Mysticegg's Blog

Shock - Horror! CCTV in Taxis?

2011-11-17T11:43:00.001Z

Oxford City Council CCTV taxi plan to record ever cab conversation

As usual, this sort of story attracts the usual '1984' George Orwell crowd.

There seems to be a public preconception that there is a large room with a vast bank of monitors somewhere that will be manned by operators, evasively monitoring every taxi 24/7.

This is not the case, and the reality of the situation is a lot less Orwellian than the Mail would have you think.

The retrieval of images is not wireless, in fact it would take a specific effort and quite a bit of time to retrieve footage of a particular complaint.
Somebody with technical knowlege of the system would need to access the recording equipment in the taxi and hook it up to a monitor, then use the software to download a clip to a CD or USB stick for review. Not something that would be done on a whim.

You only have to put the words 'taxi' and 'rape' together in a Google Search to see that this isn't an invasion of privacy, but an important advancement in technology which is being used to prevent, deter and solve crime.

Civil liberties are important, and whilst one should have the freedom to be able to do or say what they want within the boundaries of the law, the key word here is still "law", and reasonable effort should be made to protect the public from the minority of nut-cases out there. It's common sense.

The "erosion of civil liberties" is a Daily Mail construct, which in this case it uses to manipulate its readership into being 'afraid of technology'.

'My PC Care' Telephone Scam

2010-11-04T11:03:00.000Z

I had a phone call the other day from somebody called ‘Rachel’. She told me that she was calling from a company called ‘My PC Care’ based in Yorkshire. I was immediately struck by her distinctive accent. Yorkshire is a big place, she must be from East Yorkshire, I thought.

The caller assumed I was using a PC and stated that she was calling under instruction from Microsoft because my computer was ‘infected’. The amusing part is that I don’t own a PC, I use an iMac at home. This proved quite amusing when I was asked to locate the ‘Windows’ key on my keyboard.

I was asked to type ‘eventvwr’ into the ‘Run’ box. I took about 5 minutes to type this in due to pretend finger-trouble. One thing I’ll say about Rachel is that she was very, very patient.

When ‘Event Viewer’ was finally open, she directed me to the ‘Application Log’ where tiny insignificant software niggles are logged. I told Rachel that my logs were perfectly clean there wasn’t a single error. I was placed on hold and passed to another guy.

This other guy, also from ‘East Yorkshire’ told me that he could see that my computer was full of spyware and malware and that it was pumping out ‘bad files’ over the Internet. Scary stuff for a non-techy person.

To gather more information, I asked for their website details. It was very basic, but had lots of Microsoft logos. He asked me if I was satisfied. I told him I was, and he continued with his pitch.
At this point, he tried to talk me into giving him remote access to the computer to fix my ‘problems’. I refused. At this point, he passed me on a third ‘East Yorkshire’ resident.
This guy got very rude. I decided that enough was enough. I told him I worked in IT, that I had been recording the call and I would be speaking to the Police. He said “OK, thank you” and quickly hung up. No surprise there!

I contacted Virgin Media to try and get the ‘withheld number’ but they said they could only talk to the Police. When I called the Police, they told me they were unable to pursue my case as the crime being committed was outside of their jurisdiction.

I wanted to do something. So many people are being targeted, many of whom are non-technical home users who could be vulnerable to this type of scam.

I started a website at www.pcscam.webs.com which is full of information on the scam and includes a section to report details of any similar experiences. I would encourage anyone who has had one of these calls to log it on the website.

There is no legal recourse for anyone to take, so the only solution to me was to try and pool what information I could gather into a single resource where people can log their own experiences.
Hopefully, together we can raise awareness.

Back It Up!

2010-07-07T11:59:00.003+01:00

CRUNCH!

Your hard disk failed for no apparent reason!

Where are all your typed letters and documents?
Where are all your photographs?
Do you have the password for your email account?

Computers may be clever, but should the worst happen, you'd may as well start using your hard disk as an ornamental paperweight.

What can I do?

CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW
These are writable/rewritable CDs and DVDs which allow you to store up to 700MB on a CD or 4.7GB on a DVD. These disks are reasonably cheap and can be bought from most supermarkets and PC World etc.

USB Flash Drive

These can be bought from supermarkets these days, as well as PC World, Comet etc.
They cost anything from £5 to £50 and over depending on the amount of data you want to back up.
They plug into the USB dive on your computer and are a very quick, compact and portable way of backing up.

External Hard Drive

These cost in the region of £40 to £150, again depending on capacity. External Hard Disks often come with special software for automatically backing up the files on your computer.

If you have a Mac with OSX 10.5 Leopard or later, you can enable 'Time Machine' which takes periodic backups to your external hard drive automatically.

Online Backup

Companies such as 'Mozy' offer online backup facilities whereby your files are uploaded over the internet to a secure location. If you lose any of your data locally, you can log in to the Mozy website and choose the files you want to recover and download them.

A basic account, which gives you 2GB of storage is free, but larger capacities will cost extra.

Rule #1:

Don't keep all of your important files in one place. It's best to have several copies. You know what they say about putting all your eggs in one basket.

Rule #2:

Whatever type of backup you use, it's best to take one regularly to minimise what you will lose between backups.

If the worst has happened and you have no backup, there are some services which offer specialised data recovery. These can be expensive and it often takes a long time to recover the data from your drive. In some instances, only partial recovery is available.

The best protection against this situation is to BACK IT UP!

For more advice about backing up, visit www.chris-morton.co.uk

The Broadband Myth

2010-06-29T16:31:00.001+01:00

Broadband is a fairly generic term, but the gap between the slowest and fastest speeds is rapidly becoming much larger.

BT's current largest broadband offering is 'up to 24Mbps', compared to Virgin who are now finishing the rollout of 'up to 50Mbps'.

The only real players in the market are BT and Virgin Media. If your contract is with Tiscali, Orange or one of the many other providers, they are just leasing the line from BT Wholesale. They physical line still belongs to BT. Your distance from the exchange is your greatest obstacle in achieving fast speeds.

This is what BT, or any of it's Wholesale agents won't tell you when you sign up:

Copper is BT's hugest problem. BT run copper from the Exchange to the cabinet at the end of your road. The further away from the exchange you happen to be, the greater the loss of the signal attenuation in the copper wire. Living 5 miles away from the exchange, you'll be lucky to get 1Mbps at the moment.

This is tantamount to daylight robbery if you're unlucky enough to live more than 4 or 5 miles from the exchange. All customers are on the same tariff regardless of their distance from the exchange.

Virgin Media don't have the copper problem because they began laying fiber obtic cables many years ago. The only run of copper exists between the cabinet at the end of your road, and your modem. When they say 'up to 50Mbps', you actually have some chance of getting a fairly decent speed.

With speed trials of up to 400Mbps currently being trialled, it's clear where to go for faster speeds.

Last month, BT finally announced that they were effectively giving up on 21CN, which more or less spells the end for upgrading the network before the start of the 22nd Century.

(More info on BT's 21CN: http://www.bsia.co.uk/21cn#whatisthelatest)

One small mercy... according to recent research, speeds of up to 300Mbps can be achieved over 400m by using a pair of copper wires. Over 4 or 5 miles, this 300Mbps will significantly decrease though and this won't be in place for a significant amount of time.

I predict that in the next 10-15 years, if BT haven't invested in significantly upgrading their network, they will begin to sell of the Broadband arm of the company.

If you do ONE THING after reading this blog post, check your bill and look at what speeds you're paying for, then try the Broadband Speed Check to see what speed you're actually getting.
At peak times, you'll be up against the other people in your street trying to browse the internet (knows as contention), so it's probably best to run the test at off-peak times and it's probably a good idea to run it a few times to get an average.

If there's a huge difference between what you pay for and what you're getting, it would save you money to contact your ISP and ask them to downgrade your package.

"Unlimited Data"

2010-06-24T15:25:00.000+01:00

It looks like the end for unlimited data on smartphones - at least for now.

The focus for the networks is now to limit the use of data traffic for their customers.
What a backwards step! The big networks (particularly O2) have realised that the profits they can rake in from customers exceeding their download limits far exceeds the profits that they could reap by enticing new customers through upgrading the already aging network infrastructure, thus increasing capacity.

Of course, what with the economy in the state it's in, it's no wonder that the likes of O2 doesn't want to invest in major upgrades. Although doing so would likely mean the employment of more workers, eventually more money in the pockets of the shareholders and a better deal for their customers.

An Adventure in High Definition!

2010-05-04T15:59:00.003+01:00

We finally succumbed to the allure of the High Definition era this bank-holiday weekend.

I've wanted to upgrade our old TV for a while now, and the bank holiday seemed like the best time.

The Purchase:

We had a budget in mind, and we spent a good deal of time researching TVs on the Internet.

The first thing that struck me was the huge choice that was available. Each TV has a mass of specifications that you would need a degree to fully understand. It seems that buying a TV has become just as technical as buying a new computer, in fact, these TVs have a lot in common with computers now.

The array of specifications was enormous:

Screen size
'HD Ready 720p' or 'Full HD 1080p'
Response rate (100Hz - 600Hz)
Response time (0.0001ms to 4ms)
Freeview/Freesat
Number of HDMI/other AV ports
Guarantee?
Stand?
Blu-Ray Player?
...and so on...

We looked at Samsung, Sharp, LG and Panasonic. Those were the main 4 for us.

In terms of price, we found the Samsung and LG sets to be the cheapest, but they also generally had the lowest reviewer opinions of the 4.

We considered Sharp because we get a discount through the NUS/Sharp Affinity Scheme. The sets we saw were LED backlit LCDs such as the LC46LU700E. Whilst these received a good overall review, the sound quality seemed universally poor across all reviews (CNET and Revoo).

Panasonic seem to have the best reputation amongst LCD/Plasma panels, and the choice in the Panasonic range was equally impressive/confusing.

We paid a quick visit to Marks and Spencer, and then almost immediately left. Their TVs were rather overpriced and they only had a few which were over 37" in size.

Next, we visited ETS in Plymouth and found them very eager to please. At that point, we hadn't settled on a make/model so they tried to steer us towards some of the lower-end Samsung sets. Unfortunately they weren't Full HD, and at second glance were quite expensive when compared to other places.

Finally, we popped into Richer Sounds. Within minutes, we had narrowed it down to 2 sets. One was an LG, and the other was a Panasonic. We had already seen good reviews on the Panasonic, so we settled on the TX-P50S10.

Whilst we hadn't originally wanted a 50" set, we couldn't ignore the price tag. For Full HD (1080p) this was a very good price. The 5 year warranty was an additional £69.95, but because Richer Sounds operate a price-match policy, and we saw the same TV for a little bit cheaper in the Panasonic Shop it was knocked down to £749, including the warranty.

We eventually managed to get it home in the mother-in-law's car, but not before collecting our complimentary Richer Sounds mugs.

We also researched and bought a Panasonic Blu-Ray player from the Panasonic Shop (DMP BD60) for £149 including a 3 year warranty:

The Setup:

When we got home, we spent an hour putting it together and setting it up. All is working fine.

It's recommended that on Plasma panels, you should turn the brightness and contrast down for the first 100 hours. More info on that here.

One thing i've noticed is that HDMI cables can be ridiculously expensive. On a brief visit to Comet, their cheapest cable was £19.99 and the most expensive was £120!

DO NOT be taken in by this false claim that an expensive cable is better than a £10 cheapo cable. They are exactly the same because the signal is digital. It's like swapping the USB cable on your printer hoping for a better quality print. It's just not going to happen.

The only time expensive cables are better is when you're running distances of over 6m because shielding becomes a neccesity.

The Virgin V+ box was extremely easy to set up. One downpoint though, is that the Virgin Media menus are not HD friendly. This leaves the menus fuzzy and hazy, although perfectly readable.

The Blu-Ray player was also very easy to set up. All you need is an HDMI cable to the TV and you're done.

The picture quality is excellent although the Blu-Ray player does take a minute to load the disc. It's worth it though for picture quality alone.

Now to invest in some Blu-Ray discs!

From Vista to Windows 7

2009-10-28T14:22:00.003Z

I've been running Windows Vista for about 18 months now, and whilst I haven't had too many problems, I wouldn't call myself an advocate either. In order to make Vista more workable, I had to apply a series of adjustments, which included switching off 'UAC' (User Account Control) to stop those annoying messages asking 'Are you sure' and 'Are you absolutely positive' etc etc.

For a lot of Vista users, there was a big issue with compatability. It took a while for software developers to get their software up to date so that it would run on Vista, and in some cases (particularly some areas of specialist software) this never happened. The manufacturers in their infinite wisdom began, for the first time in history, to offer a 'Downgrade' to Windows XP when buying a new machine with Vista OEM.

Being the adventurer that I am, I decided to run 2 types of upgrade. First I tried upgrading from Vista.
I can honestly say, it took absolutely forever. Probably because it wanted to compress a backup of all my files before the upgrade and decompress them afterwards.

The next day, I did a complete format and reinstall which took less than 30 minutes, so I was quite impressed. I was quite suprised that unlike it's predecessors, 100% of the setup was done in the GUI, which makes a change from the clunky DOS approach.

When the desktop eventually loaded, I was initially feeling slightly underwhelmed. The taskbar was double the thickness of the XP taskbar and the option to select the 'Classic Start Menu' had gone, leaving me with the double-columned Start Menu with the Control Panel/Documents shortcuts down the right-hand side.
Fair enough I suppose, considering that this layout was selected by default in Vista, and I suppose Microsoft want people to move away from the days of Windows 2000.

So, on to the taskbar. This is probably the first visibly noticable difference with Windows 7.
You now have a completely redesigned taskbar. Traditionally, when you had a program open, it would sit on your taskbar labelled "Microsoft Word - Blah.doc". No more. Instead, there's no text, just a little square icon for the program. If you want to know what documents are open in that program, you just hover the mouse over the top.

Right clicking on a taskbar icon also gives you some more options. You can add a shortcut for the program itself on the taskbar, which makes the entire thing look like a giant 'Quick Launch' area. You also have the ability to pin certain files to the context menu of their programs. For example, if you have a Word document called "Directory.doc" you can choose to pin this item to the Word context menu, and you can quickly open it.

There are also some clever functions such as 'Quick Peek', which lets you take a quick look at the windows behind the one you currently have open. Another, is a preview of the files you have open which you can view by hovering the mouse over the icons on the taskbar. Neither of these seem to work on my machine, for reasons I have yet to discover.

The System Tray has been cleaned up, and all of your underused icons are stored away in a menu accessible by clicking on a little arrow:

Fully customisable of course.

One of the big things for me is the improvement to UAC. There's now a slider bar to adjust how anal you want Windows 7 to be about your security settings. By default this is at an elevated level, but mine is set to 'Never Notify'.

Windows 7 has a (downloadable) feature called 'Windows XP Mode' which enables users with incompatible software to run their applications in a Windows XP environment (a Windows XP Virtual PC to you and me). Details of how to do that here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx (It's free by the way).

XP Mode in action:

So compatability-wise, all your bases are covered. (Be aware that to install XP Mode, you have to download an image of XP Pro, which is about 500MB).

Windows 7 has a much improved search facility, which allows for real-time searching in indexed locations. It also seems to search the Help system too, which is quite useful. Your search results are categorise, listing programs separately from files etc:

For fans of MacOSX Leopard/Snow Leopard, Windows 7 has obviously upped the game significantly here.

If you're a Mac user you'll instantly draw similarities such as the Launcher and the Windows 7 Taskbar. The search functionality is virtually identical to it's Mac counterpart.

Gizmodo sums up the differences quite well here:
http://gizmodo.com/5285452/os-x-snow-leopard-vs-windows-7-the-final-countdown

If you're looking for Outlook Express, you won't find it! It's been replaced by 'Windows Mail' which is another freely downloadable application and part of the Windows Live Essentials suite.

So what's the lowdown?

Windows 7 is what Vista should have been all along; Real competition for MacOSX Leopard/Snow Leopard, a logical step up from Windows XP, a workable solution for incompatible software, a great visual experience and of course, something that isn't going to bug the hell out of you when you try to delete a shortcut from the Start Menu!

The taskbar is a true winner and time saver. Although I do miss the Classic Start Menu, i'm sure I will grow to love it's chunky brother.

There are a few things I haven't gotten around to talking about, such as Windows Media Centre, which is now included as standard.

Licensing the Sale of Fireworks

2009-10-22T16:55:00.001+01:00

I have a problem with fireworks. They're amazing to look at, but as any pet owner will tell you, the 5th November is the most dreaded day of the year for a cat or dog. Hours cowering in the corner, and leaving the house just doesn't seem fair.

The fireworks don't just go off on 5th November though, they start much earlier than that and go on for weeks after. Every whizz and bang sends my cats dashing under the spare bed to cower in fear.

By licensing the sale of fireworks, it would immediately reduce the strain on the emergency services. Sale should be restricted to professionals who know what they are doing.
Employees of ICI spend a long time studying and have to pass exams in order to be able to handle explosives, but anyone of age can buy them at any newsagent or off-license.

I'm not a killjoy. If you want to see some spectacular fireworks, go to an organised event. Back yard fireworks are crap compared to the thousands of pounds spent every year by councils putting on organised displays. You're also supporting your local authority rather than just winding up the neighbours.

If you agree, please consider signing this existing petition: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/rockets/

I also have a Facebook group of the subject, if you would like to join: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7586335850

XBox Arcade & Streaming from my iMac

2009-09-02T10:37:00.005+01:00

Got a good deal for an XBox360 at the weekend from 'Game'. It was £139.99 for The Arcade version (no hard drive or HDMI cable included) with an additional wireless controller, 'Kung Fu Panda', 'Lego Indiana Jones' and 'SEGA Superstars Tennis'.

I spent a couple of hours last night neatly running a straight-through CAT5 cable from the XBox to my router, and setting up XBox Live. It's only now that i'm realising the neccessity of having a hard disk. I wanted to download a demo, and I had no hard disk to put it on. There's no option to use your own USB hard drive, it has to be an official XBox drive. Fair enough I suppose, they're about £30 for a 20GB drive, so I can do that further down the line.

One of the cool features I wanted was to use it to stream video from my iMac. I know it works from a Windows PC, so it should be fairly similar with a Mac right? Wrong!

Turns out I have to buy some software to do that. Luckily, there seem to be a couple of applications to do that. One is called 'Connect360' and sits as a control panel applet in your 'System Preferences' and allows you to share your songs from iTunes, your video from your 'Movies' folder and your Photos from iLife. Unfortuately, I keep my video on an external drive so that's pretty useless for me.
The other is called 'Rivet'. Rivet is similar, but runs from the top bar. It allows you to add individual folders for sharing video, which is very useful.

I also tried using 'Vuze' (beware, Vuze has known issues with Snow Leopard), which is infinitely easy to set up, because you don't actually have to! As long as your XBox is on the same network as your Mac, your XBox will show up in the menu. You just drag a video file onto the XBox icon in the left had menu bar and it will offer to transcode it for you, if required and it's immediately available as a network location on the Video Blade of your XBox. Easy!

I'm a bit of a tidy-freak, so I like having everything in it's place, which is why i'm persevering with Rivet, so I don't have to go dragging files all over the place. At only $18.95 (about £10, it's a bit of a bargain!)

Mandelson to make pirates walk the plank

2009-08-27T14:20:00.002+01:00

Mandelson truly is an analog man living in a digital age. If he thinks restricting and disabling the accounts of suspected pirates is the way forward, he ought to think again.
Maybe it's me, but these Draconian measures seem totally unenforcable. Mandy hasn't lost the plot, because he never even bought (or downloaded) the script.

Take Dave Jones, your typical internet user. He spends about 3-4 hours a day on the web browsing, checking his email, surfing Youtube for cats falling off fences etc. Dave probably isn't going to hit his download limit.

Now take Pete Smith. He's into IT and works a lot from home. He spends his working day on the web, dialling into remote sites via his VPN*, downloading Linux distros* and service packs* for his and his friend's PCs. He REPEATEDLY hits his download limit and his connection has STM* imposed, restricting his download speed.

Lastly, lets take Mary Bloggs. She's a student and into movies and is always chatting to her friends on Skype/iChat with her webcam. Stuck in her dorm room, she'll download a movie using the iTunes video store. Unfortnately for her, that's kicked in STM again.

So if Mandy wants to punish REPEAT offenders, who he perceives to be downloading illegal content, how is he going to be able to tell the difference between the above and the pirates?

The answer is simple. He can't. Data protection laws are in force to protect the information sent and received by private individuals on the internet (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3033633.stm and http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/25/mandelson-web-cutoff-plan-attacked)

Whilst filesharing is illegal and immoral, it's not as clear cut as Mandy would like us all to think.

*If you don't know what any of these are, ask Peter Mandelson.