Author: Mike

Yes today is Pi day!

So for all of us who can only remember a few of the above decimal points here’s some links I found on the subject today.

• Pi – the movie
• The Joy of pi!
• A history of Pi
• What Wikipedia says
• The Big ‘Dick’
• The pi Song!
• Some more interesting facts about Pi.

The UK government is to launch yet another review into the UK’s Broadband infrastructure. The report to be chaired by ex-head of Cable & Wireless Francisco Caio is due to report to the Alistair Darling in the autumn.

Another review! Another Report! Another delay in getting the UK’s broadband service into the 21st century.

When will the talking stop and the work commence?

According to the latest report from Ofcom, broadband take up has increased last year by over 20 percent with a total of over 12 million connections now online.

Maybe this is where all of the bandwidth is going from my connection?

Amongst that huge various amounts of spam that circulate on the Internet are some pretty sophisticated Phishing emails.

Buried in a pile of to unread emails was one from a colleague who had received a very interesting email last week. Ever aware of the increased use of these type of emails he was careful not to click anywhere on the email before he saved the image to send to me.

If like him, you bank with NatWest, best beware of this one. It’s very convincing!

Phishing Email Image	Real Web Site

Overall February was not a good month for broadband connection up-time. All seemed to be fine till around the middle of the month, just after I renewed my contract with BT (now why did I do that?). Then I had a number of days of really low connection speeds.

However, after only two calls to the BT broadband support line and despite my assurances that that there was no technical issue with my local equipment as per my many previous telephone calls, I had a booked visit from one of the BT Openreach broadband engineers.

He duly arrived on the 22nd February and made some local tests and found (as I suspected) no fault with my equipment. However he did find via some diagnostics that he carried that the Line Profile (also known as the B-RAS setting)  at the local exchange (Reading South) was incorrectly set.

The B-RAS setting is used to determine the download speed of the circuit and will adjust itself if the line is affected by noise which I had noticed (and the engineer also heard) a few days before I first called in the fault. Why had I not noticed the noise problem earlier – I have two lines, one of which is only used for broadband.

As always with technology, you learn new things, 1) about the B-RAS setting, 2) via the engineers diagnostics that my router is exactly 3.8 km from the exchange as the wire goes (as opposed to as the Crow flies) and 3) there are an average of 16 connections (the roadside BT boxes – green ones where I live) between a home phone /router and an exchange!

Anyway the resetting of the B-RAS level seemed to bring the speed back up to near what I have been experiencing at the beginning of February and apart from a couple of  ‘normal’ blips seems to have stabilised back around the 4.2Mb level. Of course, nowhere near the impossible 8MB still being offered by all the ISP’s – when will Ofcom step in and end this mis-selling?

Lets see what happens in March!

I was looking through a backlog of emails and came across this excellent article in the Times by Simon Jenkins.

If you have any thoughts about the messed up Defence policy of this Labour Government then you must read this and the comments that follow at the end.

It will make you want to contribute a comment.

We all think that when you turn your computer off; well it’s really off and all the data stored on the disc is safe and anything in the memory chips (RAM) has gone.

However, according to a group of Princeton University researchers nothing could be further from the truth!

“The root of the problem lies in an unexpected property of today’s DRAM memories. DRAMs are the main memory chips used to store data while the system is running. Virtually everybody, including experts, will tell you that DRAM contents are lost when you turn off the power. But this isn’t so. Our research shows that data in DRAM actually fades out gradually over a period of seconds to minutes, enabling an attacker to read the full contents of memory by cutting power and then rebooting into a malicious operating system.”

“Interestingly, if you cool the DRAM chips, for example by spraying inverted cans of “canned air” dusting spray on them, the chips will retain their contents for much longer. At these temperatures (around -50 °C) you can remove the chips from the computer and let them sit on the table for ten minutes or more, without appreciable loss of data. Cool the chips in liquid nitrogen (-196 °C) and they hold their state for hours at least, without any power. Just put the chips back into a machine and you can read out their contents.”

Why is this suddenly being talked about? I seems that many disk encryption/security products keep vital identity keys in RAM and it now appears that under certain circumstances, it may be possible for hackers to circumvent the security of disk encryption tool.

You can find more details here, as well a PDF if you want to read the full research details.

Amazing how preconceived ideas are suddenly found to be full of holes!

Well you’re not alone.

It seems that so many many people are having trouble getting the code – it’s needed when you want to move Broadband ISP’s – that uSwitch is calling on Ofcom to launch an enquiry.

I understand the mans grief, but after listening to some of the reports today, I now only feel sorry for him. Surely he cannot truly believe all that he said today in court as reported.

I think that the Press should just stop reporting all of this complete nonsense, as anymore and the poor guy is going up with absolute no sympathy at all.

I am sure like many people last evening, I watched with interest the first episode of The Last Enemy on BBC One last night.

Total Information Awareness or TIA as it usually referred to in the program is all encompassing intelligence system seen by certain elements in a future UK Government as the ultimate citizen surveillance system.

Overall I thought it a pretty good program, it certainly showed what will be achieved by successive UK governments if we don’t wake up and take notice of how close we have already come to having a TIA in place today.

I thought it showed a good example of real joined-up government thinking, albeit the wrong sort! I’ll look forward to the subsequent episodes as I think it will open up our eyes as to sort of society that we are heading for.

Some of the truths behind The Last Enemy…

• Britain has about five million CCTV cameras, one for every 12 people.  More cameras than any other country.  – The Times, 27 March 2007

• “ID cards will link your basic personal information to something uniquely yours – like the pattern of your iris, your face shape or your fingerprint.  It will protect your identity from people fraudulently claiming to be you and make it easier for you to prove your identity when you need to – like opening a bank account, moving house, applying for benefits or starting a job.” – Identity & Passport Service

• Millions of children as young as 11 are to have their fingerprints taken and stored on a Government database, according to leaked Whitehall plans. The Home Office wants to include children in its biometric passport scheme in three years’ time, and automatically transfer their details and fingerprints to the controversial new national identity database when they turn 16. – This is London, 4 March 2007

• 21 of the 25 EU Member States have already introduced ID cards.  – Home Office

• The costs of the identity cards project were revealed to have risen by £840m in the last six months to £5.75 billion. – The Guardian, May 2007

• British citizens will be quizzed on up to 200 different pieces of personal information in a 30 minute grilling if they want a passport… Those who fail to convince the bureaucrats they are who they say will be denied a travel document or face a full investigation by anti-fraud experts.  There is no formal appeal process. – Daily Mail, 21 March 2007

• Advances in surveillance technology could seriously damage individual privacy unless drastic measures are taken to protect personal data, scientists have said.  The report by the Royal Academy of Engineering said that travel passes, supermarket loyalty cards and mobile phones could be used to track individuals’ every move.  They also predicted that CCTV footage could available for public consumption and that terrorists could hijack the biometric chips in passports and rig them up as a trigger for explosives. – The Times, 27 March 2007

  Technorati Tags: Surveillance Society, CCTV Cameras, Big Brother