Computer Currents BLOG – 2011- June 29

If you haven’t figured it out by now I am Australian by birth. I have been watching in amazement as the government of Australia has pushed through a National Broadband Network. I have also found it very difficult to find a single IT person who thinks that this is a good idea, at least the way that the Labor government has been approaching it. Yes I absolutely agree in public debate but this has been strangely absent or ignored during this process that has no cost benefit analysis process applied in the public arena at least.

First of all the copper network is not going to be sold. What is going to happen is that Telstra will move all their customers over to the NBN then pull the copper out, i.e. remove any possibility of a fall back plan for the customer concerned. Everything else in the network will be rented from Telstra. In the end this will be a mix and perhaps mess of fiber and left over copper. Pay TV customers will be affected be they Optus or Telstra. If you are using the Internet over a pay TV cable then you can expect that to have to be moved to the NBN option when they reach your area.

There is some disinformation from both sides. The Telstra network was not built using public funds but the proceeds of a government owned enterprise. It is also unlikely that there will be any secret filtering happening. First of all the government hasn’t been that secretive about their desire to limit access to some materials and to do so without anyone knowing would require a complete redesign of the network.  In fact the NBN layer will not offer any “Internet services” of any kind. Of course to do so will also require new laws and usually someone notices when this happens.

So if you have a Windows 7 machine running Aero and are using Yahoo Mail you will have noticed that when you try to move a mail message and the drop down of your directories appears it is so transparent that finding the right directory is almost impossible if you have the wrong background. Turn Aero off and all is made clear. This highlights how new technologies can cause problems for those who have not considered the ramifications of transparent windows and drop down menus. Yahoo certainly didn’t.

If you need more evidence of why the Cloud may not be the place to be, or at least to keep all your data then consider this story. It has been reported that thousands of Australian websites have irretrievably lost their data and email files following a malicious security hack on Australian domain registrar and web host Distribute.IT. The company has been trying to get data back and accounts restored but with little success. The incident has been described as “the largest IT disruption that has ever happened in Australia” and the LulzSec group has been blamed though another alternative could be the lone hacker “Pseudonym of Evil from efnet”. The hack has been described as an industrial espionage attack as it went way past the usual prank attacks that hackers are known for. The attackers wiped servers and all backup data including key backups and snapshots that would allow data recovery. 4800 Domains and accounts were affected. This may destroy Distribute.IT as a business.

Industry News

Firefox 5 is out. It has not been all that long since version four was released and this upgrade is not as ‘big’ as the last one. It does appear to be very stable and quicker than the last version. Included in this upgrade is a better Do Not Track system that allows you to control how your browser usage is being tracked. Check out Options, Privacy to see how simple it has become. The Android version is the first on that platform to provide these features.

Version 5 is smaller and faster beating out both Opera and Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript tests. The amount of RAM being used is also reduced. Open Web elements are widely supported including improved standards support for HTML5, XHR, MathML, SMIL and canvas. CSS animations are also supported. All in all there are supposed to be over 1000 improvements.

So where does spyware end and official software that spies on others begin? There is a new app for your iPhone. You load a Windows keylogger onto say your kids or spouse’s Windows machine then using an ITunes app monitor what they are doing, on the Windows machine. According to the author of the app it is all about catching cheating partners and protecting the children. For some this is nothing more than a thinly veiled privacy breaker. Apple has and will stop any apps that monitor Apple users but they seem to be perfectly content to allow you to monitor Android, Blackberry and now Windows devices and machines. Remember that this is in no way hypocritical it is Apple after all. The new product does not monitor the iPhone either it just uses it as the data collector.

There have been a rash of Technet suspensions recently. Technet is Microsoft’s subscription product that contains all; kinds of neat operating systems, tools and applications for development purposes by a named user. You can do this at work or at home and lately MS has been cutting off access without warning and in some cases without the individual concerned having done anything wrong, though some have. The Technet staff can often be very unhelpful when trying to resolve such issues and it appears that the numbers have been in the thousands lately. One reason has been to “protect the security of your account” whatever that might mean. There has been some suspicious activity on a number of Technet accounts lately and MS is keeping quiet about what this really means.

In more hacking news NATO is warning clients to their e-Bookshop service that hackers have likely stolen the customer database. While it has nothing secret the shop has been closed and customers warned of the breach and to change their Web passwords if they use anything similar elsewhere. The group this time seems to be unknown but NATO has plenty of enemies. LulzSec also released some documents they pinched from the Arizona Police. LulzSec also recently announced that the group would be disbanding which will be good news to authorities all over the planet.

In more Apple news the giant has been buying up the entire world’s thin battery supplies. Apple bas booked up most of the available lithium-polymer battery capacity in the IT market, according to DigiTimes at least who has been watching the Taiwanese markets. There are a lot more vendors than just Apple making the ultrathin devices these days but Apple got in early and booked up the supplies. This has left the others trying to source alternatives but supplies are scarce.

So what exactly is a 4G telephone system? This is a question also being asked by the US legislature and they are targeting network operators to provide a clear indication of what this is and if they meet the standard or not. 1G was analog so that’s easy. 2G is also easy since they were the first digital networks to appear. When you get the 3G things become more hazy. For example EDGE is called 3G by some and 2G by others. Many operators call HSPA 4G when it is clearly in the 3G world. WiMAX and LTE are 4G but some claim they don’t represent a clear speed advantage to be in the category. Still LTE is recognized by most to be in the 4G world. At the very least expected speeds should be part of a 4G definition but that may be hard to get out of your providers.

Computer Currents BLOG – 2011- June 22

It has been one of those Windows 7 weeks with a bit of Vista thrown in. My Win 7 problems started when I was converting a program to run under Win 7, originally on XP. Everything was going great until the program screens started hiding things like buttons, check boxes and radio buttons. It runs out that some older coding doesn’t work too well with Aero, turn it off and everything works just fine, otherwise you’ll need to repaint the screen elements as after the form is shown. Apart from that the OS still seems to be quite stable and I’ve found no major issues with it so far. Looks like Microsoft has finally come up with a winner after XP Pro and Server 2003.

Vista on the other had still keeps underwhelming. A friend managed to drop their battery out of their notebook as Vista was shutting down, oops. For most operating systems this would not be any problem, a quick reboot, perhaps two and XP would be back up and running again. Not so Vista. It just kept rebooting even after the “repair process.” Last known good boot and system restore didn’t work which left, as usual with Vista, the reinstall the operating system. I recommended an upgrade to wither Win 7 or XP. Yes I did indeed mean an “upgrade” to XP.

Enough about operating systems. I also found out this past week how important system testing is. I don’t mean main pathway testing but exclusion testing. The hardly used functionality; validating the business rules and even a few tests of pathways unlikely to be used, just to see if anything breaks. This testing should occur well before production implementation. Sadly it doesn’t often work out that way and you end up fixing some things the day before, this is the existing world of system development.

I did some Excel 2007 training this week. If you are a business owner or perhaps a corporation then classroom teaching is probably not a good way to go when trying to solve individual problems. I was used with a one on one basis working through each person’s individual problems and directly addressing their areas of weakness. Not only did, but the client found this a far better approach than the classroom environment. In most cases it allowed the student to find areas that improved how long it took to do their work. Now that I have taught in both styles the one on one or one on two approach can be a lot better in some circumstances.

Special Section – Playing It Safe With Facebook

These are interesting times. While teaching Excel a few times I had the student use Google to find the answer to their question. In-built Help files are good when you know what you are looking for but questions like “is there a command to check for an error?” are a little harder to find. Google can often provide an answer, with examples in a fraction of the time of looking.

The connectivity presented by the World Wide Web has also changed the way we deal with each other. Instead of phone calls people use Facebook. The latest generation is often put out if you don’t have it or don’t use it continuously. I buy lots of things online, others send people photos of themselves, others watch videos, chat, get a date, grab some music and so on. While not all of this is instant some of it is. The increasing question being asked is “is this safe?” There are connections between Facebook and the real work. IRW or RL are used (in real life, the Real World) to reference this and appointments are made, kept, broken all without any real oversight, control or in some cases safety. In a recent case a man pretended to be a Muslim Lesbian who was being persecuted. A man pretending to be a Lesbian, the leader of a group, caught the first one out before being caught out himself. It is OK to be a little confused as this.

Rule one is to set your Facebook profile to private. This allows you to grant access on a case by case basis rather that it being the default. This is one area where Facebook keeps changing the rules so it is wise to keep an eye on this and check it regularly. There is a have a privacy settings dashboard that enables you to determine who has access and to what on your profile. For more on this check here: http://www.sunbeltsecuritynews.com/CX3MZM/110617-Facebook-Privacy. Remember that you do not have to fill in every item in the personal details area, most don’t and many put in bogus info anyway. Birth dates for example are almost always wrong.

The other issue here is access security in general. Over the past few months there have been incursions into some very large databases. While Facebook may be secure tomorrow that does not preclude a hacker getting in tomorrow and grabbing all the profile information from all the users who thought it was private and protected. The general rule when recording information is the “what if everyone could see this” approach.

So far this has been about people accessing your personal data. The bigger issue is the people who read what you post on sites like Facebook. Is your company reading your posts, your Boss, your partner, your children? Are any of your friends posting pictures that you would prefer never see the light of day, let alone be viewed by millions of strangers? Have you been associated with someone else’s photos, particularly those of les that pristine standards? You can do this by going to your profile and click on photos, scroll down and you will see place that says photos of you. Look through those photos and untag yourself from any you don't like. Simply click "remove tag" next to the name in the list of people in the picture.

So in general put as little personal info out there. Don’t post information about your private life that could give hints to your most common passwords. Don’t post pictures that are geo-tagged or someone may just work out where you live, work and play. Don’t tell people you will be away, why give potential robbers that kind of info. Don’t use simple passwords and change them often. Be wary of new friends who you don’t know at all. Checl people out first, check their profiles and who their friends are. Block those who annoy you. Finally, think before you click on a link. Check the URL first it should read www.facebook.com. If it says something like www.facebook1.php then it is probably some kind of phishing scam so don’t click.

Industry News

Intel versus AMD, who has the best when it comes to notebooks? HP has decided that they both deserve a go. The latest models will come with the new APU or accelerated processing units. These are a CPU the also has ATI Radeon-class GPU cores with DirectX-11 support, Northbridge I/O, and video decoding on a single die, i.e. in a single wafer. How much of an inroad they make into Intel’s "Sandy Bridge" Core i3, i5, and i7 processors is difficult to say. AMD’s new Llano processors or APUs are after all not the only combo wafers as the Sandy Bridge rage also includes CPU cores, graphics, I/O, and video processing on a single die.

In a recent demo video in the comparison between AMD’s quad-core A8-3510MX APU and Intel’s Sandy Bridge i7-2630QM, the latter did not come out very well. Of course one competitor’s comparisons will always make the other look bad. The AMD processor is shown using less power and the latest models do appear to run quite cool. The new models are almost duplicates of the Intel versions. HP is not really making any direct comparisons, they want to keep both suppliers happy. Using MobileMark however the 14-inch 6465b managed a very good seven hours and 15 minutes and six hours and 30 minutes on the 15.6-inch 6565b.

The problem these days is that it is hard to come up with a series of benchmarks that directly compare different architectures at the system level. Normally they compare either CPU or GPU performance  but typically not both at the same time. Then it comes down to what weight you put where. If your package has the better graphics, well I think you can see where this is going.

Computer Currents BLOG – 2011- June 15

I’ve stopped playing the online game Evony. The group dynamic is a good part of the game and as I have mentioned in earlier posts they comprise people from all around the world. There are a number of aspects of this game that make it essentially unplayable.

The first problem is that unless you are online 24 hours a day then you are automatically vulnerable because people can simple wait until they know you are offline and wipe you out. All those hours of work and effort are destroyed. You can reduce this to 12 hours a day by paying money to be in truce for half a day at a time but that still leaves 12 hours, every day, sitting in front of a computer screen playing  the game. The second biggest problem is farming. The vast majority of that screen time is gathering food and other resources to keep the troop levels you need to defend yourself fed.

The biggest problem are the rules and regulations from the Evony team and their lack of ability to control some members from breaking them. You can’t use an auto farming bot for example. You are not allowed to have multiple accounts on a single server. You are not supposed to give your details to someone else so that they can defend your cities while you sleep. Over the past few months I have seen many players do all of these things and Evony, even when notified, has done nothing about it. I have seen ac counts hacked and good players taken out with no response from the administrators.

So in the end the hypocrisy, the amount of time needed and the mindless requirement to farm has killed this game for me, certainly at the decent player level, possibly forever.  Not a real problem because I still have Starcraft 2 to get through, which really requires me to get a better computer. Also, they have just released, finally, Duke Nukem’s latest. Neither of these games requires me to keep making payments to play a game that is unfairly run. If you don’t know what Duke Nukem is then ask your parents. Of course with all the hype the initial reviews are not that good probably because after 14 years of development people were expecting the best game since, well forever.

On the subject of a new computer for around $1500 or 45000 Baht you can get some amazing computers, not including a monitor. Start with 12GB of RAM, 2TB of Hard Drive, 1Gb of graphics memory and a multi-core CPU that probably has more cores than you need at any one time. After that it is what you can get for the rest. Sometimes this includes a Blu-ray drive, it should include USB 3.0 support plus the usual assortment of ports and extras. While I am not quite ready to buy I am getting close so when I do I’ll let you know what it was and how much it cost.

Industry News

So according to someone Apple’s iCloud iTunes iService will destroy iCompetition in the iMusic iIndustry, forever! Yes I am also sick of seeing a little I in front of everything relating to iApple. This is of course either a rather optimistic Apple view or a pessimistic external viewpoint. Either way it has little truth behind it. It started when a lawyer claimed that iTumes Match encourages copyright infringement because it copies your iTunes songs to the online store. Then a well known publisher, normally  critical of record labels, thinks the labels have sold out the future record industry, in return for a one-off payment of a few dollars from Apple. This is a classic case of being unsure of the concept.

Using the iCloud doesn’t get you music that you don’t already have, it is just a place to keep it. If you want to listen to a new song you need to buy it, rent it, listen to it on the radio, borrow from a friend or find a pirated copy from any of the usual suspects. Or put another way, business as usual. There is no relation to iTunes Match. All this provides is a new music collection synchronization option in addition to the PC sync option we all have today.

Apple has been forced to change one of its iTunes content conditions and shock, horror, it is because the users kicked back against them. The rule in question is the one about content and subscription providers who offer their wares through the Apple App Store must charge the same or less for that content when it's offered from a provider's own website. They have also backed away from the requirement that

Thanks to Android. And the Financial Times content providers must offer the same content and subscriptions in their iOS apps as they do from their own services. This is a turnaround from what they published, and what I wrote about, in February. This does not mean that Amazon can keep their Kindle Store link, it still has to go. Apple still also keeps the 30 percent of subscriptions sold and all the demographic info your app collects.

Since February a number of groups have been voicing their concerns and also their inability to be able to distribute their products if the impositions remain. This included organizations like Rhapsody and Last.fm who will now be better off selling their stuff on their own sites, not subject to the 30 percent fee, as long as they don't link to those services from their iOS apps. Apple is of course keeping quite on the reasons why they are relaxing the guidelines. I can’t help imagine some senior executive sitting at a desk with a look of incredulity wondering why everyone doesn’t love them.

Then there is Android. There is a long line of publishers ready to move into the Android market, one without any restrictions and one that has a larger target market than Apple users. The Financial Times has also launched a browser based service that ignores the Apple store altogether using HTML5 instead. The Ft has suggested that people move to the Web and drop their iPhone and iPad apps.  The Financial Times reasons that this allows for faster releases, shorter wait times and instant access to the latest versions. So Apple is facing what it would consider treasonous defections to the Web and to Android, hence the relaxing of some of their rules. The only question now is how much more they may drop before their June 30 deadlines.

There is a big patch set coming up for Microsoft Tuesday US time saw a big patch release from Microsoft. It includes 16 security bulletins and 34 vulnerabilities. Nine of them are critical and seven important with all OS version affected in some way or other. Also targeted are various server-side software packages and applications, including the .NET framework and SQL Server. Internet Explorer. Office suites are also included with an Excel security fix. Looks like a few Sys Admins will be busy for a few days.

Really Nissan? After all of the leaked data and organizations caught out capturing personal information this latest exposure is just sad. The Nissan Leaf is an electric car. It includes a GSM cellular connection that lets drivers share a variety of real-time data about the car, including its location, driving history, power consumption, and battery reserves. This is all part of the eco-driving push driven by the global warming lie (and yes I am willing to back up that statement with proof). The Carwings data contains a lot of detailed data that is sent to third party servers that a driver may have subscribed to. Whenever the driver accesses any RSS the current geo coordinates, speed and direction is sent in clear text including the dectination if it is programmed into the Nav computer. Too bad if there was a hit out on you. This is for any RSS feed and while many will not be interested in the data it is being stored at the HTTP server for anyone to pick up.

The best part? No way to turn it off and then Carwings issues no warning that third parties are receiving the data.

Computer Currents BLOG – 2011- June 8

While it may be my primary person e-mail system in many ways Yahoo Mail is not a very good service. Take the latest upgrade for example. They have not fixed the update the current status of the Inbox on load issue and now the processing the Web page indicator is moving all the time instead of checking at regular intervals. For those on a low bandwidth plan it would be interesting to see just how much the continuous processing costs in terms of bandwidth usage. On the plus side speed has improved.

If you use Yahoo from an organizational platform then the changing off all the main servers will have probably caused Yahoo to stop working, until at least you can convince the systems people to unblock access to those new server names. Processing is still slow mostly because they have folded in all those other services to the same page.

Contrast this with Gmail, my other account. That has been stable for years, it is quick to process new e-mails and I have had no operational problems with it. Of course it has its own issues the biggest one being no spam filtering. I opened my account recently and had a number of emails asking for my Gmail details like a login, password, and some personal information. This e-mail did not come from Google, is designed to get your account details and use them for a number of malware purposes. Worst of all Google and Gmail do not filter out this obvious phishing attempt. They should have an option to turn on spam filtering, they don’t.  No I’m not even going to comment on Microsoft Mail, I gave up on that one a while back now.

Looks like I will be moving into the Access VBA realm in a month or so. Yes this means you can expect some comments on Access VBA compared to other Office products for the simple reason that implementations are different and they all have their own unique objects. You may remember that Access SQL is a subject of T-SQL which is in turn different from ANSI-SQL. This is kind of true for other major database providers but since I have been in the Microsoft ‘space’ for a while now the differences become more sharply focused between the different Microsoft products.

The cut down T-SQL found in Access is there deliberately because if you need to do anything of a reasonable size, security, connectivity and volume then Access will not be able to handle it. There is for example a 2GB data limit with Access. If you have more than about 6-10 users at the same time performance drops sharply.  For the same reason Access SQL has been hobbled so that if you need more you will have to find a workaround or upgrade.

That being said Access has come a long way in terms of functionality and ease of building something. I haven’t seen Access 2010 yet but I suspect that it has even more than you find in 2007 which is where my focus will be, for a while at least.

Industry News

It has not been a good past few weeks for Sony. First some hackers broke into their PS3 network and stole a bunch of IDs. After taking the network down for a few days Sony finally brought it back up. A week ago some hackers broke into the PBS television website. Now they have attacked Son’s movie division publishing the email addresses and passwords belonging to at least 50,000 consumers who registered for online promotions. The attackers use the handle LulzSec and they claim they could have retrieved details on over 1 million users but the group lacked the resources to copy such a massive amount of data. The worst part of this story is that the passwords were not encrypted, i.e. they were stored as plain, clear, text. Sony has yet to acknowledge that the second attack occurred but instead that they are “looking into it.”

The same groups also hacked Sony’s Fox.com and stole hundreds of employee passwords along with the names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of some 73,000 people who requested audition information for the upcoming talent show The X-Factor. All told the latest hacks have exposed personal information for over 100 million Sony customers and is estimated to have cost Sony at least $170 million.

On Friday the 3rd of June 2011 the market capitalization of Apple passed that of Microsoft and Intel combined. For those that care that was $317.6bn versus a combined was $316.8bn. The Apple lovers will be drooling over this one. They have surpassed the great Satan known as Wintel. So no matter how much you believe that Apple as an organization has morphed into the secretive, controlling, ruthless, and monomaniacal entity that it has become today you must at least give them credit for rising to the top. Over the years there have been many who said that Apple would not last this long and now they are on top. I wonder how long it will last?

In recent testing by Google it compared the four programming languages C++, Java, Scala, and its very own Go programming language. According to the paper that you can find here https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-Hundt.pdf, C++ has the fastest runtime but you need to be some kind of genius (according to them) to tune the performance.

Go has been around less than two years and was introduced as an “experimental language.”  For most of the testing it lagged behind the others but it does at least compile to machine code. It is supposed to ‘feel’ like Python in nature and support concurrency programming. I have never seen even a line of it so I can’t comment.

Scala is a programming language that sits on top of the Java Virtual Machine. It is faster than Java, compiles into a smaller package and uses less memory but still shares some of Java’s problems. Java itself is well known, taught as the main language in many universities and is fairly easy to implement. It is however slow and large. Bottom line? Well you use the language you are told to, optimize it as best you can and then hopefully it all works fast enough.

Windows 8 was demoed recently and the verdict is that it shows two different sides. In one mode it is a touch based operating system that is better than Windows Phone 7. In the other mode it is Windows 7 plus whatever new features they have added. Anything that runs on Windows 7 today should run under Windows 8 in the second mode that is. The first one “has a new development platform based on HTML and JavaScript, exploiting the rich features of HTML5, and the fast JavaScript engine and hardware acceleration in the latest Internet Explorer.” It should be noted that .NET nor Silverlight was mentioned during the demo.

This leaves .Net developers wondering if .Net and Silverlight will be considered legacy technologies when Windows 8 hits the mainstream user base. Microsoft is promoting HTML and JavaScript as the future for Windows applications. This is of course making the client side .Net developers somewhat nervous.  The server side of Microsoft if still fully supporting .Net in what that are saying and will soon rollout Lightswitch a new edition of Visual Studio that generates only Silverlight applications.

According to the .NET community manager Pete Brown they are not allowed to comment on the subject and everyone should wait until September to find out what is going to happen. “It's not because we don't care, aren't listening, have given up, or are agreeing or disagreeing with you on something.”

From this perspective point it appears that the Microsoft's Server and Tools division is pulling one way, and the Windows team the other. If true this cannot be a good look for Microsoft and is something that needs to be addressed or nipped in the bud quickly.