I know salted caramel has been quite the in thing for some time, but finally, M&S have now caught on, and now do a pretty decent salted caramel ice cream.
It’s good, yes. But it, like others, is still nowhere near as good as the salted caramel made by Bi-rite creamery in San Francisco’s Mission District.
But, 11000 miles a long round trip (and a lot of jet lag) for some ice cream. Even ice cream that good. So M&S will just have to do when I want a treat… 🙂
Getting your large supermarket shop delivered is a double-edged sword.
You don’t have to go to the supermarket, which is a plus point. I also think it means I save money, even after including the delivery charge, as I’m not having to pay for petrol and I don’t make impulse buys.
But, you do miss gems such as this…
Sainsbury’s did some relaunching of their curry ready meal range since I last actually browsed around one of their shops. They haven’t significantly changed things – the quality is still the same, they make one of the best supermarket curry ranges, I think.
They have repackaged things and added a few new dishes… including a Chicken Phal!
For the uninitiated, a phal is a notch up from a vindaloo on the strength-o-meter, a scorching hot curry allegedly invented by British curry chefs to satisfy the macho desires of pissed up lads who enjoy eating their curry while bathed in sweat, crying.
For those of you who don’t believe me, here it is…
This probably has to go down as the hottest supermarket ready meal available. I wonder how it’s selling?
Last week, I was at the NANOG conference in Vancouver.
The opening day’s agenda featured a thought provoking keynote talk from Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim, now co-founder and Chief Development Officer of Arista Networks, entitled “Moore’s Law and Networking“.
The basic gist of the talk is that while Moore’s Law continues to hold true for the general purpose computing chips, it has not applied for some time to development of networking technology. Continue reading “Networking equipment vs. Moore’s Law”
The short answer is “No“.
There has been speculation in the press, such as this Computer Weekly article, but I would say that it’s poorly informed, and even suggests that LINX’s pioneering deployment of Juniper’s PTX MPLS core switch might be a factor (which I think is a red herring).
It looks to have been some sort of storm of flooded traffic (such as unknown unicast, or broadcast) or problem in a network that’s attached to LINX, which managed to either congest the bandwidth of various ISP’s access lines into LINX, or congest the CPU on some of the attached routers, to the extent that they became unable to forward customer traffic, or unable to maintain accurate routing information (i.e. lost control plane integrity).
But, why did it appear to start on one of the two LINX peering platforms (the Extreme-based network) and then cascade to the physically seperate Juniper-based LAN?
I think one of the main reasons is because lots of ISP routers are connected to both LANs, as are the routers operated by the likely “problem” network which originated the flood of traffic in the first place. I’ve written before on this blog about why having a small number of routers connected to a larger number of internet exchanges can be a bad idea.
I’m pressed for time (about to get on a plane), so I’ll quickly sum up with some informed speculation:
I don’t think…
I do think…
I’m sure there will be more details forthcoming from LINX in due course. Their staff are trained not to make speculation, nor to talk to the press, during an incident. Even those who handle press enquiries are very careful not to speculate or sensationalise, which I’m sure dissapoints those looking for a story.
The moral of this story is redundancy and diversity are important elements of good network engineering and you shouldn’t be putting all your eggs in one basket.
Disclaimer: I used to work for LINX, and I like to think I’ve got more than half a clue when it comes to how peering and interconnect works.
Those of you following the UK tech press, or are affected Virgin Media customers, will be aware of an issue that had been affecting some VM users’ access to the Internet.
There was no apparent rhyme or reason to the websites which failed, and in some cases, the site itself may have been working, but made very slow because other collateral hosted on third-party sites (e.g. performance measurement and marketing tools) were unreachable, or very slow.
One of the most memorable articles is the one which contained the comment “The people in the call centre are extremely dumb and it’s like talking to a tree.” (ISP Review).
Much speculation has been directed at some new or changed traffic management, traffic shaping, filtering, or deep-packet inspection (DPI) going awry inside Virgin Media’s network. It’s well known that Virgin Media apply traffic management in their network, such as “clamping” the bandwidth available to super-heavy users who use more than what VM consider a fair share of the bandwidth.
The concern many (especially the various public rights’ groups) have is that the desire some authorities have to increase the amount of monitoring, blocking access to “undesirable sites”, and logging and retaining things such as email conversations, will only serve to increase the amount of unusual, irregular, and hard to trace, service problems such as these.
One thing to bear in mind is that the technology being used in DPI is still an evolving science. This means it has warts and all. I’ve seen DPI devices mangle packets in transit – including packets which shouldn’t have been touched by the DPI, but allowed to pass unhindered – so badly that they were undeliverable to their intended destination.
It seems likely that this is what’s happened here, so it’s not a load of arm-waving about a hollow concern that’s being raised by those who don’t believe in DPI. There’s a real threat here – of unreliability and incorrectly filtered traffic – to legitimate Internet use.
Which brings me on to every cloud having a silver lining, as they say.
In this case, privately owned North West-based provider Zen Internet decided it was time to highlight the Zen approach to Traffic Management – No Throttling, No Squeezing – issuing a news release explaining how they operate a transparent network, with no DPI, and an open, fair and easy to understand pricing policy for internet access, with no complex rules or hidden gotchas.
Good for them.
Disclosure: I am a (happy) Zen Internet customer, they keep my folks’ home online, and do a very good job of it. It just works. I’m also potentially moving to an area where it seems the only high-speed broadband available might be Virgin Media. I spent about half-an-hour trying to work out how their obtuse and opaque pricing structure worked and which was the right “bundle” for me before giving up and hitting the bottle. I’d rather know that what I’m paying for is reliable and unfettered, if slower.
Before you get too excited, I’ve not heard anything back from the powers that be at UK railway operator East Coast about the data protection concerns I have after booking tickets online. It’s only been a week. Let’s give them some time…
However, I did make the train journey whose booking let me to be concerned about the excessive and irrelevant data they were collecting, which could only be stored for one reason, and that is to improve their market intelligence.
During the journey, I used the on-train wifi, for which it requires you to “register”, and asks you provide another stream of compulsory personal information. While they didn’t want to know my inside leg measurement this time, again they want to know who I am, where I live, what’s my nearest station, and what is my reason for travelling, again as “mandatory” responses, before allowing you to use the on-train wifi service.
I don’t understand how your nearest station, or why you’re travelling, are relevant to allowing you to access the on-train internet access service. Of course, I didn’t actually put any genuine details in this contact form.
This wifi registration page also presents the “opt-in” for marketing email as already ticked – so if you don’t notice and don’t untick the box, you’re opted in to their email marketing. While it complies with the letter of the law, it doesn’t really feel to be in the spirit of the law.
What’s your perception of East Coast’s data collection and retention policies based on what you’ve read?
I happened to come across an interesting graph while looking at the stats which photo-sharing site Flickr collect from the EXIF data that sometimes arrives with the uploaded images.
One of the things contained in the EXIF data is what sort of device produced the image, who made it, what model, etc. Flickr analyses this in the “Camera Finder“.
Here’s the graph of the most popular cameraphones used on images posted to Flickr over the past 12 months.
One thing this seems to confirm is that iPhone users seem to be a faithful bunch.
The other thing it confirms is the theory that many iPhone users don’t upgrade their handset with every generation, but are likely to “skip” a generation – borne out by the step decline in iPhone 3G images matched by a step growth in images posted from the 4S, while the iPhone 4 only sees a small dip coinciding with the release of the 4S.
The 3GS has a steadily dwindling userbase, and it will be interesting to see if and how these jump ship. I still have a 3GS. In the main I’m happy with it and what it does, and there’s nothing which tells me I need to upgrade to a 4S. I guess that places me into the “long tail” of 3GS users.
It’s also interesting to note the Apple domination of the top 5. I wonder if that graph will look the same by this time next year?
IBM has banned it’s staff from using Siri – Big Blue has allowed it’s staff to BYOD and use their iPhone 4S on the company’s networks, but banned the use of Siri over fears that the sound bites uploaded for processing by Siri could contain IBM proprietary information, which could be stored indefinitely, and analysed by Apple.
This isn’t a new concern for corporates. It came to the forefront when employees commonly used services like MSN Messenger to keep in touch with their colleagues, and of course all but the paranoid thought nothing of discussing company business over IM, in unencyrpted packets, routed over the commodity Internet, to some server farm their employer didn’t have any control over. Who knows if and how long a messaging service could retain transcripts of chat sessions? Or if the packets were “sniffed” in transit and the transcript rebuilt?
Companies then got wise and started to provide internal IM systems which they had control over, and having their IT departments block external chat platforms (let’s assume we’re talking about vanilla users who don’t know how to punch their way through these things for now). This also obviously helped for things like regulatory compliance.
Most recently, this has moved into the social networking arena, with things such as Twitter and Facebook – people have lost their jobs over committing corporate faux-pas on a publically viewable service. This has opened the doors to platforms such as Yammer, a SAAS-based corporate social networking platform, who seek to give the company back some control. All the things your employees know and love about social networking, but just for your company and it’s staff, with you in control of the data and the rules. Your regulatory compliance people can sleep easier at night.
So, while there’s no current evidence to support the notion that Apple are using Siri to spy on Big Blue, it’s fair to say that IBM aren’t bellyaching: I think it’s a legitimate data privacy concern, and it’s one that you should share.
When you post something on Twitter, or Facebook, or write a blog, you know that you’re putting it out into some sort of public (or shared) domain. You expect other people to see it, and you expect it to be stored (though maybe you’re not clear on just how long it’s being stored!).
I think people’s mindset is different when talking to Siri. They have the concept, in their head, they are talking to their phone, and overlook the fact that what they’ve just said has been uploaded to a server farm, possibly in a location outside of their home jurisdiction, to be processed. Do those of you who use Siri even think about that is what happens? Or that what they have just said has been placed into storage, potentially forever?
So many of the geeks I know are horders by nature, so it’s a force of habit for them to turn on lots of logging and want to keep everything forever (or at least until the storage runs out or they can’t afford anymore), “just in case they need it”, and I suspect the backend of Siri is written no differently, because that’s how programmers are.
Given a company the size of Apple, I don’t think there’s any concerns about the storage running out, and the Siri licence agreement doesn’t say for how long you’re consenting to Apple storing the soundbites collected by Siri. With a large enough sample size, statistical analysis also makes it easier to find needles in such haystacks, and we’re getting increasingly good at it.
Could market intelligence generated from analysis of Siri requests even be revenue stream for Apple in due course?
My opinion is that it is a legitimate privacy concern…
…at least if you’re UK train operator East Coast.
I thought nothing of booking some train tickets online. I even got a decent deal. I doubt I could have done the journey cheaper in the car. They wanted me to register with the site, but then, most train companies do. They gave you an option to opt-out of email, which I took.
So, you can imagine my surprise when the next day, I got an email from East Coast, which started with “Now that you’re registered with us, we’ll be able to send you exclusive offers by email…”
Erm. No, you shouldn’t be…
So, I thought I’d log into the East Coast website and check my communication preferences.
Not only did it show me as being opted in, but in order to untick the box and opt out, you have to complete some mandatory information in the “My account” page, before it will save the preferences and unsubscrive you from their mailshots.
What sort of information is it asking for?
Now, having to fill this irrelevant information in just to change your preferences and unsubscribe from a mailing list, seems a bit excessive, don’t you think?
Note that you don’t have to give any of this information when ordering the train ticket itself (otherwise I’d have gone to an alternate online ticket seller, if I’d have known), just if you need to change anything in your account.
Yes, it’s very obvious that they are harvesting this information to build market intelligence, but this should not be collected on a mandatory basis.
I also tried the “Unsubscribe” link in the marketing email they sent, however that seems to have no effect on the preferences shown in the account on their website, which still show me as opted in.
Such an attitude to collection and retention of personal data seems a bit cavalier, doesn’t it?
I very sensibly used a + sign and token in the email address I used when signing up with East Coast, which makes the email address they use to reach me unique to them. So if they are seriously cavalier (i.e. stupid enough to sell it on to a third party) then I know whodunnit.
(Another irony is that the input sanity checking in their email contact form won’t accept a + sign token, of course, while their website will as part of a username.)
It seems East Coast may find themselves foul of the Email Marketing Regulations and the Data Protection Act:
I had a quick chat with a very helpful person from the ICO helpline yesterday, about how to approach the complaint, they agreed that it didn’t seem right that one had to provide such personal data in order to change one’s email marketing preferences, and told me to conduct all communication with East Coast in writing and keep copies of everything.
I’ve written (yes, snail mail!) directly to a suitably senior bod at East Coast explaining my concerns, and I’ll let you know what I hear.
A few months ago, I wrote about what I percieved to be going wrong with Digital Region, the local-authority backed superfast broadband wholesale network in South Yorkshire.
It seems that matters have not improved since then: a Sheffield-based hosting company, KDA, has written an Open Letter to Digital Region, which pretty much confirms that everything which was true several months ago is still true today, and goes on to suggest that there’s enough experience and skill in the tech community in South Yorkshire to turn this around, if only those in charge were willing (able?) to change tack and allow the community to steer the organisation.
It’s also alluded that a cut-price disposal of the network assets, which should rightly be the South Yorkshire taxpayer’s, for a cut-price may already be in hand, and that a failure of DR will be associated generally with the South Yorkshire tech industry, tarring it’s (generally good) reputation.
DR shouldn’t be the way it is – DR should be more agile than the large telcos, and find it easier to be more focused on the needs of the local userbase, but it isn’t. It seems to be strangled by inflexibility and bureaucratic behaviour, which needs to change if it’s to survive, and deliver the promise that the local authorities set out to achieve. But, at the moment, I’m doubtful that this will happen. The peppercorn sell-off probably feels like an easy way out, however much it’s short-changing South Yorks residents and business in the process.
You can read the full text of the Open Letter here.
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