PigBlog

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…

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…

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.

For some years now, I’ve been a great fan of Lenovo PCs, especially laptops: the build quality is good, and the price not obscene. However, there’s one aspect I’ve discovered today that makes me less happy, though it would seem that HP and others are not above the same tickery.

Laptops are less stndard than a desktop PC, but always the great advantage of the PC platform over a Mac has been the openish nature of it: hardware is semi-standardised, drivers are available. This is also often the downfall: the fact that you can shove in any bit of hardware means you then run the gauntlet of dodgy drivers, but that is your choice.

So, then, when my other half’s Lenovo laptop stopped connecting to wireless and then bluescreened, after testing the obvious first thing, I suspected the wireless adaptor. It’s a Mini-PCIe card, so an easy swap, and a quick look on ebay found that a card with the same Broadcom chipset was very cheap.

It takes a while to arrive, from Hong Kong though

Once installed, dissapointment awaits:


Unauthorised network card is plugged in. Power off and remove the Mini-PCI card.


Get this: the BIOS looks at the ID of the card, and unless it’s one of the ones deemed acceptable for that model, the computer won’t boot. Even though the card is compatible in every other way (and, in this case, identical except for the ID), only a limited range of Lenovo-branded cards will work- sometimes not even ones from another Lenovo model. This really isn’t on: it’s deliberatley closing something just because you can: this behaviour would be expected from Apple: it’s one of the ways they keep stability, by using a limited range of approved, tested hardware- but it just goes to show that big, evil tech firms always are and always will be that way.

Off to Ebay again for a secondhand genuine part then… I did consider flashing the BIOS with a modified one, but there’s a risk of bricking the laptop, and the download links for this model seem to have gone.

Geek content follows, but I’ll try to lay off the tech a bit, as I’m hoping to reach out to people who would usually say “WTF?” to one of the tech twatter debates.

I’m a follower of opensource.com, and I’ve been a Linux user for years now, so this article caught my eye: it’s in respose to this rather wonderful Oatmeal comic:

How to fix any computer

Which is a joke, full of exaggerations for comedy. It plays on stereotypes of computers. Windows is unreliable, needs constant reboots, and regular reinstalls. Macs are expensive and closed, non-tweakable, Linux is hard.

There’s truth there, of course, but I feel that the author missed the point a bit- the exaggeration is there for effect, and claiming that there’s no truth there isn’t helping. Also, as the author is a sysadmin, he’s likely to be more comfortable fiddling than an average user.
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We’ve recently been away, so the Internet connection here was turned off. I use no-ip.com dynamic DNS to run a few services here and access from the internet, but since I started using the Cisco router I hadn’t got the dynamic DNS updates right that should update no-ip when the connection comes up (as Virgin Media won’t give me a fixed IP), so today I finally got sick of having to manually update with a PC and fixed it. It turned out to be a bit of missing config for FastEthernet4, and a simple typo in the URL, found by using

debug ip ddns update

and

show logs

to display what was happening. The debug can be turned off with

no debug ip ddns update


While I was there I set up NTP client and server, since the router was convinced it was May 2002.

It’s been a while since I did some proper geekery….

Tonight’s Midlands Today program had a familiar topic: businesses out in the sticks whinging about broadband speeds, and then various political types and business types saying what a bad show it is.

It *is* a bad show, or at least, it would be if I lived in the sticks, but it’s not entirely the the full picture.

Along with the fibre optic hype (of the type Virgin Media and BT both trot out now), and hopes of a brave new world enabled by faster data connections, it’s smoke and mirrors. Trust me, you can already get faster connections out in the wilds: you just need the cash, and to talk to a good, commercial ISP rather than a domestic-grade one- the problem here is that many people think broadband=ADSL, which isn’t true. Our friends at BT (other telecoms providers are available!) will happily provide you a fat pipe [snigger] to all sorts of places. It may cost you the earth, but to say it can’t be done is untrue- indeed in the very area mentioned, this project are doing just that by the looks of things, and then sharing it out wirelessly in the local area to multiple subscribers to cover the costs.

There’s other variations on a theme: You could bond together multiple DSL lines at a location sufficiently clsoe to the exchange and then make further hops wirelessly, or do what one rural group did and come to an arrangement with local farmers, dig trenches, and lay fibre.

Warning: tech content (and Windows tech content at that) follows.

I don’t blog about work much, and only then, in general, tech terms- this is one of those: mainly for discussion with a few people I know who read here and may offer an explanation.

I’ll start by saying it’s fixed. Rebuilding a Windows Domain Controller is not hard, if other DCs exist. That, in itself, is a lesson why you never, ever, only have one DC in a Windows domain.
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If anyone’s interested in a snippet of Internet history, olduse.net is worth a look: it’s usenet updated in real-time, from 30 years ago, so well before Eternal September, when the Internet was populated by only geeks.

Come on, tell me that phrases like:

At such time as we acquire 1200-baud dialout capability

don’t get your heart racing? No? Just me then.

For the non-network geeks reading, 1200-baud is in this sense used as 1200 bits per second- not strictly correct, but good enough for this purpose. A typical broadband connection today will run between 8 million and 5 million bits/sec…..

You can play with olduse.net at the web interface, or if you have a newsreader, point it at nntp.olduse.net. If you have a default newsreader, this link might do it for you.

Usenet is the oldest proper discussion system on the Internet- it’s use is declining as Twatter, Facebook and web forums become the current mediums, but Usenet is the original Internet social network- some of those currently evangalising could do to take note.

We hear a lot about open data these days. Organisations embrace it differently- Southampton University have a huge amount available in machine-readable formats, others think that posting a PDF is the way to go, despite the fact that it isn’t.

Anyway, you have to be careful what data is released: data protection laws mean that you shouldn’t release personal data.

Walsall MBC have fallen foul of this: if it’s not actually illegal (though this suggests it is), it’s not good to reveal the email addresses of everyone that signed a e-petition to all the other people that did. It’s a social engineer’s dream: a list of people with a common interest. I’m in there, but just guessing my email address is easy, but I now know several people’s email addresses I didn’t before and couldn’t have guessed.

Interestingly, I only noticed because the mail got trapped by Spamassassin, and I thought it was odd that anything from Walsall MBC would hit the filter- this made me look at it in detail.

Because the mail was badly formatted, it got scored like this:


pts rule name description
---- ---------------------- -------------------------
1.8 BAD_ENC_HEADER Message has bad MIME encoding in the header
0.2 SUBJECT_FUZZY_TION Attempt to obfuscate words in Subject:
0.6 SPF_SOFTFAIL SPF: sender does not match SPF record (softfail)
1.6 DEAR_SOMETHING BODY: Contains 'Dear (something)'
-0.2 BAYES_40 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 20 to 40%
[score: 0.2723]
0.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
1.4 MIME_QP_LONG_LINE RAW: Quoted-printable line longer than 76 chars
0.1 RDNS_NONE Delivered to trusted network by a host with no rDNS


Bad form, Walsall MBC. As for all of you people that signed the library petiton, watch out for phishing attempts.

[edit 22:34]
Just to clarify: In my opinion, this is a training or systems issue- the individual that sent the mail should have been shown/trained how to do this, or the system should do it correctly with no intervention. A proper mass-mailer would do so.