May 15 2009
I read last night that Vodafone is abolishing all roaming charges for the summer!
I think that this is brilliant, and I hope that it becomes permanent! Also, I hope that this is rolled-out across all Vodafone operations!
You can read more about this in Summer roaming promotion – mobile roaming service from Vodafone.
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Apr 09 2009
You work in a large organisation that deals primarily with very sensitive information. You develop procedures to ensure that this sensitive information is handled correctly at all times. You invest in hardware solutions to ensure that your systems remain secure. You develop access control models that are based on biometric identification. You use the most secure protocols and algorithms to encrypt data. Indeed, you do everything that you can think of to ensure you have the strongest security possible.
Then some photographer in the right place, and at the right time, uses his digital camera and zoom lens to capture a photograph of a very sensitive document.
If you are not sure what I am referring to, then take a look at Police chief quits over blunder. It is actually a great example of why security requires an all encompassing multi-faceted approach.
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Mar 25 2009
A very interesting story about Government censorship has been unfolding in Ireland over the last two days. Indeed, if not for the Internet then the story would have been successfully squashed by now!
It all started with a practical joke in which paintings of the Irish Prime Minister, who was naked, were hung in two popular art galleries in Dublin. The national broadcaster RTE provided coverage of the story.
Here is a screenshot of one of the paintings in case the video gets removed:
Painting of Brian Cowen (From RTE News)
Initially this was just an example of Irish humour, but it quickly took a sinister tone. First RTE was pressurised into removing the video from its web site, and it was subsequently forced to issue the following apology:
The Government then continued to flex its muscles today by sending the police into a radio station that covered the story. The police were demanding the name of the artist. More information about this can be read in Gardaí visit radio station in Cowen painting inquiry.
The police identified the artist in one of the fastest investigations ever undertaken, and they are currently preparing a prosecution. The police also seized five other similar paintings. More details of this are described in Teacher questioned over Cowen paintings.
My opinion on all of this is that it is outrageous that the Government is putting so many resources into trying to bury this story. I am also delighted with the responses of the online community, and I hope to play my part also :o
I am also really surprised that the Governemnt, or even the Prime Minister, did not seize the opportunity to turn it into good publicity.
For more coverage of this story from the Irish blogging community take a look at the recent posts by Maman Poulet, Damien Mulley, and Caricatures Ireland. This last web site has a very good caricature in The Taoiseach has no clothes and RTE has no balls: the Brian Cowen Nude Caricature.
Brian Cowen Caricature (Copyright Caricatures Ireland)
The t-shirt version of it looks great in Get your b*ll*ck-naked T*oiseach t-sh*rt.
I also think that this is yet another example of how a small story becomes a huge story when somebody tries to censor it! A perfect example of this is all of the other caricatures that are now appearing on the Internet, such as the caricatures in Photoshop Cowen extravaganza. I think that some of these are very funny, while others are not. However, I think it is vital in a democracy that they are all available to the public!
I have been following this story, and the associated outrage, all day on Twitter. I must admit that I really liked the real-time nature of this, although it was a distraction :o
It is also very interesting to see how the global media is covering this story. The story is covered in the UK in Naked taoiseach paintings removed, Cowen artist ‘could be charged’, and Guerrilla artist hangs nude paintings of taoiseach Brian Cowen. France is reading about the story in A poil, par Robert Solé, and the US is reading about it in Ireland: Nude Premier Paintings Appear. Perhaps the most ironic, or even worrying, coverage is by the Chinese in Naked Irish PM portraits removed. I am sure that it is also being covered by many other news agencies of which I am not aware!
The story has also made it into Wikipedia, where it is known as Picturegate. Perhaps the Irish Government will try to remove this next!
I wonder how this story will continue in the following days!
Jan 08 2009
I previously wrote about the demise of Windows 3.11 in Goodbye Windows 3.11!. I have not used in it many years, so this news did not concern me.
However, I still regularly use Windows 2000 because it does everything that I need. It also gives much better performance on older computers than its successor Windows XP.
I have been thinking recently about how popular Windows 2000 remains. I started thinking about this after reading an article describing how the UK’s Royal Navy has started using a mix of Windows 2000 and Windows XP on its nuclear powered submarines. This is instead of the traditional custom designed software. The full article is Royal Navy completes Windows for Submarines™ rollout.
During the Christmas holidays I was in several airports, and I was in many department stores. I was really surprised to see that many of the computers in these locations (boarding gates and customer information desks) were using Windows 2000. It is easy to spot this when the computers are not being used, because both the login screen and the default screensaver of Windows 2000 are distinctive.
It must be the case that the benefits of using the newer operating systems do not yet justify the massive additional costs of upgrading so many computers.
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Jan 03 2009
I read a very positive article about Asos in an Irish womens’ lifestyle magazeen during the week. The article was brought to my attention by a female family member :o
As I described in Online Christmas Shopping 2008, I bought from Asos for my first time this year. So did my female family members. We were all extremely pleased with the experience, the prices, and the purchases.
The article also states that Asos is beating the current economic downturn. In particular, it experienced a 107% rise in sales, and a 68% rise in profit. I am sure that the week pound must also be helping!
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Dec 17 2008
I read an interesting article earlier in the week describing how Virgin Media has launched its new broadband service. This service will be available throughout the UK in the next six months, and it providers users with a maximum download speed of 50Mbps. This will make Virgin Media the fastest ISP in the UK.
More details about this can be read in Virgin unveils next-gen broadband.
The same article describes how BT is beginning a fibre to the cabinet trial that will provide users with speeds up to 40Mbps.
This is very interesting, because in the middle of 2007 I attended an event hosted by T-Com in Berlin. One of the topics at this event was broadband, and T-Com told us that it would have fibre to the cabinet deployed in the 50 largest cities in Germany in 2008. This would be capable of supplying 17 million homes. At that time T-Com had already installed fibre to the cabinet in the 26 largest cities in Germany, and we were shown some of the new cabinets on the streets in Berlin. It was then easy to spot these new cabinets ourselves, because they are slightly larger than the standard cabinets, and if you listen carefully you can hear the cooling equipment running inside them! T-Com were offering a triple play service of phone, television, and Internet to customers using this infrastructure. There were some BT representatives at the meeting also, and I recall them being impressed :o
Independently, it appears that Virgin Media will start traffic shaping P2P traffic next year according to Virgin Media to dump neutrality and target BitTorrent users. I wonder if the Net Neutrality war is being lost in Europe :|
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Dec 13 2008
I did all my online Christmas shopping this week. It went very well, and I must admit that I love the comfort of shopping in my own time from my own home. I am the sort of person that researches every purchase online, thinks about it some more, and eventually purchases. Visiting real shops with a list of things to buy is an experience that I try to avoid! Now I hope that all my presents arrive soon!
I bought lots of presents on Expansys, PhotoBox, and Play (which has the bonus of being VAT free). I also bought some presents on Asos, which was my first time to buy clothes online! I really like all of these websites because they price in euro even though they are not based in the eurozone.
It really annoys me when online retailers expect Irish customers to use the UK versions of their websites. Yes – we speak the same language, but we use a different currency! I think it is just pure laziness on their behalf!
Amazon is a perfect example of such an online retailer. It has a French website in euro, a German website in euro, and an English wesite in pounds :(
Amazon Ireland
Indeed, Amazon’s approach to the EU market is very limited.
Nevertheless, I decided to give it a try this year since the pound is so weak compared to the euro. I wanted to buy a small electronics device, and the price was really good. It was only when I went to buy the item that I realised that Amazon do not ship it outside of the UK :( I understand that this might be due to the fact that Amazon does not want to be responsible for collecting old electronic devices as required by the WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment) directive. So I abandoned shopping with Amazon :(
There seems to be plenty of other people who are unhappy with Amazon also according to Amazon behaving badly and Amazon UK withdraws John Duignan’s Scientology exposé “The Complex” from sale “for legal reasons”.
Finally, it appears that I am not the only person shopping online this week! According to “Busiest day” for online shopping last Monday was the busiest day in the year for online sales in the UK. The busiest hour was predicted to occur between 13:00 and 14:00 when £28 million worth of goods were to be sold. Some online retailers are predicting that this year will be their busiest year ever as more shoppers buy online. There is also an interesting video showing the inside of Amazon’s distribution centre.
Dec 12 2008
Google published the Zeitgeist 2008 earlier this week. This shows the most popular searches on Google during 2008.
The results are broken down into separate results for each country, which is probably more useful than the overall results. One of the interesting things that I noticed is that the term Google is in the top 10 in many countries! I do not know why people search for this using Google, but my guess is that these people are not searching directly on the Google webpage. For example, I have Firefox configured so that I can type my Google search terms directly into the address bar.
It is also very interesting to see that certain terms that are directly related to well known websites, such as YouTube, appear in all of the EU results. Yet nearly all of the EU results have terms that are specific to the country or language. I do not recognise a lot of these ones!
The most popular search terms in Ireland were:
Unfortunately, none of these search terms relate to Irish websites :(
The fastest rising search terms in Ireland were:
Perhaps the most interesting search term on this list is for the Polish social networking website Nasza-Klasa. (This is the most popular search term in Poland.)
There is also an interesting observation about the list of most popular politicians in Ireland in Politician Declan Ganley more popular than Bertie says Google.
More details about the popular search terms in Ireland can be read in “Sarah Palin” the most searched query on Google. Unfortunately, Ireland is not included in the Google Zeitgeist page, and I am unable to find the official source!
The results presented by Google have been filtered to remove terms related to adult searches. I recall hearing that pornography related searches are by far the most popular. However, it seems that Google did not get the filtering totally right this time for the UK results. The original list (see Palin beats Obama in Google’s ‘zeitgeist’ rankings or 2008 Year-End Zeitgeist Around the World until the mistake is noticed) contained the term cam4 under the Fastest Rising category. Let me say that cam4 is certainly not suitable for viewing in work :o For more about this see Ooops, Google Zeitgeist lists a porn site.
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Dec 08 2008
There are two articles in the news today regarding child pornography prevention measures that are being applied at national level. These articles caught my attention because I think that they are great example of how not to apply censorship!
The first article describes how six ISPs in the UK are blocking access to a Wikipedia web page that contains a photo of a naked girl in her early teens. Initially this sounds reasonable, but the block is being applied to the whole page rather than simply the photo. Furthermore, the photo is of a well known album from 1976 by a well known band. So clearly the intention of publishing this web page is not to promote child pornography.
The ISPs are implementing the block using a transparent proxy that is not forwarding the original client IP address to Wikipedia. Unfortunately, this means that Wikipedia cannot identify individual clients within these ISPs, so all users of these ISPs are now blocked from updating Wikipedia!
To add to the stupidity of this situation, the photo is widely available on the Internet already, and a simple search for “virgin killer” on Google Images finds it. Apparently many UK bloggers are now posting the image in protest.
For more details about this see Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over ‘child porn’ album cover.
I am delighted to report that my ISP (Eircom) is not blocking access to this web page! I hope it stays this way. If you want to test your ISP then simply try viewing Virgin Killer.
The second article describes how an Australian judge recently found a man guilty of possessing child pornography. The child pornography was a fake Simpsons cartoon that depicted some of the characters have sex. For more details about this see Fake Simpsons cartoon ‘is porn’.
Again, this seems like excessive policing to me.
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Dec 04 2008
I am currently reviewing which bank I should give my business to, and as part of this review I am considering getting a new credit card. Actually, I am wondering if I should get a debit card instead.
Therefore, I was very interested in reading about a new credit card that Visa is releasing. The unique thing about this new card is that when a user wants to use it then he/she enters his/her PIN into the card. So the card has a small keyboard in it, and yet it is still the same size as a normal credit card. The card then generates a unique one use code that must be used as part of the purchasing process. This ensures that user is really in possession of the card.
The vagueness of the Data Protection Act legislation covering the usage and storage of credit card details in the UK is also very interesting:
appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data
having regard to the state of technological development and the cost of implementing any measures
More details about all of this can be read in Visa’s digital credit card could raise legal stakes.
In terms of credit card security, the thing that really amazes me is that the CVV number is printed on the back of the card! This means that anybody who can get hold of a credit card (even for a few seconds) can later use the credit card for online purchases!
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