Categories
Engineer fun stuff ofcom

And the hot news is…

Normally I’m fending off ideas for blog posts. This last couple of weeks I’ve been wading through a soup of Awards Entries which take yonks to write, especially when they limit you to writing your life story in 250 words. Bit of an  exaggeration but those of you who have to do that sort of thing will know what I mean.

So I’ve looked up, drawn breath and thought what do I want to write about. There’s the massive DDoS attack against CloudFlare that was in all the news earlier in the week. “Internet grinds to a halt” – that kind of thing. It didn’t affect us.

Then there was the cable cutting by Egyptian insurgents, demonstrators, rebels, whatever they were. Didn’t affect us though I know one or two people with operations in the Middle East and lots of traffic to Pakistan that were affected. Not us though like I said.

I note today the Register talking about how capital expenditure by network operators is very rarely recovered. I guess that doesn’t apply in our case as we are not just a bits shifter. We are into added value services that generate good gross margin. We are in this game to make money.

If you’re not in the trade you might not have noticed the Ofcom consultation on Narrowband Markets which closed on Tuesday. Amongst it’s various nuggets the Ofcom proposals contain suggestions like “if you get your line rental from BT then they would also be able to compel you to get your minutes from them as well”.  Not good really and I’m to sure that is what Ofcom wanted to say but that is how it came out on paper. Timico responded through ITSPA, that fine Trade Association that looks after everyone’s interests in the Internet Telephony space – that’s yours and mine if you but knew it. I thought about a specific blog post on the subject but no, too tedious! Yawn…

Yesterday’s news was the 40th anniversary of the mobile phone. In those days it was the size of a phone box but, hey, you could stick it in your boot (trunk) and drive it around. That was yesterday’s news. This blog ain’t a retrospective. It’s progressive and funky. Move on.

Today all the broadsheet tech pages, at least the currently free to access ones such as the Grauniad and Torygraph, are talking about the leaks of info about the forthcoming Facebook phone – poetic license intended – more here. It might interest some people but not me. I don’t trust Facebook though I do use it to keep in touch with the kids and have to admit to having two Facebook Pages of my own (here and here). One assumes btw that with modern spellcheckers they never get the Guardian spelling wrong these days, unless they use an American dictionary maybe. Whilst claiming immunity to nostalgia there are still some things worth gazing back wistfully over your shoulders. The Grauniad spelling is one.

I’m a bit of a mixed up kid when it comes to these social media platforms and online privacy. On the one hand I complain about it and say I don’t trust any of them. On the other hand I still carry on using them all in one form or another. It’s unavoidable unless I just take an allotment and spend all my time growing carrots (or peas, beans and spuds – that kind of stuff anyway. Not sprouts as I’m not very fond of them and as for broccoli!!!). #isnotgonnahappen!

Anyway I can’t think of anything to write about today so I’m going to give it a miss. Feel free to post some ideas as comments. If nobody does I’ll take it as an endorsement of my own inactivity and assume that you are either still in Tenerife catching some rays, or skiing in Bognor Regis, WL.

Catch ya later 🙂

Categories
Business Cloud

Amazon is Down and What that Means for Public Cloud Confidence

Having noted the resilience of Wikileaks and thus the internet from concerted Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks we wake up this morning to a crisis in cloud confidence with the news that some of Amazon’s own European sites have been down. The reason cited? “hardware failure”.

As a network operator I know that no one is immune from such failures.  It is a surprise however that such a failure (we are not given any details) could bring a site such as Amazon down. The Amazon pitch is that their cloud is distributed over multiple sets of hardware and is supposedly able to live with the failure of any given server/drive.

The fact is that this puts out a message that Amazon’s service is not as resilient as they would like it to be.  It will quite possibly make businesses think twice about using a public service that is shared with so many other users.  If any one of those users is attacked it could affect everyone else with collateral damage.

I’m not sure that the cyber battles currently going on over Wikileaks can be described as full scale cyber warfare. The shot across the cyber bows is however going to make people think hard about their cloud strategies.

As a provider of services local to the UK  this actually does give me hope that the model of private clouds for business rather than the big scale low cost low margin world of Amazon et  al has the potential to be one of the winners.

Categories
Engineer internet social networking

Twitter downed by ddos attack

I have to apologise to Dave Ward who manages the firewall at Timico HQ in Newark.  I complained to him that he was blocking me from accessing Twitter and he scurried off to check having denied it all. (it’s not a criminal offence in my book anyway).

I just read that Twitter was this afternoon hit by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack which took out the service for a few hours from around 2pm.  Sorry Dave.  Whenever I publish a blog post Wordpress automatically sends a tweet on the subject which in turn updates my Facebook status. What would we do without Twitter eh?