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It was chucking it down on Saturday so no golf and there was no rugby on so I wandered down to Currys on Tritton Road in Lincoln for a bit of a browse. I wasn’t after anything in particular but found myself in front of a portable Bose speaker system that allowed you to hook your phone up using bluetooth. So I did.

The sound quality was mind blowing and it was really easy to get set up. I got chatting with a sales assistant and mentioned the fact that at £249 the price was a bit rich. “You’re paying for the label” he said so I asked him whether there were some equally good but cheaper systems where I would be just paying for the quality. He pointed me vaguely at a Sonos system so I went along to look at that one.

Standing in front of the Sonos I did a bluetooth scan and took a guess as to which was the right kit to hook up with. Playing Queen’s Another One Bites The Dust nothing seemed to be happening. Then I realised the sound was coming through a different Sony product a few feet away. Someone was standing in front of it talking to the sales guy so I whipped up the volume:)

The Sonos didn’t work using bluetooth – it’s WiFi apparently. What struck me, apart from the fact that it was so easy to set up and the quality of the sound was the number of devices in the shop with bluetooth connections. The screen shot shows loads of Samsung TVs. I’m a bit of a luddite when it comes to TVs & simlar but was astonished to see how thin they are these days.

Wandering round the shop I also noticed they were pushing your own “Personal Cloud” from Western Digital. This looks like a solid state hard drive with a WiFi connection – no resiliency. It doesn’t matter. It recognises the fact that people need to store data away from their pc or mobile device. I’m still more comfortable with having lots of resiliency in a backup though I guess two WD devices would do the job. The Smart Home app is working brilliantly btw. I made a donation.

The fact that Currys was using the term cloud is pretty significant. It supports the whole move of operations into the cloud. It wouldn’t surprise me to see sales of Chromebooks shooting up this Christmas. It’s the way ahead.

PS might ask Santa for the Bose speaker for Christmas.

The whole issue of government surveillance seems to have reached a crescendo over the last few days. It makes you wonder what the whole Draft Communications Data Bill was all about if “they” can already see everything.

I don’t even know whether encrypted communications are particularly secure anymore. I thought they were but does government secretly have the capability to do really advanced tech that is not in the public domain. Quite probably. We expect it of our own side and hope that we are better than the opposition (whoever they are) – the James Bond movie Skyfall confirmed that it goes on 🙂

I don’t know what to think about the whole privacy thing anymore though. Every online platform seems to know an awful lot about us. Tesco knows the intimate details of my lifestyle from what I buy from it. Google knows absolutely everything about what I’m doing with all my waking hours.

The old joke about a bloke having an affair with his secretary after work and then rubbing snooker chalk on his collar so that his wife would think he’d been playing with his mates doesn’t work any more. She just needs to follow his movements online, or have the difficult conversation about why he switched his phone off for an hour (5mins? 🙂 ) on his way home from work¹ .

The Domesday scenario here is that all this information is opened for all to see, accidentally of otherwise. Worst case is that our bank accounts could be emptied.

Aside from ferociously safeguarding your bank password details, though it seems that crooks use back door techniques for breaking into accounts these days rather than brute force password hacks, it seems to me that we need to up the profile of the whole issue of security of our own personal data.

I can’t see how we can stop people/organisations from collecting this data but if they lose it or expose it for others to see then the penalties need to be suitably robust. The world needs to fast track a move to an online security conscious culture.

¹ On Sunday I nipped out to the pub for a swift one before dinner and forgot my phone. When I got home there was a text message from my wife asking which pub I was in! Nothing was mentioned though. I did feel an element of freedom being out without the mobile phone but was also conscious that the clock in the window of acceptability was ticking away.