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!
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.
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.
Ofcom effectively gave BT the go ahead today for a £1.5Bn investment in a fibre network to provide up to 100Mbps internet access to homes in certain areas. By removing any regulatory barriers that might constrain BT from charging free market pricing for the fibre services Ofcom has set an environment that makes the BT business case for the investment workable.
BT has been involved in a high profile lobbying excercise to get this decision since around the time of the Caio Report last year.
I welcome this move though many people in smaller metropolitan and rural areas unlikely to get access to the service will view it as another step towards widening the digital divide.
You may remember the fuss surrounding the anti-child porn agency, Internet Watch Foundation back in December 2008. The IWF blocked access to a Wikipedia webpage causing much consternation.
The IWF Council is meeting tomorrow for a post mortem on the issue and is discussing setting up a technical workgroup to find a way around the problems created at the time.
The organisation is having to deal with a highly complex issue and there isn’t the space to cover it all here. What is interesting is the fact that the criminals involved are already combating the efforts of organisations such as the IWF.
Illegal images containing child pornography are often made up of thousands of separate images, a single pixel in size and each pixel containing an URL. This way a specific URL does not contain illegal content but the combined effect does.
I’m sure I will have some feedback from the IWF meeting and will report back as and when.
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.
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.
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.
The things I have to do for the business. Today it was almost like being in a James Bond movie. I turned up at 10am prompt at the Thames Water Utilities Depot in Bow in East London – just around the corner from the site of the Olympic stadium which incidentally seems to be shooting up. I was met by Calypso Harland, bubbly marketing manager of Geo, the Alchemy owned business that sprang out of 186k’s UK fibre optic network.
I had been invited to inspect Geo’s London fibre ring which, yes you’ve guessed it, runs through the sewers. Donning layers of protective clothing I disappeared into a subterranean world for a once in a lifetime experience. Believe you me I doubt that anyone wants to do it twice.
The 140 year old Victorian sewers under London are I suppose of cursory interest. The message actually was that Geo can provide very cost effective and very secure fibre backbone connectivity because they use the sewers and don’t therefore have to dig up the roads.
What is interesting is the huge capacity there is down there. Geo run 4 ducts, three of which are currently empty. A duct can hold two fibre cables each with 288 strands of fibre. Each fibre can, using current DWDM technology, run 160 10Gbps channels (x 4 if you use phase modulation per wavelength).
So by my sums the Geo London ring should be able to operate at nearly 15 Petabits per second or roughly a billion times faster than the latest and greatest 21CN ADSL2+ connection. That’s a heck of a lot of capacity.
And for anyone that wants to know no, my thigh length wellies did not leak and no there were no floaters in sight – something to do with a high fibre diet apparently! 🙂
These sewers run on the surface (covered up obviously) right through the Olympic site. Come 2012 they will likely be crawling with security guards!
The average punter knows very little about e-crime. I can’t say I’m an expert myself but I had an eye-opening afternoon yesterday at the ISPA Parliamentary Advisory Forum on the subject. Attended by both MPs and industry stakeholders the meeting was standing room only which perhaps underlines the level of interest in the subject.
We use anti virus software in the belief that it stops nasty people putting nasty things on our PCs that will destroy our files. In the early days of e-crime this is what it was all about. Nerds sat in their bedrooms writing viruses with no real objective other than showing the world how big and powerful they were.
From around 2003 all this changed and e-crime became big business and the sad teenagers in bedrooms have turned into professional software writers working for organized gangs.
Now the crooks don’t want to break your computer. In fact they don’t even want you to know they are there. The malware that they deposit on your PC just sits there quietly logging your every keystroke. When you make purchases online your credit card information is logged and fed back to the gangs. The Conficker A virus even made your network run more efficiently so that it could better perform its job.
Until last year, when they were stopped, there were websites such as “darkmarket.com” (Google it for more info) where criminals talked to criminals, swapped trade secrets and engaged in crooked business such as the sale of stolen bank account information.
This criminal activity is organized primarily from the former Soviet Union, China and Brazil. The crooks know how to work the system. They never steal information from their own country. That way if a local police force is asked to assist with an international crime there is less incentive.
The police in Sao Paulo, for example have to deal with a high murder rate on the streets. How do you prioritise credit card fraud overseas in that case when you have limited resources to address problems on your own doorstep.
An Ukranian gang was said to stop the process of infecting a PC if it’s IP address was found to be Ukranian specifically to avoid the attentions of the local rozzers.
So what is being done in the UK to try and combat e-crime? It ain’t easy. Detective Superintendent Charlie McMurdie, who incidentally looked as if she was straight out of an action cop movie, runs the 30 strong e-crime unit at the Metropolitan Police and was speaking at the meeting.
With a team of only 30 people the police have to concentrate on big crimes. If someone rips off £50 from your credit card or bank account they aren’t interested. You are supposed to report it to the banks who then submit a collated picture to the police. In reality much of this type of crime goes unreported so nobody really knows how much of it is going on.
Where the police do get involved is with serial crimes. In other words whilst if someone pinches £50 from your e-wallet they aren’t interested, if someone does it to a thousand people then they are and this has happened in the UK.
Unfortunately, for someone who gets caught the penalties for this type of crime are often very low, community service for example, so the disincentive isn’t there. What’s more e-crime is often zero touch. In other words if someone steals TV programming and sells it to a Russian online TV Channel then the only thing affected is a potential reduction to the revenue stream of the rights holder. The man on the street is unharmed. This makes it less interesting to the police and is why the likes of BSkyB employ former policemen, effectively as revenue protection officers.
It isn’t fair to say that nothing is being done in the UK to prevent e-crime but the whole subject area is a difficult one and merits not only more effort but also improved levels of international co-operation due to the cross border nature of the game. I am afraid this is going to be an uphill struggle.
The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.
New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.
TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?
JP: Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.
Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.
I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.
TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?
JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.
I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.
TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?
JP: The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)
TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?
JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.
TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world
JP: It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.
TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?
JP: Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.
TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.
Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .
The Digital Britain report dominates current debate in the UK internet related industry. Its aim is, broadly put, is to promote universal use of broadband and to stimulate the digital knowledge economy thus keeping the country competitive in the 21st century. Although facilitating the plumbing of this digital economy, the Government quite rightly leaves the innovation of new ideas for delivery down the pipes to industry.
New York based innovator Jeff Pulver was a prime mover during the pioneering years of the VoIP industry. He started the Voice On the Net conferences and was founder of the company that evolved into Vonage, the US based VoIP telco. Jeff has since moved his attention to helping to create the wave of the Social Networking technology revolution. Both areas of technology, whilst requiring an underlying network to support them, hinge on the development of new ideas and applications.
TD: What parallels can you see between what was happening in the early days of VoIP and today in Social Networking?
JP: Social Networking has been part of the human experience since there was documented human experience. My focus is on the evolution of social communications, something I call: SocComm and what happens next as the world shifts from a dial-tone generation to a presence based one.
Back in the early days of VoIP we had dialup and slow computers and limited quality for the voice experience but it did not hold back a generation of people who were hobbyists by night but technology explorers by day who experimented with the technology and understand the power of what it meant when voice could be an application and no longer be a utility service.
I believe the advent of the widespread availability of social networking platforms such as Facebook and twitter are going to have a more profound impact on the future of communications in the next 5 years ahead than what we have seen in the VoIP space in the past 15 years.
TD: Aside from the by know well known business models associated with advertising, where do you see the moneytization of Social Networking?
JP: I am not a fan of pushing business models into nascent industries. Business models are disruptive to innovation and should never be forced into an ecosystem. What we will see emerge is another example of how disruptive technologies change the face of business in ways that were obvious to some by blindsided by others.
I believe presence will be moneytized with the advent of social communication. Presence will emerge to be a 25 billion dollar business.
TD: The battle against regulation of VoIP in the USA has been a feature of your career activities over the past ten years. Is there a similar debate to be had in the space you are in now?
JP: The fight is about to begin. Any platform which attracts 175 million active users (and growing) will get the attention of the government. My challenge is to see this space remains regulation free for the foreseeable future. (Maybe this is the foreshadowing of a future unannounced statement from me. hint hint)
TD: The UK has traditionally been strong in the production and delivery of content such as music and TV and this is recognised as a strength that our Government wants to maintain. Do you see any signs of internet innovation coming out of the UK in other areas?
JP: There were other signs in the late 90s and the post dot-com bubble but at the moment there are not a lot of hi-tech UK companies on my personal radar. I would like to change that.
TD: Can you paint a picture of life in the new Socially Networked world
JP: It is world where people are more real, we know the identity of the people we are communication with and a world where each of us contribute daily to the social sculpture known as the Internet.
TD: Whilst initially slated as a consumer oriented technology, Social Networking has now been adopted by large corporations as a marketing tool. Do you have an example of where this has worked successfully?
JP: Just ask the CEO of Zappos – @Zappos on twitter. They did a billion dollars in sales in 2008 and they have just about their entire organization focused on social media and on twitter. The Blue Shirt Nation of BestBuy is another example. This is the case where BestBuy launched their own internal social network for 130,000 people. These enabling technologies can and will change the world.
TD: Thank you very much for your time Jeff. You have had a punishing travel schedule over the past few months promoting Social Networking and have now started to raise the bar with conferences such as SocCom. Please accept my best wishes for the success with this activity.
Thanks for the opportunity to be read today. If you would like to learn more about my activities, please visit my blog – http://jeffpulver.com/ and follow me on twitter – http://www.twitter.com/jeffpulver .
Been a busy week again. Where do they all go? This week was a milestone for Trefor Davies in that I got my first 622Mbps BT central pipe. It’s not mine really of course, it is Timico’s but it feels like mine – toys for the boys 🙂 .
Not everyone will understand the significance. When an Internet Service Provider starts life they begin with a small connection to the BT (Wholesale) ADSL network. They use this connection, known as a “central pipe”, to carry broadband web traffic from their ADSL customers to the internet, email server, co-located equipment etc.
The ISP itself usually provides the applications (ie email) and contracts with a variety of network providers to offer resilient access to the internet.
As the number of broadband customers grows more BT central capacity needs to be added and this is normally done in affordable “chunks” rather than going straight for a big connection that would almost certainly be uneconomic for low levels of ADSL customers.
Unfortunately for the small ISP the bigger the connection the better the level of service experience that can be offered. This is particularly the case if an ISP has many small (34Mbps) pipes.
So this week Timico moved into the bigger league with a 622Mbps pipe and cancelled 7 smaller pipes. What is more our second 622Mbps pipe is due for delivery in April giving us a huge headroom in capacity/expansion capability. This is in additional to the resilient 1Gbps links we have for 21CN.
Ironically although supposed to provide 622Mbps these pipes in reality provide more bandwidth than advertised. This compares with a 155Mbps pipe which typically only provided 120Mbps capacity in two separate 60Mbps halves and a 34Mbps pipe which only provided 25Mbps capacity.
In the process of checking out our datacentre expansion options I have been meeting with a number of vendors. Today I met Verari Systems who manufacture high density blade based storage solutions and sell datacentres in a container. Yes that’s the same type of container you see hauled around on the back of trucks world-wide.
The beauty of containerised datacentres is the time to market. Four months from ordering you can be up and running with new capacity. You just need to supply the power and a secure place to put the container.
What impressed me was the quoted 11Petabytes of storage that Verari could achieve in a 100KWatt container designed to hold between 10 and 15 racks. This, for the mathematically challenged/lazy amongst us is in round terms the equivalent of eleven thousand Terrabyte PC hard drives.
Keeping the maths simple a rack can hold 42 servers (PCs) so ten racks would have the equivalent of 420 servers. The Veraris solution offers 26 x more density of storage than a PC. I have been buying Servers with 3Terrabytes of resilient storage – Verari still offeres 8 x the density.
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.
66% of the global routing table is carried by LINX. This means an Internet Service Provider can connect their customers to 66% of the webservers (is websites) in the world just by hooking up to LINX at their Docklands locations. Using Peering Exchanges like LINX allows us to cut down on expensive internet connections.
LINX has 57 of the world’s top 100 network operators as members, including 16 of the top 20. This confirms the not-for profit organisation as one of the world’s leading peering points.
In 2008 they had 13 membership cancellations of which 8 were consolidations. There are a further 6 consolidations in the pipeline. An indication of the ongoing rationalisation of the industry.
Finally I have put a pie chart together illustrating the distribution of ports at LINX in terms of 100Meg, Gig and 10Gig Ethernet. Not shown are stats that the 10Gig ports are on the rise and the 100Meg, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the rise in internet usage, in decline.
Dame Stella Rimington is in the news today attacking the government’s postition regarding data retention. This is in tune with comments previously made on this blog.
I sympathise with the need to guard against terrorism but you do get the feeling that we are moving backwards. When I was growing up we were hit with propaganda about the communist enemy. A police state where people were frequently spied upon just in case they had views that were contrary to official policy. Increased levels of surveillance in order to catch terrorists is undoubtedly going to impact on many innocent lives. If we are not careful we will end up mimicking the police states that we were cricisising not so long ago.
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.
Datacentres are quite a hot topic in the Internet Service Provider world, and their costs are rising, largely due to the increasing costs of power and cooling.
In the UK the major datacentres have typically been located in London’s Docklands. This is because Docklands is where most of the world’s major network providers connect. The cost of connectivity has traditionally been far too high to locate critical network infrastructure outside the capital.
I am sat in the LINX meeting in London writing this post listening to Bob Harris, Technical Services Director of Telehouse, one of the major datacentre players in Europe. Timico is already located in Telehouse North and East. Well the news is that they are building a Telehouse West (not particularly new news).
What is interesting are the financials associated with this project.
£165m over 5 years (£80m over 1st 2 years for the first two floors)
5 floors with 985 sq metres per floor
425 racks per floor providing 4KW per rack = total 2125 racks
Business plan to fill the facility over 3 – 5 years
That works out roughly at £78,000 per rack or just under £20,000 per KW. In terms of contribution to the operating costs the capital depreciation is £258 over 25 years, which is incidentally a long time in this game – 10 years might be considered more normal and the period has been arbitrarily chosen by me for illustration. Remember this is before anyone starts charging for operating costs.
I think the costs of this project point towards a trend to start building datacentres outside of London. Communications costs have plummeted and service providers and businesses are going to start hosting all but their most critical, perhaps latency sensitive, infrastructure outside the M25.
You can follow the progress of the Telehouse West building on their webcam here. I’ve pasted a picture of a typical backup generator that is used by datacentres to give you a feel for where the costs are incurred.
PS I don’t think there is room for a Telehouse South, in case anyone was wondering.
The BBC today has reported that Italian crooks are using Skype to avoid detection by police who use traditional wiretapping to monitor phone calls. The Skype signaling and media path is encrypted which makes it very difficult to tap into. Also because, as a Peer to Peer protocol Skype doesn’t use any centralised servers that might be able to be monitored it adds to the difficulty for law enforcement agencies.
The whole problem is then compounded by the fact that because VoIP/Skype is a very nomadic service, ie you can use it from any internet connection anywhere, it becomes difficult to track the location of a caller.
This is a problem being looked at by Ofcom as part of the process of caller location identification for the emergency services. Currently if someone makes a 999 call from an unknown address, it is difficult to pin down where that call is being made from, at least in a timely manner.
There was a high profile Canadian case where someone dialled for an ambulance and it went to a location three thousand miles from where the call was actually being made from because the address held by the operator was not the address from which the call was being made.
When a VoIP call is made the details of the call logged by the Internet Telephony Service Provider include the IP address of the originating party. If you are an Internet Service Provider (note the distinction between ITSP and ISP – an ITSP often does not provide the underlying broadband service) you can correlate this IP address with a physical address (ie house number and street).
The problem is that this is a manual process and would likely take hours at best and potentially a couple of days. This is a process that could be automated but it is something that would probalby cost billons to implement universally in the UK.
I’m sure there will be more to say on this subject in 2009. As a final note it is often said that the security forces, aka GCHQ and CIA et al have not cracked the Skype encryption technology. I find this difficult to believe.
Timico is a member of LINX, or the London Internet Exchange. Linx is a not for profit meeting point in London where ISPs and network operators meet to peer their traffic, ie to share their connectivity with one another.
It is a sign of the pace of growth in internet related activity that membership of LINX rose in 2008 to 308, up by around 20% from the previous year. The peak traffic carried over the LINX network is over 400Gbps which is a lot of ADSL connections.
The LINX meetings are not only good networking opportunities but a great place to keep up with developments in internet technology. This week the subject matter includes at IPv6, DNS security and SPAM. LINX64 is sponsored by Telehouse.
RIM has announced its latest upgrade to the Blackberry Enterprise Server. BES5 notionally provides a number of improvements (one might reasonably expect! 🙂 ) but one in particular caught my eye.
A BES sits LAN side of a corporate network and access to it is via an encrypted 3DES (or higher) path. Being LAN side is allows useful access to a company’s intranet. However what it didn’t do, or at least not without the involvement of a third party application, was to give access to computers on that LAN. This meant that accessing data on corporate servers was not straightforward.
With BES5 you can also access attachments within calendars. This is very useful in my mind. I often store location information for meetings in my calendar but my Nokia E Series phones don’t provide me with access to any of the notes. At least if they do I can’t see how.
I am indebted to one of our Blackberry gurus Will Curtis for the BES update. He has his own mobile gadget oriented blog with a post on this subject if you want to know more.
One of our account managers told me in passing that a customer of his had just shut up shop. Bad news I thought. Is this going to be the way of it in 2009?
The good news though is that what they have actually done is closed the office and moved their 5 members of staff to work from home to conserve cash. Their VoIP subscriptions, which they were already using flexibly from both office and home, will just follow them.
Business is still there to be grasped when times are hard.
