looking into non-wired broadband and considering challenging BT’s Openzone network. Which, much to BT’s embarrassment, runs faster than many of its wired customers can achieve. Virgin is hoping to get a 5Mbps service running in response, to tap the enormous demand created by Apple’s iPhones and their wannabees.

Roll on 2011.

Where is your iPhone?

Friday, December 24th, 2010

Let me answer that, at least as far as I am concerned it is in my pocket where it belongs. Should I forget where I left it, or The Goddess forbid, it gets stolen, I would still know exactly where it was because Apple has this handy thing called ‘Find my iPhone’ which lets me track the location of my iPhone and send it a message which is displayed no matter the user is doing.

If I want I can remotely lock the phone, and even wipe all my data off of it if I so wish. On the other hand, I could simply not leave it on the conveyer belt at an airport security check, on the back seat of a taxi or somewhere that a lowlife chav can grab it and scarper.

For thousands of people it seems that knowing where their mobile phone is creates something of a problem at this time of the year though.

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Christmas Tunes

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

I came across a fine bit of Christmas Spirit today. The very talented Gentry Morris has recorded a Christmas song which you can download for free or make a donation to “Charity Water”. There’s good use of IT for you – how would old style retailing allow you to set your own price?

With a name like “Christmas for Cowboys” you might guess he’s a bit country – well Americana? Labels are all a bit tricky! Very wistful and rather beautiful.
http://gentrymorris.com/store.cfm

My other current favourite Christmas music is also Americana, if you like Gentry you could also try Bill Mallonee. I’m really into his Christmas album at the moment
billmalloneemusic
try track 6 an instrumental simply called Nativity – have a click and listen, you can preview without buying. Again, if you do want to buy, you can set your own price but this time with a minimum $7.99. Clever stuff this online selling.

It’s not a very cheery album but who can’t love a couplet like
He was heaven sent
even for our president
(it is a pre Obama recording!).

For crying out loud

Monday, December 20th, 2010

This is for all the Bah Humbugs. The ones who greet the carol singers with a grumpy “Naff Orf”, shout at bell ringers to “Put a sock in it”, and a great way to irritate those who got too far into the Christmas spirit.

First, imagine your main hard disk has just become corrupted and your back-up is six months out of date. That Christmas TV consists of re-runs of Horse of the Year, I Love Lucy and Through the Keyhole with Posh and Becks. And your central heating boiler has just packed up and the in-laws are coming to stay.

Feeling miserable, yet?

Now, start whinging and boo-hooing like a kid. That “Ur hur hur hur aha”, that kids can do for hours. Never a real cry, just enough to make you wish they were the boy or girl who put their finger in the dyke to hold the water back, then took it out to pick their nose. The noise they make on Christmas Day when they wanted a Playstation and got a Nintendo DS. Or their radio controlled helicopter got eaten by the dog.

Feeling pretty miserable yet? Repeat after me. “Ur hur hur aha, ur hur hur aha.”

Now do it in time to Christmas carols.

I saw three ships come sailing in = Ur hur ahur ahur ahuu, aha ha ha ha, a ha ha ha ha. Once in Royal David’s City = Ur ha ha, ha ha aha, ha ha ha, ah ah ah.

It goes best if you scrunch up your face and hunch your shoulders on the “ahur”, making the noises like a whiney kid. Too many mince pies and thoughts of credit card bills arriving in the New Year helps.

Absolutely nothing to do with computers and IT but who cares.

Season’s greetings.

Small security thinking misses the bigger privacy picture

Sunday, December 19th, 2010

Perhaps the most worrying thing about privacy today is that people are failing to see the bigger picture. Literally. Just this last week I was privy to a couple of conversations which can be summed up as concluding with “nobody cares where I was last Tuesday morning so how is revealing that to my circle of friends a security risk” and “good luck with trying to build a profile of me from my online data, I’m careful not to give away too much”. Both of these conclusions are pretty full of holes, much like the argument that small and supposedly random exposures of personal data are no risk to your privacy or security.

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Six Virgins a-laying

Friday, December 17th, 2010

’Tis the week before Christmas and the Virgin came down and gave me a 50MBit fix, or XXL as they call it in the style of a pair of boxer shorts. How many men does it take to lay 30 feet of cable? Six so far including the one who never lifted a spade but suggested they drilled through my wall rather than cut a six inch long gap immediately adjacent and just wide enough to take a pinch of coax.

I’ve signed up for 18 months to make it cheaper than staying with BT services. The line is running at full speed immediately with maximum down speed and nearly the same up. Now the problem will be deciding whether to take their TV service as well.

This is our second foray into cable, the first being after Nynex had ruined the pavements of many a town in the UK. For three months we had no incoming telephone calls because someone had forgotten to switch something over.

Dubious service
Then we tried changing broadband suppliers to a firm called Business Serve who were run by Kenneth Baker the ex-Home Secretary. We had been forced to sign up for 24 months but their business class service proved anything but as we had no email for hours on end. We had to pay the @£$%^s to leave their dubious service. Just as we have got to pay BT for the privilege of ceasing to use their service. Apparently it’s to pay for the engineer to turn us off at the exchange but in reality it’s a complete rip-off.

So we enter our relationship with Virgin with some trepidation and especially as two workmen turned up last week, instead of the appointed day. A new box lives on our desks, alongside the two routers we have at the moment, we now have three wireless networks until we can reorganise things.

Virgin supply a very sexy Netgear router/modem with internal aerials, all served up in a shiny black vertical box with a fancy illuminated Virgin logo. Being Netgear it runs very hot but installation was a breeze.

Are we pleased to move to Virgin?
Last night I sent a gigabyte file faster than our DSL line can download and at the same time was downloading similar amounts at speeds undreamed of by DSL users. The costs for the services are almost identical if you take into account the difference between the Virgin telephone service and the BT business line we used to have.

Gawker hack shows passwords are poor

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

The hack on Gawker’s database has inspired many to turn their noses up at everyone using the same passwords for different services.

Whilst it is a bit infuriating for most to be the object of such widespread condescension, many seem to be missing a point about passwords altogether – namely that they are an inherently weak form of protection for our identities.

Personally, I have no beef with people who use the same key for different sites. We are so heavily dependent on a vast number of web services now that it is ridiculous anyone should be expected to remember umpteen different passwords for them.

Regardless of how strong they are, the fact is passwords are just a poor form of protection. OK, making them slightly more complex will help protect against low-key hackers who simply use guess work (are there any still around?). But those films where some guy tries to get into another guy’s computer by applying info on their target’s personal life and then guessing at the right combination of letters and numbers are a little silly. Hackers now have much better ways to get hold of passwords.

And this is exactly what this hack on Gawker proved – the cyber criminals went for the database to retrieve passwords, so it didn’t really matter how strong the passwords were in the first place.

Earlier this year I was at an event where an ethical hacker showed a number of ways to gain people’s passwords, from exploiting unprotected Wi-Fi networks to using the largest database open to the public – Google – to find people’s keys. What I learnt was clear – today’s login methods should soon be a thing of the past.

So, if people really care about their account safety, web-based services need to offer better security. Two or even three-factor authentication is really the answer and hopefully the Gawker hack will be a watershed moment for this area of the security sphere.

Indeed, if such protection had been in place already, the hack on the Gawker database would have been practically worthless for the hackers.

Media Player 11 and the disappearing MP3’s

Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

I had the strangest and most frustrating experience the other day. Obviously that was using a computer, I didn’t need to say that did I? Strange and frustrating experiences nearly always are.

Anyway, I was ripping some CD’s with Windows Media Player. I play them with player of my own (”wot I wrote” to quote Ernie Wise as is only right and seasonal) so I was watching the folder they were being ripped to ready to drag them to my player. They came through OK but then mysteriously vanished. One minute tracks 1-5 were there then just 3-5 then 3-6 then 4-6 etc. As fast as they arrived they vanished again. I tried this a few times with different CD’s and at different times, same thing.

I eventually found all the tracks had been moved to an “unknown artist” folder, bizarre as WMP recognised the CD’s and gave them the correct track names and created the correct artist\album folders. However, it appears it either later removed the artist / album data or didn’t write it into the MP3 so as part of its housekeeping it decided they were from an unknown artist and should be moved to the unknown artist folder.

This seems to be a feature of WMP 11 and the fix is to go to Tools,Options,Library tab and uncheck retrieve additional information from the internet.

Good old Microsoft, if you’re not happy unless you’re complaining they give you lots to be happy about.

The ever expanding Facebook attack surface

Sunday, December 12th, 2010

I will admit that I am more of a Twitter man than a Facebook man myself. Although I maintain active accounts at both, Facebook is much less active as I’m more interested in what folk have to say than comparing biorhythms via some app or pretending to be a farmer. I asked the chap who farms the fields behind my house if he fancied playing FarmVille, or whatever the muck spreading game de jour is now, but unfortunately his reply was far too colourful to repeat here. Indeed, at one point I thought he was going to attack me with whatever the archaic but deadly looking implement he was holding in his hand might have been. Which brings me nicely onto attack surfaces.

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Spamglish – the language of spam

Saturday, December 11th, 2010

Hands up if you know what spam is when you see it? Are you sure? What about if that advert for some penis enhancing drug is in Spanish, or there are ten million Euros waiting for you in Portuguese, and what’s ‘Make Money Fast’ in French again? It seems that the language of spam is changing, and that could be problematical if you or your filtering cannot speak spamglish.

According to the latest MessageLabs Intelligence reports spam is becoming both more culturally and linguistically diverse; to the point where MessageLabs is predicting that during the course of next year less than 90 percent of it will be in English. OK, that sounds a lot (actually, it is a lot, something approaching 90 percent – doh!) but it represents a fall from the current statistic of more than 95 percent of all spam being in the English mother tongue.

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