Categories
End User Regs surveillance & privacy

Big Brother is watching you

Imagine a world where individual sales people could see how many customer contacts they take and make, be it mobile, desk phone or email. Then they compare their performance with their peers and can see how much sales revenue they each generate.

An underperforming sales person is going to either buck up their act or realise the writing is on the wall. That person’s manager can also see the same information, how much time is spent making personal calls, calls to colleagues or calls to customers.

Who’d be a salesman eh?  The fact is that this type of management information isn’t typically available, or at least not easily so and certainly not in real time. If it was then companies would be able to use the information save communications costs and to optimise the effectiveness of their commercial teams.

I just saw a demo of an online product called the “Comms Dashboard” which integrates with a company’s CRM package. Every time a registered user makes a call it is logged on the “dashboard” and a picture is built up of an individual’s spend and activity levels.

This might sound a bit Big Brotherish but I doubt that the owner of a business cares if it is going to improve the bottom line, especially in this day and age. The Comms Dashboard integrates with pretty much any CRM system as long as the company database is available and doesn’t care how many users are registered so it can be used by businesses small or large.

The demo I saw was provided by Terence Long, CEO of RTP Solutions. I have to hold my hand up here and tell you that Terry Long has been a successful business partner of Timico almost since we started the company. Notwithstanding that the Comms Dashboard does represent innovation that will make the difference when business is difficult to come by – both for RTP Solutions and for their customers.

Since the product went live their clients have seen a reduction of over 30% of minutes usage with very little management intervention. Once users are aware of the system they manage their own costs. Result!

Check out their website if you want to see more but in the meantime here is a screenshot.

comms-dashboard

Categories
End User internet media piracy

94 percent say they would choose a legal music site over a pirate one

Bit of a long post title but this is the feedback from research conducted in June on consumer behaviour and preferences in respect of music downloading.  The research was commissioned by music site We7 and conducted on 2012 consumers aged 16 to 60 over 7 days in June 2009.

Its key findings make very interesting reading:

  • 46% of UK music fans do not understand how to legally consume music online
  • 64% do not know how to stream and share music legally
  • 85% of consumers are happy to listen to a short ad in exchange for unlimited access to free music that they can share with others
  • 94% say they would choose a legal music site over a pirate one if it had the same range of music and was easy to use
  • Women and those over 55 are least likely to stream – 85% say they don’t know how and are unlikely to try
    64% of 16-24 year olds share music with friends online and 71% know what streaming is but only 48% have ever tried it
  • Londoners and Bristolians are the biggest sharers of music online but only 39% and 46% respectively have ever streamed music. 
  • The majority of music buyers (78%) would buy the same or more music if they could listen to streamed music too, showing that the We7 model compliments the industry rather than cannibalises it

All this reinforces the ISP industry’s position that what we need is more legal ways for consumers to easily access music online.  7  million consumers can’t be criminals.  We7 is doing a great job pioneering this so thanks goes to Steve Purdham, and his team. 

Tonight I’m going to go home and listen to some free and legal music streaming online. Frank Sinatra methinks.

Categories
End User internet scams security

Email scams

I went in to BBC Radio Lincolnshire this morning, as is my occasional wont, this time to talk about email scams. I am not particularly a security expert but I guess being in the ISP game I would get more exposure to this than your average Radio Lincolnshire listener.

It was all about phishing emails from people after your bank account details, and especially spoof emails notionally from people you know. As a bit of background research I googled “how to hack MSN” and I was astounded to find 952,000 websites on the subject.

Similarly there was plenty on Twitter and no doubt there will be stuff out there on Facebook and others. I didn’t follow more than a couple of links and the first article had already been removed. It does certainly highlight the vulnerabilities of the web.

I get phishing email daily, mostly caught in my spam quarantine folder, and all of which get ignored/deleted. I do get some very genuine looking spam though appearing to come from reputable contacts.  In one example a business partner of Timico’s had its contact databased copied a number of years ago.  I still get spam appearing to come from this partner.  There is nothing they can do about it. The data is gone.

I have never personally met someone who has been caught out by one of these phishing attempts. Not that is until last night when a friend rang me up and during the conversation mentioned that it had only just happened to him. He was busy and stupidly responded to an email and typed in his bank account details!

Luckily for him the bank spotted an unusual transaction and refunded the cash after calling him to check. It just goes to show how easily it can happen – to the unwary.

Categories
End User internet

WolframAlpha

Having discussed the suitability of “bing” as a name for a search engine someone mentioned that they had recently found a site called WolframAlpha. Now that’s what I call a name.

WolframAlpha is a “computational knowledge engine”. It is worth a look. I suspect that it has a long way to go before matching google though.  I typed in a simple question: “how many IPv6 addresses are there”  and it didn’t know where to look.

Also it is fairly flawed in other ways. I typed in my birth date, December 9th, 1961 (it likes it the American way round) and whilst it did come up with some really useful statistics such as the fact that I have now been on this planet for 17,338 days it could only come up with some actor called Joe Lando as having been born on that day.  Huh!

Interestingly, site founder Stephen Wolfram went to Eton with our CFO Jonathan Radford. 

As a footnote to the bing post I have already seen some favourable comments on it on Facebook.  Time will tell.

Categories
End User internet

bing.com

I see that Microsoft has launched “bing” as its latest offering to compete with Google.  I checked and this isn’t April 1st so it must be true.  All I can say is it better be good at what it does because the name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue and it will need real customer loyalty for people to go to the site.

Ping would have been hugely better but no chance of getting that domain name.  Microsoft will have spent millions researching the name!

I wonder whether bing is the Urdu word for white elephant?  I’ll check.

Categories
End User internet

I love the French

It was only on 6th May that the European Parliament rejected Article 8 of the Telecoms Package Review.  This was the one that called for the “three strikes and you’re out” termination of broadband connectivity for anyone repeatedly found to be indulging in illegal P2P piracy. It was widely reported.

Yesterday the French Parliament under the direction of President Sarkozy did exactly the opposite of this.  I’m sure it is going to cause a huge furore.  If they have any sense UK plc will let it play out in France before having to decide what to do in the UK.

I can’t beat the FT for reporting resource so you can read their spiel on the subject here.

Although we complain when they have air traffic control strikes, baggage handlers go slows,  port blockades etc we do sometimes get good value for money from across the channel :-).

Categories
End User internet

Consumers have no voice

As a footnote to yesterday’s posts from the ISPA Legal Forum one of the things to have stuck in my mind is that consumers are not being consulted in any part of the discussion surrounding P2P filesharing.  Whilst the inter industry argument rages we are in danger of losing out on some basic human rights.

Categories
End User internet

Sorry kids but exams are going to get harder

All ISPA members are tomorrow being sent a letter (ispa-_-qca ) from the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority asking for their help during the forthcoming school examination season.

The QCA is concerned about the risk of unlawful publication of examination test questions on the internet and in particular that the usual routes for a copyright owner to request an ISP to take down unlawfully published information may not react quickly enough to avoid serious disruption to the national curriculum tests. This situation has apparently been the case in the past.

The QCA is therefore requesting that ISPA Members co-operate with QCA by providing alternative contact information which would be used to notify an unlawful publication of test materials and to request an emergency take down.

I am happy to help here of course. However I can see a problem with the approach. For example it is quite possible for kids to upload this information to non UK based sites who might not be interested in helping the QCA and who indeed the QCA will never have heard of.

Still notwithstanding this I can only say “sorry kids – you will have to pass the exam without an advanced sight of the questions – the way we all had to”.

Categories
End User ofcom Regs

Telephone call charges – you never had it so good

Lots of interesting reading comes out of the European Union (sometimes).  On this occasion I continued to study the report that provided me with the VoIP league tables yesterday.

This time I noted the change in the cost of fixed line telephone calls over the last ten years or so.

call-charge-trends

 

The chart tells me that on average, and making it easy on myself by using a £>E exchange rate of 1 we in Europe were paying around two pounds for a ten minute long distance call ten years ago.  It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Of course it isn’t necessarily easy to figure out how much you are actually paying for a national call these days because for consumers it often comes as part of a bundle.  In fact the long term outlook has to be flat rate charge covering all calls.  It would certainly remove a lot of billing costs.

Categories
End User social networking

twitter in action in Lincolnshire with possible prison riot

Last night I felt I was part of a real life drama.  I live over the fields from Lincoln prison.  In Lincoln they put the prison in the best part of town to make it quicker to lock up the burglars when they catch them 🙂

As I was hitting the hay I could hear a lot of loud noises coming from the direction of the prison together with dogs barking.  I sent out a tweet to this effect and was immediately contacted by a couple of BBC journalists asking for more info.  There have been other prison riots in the UK this week so the tweet was topical.

Independent verifiaction suggested that there was no activity outside the gaol.  After about 10 – 15 minutes I checked again and it grown quiet again.  Presumably the noisy prisoners had been locked back up again.

I guess the point of this post is the observation that twitter is really a newsfeed rather than a social networking tool. You also have to be watching it all the time to catch randomly generated news, as my two BBC contacts must have been. 

It is also usable as a marketing tool and interestingly as such it offers a highly targeted approach.  Twitter users have to be searching for specific news items.  I follow too many people to be able to sensibly catch all their tweets so I would have to be looking for, say, “Lincoln prison riot” to read any news about this. 

The same the applies for product marketing.  If I wanted to push Timico’s MPLS capability on twitter the chances are that people reading that tweet would be specifically looking for information on MPLS.

Categories
End User internet social networking

Grand National hot tip #GrandNational

This is another Twitter experiment.  If anyone really wants to know I have an each way bet on Cloudy Lane and Irish Invader.

Footnote Monday morning:

I wanted to see if the post title would attract many visits via twitter.  It didn’t especially, even though I used the two most popular twitter search strings at the time in the title.

Categories
End User internet media

TV license fee for internet watching

In my mind the clock has started ticking ever so quietly for the end of TV Licensing.  A review of the TV License fee by the BBC Trust looks at the issues associated with collecting TV License revenues for the BBC.

The report says “The licence fee collection is currently heavily reliant on the fact that almost 98% of households still use television sets (although this number has declined very slightly in the last year from 97.61% to 97.37%) and that viewing on new technologies tends to be supplementary to viewing on television.”

However “research for the BBC Executive shows that 40% of students in halls of residence use a laptop as their main way to watch TV”. iPlayer.

With almost half of all children leaving school now attending an University of some description this suggests that in time a large proportion of the population will move to watching TV online. 

This will present huge issues in collection of the license fee and will almost certainly join the regulatory debate that includes how to police illegal P2P music and video downloading.  Business models in the media industries are bound to have to evolve.

Footnote:

The report covers the problems with collecting the License Fee and specifically mentions the difficulties of proving whether a household has a TV or not.  The Davies household, after 20 or so blissful years of isolation,  got a TV for the first time ever 4 years ago following demands from our increasingly vociferous daughter.

Around 6 years ago we did a house swap with some Californian friends who, horrified at the lack of a TV in the house (how do you keep the kids quiet?) borrowed one and took out a license.  They went home and cancelled the bank payment standing order which triggered a stream of increasingly threatening letters demanding money.

Initially we ignored these but eventually complained to our MP, Gillian Merron, who got tough with the TV License Authority (or whatever their name is) and sorted it.  My issue was that I was offered two means to tell them I didn’t have a license, either by paying for a premium rate phone call or for a stamp.  As a fascist anti TV type this was objectionable to me.

Imagine how I felt when I eventually bought a TV and had to ring the same premium rate number to pay for a License.  I could feel the surprise, nay contempt,  at the other end of the phone of the call centre agent who could clearly see my record of complaint on this subject.

One of the many side benefits of when the kids eventually leave home is that I will be able to get rid of the TV again and, no doubt, renew my battle with the TV Licensing Authority.  Unless, that is, they introduce draconian measures that say if you own a computer you have to pay for a license!

Categories
End User fun stuff

Encarta – the passing of an era

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.

Categories
End User social networking

test for twitter

Just added a plug in to wordpress that automatically posts blog entries as a tweet.  Marvellous.

Categories
End User security spam

Spam not Spam

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.

Categories
End User internet security

Pirate Duck Update – Gordon Brown Petition started

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.

Categories
End User security

Victims of internet piracy

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

pirateduck

Categories
End User internet security

Online identity theft cost USA $48Bn in 2008

I was amazed to read in a press release by Anti Virus firm AVG that online identity theft lead to $48Bn worth of fraud in 2008 in the USA alone. This was part of a press release issued by the company today regarding its new Identity Protection product.

You can read the press release yourself but this is certainly topical for me having only last week attended the ISPA Parliamentary Advisory Forum on ecrime. The scale of the activity clearly makes it worthy of its own specialist blog rather than just getting the occasional post in mine.

I think I will follow up with a top ten security tips for safe use of the internet. Many of these tips will be obvious and just involve a little discipline on the part of individuals. More anon.

Categories
End User internet

Domain name scam

Another domain name scam email came in overnight. I’m told that a number of customers have had similar ones in recent weeks. My advice is to ignore these emails unless you have business aspirations in the Far East in which case you will probably already have your domain registered. I’ve reproduced the email here because it is mildly amusing to those of us who have not yet fully grown up.

Dear Manager,

We received a formal application from a person who is called Jacques Tits is applying to register “timico” as their domain names and Internet brand in Hong Kong and also in Asia on 2009-02-27. During our auditing procedure we find out that the alleged Jacques Tits has no trade mark,brand nor patent even similar to that word.As authorized anti-cybersquatting organization we hereby suspect the alleged Jacques Tits to be a domain or trademark grabber.Hence we need you confirmation for two things.First of all,whether this alleged Jacques Tits is your business partner or distributor in Asia.Secondly,whether you are interested in registering these domains and Internet brand instead of that alleged person.(The alleged Jacques Tits will be entitled to obtain a domain not needed by original trademark owner.)

If you are not in charge of this please forward this email to appropriate dept.

This is a letter for confirmation.If the mentioned third party is your business partner or distributor in Asia,please DO NOT reply.We will automatically confirm application from your business partner after this audit procedure.

Best Regards,

Registration Commissioner
Sponsoring Registrar:Asia Network

Categories
End User video

Video killed the radio star

I think I might have mentioned my appearances on BBC radio 🙂 . Well now I’m producing a video. Actually the video is being made by some final year students from Lincoln University media department and it is part of a series of shorts that the students are producing for Timico.

We are quite lucky to have a top level media facility such as Lincoln University on our doorstep. Their studios are the envy of the BBC- I kid you not.

To date any video I or anyone else at Timico has produced has been pretty much an experimental amateur affair. Now we are doing it properly. Each video has a production team of 4 people. I just need to get a Director’s chair with my name on it and turn up at the right time for makeup.  Of course I’m sure I’ll have a script to learn as well!

Timico is a sponsor of Lincoln University and I am not only looking forward to seeing the videos but presenting a prize at the end of the year. I’ll also show the vids when they are finished sometime in the spring.

Categories
datacentre End User internet

Gmail Down for the Morning Yesterday

Google themselves use Gmail, so someone certainly noticed that the service was down.

Gmail email was down yesterday, you may have noticed.  Certainly you might if you were one of their 113m strong userbase although I imagine that most are consumers and because it happened in business time it may not have had that significant an impact.

The service fell over because one of Google’s European datacentres failed which in turn had a knock on effect on some of their other datacentres. I have recently been visiting datacentres with a view to planning our next phase of expansion. Datacentres are rated in Tiers from 1 to 4, 4 being the most secure reliable and therefore most expensive.

In a Tier 4 datacentre you will find the ultimate in security mechanisms, biometric security, weighing machines etc. You also find the highest levels of resilience to power and connectivity failure. I was interested to learn recently though that there is a sensible limit to how much it is worth spending on a data centre as even Tier 4’s have been shown by modelling that they are vulnerable to catastrophic chain reaction failures .

I don’t know what Tier datacentres are operated by Google but they do employ someone specifically to manage reliability of their site. It just goes to show that when software and computers are concerned there is no such things as a 100% reliability.

In this case if you are totally reliant on a single email system it seems that there will always be a potential reliability issue. What you can do is have a totally separate mail system coming from a separate platform. I use both timico.co.uk from an Exchange server and trefor.net from our ISP platform.

Although I don’t ever recall the ISP mail platform letting me down certainly the Microsoft product has occasionally given me cause to resort to the backup. With a backup you can always call someone and ask them to resend to the other mail address and also use it yourself to send.

Most people have a personal email address but you might not want to give that out to a business acquaintance and in any event this type of email typically has file size storage and download restrictions. I’m sure others will have views on this subject but that’s my five pence worth.

Categories
End User internet security

Conficker Virus (also known as downadup)

I picked up the Conficker worm whilst at LINX64 yesterday.  I’m pretty sure I was one of the few Microsoft users in the audience of out and out geeks so I know not whence it came.

My virus checker caught it, or at least told me it was there. This morning I gave my machine a complete set of security updates and it is now clean.

This is not an easy worm to remove. You can use a free tool provided by Symantec at this location. The Microsoft update that patches the vulnerability is at this location.

Categories
End User media

Tom Davies is the man for me – White on White

This post has nothing to do with IP. I reserve the right as a proud parent to promote the interests of my family. The media file below was recorded on Saturday by “White on White”, a guest band on my son Tom’s radio show Wake Up To The Weekend” on www.sirenonline.co.uk Saturday and Sunday mornings.

tom-davies-is-the-man-for-me

Categories
End User internet

Twitter in action at SocComm

I already posted about SocComm which is happening in New York today. Well I just caught up with it via Twitter and I’ve been blown away with what I saw.

You can follow it at the SocComm web address http://www.soccomm.com/twitbuzz.html.

When I looked it was during the government and regulation session and the tweets all address this. The main concern I could see from the tweets was associated with what the US government might do in terms of regulating personal privacy issues and whether this might suppress development of Social Networking.

I was going to say Social Networking Technology but I hesitate to use “technology” because it seems to be much more than about the engine/platform that makes it all happen. It is more philosophical than that.

The information is coming in think and fast. It is really a speed read. Jeff Pulver told me he had 25 twitterers lined up in the audience but I can believe, undertanding the nature of the conference, that most of the audience is Twittering. The conference goes on all day New York time and if you miss it I imagine you will be able to catch up at a more leisurely pace .

PS it is too late I’m sure to invent another word for it but twitter is a bit irritating ! 🙂 .

PPS SocComm has just flashed up as the 3rd most active event on Twitter at this time

Categories
End User internet

Time Online

Completely unscientific but as a rule of thumb there are typically 10% of my Facebook friends online at any given time. Except for early in the morning, anecdotally this stacks up with what others have said as well.

I am online for most of my waking hours though not necessarily always on Facebook. Assuming I am on 16 hours a day, which is a bit of a stretch but not wildly off the mark this suggests that my friends are typically on Facebook for around 1 1/2 hours a day.

I’m not always active when I am online, of course.

Categories
Apps End User internet

Defining Moment In Social Networking

I’ve been conversing on Facebook with Jeff Pulver and am somewhat gutted that lack of time keeps me from attending his SocComm conference in New York this coming Tuesday, 10th February.

Jeff has a lot of experience in running such events and is confident that this one “will represent a defining moment” in Social Networking. His line up of topics is very interesting covering a range of areas such as regulatory, marketing, communications, mobility and investment.

What is also educational is the line up of sponsors, (ZiXi | Vivox | Phone.com | Pathable | Ripple6 ) fairly short this being the first time this show has been staged, but also an example of where people think there might be money to be made in this space.

I’m sure Jeff will be running other SocComm events and I look forward to the time I will be able to attend. In the meantime if anyone who is going wants to give me some feedback that would be great.

You can follow the event on Twitter at #sc09 and #soccomm. Jeff has a team of 25 twitterers lined up in the audience.

Categories
End User social networking

Friday the 13th February 2009 – an unique time in history

Unix Time reaches a milestone in history next week as it hits 1,234,567,890. For those millions of readers of this blog who don’t know what I am talking about (ie most of them I’m sure) Unix Time started at midnight on January 1st 1970 and represents the number of seconds since then.

Unix Time is a way of storing time information on a computer. It isn’t without its issues. For example back in 1970 the boffins chose 32bits as a size of number to represent Unix time in machine code. Unfortunately this means that Unix Time hits the ceiling, ie runs out, in 2038.

This could well lead to another bout of hysteria akin to Y2K with many Unix computers expected to run into problems.

Anyway the point of this blog post is not to worry you too much about what will happen 29 years hence but to celebrate the number. Party animals can join in the fun at the Event on Facebook . Pseudo geeks amongst us can read more here.  Real geeks will already know all they need to know. 

I was originally going to post this on Friday 13th but I figured some of you would want to know in advance.

Categories
End User H/W

Never Look a Gift Laptop in the Mouth??!!

I’m mixing my proverbs up a bit here but the Broadband Genie comparison website has been talking about ADSL deals that include free laptops. The message basically is that these are not usually good deals and tie you in for two years during which time you are likely to be  saddled with a not very good spec laptop.

Typically there is only a choice of one or  two machines in the deal. This compares with hundreds to chose from in the marketplace with prices starting from £175.

The ISPs offering these deals will argue that it is a good way for people to get a laptop without having to stump up the cash up front – good in times of credit crunch!  In my experience you get what you pay for and people don’t realise what they are letting themselves in for.

For example two Christmases ago Santa brought a new PC for my then 10 year old. Santa thought he’d got a great deal but the PC was very slow running and clearly needed a memory upgrade (Vista!).  When I then looked into it (Santa having gone back to the North Pole to feed the reindeer)  there was only a limited scope for adding additional memory.

So remember it is sometimes worth  looking a gift horse in the memory, or hard drive, or battery life or whatever other bits you use to tell whether you are really getting a good deal 🙂

Categories
End User internet security

Cyber-vigilantes

Circulating on the law inforcement distribution list of the Internet Service Providers’ Association today is information regarding a website called extremeporn.org.uk which appears to have set itself up as a vigilante-type organisation to hunt down downloaders of illegal extreme pornography.

According to their website:

“At present, our primary activities are categorizing and monitoring torrents. Our system, once a torrent is added to it, will periodically poll the tracker for geoIP technology to guess with high accuracy (approximately 99.5%) their location. If the IP is geolocated to somewhere other than the UK, no further processing is performed; otherwise our system checks to see whether an existing record for this IP and torrent exists. If so no further processing is performed. If no such matching record is found, the system inserts such a record.”

… and that record then generates an email to the relevant abuse team (ISPs have an “abuse@” email address that is used as standard to report illegal activities).

I’m sure that many if not all abuse teams are aware of the limitations of the above procedure, which is that having your IP address attached to a torrent implies one of four things:

a) you are actively fetching or distributing the file

b) you are an academic researcher who is monitoring the torrent, but who is not uploading or downloading at all

c) your IP address has been selected at random by the owner of the tracker to add to the list of active IPs so as to bring this type of tracking into disrepute

d) your IP address has been specially chosen by someone who wishes you harm and who has deliberately added it to the list of active IPs so as to cause trouble.

Case (a) is what the people running the extremeporn website think they are dealing with.

Case (b) has been well documented by researchers at the University of Washington http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/    .

Case (c) is believed to be behind the large number of incorrect copyright abuse allegations currently flooding the market 🙁

There is a strong belief that Pirate Bay is doing this deliberately (anyone with an on-the-record citation for this, I’d be really pleased to get this).

Case (d) is of obvious concern. The U of Washington people falsely accused their laser printers of sharing Hollywood movies. In this area there is an obvious risk of defamation or worse!

My thanks to Dr Richard Clayton of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory for this analysis. Richard is an expert on internet security and was recently quoted on the BBC concerning the Data Protection Act. Readers should note that I am in no way supportive of people downloading extreme pornography. It does seem that the approach described above is flawed.

Categories
End User internet media olympics

BBC iplayer

I caught up with some reading on the BBC  iplayer last night and lifted some interesting facts.  iplayer now has over a million users a day with 1.7 million download requests. The BBC is expecting it’s 300 millionth “play request” anytime now.

During the Olympics usage rose by 40% which is is reflected in the increase in internet usage I reported back in the summer.

What I found amusing was the fact that people only watch a programme for 22 minutes on average which the BBC finds to be a good statistic. Only 35% of viewers watch a 30 minute programme in its entirety. To me this is an indictment of the quality of what is provided for punters to watch and reinforces why I don’t watch TV (Dads Army, rugby internationals and other free to air sports excepted).

For the geeks amongst you the BBC runs the service on 200 servers, has 92% peering which hugely reduces their cost of delivery (though not ours) and peaks at 100TB a day of streaming traffic.

There’s lots more to read in the EBU Technical Review which quotes a number of sources : 2008-q4_iplayer