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.

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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.

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Is Apple rattled by Samsung? Let’s hope so

Monday, March 18th, 2013

Defensive, prickly and occasionally flat-out disingenuous, Apple’s attempt to swing undecided buyers to the iPhone is great news. For Android users, it confirms that the long wait for an alternative mobile platform that you can bring home to your parents is almost over. Apple’s anti-Android potshots are an indication that Android has finally come of age for consumers.

That’s good news for everyone. If Apple now sees Android as a real threat, it will have to find ways to stop users drifting away. In the long run, Apple on the back foot should mean nicer, better-value products. In the short term it means snippy, linkbait anti-Android marketing barely worth the HTML it’s written on – but still, Apple’s rattled. That can only be a good thing.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Geek 2013: a great celebration of British gaming

Thursday, February 28th, 2013

At the weekend I drove down to Margate, not to buy a ‘kiss me quick’ hat nor bask in the winter sunshine riding on the back of the famous beach donkeys. No, I was there to visit the Winter Gardens where Geek 2013 was being held for its second year.

The Winter Gardens are, for those of you who don’t know, a series of halls where various shows and performances are held. I was visiting Geek 2013 with my 25-year-old game-loving son, Oliver.  There were several people dressed as gaming characters and a large stage with a presentation about what to look for when choosing a wig for your Cosplay character.

A more magnificent sight greeted us when we entered one of the side halls. This was a huge, dark, noisy room full of screens connected to every gaming machine you could imagine. Everything was hands-on and so you could play the original version of a particular game on the original console or machine it was written on.

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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.

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The techs to watch in 2013

Monday, December 31st, 2012

With the January sales looming, you might be wondering whether it’s time to grab a bargain, or whether you should  hold out a little longer and see what technologies the new year brings. I’ve been closely watching the industry in 2012, and keeping track of announcements for the coming year – and below you’ll find my predictions of what’s going to happen in various areas of technology in 2013.

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Mobile data survey: tell us your results

Thursday, October 18th, 2012

Last week I wrote about a feature we’re going to be running soon, in which we try to work out what mobile data allowance the average person needs on their contract. I asked you to download and run a traffic monitoring app on your phone for seven days (even if you didn’t, you can still help).

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