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The G20 Summit is of course taking place at the Excel Exhibition Centre in the Docklands. The big day is Thursday when the leaders are all there. They are expecting demonstrations around Canary Wharf and Custom House, Prince Regent and Royal Victoria DLR stations will be shut (and possibly Bank).
The recommendation is not to go anywhere near there this week if you can help it.
Security is already pretty tight at our London datacentres. This coming week will see security stepped up further as the G20 Summit takes place in town. I’m not going to go into any details but at least BT are less likely to have any 21CN line cards stolen next week.
I’ve also had a number of meetings rescheduled from next week due to “security concerns”
Microsoft is closing down Encarta, its paid-for online encyclopedia. It now holds such a small market share, 1.27% according to The Register, that it is no longer viable.
I imagine few tears will be shed. It is worth noting though that this really does represent the passing of an era. Not “the Encarta era” but the era represented by the likes of Encycopedia Brittanica of which Encarta was just one of the last in the line.
In its time Encarta represented a big change in the market. Up until then Encyclopedia Brittanica was sold mostly by door to door salesmen and came in around 30 large bound volumes. As a kid I would have loved to have had a set but it was also impractically expensive for my parents. I imagine that salesman only needed one sale to live off for a week.
The word encyclopedia will probably now disappear into the history books having been replaced by wikipedia.
Tiscali featured on the BBC’s Watchdog consumer programme tonight. A number of unhappy people were heard venting their fury about the company’s service levels. I suspect that if they focussed more on their most important asset, their customers, they wouldn’t also be in the news because of their financial woes. It takes a huge amount of effort to win new customers. Businesses neglect them at their peril.
This is one reason why businesses in particular need to make sure they have a business oriented, responsive, service provider. Tiscali is aimed at a low cost market. At the end of the day you get what you pay for (or not as was the case on Watchdog!)
I hadn’t realised but the Conficker worm is programmed to go live on April 1st. This malware has already been the source of problems for IT managers but nobody knows what it is really destined to be used for.
Currently it accesses 250 ip addresses from which it can take instructions. On April 1st this is due to rise to 50,000 which makes managing any attack a lot harder. The nature of the attack to come is still unknown.
The good news, and the point of this post, is to update readers on the fact that over the weekend industry security specialists have finally identified how to “fingerprint” Conficker. This means that simple security scanners can be used to detect whether it is on your PC.
Previously it has involved length full virus scans on computers. A process that when multiplied by the number of PCs in an organisation could have been impossibly long and consumed huge amount of IT support effort.
Because April 1st is so close the recommendation is that you check with your security vendor to see whether they have an update and to implement that update asap. Don’t take any risks.
Twitter has been in the news a lot recently. It’s been around for 3 years and I started using it a year ago to experiment and to understand what it was all about.
One year ago it wasn’t really clear where it was all going but I could feel that there would be some uses. In the meantime celebrities have latched onto it and it has been a way of following news as it happened. Also my experience with “attending” the SocComm conference via twitter was an education.
I began to get followers who I had never heard of and when looking at their own profiles they had many thousands of followers and were in turn following thousands. It looked then as if people follow people who follow them.
I began an experiment by randomly following others who were either following or being followed by people that were following me, if you follow my drift. I got these results:
There is obviously an increase in followers in line with those being followed. This not massively scientific but interesting nonetheless. There is a scenario whereby if I spend enough time at it 25% of everyone on twitter would be following me. Of course I’m not going to waste my time doing it and I’m sure the dynamics change with volume.
Something that has come out of this excercise is a slight increase in visits to trefor.net due to traffic from twitter. So if I was focussed on nothing but growth in my readership, which I’m not because I also have a day job, amassing huge numbers of twitter followers would probably be a good thing to do.
Also it gets to the point where there is so much twitter traffic it gets difficult to see the wood from the trees. It then becomes a kind of ticker tape where you randomly glance ast tweets. Twitter has I’m sure got a lot of evolving to do.
On the 10th of this month the UKCCIS board met co-chaired by three Members of Parliament including Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. Since its formation UKCCIS has concerned itself with putting together the structure of the organisation to take it forward and it has now announced a number of working groups.
These include “Better Education” (chaired by Niel Mclean of BECTA), “Public Information and Awareness (Clive Michel of CEOPS) and Video Games (Brian Leonard, retired civil servant). There is also a group known as “Industry Standards” run by Amanda Jordan of Corporate Citizenship. Apparently the name of this group is subject to change. Don’t ask me why.
Whilst the large committe and the high profile board chairs does send out a message undelining the importance of the activity and its level of Government backing you do wonder about the amount of time they are spending deciding on the names of the working groups!
Previous posts on UKCCIS here. Latest UKCCIS newsletter newsletter-no-5-march-2009.
Just added a plug in to wordpress that automatically posts blog entries as a tweet. Marvellous.
10 years ago this month saw the publication of RFC2543 which was the first proposed version of the SIP standard that is now used an almost all internet telephony services.
This is being celebrated this week at IETF74. The Internet Engineerng Task Force is the body that maintains standards for internet related technologies.
SIP was initially championed by a small number of people that included it’s inventor Henning Schulzrinne, Jonathan Rosenberg, Jiri Kuthan, Henry Sinnreich et al.
At around that time I was being asked by my then employer Mitel to set up a product line that was based on open standards. There was quite a choice to chose from.
MGCP was adopted by the cable community in the USA and by a number of ITSPs. However the problem with MGCP was that it had a relatively small feature set which meant that service providers had to develop their own extensions to provide saleable services. Thie meant that MGCP quickly became non standard as any venbdor would have to support multiple flavours of the protocol.
Then there was SGCP, or skinny. This was a Cisco proprietary protocol. Whilst potentially this had initially the largest market opportunity it did tie you into Cisco.
So SIP was the obvious one but it took a long time for the market to appear, particularly as the turmoil around 9/11 hit the dot com intustry.
I spent 4 years service on the board of the SIP Forum from around this time. Being around during the early days of a technological revolution was exciting and I am fortunate enough, with Timico, to be able to continue the ride.
Check out the Facebook event surrounding this anniversay here.
Geeks are a great breed and I am pleased to say our NetOps team is 100% staffed by them. They are a real asset to our business.
If you ever want to test whether someone is a geek or not you have to see what reading material they take to the “smallest room” .
At the Timico NOC there are copies of Cisco’s “The Internet Protocol Journal” left there to ensure optimum use of time.
The journal also provides the facility with an N+N level of resiliency making it a Tier 4 toilet. I’m pleased to say we have never had to resort to a failover. Read on!
I spent some of this morning with our marketing team discussing our twitter marketing strategy. This is a very new field and it is interesting to see how people go about getting exposure on the site.
For example I get people I’ve never heard of signing up as followers. This prompts me to take a look at their profile and as often as not I sign up to follow them. Voila – their marketing approach worked. I was amazed to see people with 20,000+ followers – who were following similar numbers.
Jeff Pulver, who has appeared before on this blog has launched a call for speakers for a new conference called the 140 Character Conference (if you don’t understand where the name comes from I’ll explain offline 🙂 ).
This is perfect timing in my book. I could have done with it before our marketing meeting this morning because we were learning it and making it up as we went along – “it” being the science of twitter based marketing.
The conference is in New York New York so it is unlikely that I will be going. I will however be following it on line, on twitter of course which I successfully did for Jeff’s SocComm conference last month. Jeff is going after 140,000 online followers for the event.
You can see the conference call for papers announcement here on facebook or sign up for a place here.
The Data Retention Act, which is about Big Brother getting out of control, is being rolled out across the European Union. I’ve posted about it on a number of occasions, including here and here.
The story has taken an interesting turn with a German court pronouncing it invalid. Specifically:
“The court is of the opinion that data retention violates the fundamental right to privacy. It is not necessary in a democratic society. The individual does not provoke the interference but can be intimidated by the risks of abuse and the feeling of being under surveillance […] The directive [on data retention] does not respect the principle of proportionality guaranteed in Article 8 ECHR, which is why it is invalid.”
It seems to me this is going to hot up a little in the UK.
The link to the whole article is on the vorratsdatenspeicherung website 🙂
My thanks to James Blessing for this link.
I just got a copy of the Music Tank report on the illegal P2P filesharing problem that has been widely debated in both the music and ISP industries. I even get a mention in it!
The authors have requested that instead of providing a copy of the report I provide a link to their sign up page which seems reasonable to me.
http://www.musictank.co.uk/reports/filesharing/for-free
It is definately worth a read if you want to understand what is happening in this space. It expands on some of the stuff I have been posting on the subject.
I have recently started corresponding with Randy Abrams of anti virus company www.eset.com. He has commented on some of my posts in the past. He offered this postulation today:
“Sometimes I receive spam from legitimate companies. They shouldn’t be spamming me, but this isn’t the Viagra, Rolex, and other run of the mill spammers I am talking about… these are generally IT companies.
So, I am considering automatically subscribing these spammers to Industry News with an email indicating that they have been subscribed and can choose to opt out. Your thoughts. Good idea? Too good for them? Give it a try?”
My standard response to legitimate spammers is to reply to them asking whether they have read www.trefor.net? It seems only fair. They are sending me unsolicited mail. It’s amazing how many of them then do read the blog, I get quite a lot of positive feedback this way. I’m sure some of them are reading this post now 🙂 . I have a fairly relaxed view on life. We are all trying to earn a living. We all need to be friends within sensible bounds.
The Data Retention Act, as you will know from previous posts requires Communications Providers, when requested, to store information concerning voice calls, emails and potentially Instant Messages sent and received by its customers.
I learned yesterday that this will not apply to IM services of companies such as Facebook that are defined as “information society services”. This does tend to make the whole Act an absurdity in my book. Also what happens when Google launches VoIP in the UK? Is Google an information society service?
It would be interesting to understand how the reg will apply to P2P services such as Skype? I’m sure I must have been told sometime.
One of my predictions for 2009 was that mobile VoIP would finally come of age. In the last two weeks there have been significant announcements in this space.
Firstly Google announced a service called Google VoIP that is intended to be a rival to Skype. The service will also do voice to text when someone leaves a voicemail and send it to you via SMS or to your Gmai inbox. Ther service is initially only available in the USA and then only to customers of telephony company Grand Central who Google bought some time ago and have since temporarily stopped accepting new customers.
Secondly Nokia has announced native support for Skype on its new N97 handset available later this year. The Skype service will run over either WiFi or 3G when the former is not available.
However all the mobile networks apart from Vodafone have said they will block VoIP calls over 3G. Whether they do or not it is a fact that VoIP over 3G is not a cheap option. I did a rough calculation last year and the bandwidth costs from handsets are such that the cost would be much the same as if you were making a normal mobile voice call.
Whether the networks block the VoIP traffic or not this is another step toward mainstream mobile VoIP. I will be looking at a similar service myself this year.
I have recently novated three companies ADSL networks to Timico, including health charity “Stroke Association”.
Novation is the process whereby a company hands over its assets to another, in this case we are talking Wide Area Networks. There are a few reasons why companies do this:
To the uninitiated this might all sound a bit boring but in actual fact in these recessionary days it seems that more and more companies that traditionally ran their own networks are seeing that it makes sense to outsource.
The same cost pressures are starting to be seen in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) business with more and more ISPs putting up for sale signs. Small ISPs are struggling to come up with the cash to upgrade their networks. It is important to have cash in the bank these days and looking forwards to the end of the recession I can see the industry in a different shape to today.
Another audio session from tonight’s William Wright’s drivetime show on BBC Radio Lincolnshire. I talk about subjects covered in recent blog posts. Call it an audio blog.
BT’s rollout of 21CN exchanges continues and Lincoln is now up and running – hooray.
I can report that with my previous ADSLMaxPremium connection I was getting roughly 5Mbps. I am now getting 10Mbps. At a guess I am 1km from the exchange.
In my book this is a worthwhile improvement. If you live in Lincoln and want faster internet let me know.
Extremely good dinner (booze-up) last night at Percento restaurant on Ludgate Hill in the City of London. The Internet Telephony Service Providers Assocition periodically holds dinners in town where the great and the good of the VoIP industry get together for a bit of networking.
These dinners are astonishingly good value because everyone speaks frankly about what is happening in the industry and it is a great opportunity to keep up with what is happening out there. There is always a lively debate chaired by yours truly. Steve Ashley Brian of Illume Consulting gave a short talk on the health of the market. Illume’s quarterly survey of hosted VoIP sales is suggesting a definite slowdown over the last two quarters.
My thanks to the evening’s sponsor “Digitalk” and to their MD Justin Norris.
In my systematic tour of the UC09 Exhibition yesterday I sat through my first real life Telepresence demo on the Cisco/BT stand. Very impressive technology. It really was just like being in the same room, such was the quality of the video.
I then sauntered along to the Nortel stand. Nortel have similar technology but seem to have made significant strides in moving the whole online meeting and web collaboration experience forwards.
Project Chainsaw has been in the Nortel pipeline for some time and I was pleasantly surprised in seeing that it was now a production item. It has now surfaced with the marketing moniker “web.alive”, a reasonably descriptive name though I think Project Chainsaw is more impressive 🙂 .
The technology allows you to mimic more of a real world environment. For example it could be embedded into an online “world” populated with shops. You can walk up to a virtual shop and begin communicating with a virtual shop assistant to help you with your purchases, The virtual shop assistant might well of course have a real person doing the talking behind the avatar.
Web.alive integrates with existing enterprise network and security and with existing software tools (so they say). You can check out more on the Nortel Website here and take a look at the Lenovo demo example here at the Project Chainsaw microsite.
I’ve unashamedly nicked a picture of web.alive in action from the Nortel website:
Met with the Home Office, Office of Security and Counter Terrorism (OSCT) today. Not unsurprisingly the OSCT has grown from zero to over 200 staff in 18 months although only three of them are internet oriented.
The department’s mantra is the 4Ps:
Pursue – police & security forces
Protect – making UK a harder target
Prepare – for the eventuality there will be another attack
Prevent – stop people becoming violent extremists in the first place
One of the subjects under discussion was part of the report produced by The International Centre for the Study for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) – blogged about the other day. Specifically how to go about promoting more positive use of the internet.
They talked about “flooding the internet” with positive messages about Muslim groups quitely practising their religion and not indulging in fanaticism that leads to violence. I though the idea of flooding the internet was somewhat ambitious.
What they really mean is that one of the proposals is to educate groups on how to make the best use of the internet to get their positive messages across. Search Engine Optimisation etc. I could imagine the Government secretly paying Google to raise the rankings of websites promoting peaceful activities 🙂 !
It is worth taking a look at at the Alliance Of Youth Movements Summit that took place in New York (New York) in December 08. This get together was part of a drive to promote the positive use of the internet.
The Digital Britain Report is a key part of Government strategy to make the UK a leader where internet issues are concerned. I’m not sure whether I am wrily amused or plain horrified by a comment made to me by someone who had recently met the team compiling the report.
None of the civil servants at the meeting had been on Facebook, or any other social networking websites. In fact none of them seemed to have heard of Twitter. Apparently this engendered laughter all round.
You have to say that this does not bode well for the success of the Digital Britain initiative.
The Digital Britain interim report included a proposal to establish a Rights Agency to supervise the fight against illegal P2P music downloading. More detailed proposals are apparently due out this week and I am told that industry will only have 10 days to respond with comments.
This is a very short consultation period and suggests to me that Lord Stephen Carter has an agenda to muscle through this measure. Whilst I don’t disagree with him – the list of stakeholders is too long to get any meaningful consensus – the notional speed at which he seems to be trying to make things happen here lends itself to mistakes being made.
I can see a mopping up excercise following any legislation to make corrections to laws created in a rush.
Notwithstanding anyone’s particular feelings about the suitability of the Pirate Duck as a technology blog post it is worth looking at what has happened since it first hit the ether yesterday afternoon.
The Facebook group Save The Pirate Duck hit 50 members the same evening. Now, 24 hours after the group was started, it has 120 members (up by 7 since I started writing this post). The group has 10 wall posts and one video link.
Pressure group, Pirate Duck People’s Coalition, has also set up an online petition urging Prime Minister Gordon Brown to help save the duck. So far there are 5 signatures and I’m sure this number will increase further – it is only a matter of time.
I have also had a request by a prominent radio station to field a spokesman for an upcoming investigative special this weekend. More details on this once it is firmed up.
Clearly democracy is flexing its muscles here and the power of the internet is being used to promote the will of the people. Anyone wishing to contribute their time, money or simply expressions of support should joing the Facebook group and sign the petition.
Also constructive ideas on how to track down the perpetrators of the crime are welcome as hitherto the team’s investigative efforts have drawn a blank and the duck remains firmly ducknapped.
A bit of an ambiguous post title but considering this is meant to be a technology blog I get more and more opportunities to comment on political and business issues. Following on from yesterday’s post on the Coroners and Justice Bill today brings a report on how to combat Online Radicalisation and also more on the debate between the music industry and ISPs as YouTube pull the plug on music downloads in the UK.
The International Centre for the Study for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) has produced a report recommending how “the world” should combat this problem. It starts off saying that any efforts to date have been either “crude, expensive or counterproductive” and concludes that we need to spend more time deterring the producers of extremist materials, empowering users to self-regulate their online communities, reducing the appeal of extremist messages through education and promoting positive messages.
Call me a cynic but I doubt that this will get anywhere though I suppose at least they are having a go.
The second bit of news relates to a public spat between YouTube and the Performing Rights Society (PRS) who can’t agree licensing model (ie costs) that will allow YouTube to stream music. Unfortunately this seems to be a theme of any discussion between the music industry and those organisations providing internet services. During my time spent in meetings between the ISP and music industries it seems to me that the latter needs to start exploring new ways of making money, and believe you me I do not in anyway support the illegal downloading of another person’s intellectual property. Link to the Guardian report here though it has been widely reported elsewhere in the UK.
What all this amouts to is a huge change in the way we live our lives. Last night a friend rang me for advice. His broadband connection was down all day and his family was up in arms. Other than suggesting he moves to Timico all I could do was make sympathetic noises and say at least his family would talk to each other that evening – united in the face of a common problem instead of locked away surfing in their own rooms.
Internet security issues were again covered in Parliament last week as the Coroners and Justice Bill was debated in committee. I don’t envy Parliamentarians. The complexities of what they are having to deal with are enormous.
In this case they are trying to improve the law to further protect children from online threats. The opening line of the questioning reads like this:
“It is curious that it is illegal in this country to groom a child for sex but not illegal to groom a child for suicide.”
It is worth reading the rest of the text of that particular section of the debate here. We are bound to see increased legislation in this space I feel.
Internet crime came closer to home today with the kidnapping of one of the Timico NetOps team’s key players, the Pirate Duck.
Criminal sophistication has reached new heights with this case. The gang responsible for the crime has set up a web page, www.wheresmyduck.com, so that distraught owner, engineer Ian P. Christian, can reassure himself that his duck is as yet unharmed and being looked after.
Efforts to track down the owner of the domain name have been fruitless as the “Who Is” function for that domain has cunningly been disabled. No ransom demands have been received as yet but Ian is standing by his PC anxious to hear more news.
Ian is fairly phlegmatic about this incident. “He was after all a pirate duck and he who lives by the sword…”
The victim’s twin brother is pictured below. Any information leading to the safe retrieval of the duck will be gratefully received. The incident is being dealt with privately and the Meteropolitan Police eCrime Unit has not yet been called in. If you want to show your support for this cause you should join the Facebook group “Save The Pirate Duck”
Unified Communications ’09 is on next week at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. I anticipate there will be 70 or so businesses there pitching their wares, including Timico subsidiary KeConnect which has a joint stand with Cisco.
UC09 is a business to business show. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in the consumer world UC is racing ahead of what is typically available to business. Lets look at my son’s radio programme as an example.
Tom, as regular readers of this blog will know, has his own weekend breakfast show on Siren FM, a local community radio station in my home town of Lincoln (England). He has a website and a Facebook home page. The Wake Up To The Weekend homepage has 318 fans as I write and each show gets around 100 listener contacts/interactions.
Tom’s listeners are by and large teenagers in the Lincoln area. They listen to his show on their laptops whilst lying in bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings. When they want to conatct the show to request a song or enter a competition they send an IM via Facebook, or leave a message on the show’s wall.
Listeners also communicate via SMS and email. I doubt that many make phone calls but if Facebook had an embedded voip client then this would overcome a teenager’s cost objections to talking. The radio presenter could then escalate an IM request to a voice call – to talk to the winner of a competition for example. The show can also post photos, videos and recordings of bands they have had in the studio on the Facebook page.
So where is this leading to? For radio show read business. Companies are more and more going to have to move into this space. Corporate websites are going to change to reflect Facebook and Twitter-type functionality and begin to interact with their customers in real time in new ways.
Integration of a corporate communications strategy with Twitter has already been shown to be highly effective. Initially the domain of large corporates, smaller companies should easily embrace it. Customer care and marketing teams will sit “on the internet”. I anticipate doing this at Timico sooner rather than later.
As a footnote Tom’s biggest fan, me aside, is a person in Lincoln named Les. Les enters every one of Tom’s competitions and has frequent interactions with the show. Looking at his picture on the Facebook site it can be seen that Les is in fact probably in his sixties. This then is not just the domain of the teenager!
PS if anyone is at UC 09 and wants to meet up drop me a line.
Tina Turner was great. Amazing in fact considering she is 69 years old (allegedly). What’s that got to do with a technology blog? Only that I went along to a concert at the O2 Arena last night and was absolutely bowled over with the quality of what I saw.
The quality of the show, the quality of the venue – wonderful acoustics, and the quality of the hospitality on offer. My thanks to hosts, Telcity and specifically sales manager Sharon Newling for looking after us in their suite.
Telecity is one of Timico’s high quality datacentre partners – we have a number of suites and cages at both Harbour Exchange and Sovereign House in London’s Docklands.
Just to round off the story I was pleased to take along with me Barry Skillett of Paypoint and Terence Long of RTP Solutions, both Timico customers. What’s more the O2 Arena is run by AEG, also a customer.
From left to right Barry Skillet, me, Sharon Newling, Terence Long. I am obviously enjoying myself and obviously in need of a haircut!
Below – Tina herself on stage.
Hot on the trail of yesterday’s post on the Ofcom decision to waive regulations on the roll out of fibre to homes in the UK Cisco CEO John Chambers has written a guest post on Om Malik’s blog on a similar subject.
I had thought that the Obama stimulus package, which contains a substantial sum of money targeted at broadband roll out, was aimed at standard broadband speeds but it looks as if this is not correct.
It does make you wonder whether the government here in the UK will now look to subsidising the £29Bn it is estimated it will cost to get universal fibre coverage in this country.