How AOL killed a company’s email

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

AOL is a long-standing provider of online services. I choose that sentence with care: firstly because I want to draw a distinction between “online services” and “internet access”, and secondly because I want to dispose of the fact that far back in the mists of time, there were plenty of PC Pro types, including me and erstwhile editorial director Mr Derek Cohen, who had AOL accounts. For several years, this was a mainstay of my internet access, so trust me when I say that it gives me no pleasure at all to relate this current, 2013 tale of woe.

My client is a wholesaler of raw materials to the fashion business. It has a small list of customers and every so often, it has an over- or under-supply of its principal product. My client has tell its customer base whether it’s sensible to make orders or to hold off, and it has been using a mailing list to do this job for several years. Unbeknownst to my client, there are some gaping holes in its success rate when it comes to mail delivery, and the principal source of the problem here is AOL.

If AOL thinks it has detected incoming UCE (unsolicited commercial emails, to use an acronym that doesn’t come from a Monty Python sketch featuring lots of vikings) then it takes pretty serious and far-reaching action. Rather than responding to the spammer’s apparent reply-to address with a notification of UCE status, AOL goes straight to the top of the tree and threatens the ISP that hosted or forwarded the traffic with a blanket block of not only that customer’s mail, but all customers’ mail. Stopping the flow of identified messages is the only solution it will accept.

(more…)

Thatcher’s tech legacy: an inconvenient truth

Tuesday, April 9th, 2013

There are no shortage of reasons to regret the influence of the late Baroness Thatcher. Her death has produced an understandable outpouring of bile from those who believe that a Thatcherless world would have been a better place, though I confess I don’t understand their emotional approach to the matter, best summarised as “good riddance to the politician who did more than any other to ensure the death of social compassion in the UK”, which to my mind demonstrates far less compassion than anything she managed to achieve…

That’s hardly a matter for us techies, however. Instead, I want to highlight something that is tech-centric, yet which at the time was taken to be an irrelevant sideshow.

It surprises me how much I turn out to know about telecommunications – not in terms of all the protocols and structures, but rather in terms of the companies and the relationships and the winds of change. I think this has a lot to do with my late uncle, who was “something” in the GPO before British Telecom was moved out into a separate but still government-run entity.  Even though he didn’t bring his work back to the family very much, some genetic osmosis seems to have taken place, and it’s against that background that the death of Thatcher cast my mind back to what life was genuinely like in the early 1980s.

(more…)

Could Corning’s toughened fibre cables be the making of Thunderbolt?

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

The picture above tells its own story. This was the Corning Glass stand at CeBIT. Rather small, I thought for such a big name in computing, and only really focusing on its optical cable business, but that was intriguing enough.

I like the idea of an optical, 30-metre USB 3 or Thunderbolt cable, with transceivers small and low-power enough to fit into an only fractionally larger USB 3 plug at either end. But when I started thinking through the implications of what Corning was proposing, I hit a rock.

The last time I put in an optical fibre by myself (by buying a very long patch lead, admittedly) it bordered on the farcical, because any damage to that lead and the whole idea was toast. A lot can happen to a humble cable over a 100ft run, from mice to vacuum cleaners to incautious furniture movements, and I was used to the old assessment of optical fibre of any kind: it’s fragile. Certainly more fragile than the equivalent copper.

(more…)

The wall that knows whether you’re a criminal

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

It’s pretty common to end up wandering around CeBIT in a daze. The size of the show (there are bus routes inside the showground), the hubbub of languages, and the constant obstructions caused by gawping nerds. It was while semi-hypnotised, then, and irritated by a crowd behind me and a crowd in front of me, that I got my wake-up call, taking the form of the system of which I took the very bad picture above.

It’s not a cartoon-face pre-processor: it claims to be an automatic face recognition and fraud-prediction system. It was on the stand of German identity-management firm Dermalog, though I confess I was jostled so much by gurning techies eager to get a picture, of their picture, on this screen that I didn’t manage to verify how complete the development is.

(more…)

That’s not a backup disk, it’s a mousetrap

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

I’ve just had one of those scary conversations with someone about backup. The one where your reaction to their interpretation of “external backup disk” leaves you gasping for breath for such a prolonged period that you make a right mess of explaining that they have taken leave of their senses.

So, on the off-chance he recognises himself in this blog, I’m going to have another go at explaining his error: in part because I want to make sure his type of mistake is clearly flagged amongst those who have to clean up after a data-loss disaster, and also because my mind is still very full of the rich variety of disks I saw with their rusty, iron intestines all spilled out on the clean room desks at Kroll Ontrack, down in Surrey, a couple of weeks ago.

My friend said to me: “I’ve got my data saved nicely onto one of those external disks”. No problem there, you might say. Prudent fellow. But then I saw he was pointing to one of those plastic cased USB external drives – the ones you see going for a bean and a smartie in high street gadget and electrical retailers.

(more…)

A breathtaking trip to the Parallels Summit

Friday, February 8th, 2013

Serguei Beloussov flew a million kilometres in 2012. This probably explains why the founder and still active chairman of Parallels held his annual Summit in Las Vegas this year – he probably did it purely on the Air Miles.

Before he got up on stage, some of the Parallels team had verbally labelled his session Serguei Unplugged, meaning that nobody really knew what he was going to say or how he was going to relate it to the core business that Parallels has decided is its home turf – namely, providing cloud hosts with a toolbox to move from the old Linux http-only web hosting universe, over to a much more complicated and powerful suite of services.

A man after my on heart, Serguei’s slide stack included a “Strategy Bird” sagely advising some beleaguered mice, a nuclear icebreaker, references to Richard P Feynman and David Deutsch, and even some Sim City-like graphics to refer to instant teleportation – pretty much everything except web hosting software platforms.

(more…)

VMware Mirage: run a Windows PC from your iPad

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

Someone at VMware, I reckon, is a Doctor Who fan. Not only have we had the cliffhanger ending to Tuesday’s session, with the data centre administrators griping about the awkward and ever-changing requirements to run vSphere Administration consoles on their super-nerd custom-special workstation PCs, but also, yesterday, we had the (partial) answer to a mystery, which involves an iPad that’s considerably bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

This is the result of a good few years of development and acquisitions, and has hidden behind a variety of codenames while development has been in progress. This year it’s demonstrable, and it’s called Mirage – a stack of technologies, protocols, and tools that conspire to hoover up your laptop’s hard disk in its entirety, make it safe within a farm of VM hosts, and then either put it back down on a newer machine when you upgrade, or play the same image within the VM Hypervisor, displaying everything that was on your old laptop via the new iPad remote access client.

(more…)

VMworld 2012: Gelsinger sockets it to ‘em

Wednesday, October 10th, 2012

Thirty eight days into his role as CEO of VMware, the former Intel executive Pat Gelsinger stood up in front of 7,000 European VMware afficionados, in front of a big projection of a sign reading “no vRAM”.

This got the biggest cheer from the audience, and gave Gelsinger a chance to be charmingly frank in front of the European media in the later press conference. No, he said, it wasn’t his liberating declaration the first day he joined the firm, replacing Paul Maritz: the decision to change to per-socket licencing was already on the table as a clear sign from the VMware faithful that the licence pricing model should be abandoned, and Gelsinger was happy to take the credit for arriving just in time to make the announcement.

As is becoming normal at these shows, there were comparatively few trumpet-blast major version releases on offer – just more of a process of consolidating existing gains, though I was sitting there wondering exactly what the gains might look like once you’re installed within 100% of the Fortune 500 companies, as is the case for VMware these days.

(more…)

Don’t rush headlong into IPv6

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

If you dip four links deep from the BBC story about World IPv6 day (that’s today) then you will eventually see a banner headline: “This time it’s for real”.

This is partway down the page at the World IPv6 Launch wesbite, after a surprisingly short list of only 14 participating technology companies, and is about all you’re going to see in the up-front materials that makes any reference to just how long this whole project has been in the works. I think that the simplicity of the statements made is a bit of a breakthrough for the technologists and agencies responsible for IPv6, whose minds are normally preoccupied with the delights of colonic quad notation, rather than easy-to-digest English. Incidentally, on the colonic quads – anyone who has had to explain to uptight clients why their unused, default IPv6 configuration includes FECC:00FF as a valid v6 address will already know just how irritating this whole business really can be.

I won’t recast the kindergarten explanations here, aside from saying that as per usual, Vint Cerf has managed to be technically accurate and commendably short in his blog. What I will say is that I have been spending quite a long time now on another planet entirely (that’ll explain the unanswered phone calls – Ed). I don’t mean by hitching a ride on Virgin Galactic – I mean that I’ve got a pure IPv6 connection, and have had for rather more than a year, and the address allocation I have been given is a /64. This means it has as many bits – and therefore, as many potential unique addresses – as all of Planet Earth, on good old IPv4.

(more…)

Warranties, app stores and me

Friday, January 6th, 2012

My late uncle and I were very different people. Despite being the two ‘fixers’ in the family, the ones who got the busted kettles and the snapped gear cables from the rest of the clan, we were poles apart in one area: our approach to warranties. Even though he would keep his cars going for 20 years, he had a very sharp understanding of what should be his responsibility, and what was down to the vendor.

Actually, that’s an understatement. Woe betide the firm whose slipshod customer handling captured his attention. Once the horn-rimmed specs and the Brylcreemed bonce were aimed in their direction, he would pursue them relentlessly, his measured drawl torturing their receptionists until they actually did put him through to the MD or the Company Secretary (which incidentally is still quite a good one to try, since chancers seldom know enough about company law and structure to try that route).

(more…)