Categories
End User internet

Wonderful domain name scam

I just had a great email from someone called Williams Huang based (allegedly) at a domain name registrant in China. In it he told me that he had had a request from some unknown organisation to register the Timico domain name with the .tw, .co.tw,hk .asia, .net.cn and .org.cn.

Fortunately for me he had “checked to see whether this organisation was a genuine applicant and had the right to register the domain”. Finding that Timico was actually based in the UK he got in touch to give us first refusal on the domains. Phew what good luck!

Does this provide me with a dilemma? Actually no. It just gave me some good material for the blog. It might, however, play on the concerns of some businesses. What would you do in this case?

Hope you are having a good Olympics and whatever you do don’t respond to cold calls from the internet.

Categories
End User travel

A4 Pacific

Leading edge technology of its time.

Sir Nigel Gresley was the designer of the A4 Pacific Class Locomotive.

The A4 Pacific Mallard still holds the world speed record of 125mph created on 3rd July 1938.

The A4 Pacifics cut the journey time between London and Newcastle down to 4 hours (from 5 days by horse and cart 🙂 . The coal tender had a walk through passage so that drivers could be changed without having to stop the train.

These pictures were taken at the North Yorkshire Moors Railway which still operates the Sir Nigel Gresley.

Categories
End User travel

The rain in Scarborough falls mainly on the Davies’

It also rains in Spain

but are they as well prepared for it?

You won’t find anything like this in Las Vegas.

Nor this.

 

Categories
End User travel

The rain in Scarborough falls mainly on the Davies'

It also rains in Spain

but are they as well prepared for it?

You won’t find anything like this in Las Vegas.

Nor this.

 

Categories
End User internet

Municipal WiFi Scarborough style

Categories
broadband End User olympics

The Olympic Effect

Readers might be interested to know that the Olympic opening ceremony stimulated an increase of almost 10% in internet usage last Friday afternoon.

It will also be interesting to hear whether the consumer ADSL customer community will have seen any changes in the performance of their connection as their ISPs begin throttling to cope.

Categories
broadband End User internet mobile connectivity

A Teenager’s Homepage

Before we set off on our camping holiday (destination unknown) I sat down at my daughter’s pc to print out some campsite options in Yorkshire.

I was somewhat bemused to find that her homepage was set to BBC iplayer.

Look out ISPs everywhere. Your bandwidth forecasts are inadequate.

My trusty E71 got me to the first campsite on the list and that is where we stayed. I also used it to write this post.

Categories
broadband End User internet mobile connectivity

A Teenager’s Homepage

Before we set off on our camping holiday (destination unknown) I sat down at my daughter’s pc to print out some campsite options in Yorkshire.

I was somewhat bemused to find that her homepage was set to BBC iplayer.

Look out ISPs everywhere. Your bandwidth forecasts are inadequate.

My trusty E71 got me to the first campsite on the list and that is where we stayed. I also used it to write this post.

Categories
End User mobile connectivity

Nokia E71

Nokia E71

 

Nokia kindly sent me an E71 to review. I’m not a gadget man but I have now had a series of Nokia E Series’ which I hope qualifies me to comment on this latest one.

 

I some time ago decided that I would use Nokias for email rather than RIM. BlackBerry at the time did not support WiFi and offered no hope of a VoIP client. Windows mobile devices did not cut it. For me they did not seem to be very good phones to me; clunky with a poor user interface and not a very good battery life.

 

The E Series came along and with it the business mobile range for the future. I thought the E60 was good and was somewhat surprised when it was canned. I put it down to progress. It wasn’t perfect. Pages downloading from the internet frustratingly seemed to do so twice. I put it down to some strange caching process. Still the screen was very clear and I could lie in bed on a Saturday morning reading the paper over my home wireless network.

 

My replacement, taken in order to run mobile voip clients on the latest Nokia device, was the E65 which I thought was great and is what I have been using since it came out. It seemed to be a stabler device although it still locked up from time to time. I eventually worked out that if email was synching some of the other buttons wouldn’t respond – crucially the address book. It still seems to download web pages twice.

 

Cosmetically the paintwork on the E65 rubs off so it doesn’t necessarily stay looking good but this isn’t what turns me on. I would happily carry on using the E65.

 

Enter the E71.

 

What I like about the E71?

 

Old fashioned PDA footprint but is a lot slimmer and slips in the pocket very easily.

Good weight – the Blackberry’s are too light for my liking

Good screen

You can listen to your text messages

On board satnav

WiFi – you can also get software that turns it into a WiFi hoptspot.

Battery life seems reasonably good

 

What don’t I like about it? I need to get a Bluetooth car kit. It isn’t really fair on the device because most modern cars probably have Bluetooth built in but mine is a “Classic” and so I have to switch SIMs to my E65 which has a generic Nokia interface that fits into the car.

 

If that is all I can complain about I think the Nokia E71 does very well. In fact it looks to be a huge step forwards as devices go. Well done Nokia.

Categories
End User mobile connectivity

This post was created using a Nokia E71

Chez Davies, around 7.45pm August 7th.

The photo is of the Davies’ back garden and was taken at around 7.45 PM on August 7th using the Nokia E71. I had to go to my PC to help upload the photo itself – it uploaded to the website ok but at a certain point of the proceedings I kept losing the link to the website. I’m not sure whether this is specific to the WiFi connection. I have found that the WiFi on the E Series isn’t as robust as it might be although I do like the phones in general.

Note the grass needs cutting!

Categories
End User internet security

Alphabet attacks

Following my last post which was on security I was sat in the Timico NOC today and interestingly watched a SPAM attack in progress.

It was an alphabet attack. This is one where someone’s email server is compromised and used to send out SPAM by rotating through the alphabet for email addresses (eg [email protected] – the SPAM algorithm works its way through every combination of alphabetical variants. In this case it was targetting Italian .it addresses.

Our network monitoring picked it up and we immediately blacklisted/shut down access to that Exchange mail server. We also contacted the customer to let him know and so that he could take remedial action and remove the offending SPAM.

Apart from being interesting to watch it in action, a bit like standing on the edge of a battlefield watching the fighting, it again highlighted the need to have secure passwords. In this case we tried accessing the offending server and were able to log on using a simple admin/password combination of credentials.

When I started this blog I didn’t think that security would become such a mainstream subject but I was wrong

Categories
End User internet

"Stealing" domain names is just not cricket

Businesses need to be mindful of the need to manage their domain name strategy sensibly. There are any number of individuals and organisations out there ready to take advantage of the careless.

For example take a look at http://www.cricinfo.com/. Not a bad time to be visiting the site during an exciting match between England and South Africa (yes I did say exciting).

If you now visit http://www.crickinfo.com/ you will see a difference. The spelling mistake is an easy one to make for someone looking for the main cricket website in the world (wide web). A good domain name strategy would have seen cricinfo snaffle both domains.

Now visit http://www.cricinfo.co.uk/. This one you might think would certainly take you to cricinfo but it doesn’t. It is owned by someone else and until recently took people to a cricket shop completely unassociated with cricinfo.com.

This is quite a high profile example of someone not doing something right when the business was small and it didn’t matter but paying for it downstream.

There are other different examples – the famous myspace court case where the .co.uk domain name was owned by an ISP long before myspace.com existed.

It is quick and easy to check your own business’ domain name – click here if you need a domain name checker.

Good luck England.

Categories
broadband End User

Magnolia Paint, Croquet, and Broadband Internet

I was on a rare Tuesday night out with Ben our Head of Network Operations and Dean, Chief Technical Architect. Ben was up from the NOC in Ipswich for a meeting so we combined business with pleasure and had an evening discussing technical strategies and roadmaps for The Timico Group.

The output will reveal itself in due course but the nature of such evenings, spent in Tequila’s Mexican Cantina in Lincoln, is that the conversation lead to other subjects.

On this occasion it was magnolia paint. Dean said it was a completely boring subject and that there was nothing really to talk about. An earlier career spent in RAF accommodation had coloured his judgement on the subject.

My take was that magnolia paint is in itself a complex subject with many facets. After all you can get gloss magnolia, matt magnolia, emulsion, satin, small pots, large pots, industrial sized pots etc etc. It is also quite possible that there are many different shades of magnolia.

The point is that there are probably experts in magnolia paint who can advise the mere mortals and colour blind amongst us as to which tin of magnolia we need.

Now compare magnolia paint with your internet connection. You have probably taken both for granted but in reality a broadband internet connection is a complex animal. What sort do you go for? Is the free one that comes with a phone line the one for you or do you actually pay good cash for something different? Is there a difference? How do you decide?

Let me tell you even if you think you know what you are talking about it is not easy. It’s like the first time I had my own business and needed to choose a mobile phone tariff. There were so many on offer I basically had to take a pin and stick it in the pricelist and hope that that one was the right one for me. Someone had always made the choice for me before.

Not every business has the luxury of employing staff to specifically choose on your behalf. In fact most businesses don’t. They need to team up with someone who can advise them and who they can trust.

The fact is I leave the choice of magnolia paint to an expert, in this case my wife. My wife knows nothing about internet connections so in that case she asks me.

PS, Ben and Dean also wanted me to write on the subject of croquet. There are around 3,500 members of the Croquet Association spread amongst approximately 165 clubs. The Association was founded in 1897 so it is still taking a little while to take off! If you want to know more go to http://www.croquet.org.uk/. They are looking for support.

For internet connections go to http://www.timico.co.uk/. They want your business.

Categories
End User internet

.UK domain snippet

Interesting fact that came out at the nominet meeting today was that they have almost 7 million .uk domain names under management. These are being added to at the rate of 137,000 new registrations a month, offset by the fact that only 70% of domains are renewed when they expire.

Categories
broadband End User

Sports Bar

This isn’t really a technology post. I have just had dinner in a hotel sports bar somewhere near the M25 outside London.

 

Initially I couldn’t get near the bar because the one barman was snowed under with customers attending a function that had closed the restaurant. I didn’t mind that because I don’t like being seen as a sad git reading a book on my own in the restaurant. I prefer to sit at the bar with a beer and a burger and then go back to my room to work/sleep/watch TV. I did mind it taking ages to get served with my glass of shandy (yes).

 

On this occasion the bar eventually emptied of function goers only to reveal the lonely individuals normally seen in the restaurant but this time sat on their own at tables in the sports bar.

 

It does get worse. The four screens in the sports bar all displayed the same round of some boring darts competition. Probably the world championships J.  I seem to recall that at the age of eighteen I was interested in darts. I’m 46 now and no longer interested in darts.

 

Back in the room I’m writing my board report. Can’t send it though. The Wifi signal although present is too weak. I have to go back to the bar to get a strong enough signal. It will have to wait until morning. I could do it through my Nokia E71 (more on that later) but the GSM signal is also pretty crappy.

 

There you go. It was a technology post after all – sent from reception in the hotel.

Categories
End User fun stuff

Generation Y in action

Here’s a link to my son’s website.

 

http://www.tom-davies.net/frontpage.html

 

He hosts a radio programme in Lincoln and is encouraging listeners by making his website interactive.  You can register to become a member of the “Wake Up To The Weekend” Nation and also vote online for members of the “National Government” There is even a pictorial security code that you have to enter when you register “for security purposes”

 

He is 16.

 

The point is that this generation does this instinctively. The revolution is only just beginning.