When Clive Walker pointed out the 12412 Project on twitter I signed up , well okay I committed to taking part . The prospect of committing myself to learning 1 new skill set every month in 2012 as a process to focus on pushing myself beyond some of my existing skill sets appealed because it was non invasive to my time and improved my exposure to new toolsets.

In January I committed to learning about Git and GitHub and after 4 weeks I can now confirm that I have left my old roots of CVS behind and have moved one of my core client projects into a private Github repository.

What I learnt about Github was less about Github but more about my approach to learning a new subject or toolset. In simple terms these broke down to

In 4 weeks my grasp of Github and git for my development toolset is sufficient for me to move forward. Whats for February ? Well you will just have to add me to your feed reader.

Thanks for reading.

It was @DataInadequate who sent me my first few “Field Notes†in response to my usage of Moleskine Journals for blogging. At the time I decided against using them for the blog as I felt it would break the continuity of the books.

However I continued to carry the Field Notes notebooks  with me and they soon transplanted my moleskine journal as a means for occasional note and thought scribbling.

I am grateful that John introduced me Field Notes as until then I was carrying two moleskines around and the bulk of two books was too(hah) much. These slimmer memo books are a similar size if not depth to the Moleskine Journals and the paper and build quality of the notebooks is hard wearing and resilient to my in out, drop , place, cover, spill and walking lifestyle.

I start each new book with a thought on the front cover and when complete I review them for pertinent data that might need to be carried forward , in which case it is stored in @evernote and then the books are archived. I am not going back; I will continue to use my Moleskine for the purpose of writing the blog but I urge you to take a chance on Field Notes as an alternative. Somehow your thoughts feel like they are working if they are written between those brown covers.

 

Thanks for reading.

I cant remember when I thought that I was going to commit to writing and posting a new entry every day but it happened. As the project got older and the rhythm of words and pen strokes became addictive I realised that no matter how I felt the words inside wanted to escape and they wanted to find a type of permanence that a life in digital feels ill prepared to equip them for.

So it was that I gathered up my Moleskine and I set a new thought onto the pages every day this year and a few more in the year before. Now there are more than 365 posts and from the first to the current me expectations of what it means to use technology to communicate are rewritten in ink and communicated on a level that currently only  a human will be able to interpret. In the meanwhile I make robots and spiders blind and leave it to another human to find value and meaning in each post.

I like to think that the entries in Loudmouthman.posterous.com are leaving a trail of ideas and inspiration but I fear the lack of dancing kittens might be stalling the acceptance.

Thank you for reading them

A few months back I was asked by @DaHowlett if I could specify and build a machine on which he could  render and encode video. He was aware that I had some experience in building render and animation machines for another animation studio ( Slicedbread Animation ) and their experiences matched with Dennis’ previous exposure to my approach to providing answers to technical problems ensured that he was determined that I would be the one building him the answer to his encoding question. There was  only one catch though; could I deliver it to spain ?

This blog post is to describe a little of what goes into my thinking about building out a machine suitable for render work and with I constantly choose to work with Ebuyer when it comes to selecting components and parts. 

Lets first talk about Ebuyer website design. It enables the process or selecting components and building a specification in a way that I have not found rivalled by other ecommerce sites ( in the UK ) for an example watch the video below where I explain how to buy a sub £400 laptop and you can see how Ebuyer makes that job simple.

 

You can see with Ebuyer I can quickly build out components dependent on my expectations in cost and rating. I chose a i7 chipset over Xeon Quads as despite the chipset similarities the i7 and the architecture are establishing themselves as crowd pleasers in the Encode and render stakes and for their price and support a better investment. Other than that the remaining components were down to support from the motherboard and support from the drive manufacturers. Everything else being Windows7 would be down to DirectX support. I could have spent several days twisting the refinement on the specs but the juice squeezed out is rarely more than a few more percentage points. You can see my specification by clicking below.

in hindsight we were extremely lucky to be purchasing hard drives at that time of the year given the later flooding and devastation that was wrought upon Thailand which saw hard drive prices soar; thankfully they are sliding back down again. Meanwhile the addition of the SSD drive added a performance boost to the windows installation and raiding the remaining 3.5†drives ensured that the read/write times for big files would be above expectation.

 

 

the final part of the problem lay in shipping the box from Horsham in Sussex to somewhere in Spain and ensuring that it arrived in one piece; for which Chordline were able to step up and sort out the questions of delivery, customs and receipt.

You can watch the unboxing of the Monster below or read more about “The Monster Has Arrivedâ€

 

Thanks for reading.

This is the story about an Xbox Game : Your Shape: Fitness Evolved – Kinect and how I used it to change my shape , loose weight and regain some energy and a little self respect.

I have been promising to write this post for some months now. I have lost a lot of weight and slimmed down from busting out of 38†waist trousers to happily fitting 36†providing I wear a belt. I proved it was  possible to use the Your Shape: Fitness Evolved – Kinect to improve energy levels and to loose some weight.

 

It is worth bearing in mind that I am not a doctor nor am I some nutrional or fitness enthusiast who recommends sniffing 30 goji berries a day whilst running a half marathon. I am a married man with two young kids ,a full time job working for my clients  and I am a parish councillor. Let us be clear that I do not exactly overflow with an abundance of spare time ( or cash )

 

It started in May 2011 with a glimpse at my toes , or rather trying to glimpse my toe , and the realisation that I had to lift my foot forward to see past my belly. Hell I couldn’t even see my dick to pee when trying to use the toilet, things were not in good shape I was actually unimpressed with myself.

I had bought  Your Shape: Fitness Evolved – Kinect   in the year before and had not gotten ‘focussed’ to use it with any anger. I cant tell you when or how this began but I can see from my profile on yourshapecenter.com that  somewhere around May I kicked off and by August I was focused on a daily routine.

 

This is not a review of the Game since you can find those across the net anywhere.  This is a post on what I did and how I progressed and what I did next.

In May I began light with a focus on doing not more than 30 minutes a day of a routine; no more than 100 calories of exercise for the first few weeks. I was out of shape and frankly the Personal Training ‘Light and Easy’ knackered me out. I selected the Zen routine ( Stream ) and would follow that then switch to the Personal Training choosing a cardio nice and easy routine. Each routine runs for 12 sessions daily and if you do more than one a day it doesnt count them. I would follow with the Punching Game then cool down with the Zen routine followed by the Stack Em Up game.  What I learnt was that it was “okay†to not hit the target repitions or to feel a little knackered and tired but not to be demoralised from this.

to recap :

 

By June I was feeling more energised and that 100 Calories was a good warm up. I was switching up to Zen River :Complete for a full warm up then the next level up on the Personal Training ( I cant remember which one though ) and I would add some games ( Hoops and Punching ) then a little Cardio Bronze level and cool down with the Zen moves.  I was doing 30 minutes in the morning and again in the evening. I had signed up to the Yourshape center to track my achievements and this seemed to motivate me to keep hitting the new goals in the list.  I had measured myself on the Wii Fit and was only a little annoyed to see that as far as it was concerned I was 13st 6lbs and still obese. I continued to focus on the routines.

to recap

 

In July I noticed the first change up in myself, pants were getting baggier and the shadows on my face had changed I was also finding that I was wanting to push to 300 calories per day of exercise my routine now consisted of Bronze Cardio complete to warm up then a personal training session then a silver or gold cardio session to keep adding on the calorie burn then a long session on the Zen Ocean or River to cool down with. I was now focussed on an hour in the morning and was setting my clock to wake me up at 6am so that I could get enough time ahead of the family. On the weekends I would add some session selections to keep the burn near 300 cals if I could. I also followed the Bollywood sessions even if they seemed to comically speedup when attempting to do them in double time; but for the completionist in me I got them done.  By July I was into 36†jeans and I was doing an hour of cardio and endurance routines each day and I had kicked the drink habit as well.

to recap

 

In August I had begun downloading the additional Downloadable Content to extend the Cardio and Fitness routines focussing on at least 300 Calories in the day. By now I had added ‘RunKeeper’ to my iphone and was tracking any bike rides I was doing into town and back. I had also just ordered UFC Trainer ( and I will write up my thoughts on that another time ) the range of routines were pretty used up but I still had a number of Personal Training sessions for arm building and cardio to complete so they became the focus and I was trying to squeeze in at least 2hours a day into my routines, mostly an hour in the morning and another hour in the evening. I measured myself on the Wii-Fit and discovered I had dropped a Stone in the intervening weeks, that was a boost to my morale.

to recap

 

In September I had moved to using UFC Trainer alongside Fitness Evolved, but thats another blog post.

 

I have gone from 14st 6lbs in June to a little over 13st by the end of August and I had recovered my energy, my wardrobe oh and I can now see what I am doing when I stand to pee!

In the course of these activities I have occasionally tweeted and shared my experience and achievements ( though Raptr does a good job of helping here ) and have had encouragement as feedback  and a few questions along the way which hopefully I have helped to answer in this post.

 

What other things did I do to help with the weight loss ?

I stopped drinking beers and wine most nights and I had cut them  almost completely through July and August. I cut back my portions on meals  by a handful less on the plate, nothing scientific  , just a little less on my plate or in my bowl than I usually serve myself. I drank water in the morning before, during and after exercising and I took the stairs and walked  up escalators or  ran up  the stairs whenever I could.

I have a new goal for December and a new target to achieve,  if you are watching me tweet then you may see me head towards it that Goal.

If your thinking  you want to join in and kick some waistline and energy then please feel free to use the affiliate link from Amazon and earn me a few more pennies if you care to.

[ http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank

 

Thanks for reading.

The trouble with the internet is “there is always someone wrong on itâ€. This weekend proved no exception as an article posted ( I wont even give it the credibility of a link to it ) by a ICT Teacher who I think might have been trying to make a comment about the new Raspberry Pi and resolved his argument by suggesting that adding programming to the curriculum would be a bad idea; he was wrong.

 

I do hear the argument and it is repeated often and by people who themselves as kids were not really programmers or interested in programming.

The usual excuses go something like the following

 

As a child in school I was lucky enough to be of the era that the BBC was focussed on its computer literacy programme. BBC Micros were flourishing in every classroom and we had the chance to learn about programming. Luckily especially for me because I demonstrated an aptitude for working with computers and programming languages; there was finally something at school at which I excelled.

I was not brilliant at maths I was average in English and poor in science. I hated sports and I could not play a musical instrument but I could sit in front of a computer and write a program. Incidentally at the time of leaving school it was believed then ( and still is today in some less educated establishments ) that you needed an A Level in Maths and Science in order to get onto a University course for computing or even to find a job in programming.  I was not the only one at that time and I suspect that we have missed the opportunities many times over since then for us to find new programmers and open them up to their skillsets.

 

This topic makes me angry if only because when we discuss how to implement it; various ‘shortcuts’ are suggested such as ‘pseudo code’ or ‘framework codes’ to teach kids the idea of programming. More often than not these do not actually teach anything practical or valuable in terms of seeing, doing and understanding they present routines to complete and then move on.

What I want to see is real world programming using languages like Java, Javscript or PHP and these courses can begin by teach the three basic elements in programming.

 

That right there thats programming calling functions ; routines or objects is another layer and debugging and optimisation are features you learn. We can teach this to kids and we can allow them to use simple texteditors  trialling their code in a browser debugging as they go. Programming has very little barrier to entry today.

 

But if we are not going to do this because of the  reasons listed above then I suggest we put an end to sports, music , arts and crafts and anything outside of Reading and Writing.

 

See I am so angry I can barely post straight on this topic.

 

Thanks for Reading.

[UPDATE] It looks like they have removed all links below ( or possibly its just from my IP ) either way I now cannot follow the conversation from Lan. To the right was a grab of the forum I had made I bet you cant locate them now!

Come On Klout is it so difficult to accept that people want OUT of KLOUT ?

  I am clearly not ‘Social Media’ enough to warrant the attention of KLOUT. It used to be that their service allowed you to hide your score on Klout and indeed to hide your profile. Now  irrespective of your personal feelings about your score it is not possible to login to Klout claim your profile then hide or disable your Klout profile. They will continue to add metrics and content and give you a score and if you dont play the game and take part then its not your fault if your Klout score is low.  It is not like I have not asked in public and on their forums but as you can see they do not want to answer the difficult questions.

So how about this KLOUT ? I find that your score is personally damaging to my profile and my business. If you cannot remove me from your scoring then I will consider legal action in regards to how you are representing me online against my will.

[Update numero deux] An Email from Klout

A long time ago we bought a bin for the kitchen like many things Sharon and I purchase for the house there was some wrangling , discussion and agreement[1] on what would be acceptable and despite the price the Simple Human Butterfly bin was ‘that bin’. For many years this bin stood us in faithful service opening , closing , filling and emptying  and we were that suburban family happy with our gadgets. Until one day the wear and the age got the better of the lids and they snapped.  For many this would be a time to buy a new bin, but for us , well, we knew what we went through and we did not want to spend another £90 what  I was looking for were spares to be available.

When I contacted  the SimpleHuman  Customer service form explaining  what had broken I was expecting a reply which would point me to their spares catalogue.  What I did not expect was an email back that said;

 

Within  5 days the package arrived containing said brushed steel lid parts, replacement hinges and a clear instruction leaflet detailing how to repair the bin. No invoice , no charge, no additional emails or web browsing just a simple human gesture that said “oh! let us fix that for youâ€

 

SimpleHuman  have earnt themselves a level of brand loyalty that PR blogs and ‘Social Media’ types only dream to write about. This blog post is my thankyou to  SimpleHuman for making an after sales experience a pleasant surprise.

 

You can follow SimpleHuman on twitter as @SimpleHumans

Thanks for reading

[1] In twenty years of being together we have learnt that compromise can breed resentment so we  buy only when we both agree, its slow but it works.

Between Terence Eden (@edent)  and I we have spotted a hole in the social network Du Jour ‘Google+’ . How can you create a circle of your friends for a topic if you dont know if they would want to join ?

For instance; I am creating a circle for BitCoin and want to invite people to join.

Terence goes a little further and wonders what circles people have created to include him  in.

Whilst I for myself would not want to know what circles I might be in ( intimate ones or the 7th of Hell ones ? ) I might be interested in making some of my Circles public.

Though I can see that being abused by online bullies wanting to make statements in the same way they did with twitter lists.

 

Your Move Google

If it had not been for Windows 7 I do not think I would ever have found the best answer to this problem.

I own an iPhone and it is synchronised and managed  via the Mac Mini on our network. The iPhoto Collection of images from the iPhone   have been difficult to access from other Machines. iPhoto does not have the best track record for providing network shares to photo libraries.

Discovering that Windows Live Mesh was available to for the Apple OS X platform meant that I had an answer to the problem of copying all the iPhone/ iPhoto images from one Mac any other Windows Live Mesh Client. Further it had the added advantage of providing multiple backups of all  photographs.

This is what I did

I set up Live mesh on the Windows and Mac clients. On the Mac I configured it to Sync the Folder from ‘Pictures iPhoto Library Masters’ and on the Windows 7 machines I created a new Folder above ‘My Pictures’ called ‘iPhoto’. I then selected that folder as the destination for the sync feed at each client.

I chose a folder above the ‘My Pictures’ folder because I had  configured a ‘My Pictures’ Sync Feed between all my Windows 7 Clients. I added the iPhoto folder to the Libraries for Photos in explorer and I was done.

Now all the Windows Machines get a copy of my iPhoto library . The Sync is  one way as iPhoto does not care about Windows Live Photogallery changes. 

 

Windows Live Mesh does not appear to have any limits to the size of the duplications so there is no Dropbox style limits

Oh and one more thing; Sharon has her own Windows Live Essentials Account I shared the iPhoto masters library with her account  in addition to my own, making Windows Live Mesh an efficient way to share the Photos with other user accounts that you trust something Dropbox users are familiar with.

Now with the luck of Google juice people looking for ways to duplicate and access their iPhoto collections with Windows machines will have an answer.

 

Thanks for reading.

I think I might be  tiny bit addicted to Favstar.fm . It tracks your tweets in terms of who has ReTweeted ( using Twitters Retweet button ) or Favourited your tweets. I confess there are times I sit and anxiously hope I have created that one tweet which captures the imagination and motivation of people in my timeline and causes them to ‘pass it on’. As metrics go I consider it to be the purest form of acknowledgement that what was said had influence because once a tweet is retweeted it has the potential to reach new followers in a way that no amount of tweet stream bombarding or random @replying to people can. The other reason I believe it to be a tool for the power of good in marketing is that I dont see ‘Social Media Gurus’ talking about it. So lets keep it under our hats okay ?

 

Thanks for retweeting.

Conferences can feel like sitting through a slideshow of  someone  else  holiday snaps. You nod and approve and smile and agree to all that is said and do so at  all the right moments but you generally look to your watch and wonder if something interesting will slip into the presentation.  This Conference began with Holiday snaps and then a few things dropped in that made it ‘interesting’

Dell Techcamp 2011 was part showcase, part conference , part meet Dell and their partners  and mostly it was  part of the day. From a buying perspective I could note nothing of individual merit other than the confirmation that the updated Vostro v130 would feature an improvement to the design of its battery life. 

 

I left the techcamp ( can we call it a conference ? ) with the knowledge that I had been given the opportunity to highlight one aspect of design and delivery for Dell that had  gone overlooked among the demonstration for the day.

 

The unboxing and subsequent  disposal of packaging of the Dell Experience. I speak of the abundance of twist ties and cable wraps, plastic sleeves and plastic covers. CDs and Cardboard cases.

Whilst Dell have made excellent progress in updating the materials and product for protecting the goods on route to the customer what we are left with are robust boxes, plastics and wires which must be disposed of. The materials used in their manufacturer have improved and their design to degrade and reduce volume is noticeable.  Dell offer to recycle your old PC if you put it back into the box in which the new machine arrived however many businesses will sell old machines onto employees and the boxes and packaging remain to be disposed..

From my own experiences and metrics ( based on timesheets for work I have done on site ) I can see that delivery and installation  of Dell computers has reduced in onsite time from appx 180minutes to 90 minutes per device. In examining the process I can see that at least 20minutes of my time is spent in handling and managing packaging. Not only the time to remove the equipment , remove the plastic, remove the tie wraps and then to fold, pack , collapse and dispose of the packaging are factors in hardware delivery.  It needs only three new computers and I am charging my client for an additional hour of my time to install and configure said equipment.

Hats off to Dell for listening to  my comments and taking the next to introduce me to people within  Dells whom are  responsible for packaging and the ‘out of the box’ experience

If I had a wish list of what Dell could change in their delivery it would be.

 

 

So there we go ; I went to see tech and I left with a wish list in cardboard and bamboo lets see whats next. 

Thanks for reading.

 

#dtc2011 , #delltechcamp

The current solution to the problem of malware self installing itself has been to add a level of authentication or consent to the installation process. Requiring the user to provide the administrator details or to click an agreement to change security levels to enable an installation appears to be a good level of security until you realise that users are simply going to ‘go ahead’ assuming that the software is safe.

 

I would challenge the software industry that it needs to build into its installation or upgrade process a two factor process that first requires the user to enter a passphrase that has been set by the user and stored with the software developer accessible via a unique one time string provided by the developer. In short we are adding a level of effort to the installation process that allows the developer to confirm that they are the ones delivering that update.

An example of this;

.

 

Dropbox requires me to install an upgrade; as part of that process I set the passphrase on Dropbox website fro the machine I am installing and get a short code back in response. I enter that shortcode back into the upgrade ( this is before I have entered a administrator passphrase ) and the upgrade if valid would talk with the software provider by way of this code effectively  authorising the code. Checking back on the website I could see if the passphrase was accepted and continue. Now there is a LOT of overhead in this process but the benefits of security and authenticity should outweigh the costs. This process could be extended into a process/gateway broker system which could be used by system administrators to globally manage machine upgrades and to ensure that machines can be additionally locked down whilst pre approving upgrades.

No doubt people will tell me this wont work but I challenge them to consider a better proposal.

 

Thanks for reading.

The next round of social media invites has flooded into my attention. This time it is Tag.Connect.me.

A service which says;

I got tagged today which is how I knew my details were now on their website although given the amount of betas I have signed up for I am not sure that I hadnt asked to sign up at some prior date( this is not a bad thing of itself )

I was tagged  “technologyâ€, “admin†, “systemsâ€, “digitalâ€, “politics†and “digitalâ€. What If I had disagreed with those tags ? What if I wanted to hide what people were saying about me on this site ? What if I wanted to opt out of being involved in the process ? There is nothing on their website that gives me that level of control.

Speaking of control what is top stop anyone from posting malicious or controversial tags ?

I have speculated in the past that there is a problem with #Hashtagging of articles and content. It is too easy to poison those tags with malicious content or associations. HashTag poisoning is simple to achieve and whilst it creates noise and spam for other listeners there is little to stop the trolls and bullies from using fake accounts to create profiles and in turn associate and ‘tag’ an individual in a harmful fashion. It is interesting to read Connect.me statement on Trust because I dont feel that the statement is reflected in my own profile settings or account control.

 

If Connect.Me want to make their service good, if they want to make their service useful they need to do three things immediately.

 

Many social media sites have to ‘automatically’ include a social media profile in order to provide any value these optioned in sites remove privacy for individuals by forcing them to login and ‘claim’ their profiles and I feel that this is a level of openness too far. But I could be being cranky, what do you think ?

 

Thanks for reading.

I may be coming to these a little late , if Warren Ellis was writing about them in 2009 , however thanks to  Datainadequate I  have  caught up.  There is now a ‘priority’ to the capturing of notes versus whole ideas.

The Moleskine notebooks will continue to be used for my side project ;  Paper & Pen Blog and the  Field Notes notebooks are  the goto for spot, jot and scribbling of ideas and thoughts. 

Like Warren I headed to The Paperie  and ordered my 3Pack of plain notebooks and these tidy brown books now accompany my daily wanderings and meetings. Thanks John and thanks Field Notes.

Thanks for reading.

I was fortunate to be invited to attend the recent West Sussex Better Connected : Rural Broadband Summit 2011 which was held in the council chambers at Chichester on May 20th.

It was arranged by Nick Herbert MP and by the members and staff of West Sussex County Council. It featured a number of delegates , listed below , and was attended by many parish councillors and interested parties; you can view a full list on this handout available from Nick Herberts website. 

 

The Session was recorded on West Sussex Public i.tv however I cannot embed this video from their site so for the moment you will have to click on this link : West Sussex Better Connected 20 May 2011 Video to open a new window.

 

Throughout the summit is was clear that the term ‘super fast’ broadband speed was defined by a speed of at least 24Mbps (mega bits per second ) and whilst there was a  Govt target set by DCMS as 2Mbps this was to be considered the minimum acceptable speed for connectivity. I should emphasise that no point in the conversations was anything less than  10Mbps considered as reasonable. I think we need to end the 2Mbps propaganda and focus on what is available to communities if they want it.

 

Of the talks given I was left with the impression that Jeremy Leggett of Action In Rural Sussex (AiRS ) fully understood the implications of slow internet access to communities further Jeremy demonstrated Community21.org a tool for parish planning and community management and a pretty good step forward in the direction of open administration . Bill Murphy , Managing Director of BT Next Generation Access gave a talk which left a few of us feeling ‘told off’ and berated for considering anything other than BT for delivering broadband to communities. Finally Jeremy Hunt MP arrived to conclude the talk and sum up the views of the Govt in its concerns over broadband speeds in the UK. 

It was made clear by  Jeremy Hunt MP  and by Robert Ling ( of Broadband Delivery UK ) that councils, parishes and communities could assemble a broadband action plan detailing how they would deliver broadband to their neighbourhood as well as how funds would be met. In turn the Govt would look to provide additional , or possibly matched , funding to those projects to aid in their completion. This is an opportunity for villages and towns to take on the delivery of their communication infrastructure and to improve it.

 

Throughout the day I had been dogged in pursuing  the question of price and cost.  I posed the question “Where can I get a price list of the necessary items required to put super fast broadband into my area ?â€. As a councillor I am familiar with the publication LCR which is ‘the voice of Local Councils’ and in which there are adverts for playgrounds, streetlighting and furniture.  I persisted that it must be possible to have a price list or a quotation  which could be taken back to our parish and town councils with the view to planning budgets. As I persisted in questioning it was obvious that this had not been addressed.

A whole day spend talking about why we need a product and at the end when asked for the costs , none was available.

I am pleased to say that at the end of the summit Louise Goldsmith ( Leader, West Sussex County Council ) and Peter R Cowen ( Partnership Director Retail BT ) approached me to suggest that the Broadband Consortium and Mike Hickes ( WSCC Broadband Programme Manager ) would endeavour pull together this price list as a starting point for conversations at council and community levels.  Dr Robert Sullivan ( Chief Executive Broadband Delivery UK ) suggested there was a Huddle group which contained some of the more salient details I was seeking , later Robert Ling ( @ling_robert )   direct messaged me via Twitter to point out  www.bigsocietybroadband.coop and www.ruralbroadband.com  as resources for that information though I cannot find that data despite crawling the website  so it remains unavailable.

Our next actions

It is clear to me that groups, communities, parish , town and county councils need to have a clear price list and minimum specifications for the delivery of broadband infrastructure. It begins with price lists and work orders and builds out to fully completed parish plans ( no doubt management agencies will spawn to provide consultancy to council and groups to help them get funding ) form there orders need to be raised and work commenced. An ordinary person approaching these sort of disjointed and multi faceted tasks might bulk at the thought. My own experience in working with the Open Source community leaves me with the mind set that these goals are entirely achievable and that management and delivery of these projects is a task best approached in small chunks and tiny bites.

Money will need to be raised, either in kickstarter projects, donations or  increases in precepts ( another word for tax ). None of this can begin unless we draw a clear line in the accounts for the amount we need to raise and how that money will be managed.

 

Thanks for reading.

Lets leave aside the issues of Sony Play Station Network failures  which are more of a Stationary Network which has taken the Pee and look to  the recent comment from Ed Vaisey which has to be one of the best attempts at chutzpah I have seen this side of the Govt taking over.

On the one hand Ed Vaisey insists that companies should be doing all they can to protect the identities and information of the users of their networks,  as you can read more in this Games Politics article. 

Which beggars belief when you consider that on the other hand and  in the same capacity Ed is responsible for overseeing an Act of parliament whose very purpose is to disclose personal information of network users on vague requests and accusations made by media companies , more on that from the Telegraph article on that topic.

 

 

So which is it to be Ed ? Privacy or Piracy ?

A new client ( lets call them client ) has come to me following the dramatic reduction in quality of service and support from their webhosting company. The client has requested that I  rescue their domains and their website.

This is an extract from the email that I sent to the client , including explanations of why and how I did some things.

 

 

How did I know to use onlinenic.com ?

If you visit a site like whois.domaintools.com and enter your domain name you will see the details of your domain. Look for the line that reads ‘Registrar:’ That  is the name of the Registrar for your domain and they should have  domain resolution and complaints section. Note that not all  domain resolutions are managed so elegantly so if you are in the UK check with nominet as they have a phone number you can contact to discuss your issue.

Why use Domain.com ?

I have been a fan of Domain.com for a while, they have been around the internet block for as long as Dreamhost.com so I use them with confidence.

There was a time when I would go everywhere on my Bike. Cycling several miles in a day around Horsham to go to and from town and to visit the Gym or get some basic shopping items in and then we moved home. The new house didnt make it easy to move the bike from its storage to the road and back and Sharon was not happy with me locking it up securely in front of the house. So the bike remained in its storage in a shed for the next 7 years. I dont know what has spurned the interest in cycling , other than the desire to not use my car for moving around Horsham and whilst it is not easy to have a Family and use a bike it is no longer insurmountable in my daily routine that a Bike would be a hindrance.

So it was in the last few weeks of April that I opened the shed and looked upon the bike. It would need some care to restore it. Chains and cables and levers and fastenings would need to be inspected. Tyres and inner tubes given some thought to and brake blocks inspected. If I had approached this a decade ago then I would no doubt have given up on the thought of getting that job done. I realised that with Google and YouTube I would have many answers to my questions if only I was prepared to read, listen, watch, consider, plan and implement.

 

There are plenty of tutorial videos and hints/tips websites available , there are whole chapters on Lifehackers own website that can give you direction and then there is the equipment you really should purchase. The BikeHut maintenance stand and tire pump being just two such must haves. Sure my Dad would insist you could just turn the bike upside down to work on it but there are always those jobs for which a inverted bike is simply more of a fiddle and problem than a bike raised to eye height and accessible from every side. A Decent pump with pressure gauge and foot plate made bloody short work of inflating and testing the tyres and the cycle chain degreaser unit was a thing of wonder. The bike cost a few hundred pound when new skimping on the tools to repair and renew that it would have been a false economy.

Three weeks later and with the bike tyres checked over and the brakes tweaked and the gears corrected and several cables replaced the bikes are on the road and there is a general feeling of satisfaction of getting a job done.

I am sure there are many jobs for which internet based learning would be inappropriate but in this one area I have to say the Internet proves how it is an incredibly powerful tool for education.

 

Thanks for riding

In the last 48 Hours Loudmouthman.com wordpress site was compromised. One of the side effects of this infection was that Live Writer stopped publishing to my blog and would return ‘blogger.getByUsers’ authentication and validation errors.

I have yet to work out what vector was used to add additional code to my site but it appears that the automated tools which injected the code are running depsite the payload no longer being available ( though that will change as the code evolves ) The additional code was injected into the top of every .php file in the root of my wordpress installation and it came to light when my own scripts emailed me to say that the files contained some key phrases that had I was looking for.

Before I discuss my method of scanning and maintenance lets have a look at the core infection; warning this code is not defanged and if your try it out then please realise I do not accept responsibility for you pulling the trigger.

 

The Infection :

FOR TESTING PURPOSES I RAN THIS SCRIPT IN THE CONSOLE OF A STAND ALONE VIRTUAL MACHINE WITH NO INTERNET ACCESS.

The Single line of new code was pasted to the top of each file.

 

To debug what is going on the first step was to copy the code into a separate file and rename the eval statement into an echo statement then run the script and pipe the output into a separate script.

 

It is clear that the script will only launch if the User Agent ( Browser ) Rendering the script is Internet Explorer, So lets edit the relevant  line and replace it with something that returns true.

 

Now we can run that script and output its results into another file

If I had been an Internet Explorer user then pages served from http://loudmouthman.com would have been making a call to GlobalPowerGathering to return a script.

I cant find the contents of the script because the site in question will not return a response. Further if you are surfing with Comodo , Google DNS or Chrome you are warned about visiting that site since it may contain malware.

 

Doing some research on Google I belive that had the script worked it would have attempted to launch a Malware page which would have created a Fake Antivirus page examples of which can be seen if you search google for “fake antivirus popup†The script targeted Windows IE users which meant the script was not being called if you visited from any other browser.

 

Having defanged my own WordPress files and reset the security flag on my site I checked with Google to see if they felt I was a problem website. Visiting Google Safebrowsing page will let you know if your site has in the last 90days been reported as a problem.

With my site cleaned up I went ahead and checked my Friends and Clients websites to check they too were not infected or reported on Google. Thankfully we came up clean.

 

Prevention

Outside of ensuring that I keep wordpress as upto date as is safe and using lockdown and admin login tools to monitor access to the websites I have a script which runs every hour and scans for keyphrases or words inside the files on my sites. If the magic pattern makes a match then I get an email and can log in via the shell and begin to repair the damage ( usually by replacing the files with a clean copy of wordpress )  You can  automate a lot of this process but nothing beats the intervention of a human for double checking against a false positive.

 

I might have chosen not to admit that I was infected , l I run a business that helps reduce this from happening and it could be perceived as a failure on my part. I feel that honesty and information are a more valuable currency and hopefully the above will help others in diagnosing their problems.

 

Thanks for reading.

Recently I noticed a drop in line speed. @SkyHD Suggested I contact the support line directly. This is the story of that experience.

 

 

 

 

I sent the first contact form today :

 

 

 

Update:  25 April 2011

Sky called me back and explained that following a line test the speed I was seeing would be the best I can expect for the line. They will raise this as a complaint and things will progress as best they can.

Genki Gear create those T-Shirts you see other people wearing and wish you could remember to put them on your own wishlist. The jokes here do not require a hidden knowledge of Games or Movie trivia , although there is a range if Rankin is your thing.  I picked up a T-shirt for Sharon at this years #Kapow comic con. Cupcakes of Doom and their horrific Buttercream fillings should be treated with caution no matter who wears the shirt.

You might remember that throughout March I blogged quite a bit about the Dell Vostro v130 as part of the Dell Trade Secrets marketing event. Participants were invited to contribute business advice which would be turned into an eBook ( available as a PDF  in this link ) .

My advice was is on page 25 in the “Advice from SMB Expertsâ€.

 

If you have the time and are genuinely interested in what there is about me , how I work and why I keep my clients then I recommend you listen to the interview that Dennis Howlett   ( @dahowlett  ) did with me back in June 2010.

Victim no 1: Why should you hire Nik Butler ?

If I am guilty of anything it is that I rarely promote what it is that I do or why I get things done. I think the best people to tell you that are my clients and my friends. Hopefully they might leave a few comments here to expand.

 

Thanks for reading.

Its that time of the upgrade cycle for a client and we have to replace the 3 year old PowerEdge 1000s with something new and under warranty.

The Dell Poweredge R210 is an ultra compact 1U Rackmountable server it is customisable on purchase and for my mind it suits a Small to Medium Sized business of upto 50 workstations for File and Network services. These purchases  two  Ubuntu and Redhat Servers which are running on virtual instances under VirtualBox ( more on that another time ) .

 

What knocked this purchase out of the park for me was the mounting kit. Seriously the mounting kit was a work of engineering genius. It was a no tools , no fiddle , no scrapped knuckles mounting rail that meant the servers were installed in the cabinet in less than 5 minutes. I could hug the designer that made those rails.

 

 

 

 

Those little pegs replace the need for the nuts, bolts, pliers and screw driver combination that traditionally welcomes the unsuspecting system admin.

 

 

 

 

 

It is not easy to make out but the side of the R210 has two pegs into which the spars from the rail mount kit slip over and lock down by way of the tension spring which clips under the peg when flush.

The external rails are clearly labelled LEFT and RIGHT and the front and rear are clearly marked. The rails fit into the mounting points on the cabinet post and a small retaining hook stops them moving back out. The spars fitted to the case of the R210 are slid onto the rails and everything slips back and cleanly ‘clicks’ into place. It feels like your cheating to use these rails but if this is cutting corners then I say look the other way. Dell you rock for this creation, thank you.

 

Thanks for reading.

The next round of papers have arrived from the council and these are to details the when and how of the count of votes for the election. You can nominate yourself or another to attend the counting of the votes and whilst it might appear to be a dreadfully dull affair the tension, celebration or commiserations are palpable in the atmosphere of the day. Needless to say I am putting my name forward to spend a day at the count.

Those papers I mentioned are here; I have about 400 of them to deliver to the local residents of my Ward. I understand we have a few volunteers to help with literature delivery to the various streets but it is still a large task and one that continually leaves me asking how do WE know the ROI on this is any better than on Web campaigns. To be honest I actually have never had anything less than an anecdotal answer but the couch marketing droid in my head wants to see figures somehow. We are still moving down the list of profiles and updates for the website so I suppose it behoves me to wrap up some of these papers items and post them online to the local party site. With luck the weather will keep up its attempts to start the early heatwave.

 

Thanks for reading.

 

Like many Geeks I enjoy the relationship between hidden knowledge and public symbols. Nothing enables us to express this better than a Tee shirt on which some obtuse reference is passed and for which those with access to that experience will interpret and gain understanding.

 Insert Coin Clothing have done this with the  Video Game Genre. I may love them a little too much though since I have  updated my Evernote “Wishlist – Notebookâ€Â  to include a few more designs for which  people might wish to buy me .

I discovered Insert Coin Clothing at the recent Kapow Comic Con and this may be a good thing for one of us but I have yet to  work out which that might be. Meanwhile I have been faking Irish accents and walking round Horsham in the above.

You can Follow the team of Insert Coin Clothing on Twitter @InsertCoinTees  tell them @Loudmouthman said to do so. Now go ahead and buy some more Tees !

 

Thanks for playing.

 

Kapow Comic Con was busy on day one and from accounts of twitter it is equally busy on day 2. I dont have enough points of reference to speak for other Comic and Fan conventions but  Islington Business Design Centre added something I have not experienced in other Cons, Natural Light!  The trade floor was tough to negotiate by the afternoon and many of the queues for seminars had a tendency to trail infront of exhibitors stands. I am sure we might like to see a Convention on the scale and duration of the San Diego Comic Con but I doubt that many places in the UK would be delighted with the concept of churning over their daily business for a week of Geeks, Nerds, Fans and LARPers. For a first run there is much to be improved but lets hope that they do come back again with a larger venue and better queue management.

There are several things you can expect to be doing if you have put your name down on Ballot paper.

Today I did none of those, I went to London met a few friends and read Comics; back to proper Election stuff Sunday okay ?

 

Well maybe not , it seems a little late to take such actions. As the old joke goes “they spelt my name wrong†and in this case West Sussex County Times were printing a list of candidates by Ward and decided that I ‘Nicholas John Butler’ would  now be reffered to as  ‘John Butler’. Okay it is not the end of the world when it comes to press exposure but I am pretty sure people looking down the list of names will not know that it is me standing for that ward , if only  because I have rarely spoken about my other name , John.

Meanwhile Anna Coe who helped in that article has accepted that a correction might be in order, I wonder if I might encourage her to accept one of those action photos ?

 

There are, I am told, leaflets to be picked up and delivered door to door. Yes even in this wonderful age of technology we still find that actual bits of paper through a door will capture the hearts , minds and attentions of many  potential voters.

I note though that one or two people on twitter have commented that much of the paperwork they receive appears focussed on  negative campaigning or explaining what  may have  been done differently. Just as it took a while for Marketing and PR to catch up with the conventions of the modern consumer so it is with Political Campaigning that there is  a lag between where people are today and how parties will expect them to react. 

I think I shall stick to making a noise and keeping up the signal.

Thanks for reading.

I dont know what an ‘Action shot’ is but I was told today that the campaign mailshots going out wont have any pictures of myself from around the Ward of Roffey North. It is moments like this when I wish I had someone like Christian Payne, @Benny Crime or @Paul_Clarke ( I note the underscore paul ) as a neighbour because if Social Media teaches you anything it is that staging photos is always hard work and that doing it on your own is impossible. Thankfully a visiting client was able to take a walk with me and the weather ( if not the sun ) was on my side. They say the best camera you have is the one that is with you ;  we used both the Sanyo Xacti and the iPhone 4 cameras to grab some images the majority of which I discounted because I looked constipated the rest, after allowing Windows Live Photo to do some work are at least acceptable. I much prefer candid and observed photos over staged and placed images however their is a need to create content and locate landmarks for association and this was achieved.  There may be more photos to come I am sure.

That bit of paper is the ‘next step’ in my involvement in Local Government.

That is my name on a list of candidates who will be representing the Ward of Roffey North in the May 5th Horsham District Council elections.

I am also standing for the Parish Council Elections in the same ward which means I might have made myself very busy for 2011.

I surprise a few people when they discover that I am interested in Council and Government.

Do not be concerned that you can clearly see the names and addresses on the paper for if you were at all interested you could see the names and addresses of any candidate by inspecting the councils own website.

 

So why am I standing ?

Because I can and because,†you have to be the change you want to see. “  As a councillor you can bring your experience and skills to the cabinet meetings. You  can help shape decisions made in those meetings. Much of what will shape Local Council and National Government in the next decade will be the Internet and the World Wide Web.

Being involved in those meetings ensures  I  bring my own experience and skill sets to the table. A small part of that skill set and experience enabled me to ensure that North Horsham Parish Council avoided spending over 1k a year on a Website hosting company  instead the Parish uses WordPress and its Free. Those are small savings but we are saved the  potential price rises in subscriptions for a service we did not need.

 

I thought  you were with another Party ?

Yes for quite a while I was with the Conservatives and I had hoped that my involvement would give me the opportunity to explain to Francis Maude my concerns over the Digital Economy Act . What I discovered was that they were not  interested in listening to their own member which made me wonder if they would be interested in listening to the views of an electorate ?  I joined the Liberal Democrats because they had listened to their own members and had taken a different  stance on that Bill .

Many people suggested I was more Liberal than Conservative but I suspect I will always be too much in either camp for either side . What I have come to understand is the core issues for Horsham are not ones that fit conveniently into a particular banner and will require people who are part of Horsham as public , as business and as councillor. 

Was it okay with you that I chose to change my party because I believe the Internet is an important facet of our society and needs people who understand what it means ?

Do you plan to make a difference ?

When you are one council member your views are sought and you may not necessarily sway the committee by a vote alone. When I addressed the issues on webhosting spend I was only one among many and I  understood the issue enough to take time to convince the chairman and the clerk that there was a better answer.

I dont intend to be elected to simply sit out a term; I am looking to take part in the debate and put forward issues that relate to the electorate.

 

How can you help ?

If you want to help me then there are a number of things you can do.

 

 

 

Thanks for reading.

In the  20  years and more  that I have been buying equipment for enterprise little has  changed in the ‘channel’ market when it comes to dealing suppliers ( be they Dell, IBM, Compaq, HP or Cisco ).

You find yourself a good account manager and attempt to establish a credit account then you begin the process of ensuring that the long term support and communication with the supplier is maintained and managed.

The goal is to get the best price/performance for hardware purchased and to ensure that presales advice has matched your expectations to your requirements and that you have negotiated suitable long term support in terms of engineers on site.

Then along comes Apple.

Apple products are turning up in enterprise and from my perspective Apple has has no clear strategy for dealing with Small and Medium Sized businesses who engage with my services to buy Apple products.

I can buy an Apple in one of their  Stores or over the Internet however there are no  mechanisms for me to arrange for the details for that purchase to be registered in the interests of the client. There are no 3 Year Pro support options that result in Apple certified engineers arriving on site, I may have to take the product to an Apple store or contact Apple and send the purchase away. There is little in the way of a asset management or warranty management toolsets to help with System Administration and auditing. In short Apple have some strategic gaps in their delivery which is getting in  the way of business.

 

Personally I have managed a great contact within Apple Sales and between us we are walking through my expectations and the requirements of my client. We are identifying the areas of weakness that will contrast with my existing delivery of Dell hardware ( predominately on Site Support and warranty management ) and we are planning how this will scale if we were to consider a larger volume of orders.

Clearly it is early days for Apple in the boardroom and for many SMEs Apples presence is growing but how this will be managed is a technique Apple is learning.

 

Thanks for reading.

I promised a few people that I would blog about my productivity habits.

I make no claims that I am the most efficient or the most reliable when it comes to email and I am second only to @sizemore when it comes to there being days that I realise it might be out of my control.

Here for your amusement is how I am managing my Inbox to Zero.

The Preparation

Labels

My Label system has four categories; Clients  , Suppliers , Websites, Groups .

The Labels might be a little obvious but allow me to break them down. For every category I will have a second name on that label so that I have a long list of Labels which look something like;

As many emails with be assigned two labels, such as suppliers – dell with clients-Incom I have a filing system which tracks Suppliers or Clients or both.

Further: I find it perfectly acceptable to have some emails arrive that are never labelled.

 

Filters

Labels can be applied to received emails automatically so that certain emails ( such as notifications or updates ) can have an appropriate Website label and then marked as read and possibly marked to skip the inbox. These are not urgent messages and can be bookmarked. Other messages can be relabelled to match messages from a supplier or client and they may or may not be marked as read. Notifications from Dell about delivery dates are marked as read but left in the inbox.  Setting things Marked As Read means that I am not nagged by the unread counter on my iPhone or other mail clients ( of which I use the browser predominately )

As a note here use the LABS import/export filter feature to make a regular backup copy of your mail rules then email that rule set to yourself for backup.

 

The Process

 

Step 1 : Star for Response

On opening the inbox for my email I look down the list of messages and mark with a STAR and a Tick in the check box the messages that will need a response or a review then I select Archive.

Step 2: Archive

The remaining emails will now be items that can either be Archived to Deleted. A quick review of the subjects and labels means I tick the checkbox on items that are to be deleted and select Archive again.

Archiving a message places the email into the All Mail ( non inbox ) list and removes it from your ‘things that need an action’ you want to keep a copy but you should not be responding to it.

 

Step 3: Deleting a messsage is OKAY !

What messages remain  can be deleted and you do not want to be in the habit of leaving them behind.  If they are from mailshots, lists or groups I may take the action  to unsubscribe or simply keep marking as spam certain messages.

Step 4: Reply and unStar a message

When I reply to a message I use the SEND & ARCHIVE lab feature to move the message from my inbox into archive ( remember it will have been auto labelled and if not then I set up the filters to do so ) .

I remove the Star on the item since I have pushed back communication from my side of the table and I do not  see the point in using a label called –awaiting reply. I remove it to archive and out of my focus in my star list.

 

What if I start a new email ?

The above rule  applies. I am not focussing on other peoples attitudes to their  emails as long as I have pushed back a response then I am happy to know my inbox is moving ever towards zero.

 

 

Results ?

 

I have been employing this method for a year now; it works for me and if it works for you then please come back and let me know.

 

Huge thanks in the creation of the fake inbox goto

 

Ian Kath, Kat Miller, Paul Swansen, Marc Kevin Hall, Nikki Pilkington, James Whatley ,Scott Gavin and Mike ( Sizemore ) Atherton.

 

Thanks for reading ( now mark as read )

Since HP aquired Palm there was no doubt some speculation as to the ongoing support and progress for Palms Mobile Development Kit; WebOS. HP have been working hard to encourage developers and consumers that the Palm device and the WebOS toolkit are thriving.

Whilst many of the presentations at a recent ‘Launch event’ fell into the category of tired and ‘been done before’ there was at least one presentation made me sit up  and tweet. [ note thanks to the wonders of Autocorrect poole should have read as people ]

 

Ben Tattersly ( aka @UbershinySheep ) is a Student , and a Teacher, who explained how he was using WebOS as a platform to teach Children programming. Thats right; kids do find learning to program not boring. Moreover certain kids want to  develop in a language that is not some bastardised TOMY My First scribble language but a real tool used by professional developers. Further  they were creating content and they could create that content with a real world value.

 

Ben Tattersley

There appears to be an  misguided belief that you cant teach children about programming. That you might as well teach them to code the Word Document Format because teaching programming would be ‘boring’. It is a pretty screwed up view of the world if you ask me. I was 12 years old and learning about machine code I was teaching myself and I was interested in programming. Why should a 12year old today be any less interested in learning about programming , coding or development of applications ?

Meanwhile I am sure more money will be poured into School funding for sports and football.

I dont have the answers but If I had one wish it would be to see HP do a 2 week course at hundreds of schools taking people like Ben into those classrooms and finding our future. Because I know this much; tomorrows future Footballing star are rarely  responsible for creating jobs and innovating in business.

 

 

Thanks for reading.

How apt that I am posting this final entry whilst on the Gatwick Express heading out of London. The Vostro has travelled a hundred miles but at the end of the day the Battery life is not up to the job. This is a terrible shame because the Laptop in every other regard is a playful and creative object that wants you to keep it open and paying attention to it. Meanwhile my Mac Air has been with me all day and even though it is after 11pm there is still the best part of two hours battery life to go.

In many ways it fits the role of a damned useful windows box and is far more suitable for the presentationally challenged or portable coder who will not mind that they need to keep their power supply nearby.

 

My advice for verson 2 of this laptop is make the battery replaceable or make the charging universal.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

This blog entry is a twofer , I had a Windows Phone 7 to play with last year and was asked to create a suitable Christmas list using my Zune software. It looks like I did terribly enough that I have been asked to create a playlist suitable for the Royal Wedding.

Given the HDMI and Audio out capabilities of the Vostro v130 along with the 500gb of disk storage the possibilities of keeping your Video and Audio collection on here are straight forward enough. Add a Zune monthly pass to that collection and you will be watching Videos or being the life and soul of the party with Zune.

The Zune software itself is a huge step up on interface and interactivity compared to Apples own product for the PC and it has rapidly usurped iTunes on my own workstation Desktop and it is the primary playback software for my Vostro v130.

So here are my suggestions for Wedding day tunes.

If that text proves to small to read the suggested play list is:

 

Thanks for reading ( and listening ) 

Whilst being mobile with the Vostro I have not taken advantage of the built in  5540/5620 EM820U HSPA which accepts a SIMM for the purpose of Data access via 3G.

Traditionally most business laptop users have resorted to 3G Dongles and whilst the tiny SIMM slot at the front of the laptop replaces the need for the ungainly USB component,  I am unsure t the battery life will survive yet more drain on its already shallow resources.

My advice is to pick up the 3Mifi Dongle which provides its own power supply and delivers internet access by way of 3G over a WiFI connection which is frankly less of a burden on the battery. 

Thanks for reading.

Sunday rolls around and as usual its time to check , update, backup and manage my machines. since it is the end of the month that means I make a trip to the manufacturers website and keep an eye out for any changes to device drivers for my machine that may benefit me. Now as I said before negotiating the Dell website is an adventure on a par with some of the best episodes of Zork.

You are in a small room there are many exits; which way now ?

Okay so the Dell Drivers and Downloads site looks to make life easy, but I guess I wrote too soon.

 

 

Yep thats right we are still working in the world of Internet Explorer here.

 

 

 

 

North: You head north.

Okay then lets move on and see about scanning my Vostro v130 under IE and after starting the browser, accepting the ActiveX tool and reloading the screen you might think that we were making progress again I spoke to soon.

 

Never mind then, let me flip the Laptop , squint into the tag and read back the Service Tag ( which on Systems I spec and deliver are tied to my account so that I can keep track of warranty status and upgrade expectations for all my clients ) . Progress is made and Dell recognise my product; but here is the next interesting experience.

My Dell Vostro v130 shipped with 64Bit Windows 7 professional for which no choice exists in Drivers and Downloads for me to check for updates.

You encounter a Grue.

 

 

Have I mentioned that Dells website is an adventure experience in its own rights ?

Hopefully this is some misstep on my part and that somewhere in there are updates and information that I am looking for but for now I will settle for checking for updates for other installed applications ( again why cant I do this at the control panel )  and keeping a watch on this updates next month.

 

Thanks for reading

Another Saturday rolls around and I have time on my hands; so it was only normal to find something big and fun to want to download and play with and at near to 25Gb of Downloads World Of Warcraft was a challenge worth dipping into. Thankfully the 10day trial did not ask me for a credit card. Whilst it is late in the day  and the download took nearly 5 hours the Game actually ran  and allowed me to get a character up and running.

The graphics are ramped right down but the interface and the interaction were more than usable and I would say if you were a travelling Warcraft fan then this Core i5 v130 with 4Gb of memory is going to do fill in the gaps on the road. Now where did I leave my Halberd ?

Thanks for reading.

Quote of the Day: Herman Cain’s Chief of Staff Mark Block, attempting to explain this inexplicable campaign ad.

[dmr.]

Tagged: 2012 Presidential Campaig, Block Being Block, Herman Cain, Mark Block, Quote

The paperback edition of my book, Made by Hand: My Adventures in the World of Do-It-Yourself went on sale today. It includes a new section with a recipe for making kombucha and instructions for making a nice-sounding 2-string guitar out of a tin can.

Here are some quotes about Made by Hand:

Here’s the book’s description:

You can read the first two chapters of the book here.

Order Made by Hand: My Adventures in the World of Do-It-Yourself on Amazon.

If you have a neighbor that's playing their music too loudly, you can get them back by hijacking their speakers with a little DIY project. More »

Comments

Motor writes "As has long been expected — we are now beginning to see governments pushing for the use of so-called 'trusted computing' — chips installed in all computers that effectively remove control of the PC from its owner. While there may be security advantages to some of the ideas, few can doubt that it represents a fundamental shift in the IT world. A radical move away from an open technology landscape and towards a system that denies all access unless you have the right credentials. Governments will demand the right credentials to access their services — meaning approved software stacks (i.e Windows) with the right digital signatures. Vernor Vinge had it right ."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[ http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discuss

The network of global corporate control (PDF), a study published in PLOS One, analyzes the ownership structures of the world's corporations and finds a tightly-knit cluster of 147 entities control 40 percent of the world's wealth. Not only is this creepy inasmuch as it puts a lot of power into a small number of hands, but it also suggests that the governance of much of the world's wealth is closely correlated, so one disaster could sweep like wildfire across them all:

(via Kottke)

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world [newscientist.com]

Comments

Comments

Way to prioritize, America.

via reddit.com

judgecorp writes "A Parliamentary Committee in the UK has suggested that sites should be protected against libel claims against contributors — as long as those contributors are identified. Anonymous postings should be taken down if someone complains of libel in them, in a set of proposals which online community groups have described as 'chilling.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[ http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~ah/f/lrqi37l1p7a6hqgtg7dfla1i4g/468/60#http%3A%2F%2Fyro.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F11%2F10%2F21%2F0247230%2Fproposed-uk-online-libel-rules-would-restrict-anonymous-posting%3Futm_source%3Drss1.0mainlinkanon%26utm_medium%3Dfeed ]

Comments

Today we found out that the Occupy Wall Street movement has so far raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's a lotta scratch! What should they do with all that? One commenter knows. More »

Sounds like he might RT you, too.

This may run counter to what your common sense tells you but, a new paper out of Duke and Rice University says that ditching DRM could actually reduce piracy. The study, which relied on analytical modeling, showed that while copy protection made illegally sharing content more difficult it had a significantly negative impact on legal users. In fact, the researchers say, "only the legal users pay the price and suffer from the restrictions [of DRM]." Many consumers simply choose to pirate music and movies because doing simple things, like backing up a media collection, is difficult with DRMed content. Even the most effective DRM is eventually broken, and fails to deter those already determined to steal. Meanwhile, abandoning these restrictions could increase competition and drive down prices (as well as remove a serious inconvenience), encouraging more people to legitimately purchase content. You can check out the November-December issue of Marketing Science for more details.

Ditching DRM could reduce piracy, prices, inconvenience originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 09 Oct 2011 20:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TorrentFreak, Digg  |  Rice University  | Email this | Comments

Note: a life irradiated by fiction:

Textures
in the Literary Criticism section of The Times Literary Supplement
by MICHAEL SHERINGHAM

See this item on Amazon.com

Shared on October 9th, 2011 from Kindle

The literary icons who grace the Kindle's screensaver surely deserve their place: Milton, Steinbeck, Brontë and, ahem, a Kindle feedback request. But what if you want to celebrate, in glorious e-ink, those writers who didn't make Amazon's cut? You can in fact import any image to use as a Kindle screensaver -- if you jailbreak your device. Doing so may void your warranty, but if you're feeling brave, here's how to do it.

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As detailed in yesterday’s article, if a VPN provider carries logs of their users’ activities the chances of them not being able to live up to their claim of offering an anonymous service begins to decrease rapidly.

There are dozens of VPN providers, many of which carry marketing on their web pages which suggests that the anonymity of their subscribers is a top priority. But is it really? Do their privacy policies stand up to scrutiny? We decided to find out.

Over the past two weeks TorrentFreak contacted some of the leading, most-advertised, and most talked about VPN providers in the file-sharing and anonymity space. Rather than trying to decipher what their often-confusing marketing lingo really means, we asked them two direct questions instead:

1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?

2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

This article does not attempt to consider the actual quality of service offered by any listed provider, nor does it consider whether any service is good value for money. All we are interested in is this: Do they live up to claims that they provide a 100% anonymous service? So here we go, VPN providers in the file-sharing space first.

VPN providers marketed strongly in the P2P space

 

BTguard

Response to Q1: “It’s technically unfeasible for us to maintain log files with the amount of connections we route,†BTguard explain. “We estimate the capacity needed to store log files would be 4TB per day.â€

Response to Q2: “The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event we would even communicate with a third party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.â€

BTguard website

ItsHidden

Response to Q1: “No logs, they are not kept. Even system logs that do not directly link to users are rotated on an hourly basis.â€

Response to Q2: “The company has recently been sold and falls under the Jurisdiction of the Seychelles. As such there is no requirement [to log] within that jurisdiction.â€

ItsHidden website

TorrentPrivacy

Response to Q1: “We have connection logs, but we don’t store IP addresses there. These logs are kept for 7 days. Though it’s impossible to determine who exactly have used the service.â€

Response to Q2: “We have servers in Netherlands, Sweden and USA while our company is based on Seychelles. We do not disclose any information to 3rd parties and this can be done only in case of a certain lawsuit filed against our company.â€

TorrentPrivacy website

Ipredator

Response to Q1: “We don’t store the IP at all actually. It’s in temporary use for the session you have when you’re connected but that’s it. We’ve had very few issues with not having logs, but not keeping them makes it safer even for us since we can’t accidentally give out information about anyone.â€

Response to Q2: “We fall – mostly – under Swedish jurisdiction when it comes to the service. When it comes to organisational stuff (who keeps the data, who owns the service, who owns the server, who owns the network etc etc) it’s very mixed, intentionally. This is to make it hard and/or impossible to legally bully us around if that would be the case.â€

“We can’t be easily shut down, and we can’t be pressured by courts to implement stuff we would oppose. For end-users this is not affecting them in a negative way at all, only the opposite.â€

Ipredator website

Faceless

Response to Q1: “We do not log any IP addresses and no information about what data is accessed by our users, so we have no information that could be interesting to third-parties.â€

Response to Q2: “We have servers in The Netherlands and our company is based in Cyprus. If authorities would contact us we would have to tell them that we have no connection logs or IP-addresses saved on our systems.â€

Faceless website

General VPN providers

 

AirVPN

Response to Q1: The company carries no identifying logs.

Response to Q2: “Jurisdiction is in the EU, under most circumstances Italy (country of the company and home of the person legally responsible for data protection), but applicable law may be one of the EU Member States where the servers of the network are physically located (no servers are in Italy),†AirVPN told us.

“We don’t share any information with anyone.â€

AirVPN website

VPNReactor

Response to Q1: “Only for 5 days to stop abuse[..]. After 5 days we have absolutely no way to match any IP address or time stamp to any users. Privacy and Security is further enhanced for individual users because their VPN connections are basically lost in the crowd.â€

“Our free VPN users share a block of IPs when they connect to the internet via VPNReactor. So at any given time hundreds/thousands of our VPN users that have active connections could all be sharing a single IP address. None of our VPN users are assigned individual public IPs.â€

Response to Q2: “We strive to be upfront and transparent with our logging policies for the benefit of our VPN users.†Logs seen by TorrentFreak seemed to confirm no identifiable information being stored.

“We are a U.S. based company and are bound by U.S. based court orders,†VPNReactor continued. “However, if a U.S. based subpoena comes in requesting info for activity that occurred more then 5 days prior, we have absolutely nothing to provide as our logs would have expired off. Request for connection details outside a U.S. based court order will be fully ignored.â€

VPNReactor website

BlackVPN

Response to Q1: “We do not keep any logs about our users internet activities including which sites they access or what data they transfer. We also run log cleaners on our systems which removes the IPs from logs before they are written to disk,†the company told TorrentFreak.

“For tax and legal reasons we do store some billing information (name, email, country), but it is stored with a third-party and separate from the rest of BlackVPN.â€

BlackVPN say they hold a username and email address of their subscribers and the times of connection and disconnection to their services along with bandwidth consumption. Logging is carried out as follows:

“On our Privacy Servers, NL & LT we don’t log anything that can identify the user, but on our US & UK server where we don’t allow sharing copyrighted materials we do log the internal RFC1918 IP that is assigned to the user at a specific time,†BlackVPN explain.

“So to clarify, we don’t log the real external IP of the user, just our RFC1918 internal one, this we have to do to comply with local laws and to be able to handle DMCAs.â€

Response to Q2: “We operate under the jurisdiction of the Netherlands and we will fiercely protect the privacy and rights of our users and we will not disclose any information on our users to anyone, unless forced to by law enforcement personnel that have produced the proper legal compliance documents or a court order. (In which case we don’t really have a choice).â€

BlackVPN website

PrivatVPN

Response to Q1: “We don’t keep ANY logs that allow us or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user our service. The only thing we log are e-mails and usernames but it’s not possible to bind a activity on the Internet to a user.â€

Please note: PrivatVPN also offer use of a US server for watching services like Hulu. IP logs are kept when users use this service.

Response to Q2: “Since we do not log any IP addresses [we have] nothing to disclose. Circumstances doesn’t matter in this case, we have no information regarding our customers’ IP addresses.â€

PrivatVPN website

Mullvad

Response to Q1: “No. And we don’t see why anyone would. It would be dishonest towards our customers and mean *more* potential legal trouble.â€

Response to Q2: “Swedish jurisdiction. We don’t know of any way in which the Swedish state in practice could make us behave badly towards our clients and that has never happened. Another sign we take privacy seriously is that we accept payments in Bitcoin and cash in the mail.â€

Mullvad website

Cryptocloud

Response to Q1: “We log nothing at all.â€

Response to Q2: “We don’t log anything on the customer usage side so there are no dots to connect period, we completely separate the payment information,†they told us.

“Realistically unless you operate out of one of the ‘Axis of Evil Countries†Law Enforcement will find a way to put the screws to you,†Cryptocloud add.

“I have read the nonsense that being in Europe will protect you from US Law Enforcement, worked well for HMA didn’t it? Furthermore I am pretty sure the Swiss Banking veil was penetrated and historically that is more defend-able than individual privacy. The way to solve this is just not to log, period.â€

Cryptocloud website

VPN providers who log, sometimes a lot

 

VyprVPN

VyprVPN is the VPN service connected to and offered by the Giganews Usenet service, although it can be used completely standalone. In common with many other providers we contacted, VyprVPN acknowledged receipt of our questions but then failed to respond. We’ve included them here since they have such a high-profile.

The company policy says that logging data “is maintained for use with billing, troubleshooting, service offering evaluation, [Terms of Service] issues, [Acceptable Use Policy] issues, and for handling crimes performed over the service. We maintain this level of information on a per-session basis for at least 90 days.â€

On Usenet forum NZBMatrix several users have reported having their VyprVPN service terminated after the company processed “a backlog†of DMCA notices which pushed them over the “two-strikes-and-out†acceptable use policy.

So, does VyprVPN log? You bet.

SwissVPN

We included SwissVPN in our survey because they are well known, relatively cheap and have been used by those on a tight budget. To their credit, they were also the fastest company to respond. They are one of the few companies that do not make anonymity claims.

Response to Q1: “SwissVPN is being operated based on Swiss Telecommunications and Personal Data Protection Law. Session IP’s (not visited content, websites, mail, etc.) are being logged for 6 months,†the company told us.

Response to Q2: The company responds to requests from 3rd parties under Swiss criminal law (pdf).

SwissVPN website

StrongVPN

This company did not directly answer our questions but pointed us to their logkeeping policy instead.

StrongVPN do log and are able to match an external IP address to their subscribers. We have included them here since they were the most outwardly aggressive provider in our survey when it came to dealing with infringement.

“StrongVPN does not restrict P2P usage, but please note sharing of Copyrighted materials is forbidden, please do not do this or we will have to take action against your account,†they told us, later adding in a separate mail: “StrongVPN Notice: You may NOT distribute copyright-protected material through our network. We may cancel your account if that happens.â€

StrongVPN website

Disappointing: VPN providers who simply failed to respond

 

In addition to the above, TorrentFreak also approached a number of other fairly well known VPN providers. It’s not clear if our questions were simply too tricky to answer in a positive light or whether there was some other reason, but disappointingly none of them responded to our emails, despite in some cases having acknowledged receipt of our questions.

They include Blacklogic.com, PureVPN.com, VPNTunnel.se, Bolehvpn.net and Ivacy.com.

Should the above now feel able to respond directly to our questions, or if there any other VPN providers reading who would like to be included in a future update, please contact us now with direct responses to the questions above. Apologies to the providers who contacted us at the last minute but were too late to be included in the report – we had to stop somewhere.

Final thoughts

 

When signing up to a VPN provider it really is evident that their their logging and privacy policies should be read slowly. And then read again, even more slowly than at first. Many are not as straightforward as they first appear (some even seem to be deliberately misleading) and that is the very reason why we asked our own questions instead.

In contrast to the the pessimism generated by yesterday’s report, as we can see from the list above, when it comes to offering real privacy there are plenty of services out there.

Source: Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?

As detailed in yesterday’s article, if a VPN provider carries logs of their users’ activities the chances of them not being able to live up to their claim of offering an anonymous service begins to decrease rapidly.

There are dozens of VPN providers, many of which carry marketing on their web pages which suggests that the anonymity of their subscribers is a top priority. But is it really? Do their privacy policies stand up to scrutiny? We decided to find out.

Over the past two weeks TorrentFreak contacted some of the leading, most-advertised, and most talked about VPN providers in the file-sharing and anonymity space. Rather than trying to decipher what their often-confusing marketing lingo really means, we asked them two direct questions instead:

1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, exactly what information do you hold?

2. Under what jurisdictions does your company operate and under what exact circumstances will you share the information you hold with a 3rd party?

This article does not attempt to consider the actual quality of service offered by any listed provider, nor does it consider whether any service is good value for money. All we are interested in is this: Do they live up to claims that they provide a 100% anonymous service? So here we go, VPN providers in the file-sharing space first.

VPN providers marketed strongly in the P2P space

 

BTguard

Response to Q1: “It’s technically unfeasible for us to maintain log files with the amount of connections we route,†BTguard explain. “We estimate the capacity needed to store log files would be 4TB per day.â€

Response to Q2: “The jurisdiction is Canada. Since we do not have log files, we have no information to share. We do not communicate with any third parties. The only event we would even communicate with a third party is if we received a court order. We would then be forced to notify them we have no information. This has not happened yet.â€

BTguard website

ItsHidden

Response to Q1: “No logs, they are not kept. Even system logs that do not directly link to users are rotated on an hourly basis.â€

Response to Q2: “The company has recently been sold and falls under the Jurisdiction of the Seychelles. As such there is no requirement [to log] within that jurisdiction.â€

ItsHidden website

TorrentPrivacy

Response to Q1: “We have connection logs, but we don’t store IP addresses there. These logs are kept for 7 days. Though it’s impossible to determine who exactly have used the service.â€

Response to Q2: “We have servers in Netherlands, Sweden and USA while our company is based on Seychelles. We do not disclose any information to 3rd parties and this can be done only in case of a certain lawsuit filed against our company.â€

TorrentPrivacy website

Ipredator

Response to Q1: “We don’t store the IP at all actually. It’s in temporary use for the session you have when you’re connected but that’s it. We’ve had very few issues with not having logs, but not keeping them makes it safer even for us since we can’t accidentally give out information about anyone.â€

Response to Q2: “We fall – mostly – under Swedish jurisdiction when it comes to the service. When it comes to organisational stuff (who keeps the data, who owns the service, who owns the server, who owns the network etc etc) it’s very mixed, intentionally. This is to make it hard and/or impossible to legally bully us around if that would be the case.â€

“We can’t be easily shut down, and we can’t be pressured by courts to implement stuff we would oppose. For end-users this is not affecting them in a negative way at all, only the opposite.â€

Ipredator website

Faceless

Response to Q1: “We do not log any IP addresses and no information about what data is accessed by our users, so we have no information that could be interesting to third-parties.â€

Response to Q2: “We have servers in The Netherlands and our company is based in Cyprus. If authorities would contact us we would have to tell them that we have no connection logs or IP-addresses saved on our systems.â€

Faceless website

General VPN providers

 

AirVPN

Response to Q1: The company carries no identifying logs.

Response to Q2: “Jurisdiction is in the EU, under most circumstances Italy (country of the company and home of the person legally responsible for data protection), but applicable law may be one of the EU Member States where the servers of the network are physically located (no servers are in Italy),†AirVPN told us.

“We don’t share any information with anyone.â€

AirVPN website

VPNReactor

Response to Q1: “Only for 5 days to stop abuse[..]. After 5 days we have absolutely no way to match any IP address or time stamp to any users. Privacy and Security is further enhanced for individual users because their VPN connections are basically lost in the crowd.â€

“Our free VPN users share a block of IPs when they connect to the internet via VPNReactor. So at any given time hundreds/thousands of our VPN users that have active connections could all be sharing a single IP address. None of our VPN users are assigned individual public IPs.â€

Response to Q2: “We strive to be upfront and transparent with our logging policies for the benefit of our VPN users.†Logs seen by TorrentFreak seemed to confirm no identifiable information being stored.

“We are a U.S. based company and are bound by U.S. based court orders,†VPNReactor continued. “However, if a U.S. based subpoena comes in requesting info for activity that occurred more then 5 days prior, we have absolutely nothing to provide as our logs would have expired off. Request for connection details outside a U.S. based court order will be fully ignored.â€

VPNReactor website

BlackVPN

Response to Q1: “We do not keep any logs about our users internet activities including which sites they access or what data they transfer. We also run log cleaners on our systems which removes the IPs from logs before they are written to disk,†the company told TorrentFreak.

“For tax and legal reasons we do store some billing information (name, email, country), but it is stored with a third-party and separate from the rest of BlackVPN.â€

BlackVPN say they hold a username and email address of their subscribers and the times of connection and disconnection to their services along with bandwidth consumption. Logging is carried out as follows:

“On our Privacy Servers, NL & LT we don’t log anything that can identify the user, but on our US & UK server where we don’t allow sharing copyrighted materials we do log the internal RFC1918 IP that is assigned to the user at a specific time,†BlackVPN explain.

“So to clarify, we don’t log the real external IP of the user, just our RFC1918 internal one, this we have to do to comply with local laws and to be able to handle DMCAs.â€

Response to Q2: “We operate under the jurisdiction of the Netherlands and we will fiercely protect the privacy and rights of our users and we will not disclose any information on our users to anyone, unless forced to by law enforcement personnel that have produced the proper legal compliance documents or a court order. (In which case we don’t really have a choice).â€

BlackVPN website

PrivatVPN

Response to Q1: “We don’t keep ANY logs that allow us or a 3rd party to match an IP address and a time stamp to a user our service. The only thing we log are e-mails and usernames but it’s not possible to bind a activity on the Internet to a user.â€

Please note: PrivatVPN also offer use of a US server for watching services like Hulu. IP logs are kept when users use this service.

Response to Q2: “Since we do not log any IP addresses [we have] nothing to disclose. Circumstances doesn’t matter in this case, we have no information regarding our customers’ IP addresses.â€

PrivatVPN website

Mullvad

Response to Q1: “No. And we don’t see why anyone would. It would be dishonest towards our customers and mean *more* potential legal trouble.â€

Response to Q2: “Swedish jurisdiction. We don’t know of any way in which the Swedish state in practice could make us behave badly towards our clients and that has never happened. Another sign we take privacy seriously is that we accept payments in Bitcoin and cash in the mail.â€

Mullvad website

Cryptocloud

Response to Q1: “We log nothing at all.â€

Response to Q2: “We don’t log anything on the customer usage side so there are no dots to connect period, we completely separate the payment information,†they told us.

“Realistically unless you operate out of one of the ‘Axis of Evil Countries†Law Enforcement will find a way to put the screws to you,†Cryptocloud add.

“I have read the nonsense that being in Europe will protect you from US Law Enforcement, worked well for HMA didn’t it? Furthermore I am pretty sure the Swiss Banking veil was penetrated and historically that is more defend-able than individual privacy. The way to solve this is just not to log, period.â€

Cryptocloud website

VPN providers who log, sometimes a lot

 

VyprVPN

VyprVPN is the VPN service connected to and offered by the Giganews Usenet service, although it can be used completely standalone. In common with many other providers we contacted, VyprVPN acknowledged receipt of our questions but then failed to respond. We’ve included them here since they have such a high-profile.

The company policy says that logging data “is maintained for use with billing, troubleshooting, service offering evaluation, [Terms of Service] issues, [Acceptable Use Policy] issues, and for handling crimes performed over the service. We maintain this level of information on a per-session basis for at least 90 days.â€

On Usenet forum NZBMatrix several users have reported having their VyprVPN service terminated after the company processed “a backlog†of DMCA notices which pushed them over the “two-strikes-and-out†acceptable use policy.

So, does VyprVPN log? You bet.

SwissVPN

We included SwissVPN in our survey because they are well known, relatively cheap and have been used by those on a tight budget. To their credit, they were also the fastest company to respond. They are one of the few companies that do not make anonymity claims.

Response to Q1: “SwissVPN is being operated based on Swiss Telecommunications and Personal Data Protection Law. Session IP’s (not visited content, websites, mail, etc.) are being logged for 6 months,†the company told us.

Response to Q2: The company responds to requests from 3rd parties under Swiss criminal law (pdf).

SwissVPN website

StrongVPN

This company did not directly answer our questions but pointed us to their logkeeping policy instead.

StrongVPN do log and are able to match an external IP address to their subscribers. We have included them here since they were the most outwardly aggressive provider in our survey when it came to dealing with infringement.

“StrongVPN does not restrict P2P usage, but please note sharing of Copyrighted materials is forbidden, please do not do this or we will have to take action against your account,†they told us, later adding in a separate mail: “StrongVPN Notice: You may NOT distribute copyright-protected material through our network. We may cancel your account if that happens.â€

StrongVPN website

Disappointing: VPN providers who simply failed to respond

 

In addition to the above, TorrentFreak also approached a number of other fairly well known VPN providers. It’s not clear if our questions were simply too tricky to answer in a positive light or whether there was some other reason, but disappointingly none of them responded to our emails, despite in some cases having acknowledged receipt of our questions.

They include Blacklogic.com, PureVPN.com, VPNTunnel.se, Bolehvpn.net and Ivacy.com.

Should the above now feel able to respond directly to our questions, or if there any other VPN providers reading who would like to be included in a future update, please contact us now with direct responses to the questions above. Apologies to the providers who contacted us at the last minute but were too late to be included in the report – we had to stop somewhere.

Final thoughts

 

When signing up to a VPN provider it really is evident that their their logging and privacy policies should be read slowly. And then read again, even more slowly than at first. Many are not as straightforward as they first appear (some even seem to be deliberately misleading) and that is the very reason why we asked our own questions instead.

In contrast to the the pessimism generated by yesterday’s report, as we can see from the list above, when it comes to offering real privacy there are plenty of services out there.

Source: Which VPN Providers Really Take Anonymity Seriously?

twoheadedboy writes "UK service provider BT has launched its Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) product, pledging it will offer downstream speeds of 300Mbps by spring next year. At present, the service can hit 110Mbps downstream speeds and will be available in just six locations from the end of October. More locations will be added and speeds will rise, however, with a 1Gbps service currently being trialled in Kesgrave, Suffolk. There may be continuing disputes over BT Openreach's pricing of fibre products, given the recent industry in-fighting. Nevertheless, 300Mbps fibre will provide some pretty speedy downloads for end users."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[ http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discuss

Before the Kindle Fire was launched I was thinking it would be less a rival for the iPad and more a a rival for other Android tablets. Now I think it is a really effective rival for the iPad. Amazon have out Apple'd Apple through effective implementation if the "less is more" philosophy and Apple finally have serious competition in the tablet space. The answer to one simple question will worry Apple more than anything else and illustrates why, to my mind at least, Amazon are about to pull off a great success;

"Which is the more techie device ?"

The answer for tablets pre-Fire was never iPad. Now it is.

Amazon have also, for me, illustrated why Apple are right in their complaints about Samsung copying. Here is a company who have come along, analyzed the problem and thought carefully about how they can best leverage their assets to serve the market. It will be a success precisely because they have learned key lessons from Apple and applied them intelligently. Amazon have attacked an internally consistent and coherent portion of the tablet use case that also happens to be the most significant use case for tablets as a whole. Content consumption. The result is something unique and effective, an always open portable shop for content be it games, books, music, movies or apps. They have recognised, according to the "less is more philosophy," if you look at how tablets are actually used, you better serve the majority of user time by taking "iTunes" or the online store, and expanding it to be not just the centre of the OS but the whole of the OS. They have played to their strengths and asset base made the OS the centre point for loading and consuming content. iOS by contrast fragments the buy and "consume content" use-case across a number of areas of the OS (most noticeably dividing iTunes and iPod). The Fire illustrates iOS has perhaps a little more old school PC centric thinking than even Apple realized. I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs will be highly respectful of what Amazon have unveiled and achieved - something that can't be said of his other tablet rivals.

Dave a better question is not how can I remove my Data from Path but how do I remove all instances of my data that have been uploaded by way of other peoples address books ? I dont just want out of Path I want to ensure you will not be having my details from any one else  address books ? As I am pretty sure you cannot assure me of that and I can assure you I granted no rights to my friends to pass on my details without permission then  would i not be better to delete the whole address book table for every user and go back to thinking about this problem again ?

Interestingly when I popped the iphone into recording they looked a bit worried; as if people asserting what is legally within their right to do is something they should question and create cause to doubt. When I pointed out that it would ensure that every question and response could be verified later I was told "thats why I am writing it down" to which I responded , in which case you better spell your last note as Parish Councillor not Counsellor , it makes all the diference.

I was just pissed they didnt top up my club card or nectar points !

This happened to me last year. As I left a bank (HSBC ) on my high street I was stopped by a ( out of breath ) Police Office who explained I was stopped because I was "seen, on CCTV,  leaving the Royal Bank Of Scotland" I matched the description of an Asian man wearing an Orange tee shirt who was wanted for questioning. When I pulled out my iphone and asked to start recording the conversation the office got a little concerned and was soon joined by her Colleagues. I was questioned about where I had been and what I was doing in town and told that the CCTV operator ( who is stationed over 20 miles away in another office ) identified me by my beard and tee shirt. They were looking for an Asian / Dark skinned man who was believed to be tampering with the Cash Machines. Iwas given a interview receipt and allowed on my way. The one small problem in all this, especially for the CCTV operator and for the Office involved. I am a middle aged white man with a goatee who was wearing an orange tee shirt. Apparently I "looked asian" on the camera. I am not sure what was worse; that the CCTV operator got it wrong or that I had not been near RBS or its area of town , but that the CCTV operator felt I was a good  candidate or that he detaining officer thought I "looked asian"  I still have the recording; just in case.

So when I raised this conversation in 2010 on Episode 41 of Social Media White Noise I got a response from @ICanStalkU http://www.mayhemiclabs.com/co...  all I can say is its good to note that in general they still miss the point

I would point you to the video I include in my experience of the West Sussex Broadband Summit earlier this year but the West Sussex County Council have expired it :  
http://loudmouthman.com/2011/0...

When discussing the process of bringing High Speed internet to rural and city locations I constantly see an awful lot of smoke cover and bluff for technology that is already well established. I had asked Jeremy Hunt MP why we cant provide a shopping list experience to help Parish Councils and Town Community Partnerships ( and LEPS ) to build a quote in order to fund the delivery. 

Every installation has three components.

The Infrastructure costs; which are the time , materials  , manpower and features required to lay in cables and boxes and wires. Speaking to a few Quantity Surveyors for Civil engineering Companies the confirm that this is not a large job to estimate for an area and provide costs for. 

The Hardware costs; which are the wires, cables, components and products to be installed for the service.

The Service Delivery and Management; which would be the ongoing maintenance and support for the above as well as delivery of network services for that community. 

Pretty straight forward requirements which would help projects and communities to ascertain their costs and so on. 

What I was suprised to find out is that BT required an NDA to be signed by council members in regards to costs and provisioning costs which left me wondering what was not being disclosed to the public. 

I am now watching the West Sussex Broadband Scheme take another shift in focus and with the deadline for applications for projects moved to February it looks like it will not be possible for those projects to be delivered on; leaving the Govt free to wipe its hands of the non delivery of a promise should they not get enough responses. 

Mostly I am unconvinced that BT are incentivised or focussed on delivering a Broadband to make Britain work.

Hey Chris, I opted out of Klout months ago but to do it I had to email and campaign hard ( see Lacking In Klout on Loudmouthman.com ) what later transpired was that whilst my account was ( disabled ) I was still appearing in the API calls. When I blogged about this issue I had many more people arrive at my blog and agree they wanted to get out and used my method. Originally Klout did allow you to hide and remove your profile ( then those tools went away ). 

When I had asked questions about removing myself from Klout on Klouts on support forum they deleted and removed those articles. I took to posting comments on Blogs where Jo Fernandez had been posting or being interviewed and that got their attention. 

When I sat in the Demo for Kred.ly I asked "will we be able to opt out?" the owner admitted that they simply had not put that into Kred.ly and that they didnt imagine that people would not want to play. No I understand that Kred.ly will launch with tools to allow you finer control over how much information and data you are left to share back out. 

Personally I dont mind my information being scrapped and used for reporting , in aggregation , meaning as long as my details are buried, hidden, unavailable in the scores then I dont mind. But when social sites like Klout, Kred , Peer Index and Empire avenue ( another site I had to email to get removed from ) pull your data and represent it as You with your score , before you join I consider that they have crossed the line of privacy and are now heading into digital harassment. 

It is interesting to see how many people berate me for NOT wanting to take part .

Hello Brian, thank you for your comment on my Blog (  http://loudmouthman.com/2011/0...  my advice is write to jo@klout.com and also find anywhere that Klout is currently a story or a comment or a conversation and drop a comment in linking back to your blog.  Throwing this conversation up here , as I did with my own blog, gave me a hook to draw out the crowd and extend the conversation further.  You might also cc : Robert Scoble on your emails. If enough of us are asking to have accounts removed it might make Robert realise that we are now unhappy that Klout wont let us out.  Whilst my own Klout in social media influence was sufficient to erase my profile it seems not enough to get Jo to commit to agreeing that people may want to delete and remove their profiles are well.  So lets keep Klout ing Jo around the email until he understands our request.  if anyone else is stumbling upon this article or my own leave a comment on both blogs and then push out your own blog and link those to the klout articles you find.  Thanks for your time Brian. 

but it turns out that you cant unlink from the network according to the instructions and you also cannot have your profile hidden not to be seen. there are promises that this might come in the future. It turns out this feature USED to be implemented and I could have a profile that no one else can see. 

I have contacted Klout to be told the above If I disconnect twitter from the account the score and the profile still stay active and visible to all.

Finally I should point out that you have edited your own forums to remove previous conversations I have had on this topic. you have dodged and avoided this conversation several times in email and you simply do not accept that if someone asks for their klout profile to be utterly removed ( not simply network disconnected ) but fully 404'd on your website that this is a valid request. 

this may not be the best forums but I think people who want to praise Klout should know that your handling of data removal requests is less than salutatory. 

its great isnt it : you want to delete your profile and they never actually answer the question : http://support.klout.com/custo... somehow they keep spinning round the idea that you want to change your settings. You dont want to change the settings you just want to delete the profile from Klouts website so that it never appears if people go looking for it.

And now they have replied but the information is unhelpful and whilst they say they can remove your registration since I never registered I am unsure what they are removing. what I want is to own that profile and BLOCK the display or inclusion of it. Come on KLout sort it out

Maybe they can Explain why the answers they are giving the community about removing a profile dont match up. http://support.klout.com/custo... you cant remove or delete yourself from KLOUT

I would be more impressed if Klout talked about why they dont answer the questions related to deleting or removing your profile from Klout : http://support.klout.com/custo... funnily enough they seem to be very slow to respond to those questions. Maybe they might want to explain why you cannot delete or remove your profile from their service leaving your Profile Score available for all to review.

Thanks for the link ; my video ( me in a kilt ) was posted if only to show hey look there is this tool we might use somehow.  Could I be cheeky and get you to link to my blog on that as well though, thanks

They cancelled @BennyCrime  s account and I see that there is a possibility that in redacting your access they can lock you out of your services ( read email, calendars, reader, analytics ) which is pretty damned worrying. 

I had taken time to point out wierd problems and issues on G+ only to be shouted down that I was being too serious and that it was all in beta and would soon be fixed. FML if it isnt like being the child in the emperors clothe tale all over again. 

I have two gmail accounts and three google apps for your domain accounts running but my Google Profile is on my work related gmail account so I am suitably concerned that being locked out of G+ might royally screw me over. 

I find gmail/google apps for your domain to be a bloody marvellous service suite but Google should stop trying this social stuff , they just keep screwing it up. 

And I for one look forward to the day when the message is delivered; not its formatting. Dressing up email with HTML formatting is the equivalent of visiting a sound recording studio every time you want to make a phone call.

you left out Pogoplug and I dont believe iCloud has enough use-cases for their to be a definitive statement of its value. 

So there you are with an ecosystem that lives in a pretty vertical well your either Android ( and you get to play on a laptop or phones ) or your iOS and your living with a phone as your support system. Along comes Windows Phone and it is easy to think of it as living in that ecosystem  unless you happen to be a developer who also owns an Xbox and has experienced Xbox Live and the Xbox Live Arcade. Now your looking at a phone that connects to the entertainment system which is linked to movies, games and a social network. Now your looking at a phone that works as the extension to Xbox Live and MS Live. You now have an application build that can push its architecture to touch on ecosystems outside of your phone infrastructure. Now that is interesting. When you talk to potential mobile developers of WinPhone ask them if they have are xbox live users as well?

So your saying the strops and hissy fits that I threw as a three year old are indicators of my behavior now that I am nearly 40 ? well screw you mr poopy head ! 

However I accept that you Mr Eden are far more enlightened and take the whole approach over the single events.

One was a developers confernce the other a promotional event. At one the recipients were likely to create and build and play with the technology at the other the recipients would be likely to write something positive. 

The ethical question should not be addressed to the companies handing out freebies but to the recipients receiving them . Are their ethics compromised in accepting free ( and notably expensive ) goodies ?

Incidentally I have the morals and ethics of a backyard alley cat when it comes to being given free stuff from vendors and manufacturers but it doesnt mean I will lovel them any more for it.

There came a moment when the Internet was 'just' ubiquitous enough in my routine and 'just' fast enough for my preferences when I stood in a book store and realised I didnt need to buy a book for anything more than fiction. Now I own a kindle and the delay between thinking of owning a book and its ownership is less than a minute ( for a given value  of that book being on Amazon ) and I have started to reclaim my shelf space at home.  I should , and am told , feel sad that some great 'thing' is being lost. The way I see it, I have  gained more and lost little.  Thanks for making me think about my books again

My Daughter Alyssa is 7 , she hates buying clothes because they tend to be Pink or Girlie so she shops for boys shorts and trousers because they are blue. When we goto parties she asks for the boys party bags. She is a big Dr Who ( Tennant ) Fan and currently has me reading any Green Lantern and Blue Beetle comics she can get her hands on. Though our little boy of 2 is managing to meet many of the expected traits for 2yr old boys playing.

Neither Sharon or I set out with an agenda for or against stereo typing and there are plenty of prams and dolls and makeup kits that Alyssa has inspected and ignored to testify to this. Whilst I am , as any parent would be , proud and happy with my daughters ( and Sons ) choices I know that Kids will be cruel and some teachers crueller ( is that a word ? ) so as parents we have to prepare Alyssa for the onslaught of pressure to accept and conform which we doubt she will take part in since she shows no interests ( yet ) .

Whilst we see her playing with girls her own age we know that there will be some Girls who will pick on this perceived difference and Girls bullying can be socially insidious compared to a boys physical bullying.

I love that my Girl asks for the comics she wants and knows the things that keep her entertained and with luck we can teach her that being an individual need not be a lonely experience through her early teens.

Lets just hope they fix the terrible terrible battery life that the Dell Vostro V130 suffer from. As much as I love the V130 in build and design and ultra-thinniness the batter feels like 1990s

Hi James, GeekPlantonline.com stayed online by being in eu-east-1a we didnt go down because we used the redundancy offered. us-east-1a is the default zone when you login but it is not primary, i am not sure they have a primary but if you have documentary evidence that would be awesome. We took 'advantage' of the zones we didnt go down.

I first discovered Empire Avenue when I discovered Loudmouthman was being traded , and I had not joined Empire Avenue. I logged in to claim my account then set about disabling the details but this still did not fully remove me from the game.

It took a while for me to contact the guys at empire avenue and explain that since I had claimed my account I wanted to ensure that 'Loudmouthman' as not traded in any way or included on their site.

I have no problem with the game being played but I dont believe your details should be traded as such without your given permission.

On the day that we met Charlotte Stamper in Hillingdon. We discussed her use of Twitter as part of Hillingdon Council's communication strategy. In other news - Path found uploading people's address books Recorded at Coffee Break, High Street, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 1JN, UK

On the day that Andy drove to Horsham - which a rarity these days: We won a reprieve on SOPAnbsp; And are terribly distracted by twitter censorshipnbsp;but ACTA is the new concern. Is it time to move on ; Even Robert Scoble is tired. Incidentally where can we get analytics for our google+ pages ? Not that it matters Google is always watching now. Its almost as if Facebook dont have to do anything to look better ! Recorded at The Roffey Griddle, 16 Fitzalan Road, Horsham, West Sussex RH13 6AA #160; PLEASE SPONSOR ANDY'S BRIGHTON HALF MARATHON RUN

On the day that seemed back-to-normal because it was after Christmas: Protesting SOPA then black out your site: Tim O'Reilly explains more Things to do on the 18th might include nbsp; Decide on a learning a new skill through 12412.org nbsp; Catch up on your reading : nbsp;Amazon Sales A Rather Amazing . nbsp;The Copper Promise by Jennifer Williams ( aka @SennyDreadful ) Recorded at Grints of Brighton, 13 Cranbourne Street, Brighton BN1 2RD, UK PLEASE SPONSOR ANDY'S BRIGHTON HALF MARATHON

In today's Christmas Special, Andy and Nik take a ride on the Brighton Wheel before settling down for coffee: Paypal and Wikileaks NewsBin blocked by BT BT trying to sue Google Bloody hell, it's Christmas Recorded at The Brighton Wheel AND The Terraces, Madeira drive, Brighton BN2 1AY, UK

The show where Nik explains why people should be elected: Have you Joined Diaspora ? Reddit Users get active on the Darknet plan Shad.ddih explains some problems with RF networking. Honary Mention to Geekplanetmatt Recorded at Esquires Coffee House,nbsp;6, The Forum,nbsp;Lower Tanbridge Way, Horsham RH12 1PQ, UK

On the day that Andy found a new coffee shop opposite the Town Hall: France looks to tax the net to pay for musicnbsp; Europe's technology chief has said "Copyright isnt working" lets Remind ourselves about where the Internet came from Given up on Gowalla ? Is Foursquare the only Tool for Checking in now ? One More Show Before Christmas : Do you Wish list ? Nik wont. Recorded at The Little Coffee Company, 4 Bartholomews, Brighton, BN1 1HG, UK.

On the day that Andy actually found the Mock Turtle: TV License fee may be extended to iPlayer - but PCs likely to escape Google Reader yes they screwed it up just as Nik Predicted. Scrivenerfor Windows is out David Hewson has some advice. So now Nik Doesnt remember why he shared these ! The Kloutopaclypse began; whose next ? Recorded at The Mock Turtle,nbsp;4 Pool Valley, Brighton BN1 1NJ, UK.

On the day that Andy tripped over his bag and knocked a vase of flowers over, which spilled down a vent and nearly cut off the electricity to the cafe we were recording at.... iPad and tablets now exceed Smart phones for USA web traffic Chime.in ; something better than Google+ And Hypothe.is looks pretty cool can the UK Govt ever have a clue ? can Google listen to its readers ? Recorded at Aloka, 14 East Street, Brighton, BN1 1HP, UK.

On the day that Nik walked fast without complaint: DRM its not the protection they thought. VPN Services , which one offers protection[1]. BT and Talk Talk keep fighting the DEA One more thing , We are going to miss you Steve Jobs. Recorded at ChoccyWoccyDoodah (bar du chocolat), 27 Middle Street, Brighton BN1 1AG, UK [1] And Yes NIK hates that we call them VPN services. #160;

On the day that we jumped to episode 72 due to the newly-found ability of certain atomic particles to move faster than the speed of light: Kred A new Influence site that may not let you out OnLive ; Game without the gear launching in the UK Bad rap for rep rap : Gangs building skimmers and Lives being saved Recorded at Al Fresco,nbsp;The Milkmaid Pavilion,nbsp;Kings Road Arches, Brighton BN1 2LN

The Phallacy of American kitsch. Hotels and hardons on the lonely road to nowhere.

Anal beads of the Gods. Alien probes invade blackholes !

The tale of human progress in teleportation technology and its early setbacks as travelers forget their spacesuits.

The Jaundiced angel of death wreaks havoc in lower Y’ha-nthlei

Before Sex & The City Sarah Jessica Parker writes about driving in inappropriate shoes

Skorg the Orc attempts to fit in were constantly suffering setbacks.

Burning through cash in 90s Russia seeking a cure chronic sun burns.

The uneasy life of a Corporate Giant set apart from his diminutive work colleagues.

The battle weary space knight would fight forever in search of a helmet that didnt shrink his head to the size of a walnut. Size Matters in this Big Universe.

Cursed with constant pink eye the Glamour Model Elric would sell his soul for that luxury yacht !