PigBlog

They’re at it again then.

The politicians, despite being met with indifference over the wholesale filtering of domestic Internet connections, our right honourable overlords now wish to promote “good, clean, wi-fi” in public spaces.

Whatever the fuck that means. No porn, maybe? The conspiracy theory types will say this is just the thin end of the wedge for censorship. We could have all sorts of content considered ‘unclean’.

I’ve already discussed that providing wi-fi for public access can be hard, and this is a further obstacle. It’s unclear what the term “wi-fi provider” defines- it could be anything from the biggies like BT Openzone down to my local friendly garage or pub who have chucked a Netgear domestic router in for customers to use.

I’ve already said how hard it is to do filtering properly, and you don’t have to take my word for it.

It’s a bit easier to do on a larger scale, with some enterprise-grade hardware and a subscription, but this costs thousands of pounds a year, and still isn’t 100% accurate.

The domestic routers a lot of small potential wi-fi providers use are the same sort of stuff we all use at home. Here’s my router’s filtering setup page:

A typical domestic router’s filtering setup: dependent on manual entries. Click to embiggen.

It’s reliant on maintaining a list of dodgy sites and entering them. Other routers can block based on DNS hostnames, but this, once again, relies on manually keyed blacklists. This is not going to encourage the provision of free wif-fi if people have to stump up time and money, or face legal problems if they don’t.

Here’s a wild idea: if you’re a parent, talk to your kids about the content available on the Internet (the chances being, if they’re teenagers, they can probably teach you a thing or two). Don’t devolve parenting to tech, and if you really have to, do it on the device, where you have control.

This is a bit painful: I’d usually steer a million miles from linking the Daily Fail, bu there’s local content.

If you drive along the Rugeley bypass (the A51/A513 multiplex), as I did last Sunday from the Stafford/Milford direction, you can’t really miss two things: Rugeley Power Station, and the huge Amazon “fulfilment centre” (i.e. a big shed).

This article I’m reluctantly linking is written in fairly typical Fail style:

Between a sooty power station and a brown canal on the edge of a small Midlands town, there is a long blue building that looks like a smear of summer sky on the damp industrial landscape.

*[retch]* Where do they get these journos from?

but still has a bit of interest, and makes an interesting read just to hear about some of the organisation. The way the staff are employed leaves something to be desired though: it being the all-too-common scene these days of temporary contracts and hire-and-fire.

This is letting light in on the magic a bit of course: to me it still is magic that I can sit at home (or at work, or, well, within reason anywhere), and order stuff, and a few days later the magic pixies deliver it to me. Of course, the pixies are HGVs or Transits, ships, containers, railways and all the other infrastructure we barely think about (like this huge warehouse in Rugeley), and all the people, too- people on minimum wage, on short term contracts, and at risk of losing their job for going off sick, if the story is to be believed.

There’s a couple of further, better written articles I’ve found on this, but they’re US-based: The Price of Amazon’s Free Shipping, and I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.

This is all a good indicator of the way things are these days of course. Lots of hidden layers we don’t see, outsourcing, but (on a more positive note) some great use of tech. Tech that’s useful, rather than flashy. I’m still loving the idea that, in effect, stock gets dumped anywhere that it will fit, rather than a designated place, and just gets scanned as being there.

Amazon, like any big, successful business, has some practices you’d rather they didn’t have, but by god, the system works…

I’d like to think so, but as I’ve discussed on Twatter, I think not.

The proposals to filter Internet access at the ISP network level have failed, apparently because the public at large weren’t interested enough (PDF, 499kB).

Instead, they want ISPs to offer and encourage filtering software, like that offered by everyone’s favourite pikey ISP TalkTalk (whose filtering software was notoriously ineffective when PC Pro magazine tested it).

There’s something funny going on here. I’d love to think that someone has taken notice of the reasons why the idea was ill-conceived and just plain wouldn’t work, but I doubt that’s the case.

Maybe a few MPs have decided they’d rather not have to opt-in in order to find online filth? Dunno, but you can bet it’s not because of common sense, judging by previous performance.

Less than 24 hours have elapsed since yesterday’s rant about the 4G hype and already there’s some bullshit piece in tonight’s Express and Star showing the cutting-edge, well researched, informative and technically accurate that publication has an unenviable reputation for, saying that the lack of 4G will cost the UK economy £120 million, according to “a study” (and then it fails to mention who commissioned the study [edit- reading the article again, Ebay commisiioned it], or any data whatsoever). It then quotes Ebay as saying that “slow connection speeds, payments timing out, and network reliability” were barriers that would be “effectively eliminated by 4G”

From the Express and Star, 31-10-2012. Unmitigated bollocks.
Click to embiggen.

This is starting to look like a Daily Mash Story with bold assertions, quotes from imaginary experts, and meaningless, unqualified stats.

I’m now drowning in bullshit. As my dear friend Andy points out there’s so much marketing crap here, and as a tech who is asked to provide solutions to people who read this shit, it’s wearing very thin.

Does the lack of mobile internet really cost sales? Maybe a few. A smartphone is a crappy way to browse Amazon or Ebay, with small screens and no proper keyboard. I’m sure a smartphone app will improve this, as would using a tablet, which may well have mobile data capability, but £120 million? really? Will people not just wait until they’re at home/work/Starbucks?

If 3G was actually available everywhere, it would do just fine for present-day Internet shopping, being about as fast as many people’s fixed-line ADSL. Of course given time, bandwidth requirements will rise: the Internet of the 90s coped on 33.6-56Kbit/sec, whereas now even 10 times that seems sluggish, so we will need 4G one day, and yes, installation should start now, but it’s not a requirement right now, and a good job too, because it will take a good while.

4G will not magically fix poor coverage, and will, trust me, cost a lot of money to implement.

I do find the tech industry very frustrating: the false promises, the use of tech terms as (inaccurate) buzzwords, the assumption that a “new” technology will magically make everything rosy. The shiny adverts, and the shiny-suited salesmen that perpetuate the myths. It must be very confusing for those of us that don’t have a deeply cynical view…

This morning’s BBC breakfast was full of hype for the launch of 4G data. In theory this sounds great: mobile data has changed our world, from smartphones and tablets to remote telemetry, data logging, and security applications without the need for cabling. We can, at least in theory, stream movies or music, read our email, telework, and tweet a load of shite from anywhere. The networks are now crowing about their superfast performance, their fibre backbones, and anything else they can spin into saying how great they are.

One problem: this is all still radio. Radio needs masts, and residents hate masts, even before the electrosensitivity loonies get going. Without masts, and even with them sometimes, depending on environment, coverage suffers. Plus of course, masts, and the backhaul all cost cash too.

This means that, practically, in some areas, the current 3G/2G connectivity is non-existent or so slow to be practically useless: down the road in WS9 9LR coverage is so poor for Vodafone that voice calls and SMS messages barely work, and data is unusable. Walsall Wood may not be a huge metropolis, but it’s not a rural backwater either, and the same applies to suburban Pelsall and Rushall, where you can find similar holes.

I was complaining about this seven years ago, when 3G data was a niche product.

If you go into the centre of Birmingham, you can easily see 3Mbit/sec: faster than some home broadband, and fast enough to run an entire office from (trust me, I have done it), but outside the city, coverage can have some huge holes: this is why, for example, NXWM’s trial of wi-fi on buses didn’t catch on: the only way to backhaul the data from the bus is over 3G, and by the time you have a busful of people, and the router keeps dropping out, it becomes painful- the same applies to the West Coast Main Line, and that has a fixed route.

In summary: Phone networks: stop bullshitting us. Cut the shiny marketing, bullshit about fibre optics and other tech terms littering the adverts: just make the existing 3G service work before you try to flog us the replacement. Let me be able to tweet bollocks from the pub, or fire up my VPN from a house in Pelsall that doesn’t have broadband.

NB: I’m only picking on Vodafone here because I have more experience of them, and because they’re ‘Best Network’ of the year as voted by Mobile Choice Consumer Awards. They all have the same problems, in different places.

Something struck me the other day: I’ve become almost obbsessive about communicating online, in one form or another: I buy online almost whenever I can, because I detest brick-and-mortar shops.

I bank online, manage my household energy accounts online, talk to people online. At work, I prefer communication by email, and the thought of someone phoning up “for a chat” fills me with dread, to be honest. Phone converstations, even with my better half, are short, and convey information mostly.

I suppose this is to be expected in one way: the nature of my work often lends itself to email, and email is a great medium to queue things: stuff can be dealt with at a good moment, rather than interrupting thoughts. It’s a great medium for facts too. Of course, it has it’s problems, and I’m probably painfully more aware of them than many people.

Hpowever I do find the countless ‘death of email‘ articles frustrating, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.

I find companies that don’t enable online communication very frustrating: I don’t want to talk to your representative (or anyone, for that matter): I don’t want you to try to sell me crap I don’t want, I don’t want to be called sir, and thanked every 5 minute for my call by someone in a remote call centre who doesn’t actually care. Most of all, I want to do stuff when I think of it, quickly and efficiently, be that whatever time or day of the week. If I want a chat, I’ll meet a friend in a pub, thanks.

This week has seen one organisation that are reluctant to handle email (an NHS department), but do so with a tone that suggests this is a bit too hard, and one that simply doesn’t respond (an insurance company), so now I’ll have to spend a lunchtime talking to people I don’t want to, in an open-plan office…

I realise I’m sounding like the stereotypical uncommunicative geek here, but people that know me in real life will (hopefully) confirm that I do like to talk, preferably in a pub. I do seem pretty phone-averse though: am I odd in this respect?

I’d be interested to hear any other thoughts on this, though I realise my data will be skewed here: people reading this are more likely to favour electronic communications.

Anyway: back to the death of email. This is widely predicted by a certain class of social media consultant (specifically, the ones that are full of shit: you may wish to peruse this article, as it prompted this post). Email is still the business ‘killer app’, the basic form of ID on the Internet, and the best way to get a wide range of information to a small number of recipients. For a good analogy, think of the ‘paperless office’ widely predicted not so long ago. It’s bullshit. Social media has it’s place, but it’s intrusive, disjointed, immature (technology wise), and in the control of US corporations to one degree or another.

My prediction: email will last another 30 years, at minimum, in a recognisable form: It’s existed in a recogniseable form already since around 1965. So will the written word, the printed word, and the telephone (despite the fact that landline use is declining, and teenagers seem to communicate entirely by SMS). Fax will probably die sooner, but it still has legal significance that email does not. Thoughts anyone?

I’ve encountered two occurences locally of an oddity of late with Virgin Media cable Internet services: this may be related to speed upgrades?. In each case, internet routers have stopped connecting. Swapping the PC directly to the cable modem works OK, putting the router back fails. Before anyone junks their router, try changing the MAC address of the router via it’s web interface- most have the facility to clone the MAC of the PC. Then reboot everything, but allow the cable modem to fully start before powering up the router.

It seems that VM are handing out duff DHCP addresses (I saw a combination of 92.x.x.x with a mask of 255.255.255.x and a gateway of 77.x.x.x, and of course, once an address has been issued, it will tend to be re-issued to a device (the router) until the lease expires- which could take several days of power-off. Spoofing a different address forces a new lease, which seems to work. I don’t know what has happened, but something is wrong, and it isn’t your router…

I’ve touched on this before, and it seems worth a revisit: in a week where The Pirate Bay has been blocked by Virgin Media, and discussion of an opt-in for Internet porn has resurfaced, and people who don’t understand have made themselves look uncharacteristically foolish (via The Register), it seems worthwhile to explore a few things.

This is going to be a mix of my opinions, and technical facts. The tech I know about: I’m sysadmin for a medium-sized business: I know how web filters, DNS, and routing works. I know about tunnelling, VPNs, and proxies, but I rpomise not too go too deep into the tech.

To set out my opinions: the Internet should not be censored by ISPs or the goverment for two reasons: first of all, it’s wrong. It might be porn or copyrighted material today, but it could be your political beliefs or anything else deemed unnacceptable tomorrow.

Secondly, it doesn’t work. Technically, it doesn’t work, because techies will find a way round it by use of a VPN, SSH tunnel, or anonymous proxy. Once the techies do it, they’ll distribute knowledge or tools on how to.

It also doesn’t work on another level. How do you define porn, for example? As The Register points out, is this site porn, or is it OK because it’s educational and produced by Channel 4? If we’re talking about electronic distribution, is this little lot OK, because there’s no pictures?

What level of nudity and/or sexual activity is OK?

Children have always had access to porn: stashes of magazines, their dad’s videos, etc. People need to get a grip and do some parenting, instead of devolving things to their ISP or the government.

Moving away from porn, The Pirate Bay, it should be noted, didn’t actually host any copyrighted material, just links to filesharing of that material, which also makes it a dodgy target.

I guess what really annoys me is this: this is blaming a transport medium. I have one expectation of my ISP: I don’t want “value added content” or crappy customised search pages. I want them to route packets of data, correctly, and unfiltered, without having to opt-in. Let us not forget that in the 1950s ‘saucy postcards’ were banned (and their creator found guilty under the Obscene Publications Act…, so can we really trust a government to be our moral guardian, or perhaps we should start burning books now.

Will someone please think of the children?

A technical oddity from a colleagues Android phone today led me to do a bit of googling, and discover a interesting bit of tech: Skyhook.

The oddity was that the colleague’s phone kept thinking we were in Glasgow, before realising we were actually in Birmingham. The interesting thing being that we had been in Glasgow about a year ago, but my colleague had replaced his phone in the intervening time. What was going on? It had us both stumped for a while.

The answer was this:we were using a number of Cisco wireless access points that were last used there, and then packed in a box.

Skyhook uses a combination of Wardriving and automatic submission by wi-fi and GPS equipped devices to keep a database of the BSSID (or hardware) address of wi-fi access points and their location. Android and Apple smartphones then use this data to do automatic location in addition to, or instead of GPS (which doesn’t work if the signal is blocked by, for example, several concrete floors) and cellphone tower triangulation, so Skyhook evidently had records of our APs being used in Glasgow (probably auto-submitted by the older phone), and my colleague’s current phone was using this data, and then later correcting via cellphone triangulation.

The BSSID is (or should be) unique to each AP, so unless someone does exactly what we did, it’s reasonably reliable for locating things. One thing is for sure, there’s a lot of location data held by Skyhook.

I twattered this, but I’m looking for some discussion here after all the discussion over at Come The Revolution and some conversations: 16 bit, 44.1KHz audio (CD Audio, basically) is all you need, so me lamenting the failure of SACD and DVD-Audio really doesn’t matter a hoot. We’ll leave the analogue/vinyl (warmth) argument for another time.

24/192 Music Downloads…and why they make no sense

presents the argument well, and scientifically, and I found the authors comments on MP3 codecs and on Loudness Wars fascinating. 24/192 is being touted as audiophile quality downloadable music.

One must remember that the audio world is prone to bollocks: £500 cat 5 leads audiophile mains cables and sockets, but also that some people can’t hear quite significant audio problems: it’s subjective- I know people that would not consider the difference between a £30 mini system and £600 of seperates significant.

Interestingly, I claimed that FLAC wasn’t practical in the comments on Come the Revolution, and have proved myself wrong: A Sandisk Sansa MP3 player will happily handle FLAC, and a big Micro-SD card copes with the filesizes. For the record, with good headphones, it’s indistinguishable from CD to me, so that Minidisc player may get retired, finally.