BYOD?

Am I the only one thinking that it's still way too early for BYOD to start blaming that as a significant factor?

Oh Look...

Yet another tough hand of justice dished out from the ICO to a public body and public purse.

But if a private business is involved in a data offence, they get away with blaming it on a rogue employee or third party, receive big hug from the ICO and "guidance" to ensure it doesn't happen again.

They overpayed, should be £0* :-)

As per "http://www.europe-v-facebook.org/" I am more interested in the alleged 16 counts of Data Protection Act violations inherent in their service framework. Or the fact that they went on public record stating that they will not honour the lawful 40 day response time for Subject Access Requests if the volume of requests is too high. I don't believe the DPA makes any provision for such excuses?

So in other words, if they cannot operate lawfully within the boundaries of UK/EU Law, they should not exist. Unfortunately we have seen the Irish Data Commissioner only issue "non binding recommendations" - nice to see the usual “one rule for big business, one rule for everyone else” principles of the regulators is alive and well.

So in terms of their accounts and tax, I offer an interpretation that they're not that dishonest after all. Because I would give their European operations a valuation of £0 because if they are non-compliant with the laws in those territories, with any justice could/should be shutdown at any time. And as for their growing user base, well I don't know a single person who doesn't have at least 1 fake FB profile. *yes this is tongue in cheek, to make the point.

Wi-Fi is flakey

I think people are failing to consider why Wi-Fi may not be supported yet.

Do we need a brief lesson in Wifi?

So the most common is 801.g 54Mb. That 54Mb isn't per connected device, it's shared across all connected devices. It's a half-duplex medium also meaning you can half that figure straight away. The highest rate any one device can achieve in the real world is around 20Mb. And that's assuming that Wifi is 100% clean and not also being shared with your Xbox, PC, Tablet, Smartphone etc for any serious use at the same time.

Now remember there are only 3 non-overlapping WiFi channels, yet in my street that are about 8 AP's in range. Every other AP on the same channel as mine eats into that shared 54mb of radio space even more. And that's without even considering high error correction overheads to co-exist in the same space as others.

Sure 20Mb is going to be fine for standard def streaming, but it's getting close for HD. WiFi is inherently an un-assured technology and subject to all kinds of operating conditions and interference.

It's well known that in the age of 40mb and 80Mb FTTC broadband, 802.1g 54Mb Wifi is now a bottleneck.

None of these issues occur on a 100Mb piece of Ethernet cable connected to a full duplex switch port.

Based on that, it occurs to me that YouView do not yet wish to risk having their brand tarnished by floods of support calls about chopping and buffering video etc because the end user has a poor WiFi setup. Even if they sent an engineer out to optimise everything, there is nothing to stop a neighbour standing up a new AP the very next day on the same channel wiping out that finely tuned setup.

As for Wireless N-150 or N-300 these are indeed a solution. Unfortunately for me I upgraded my router and several devices to Wireless N last year and for the life in me I cannot get anything to connect above 54Mb. I'm not sure if it's due to vendor mix of not quite standards compliant devices or that it's because I'm using the 2.4Ghz Wireless N so presumably there is simply not enough channel space left in there after all the other AP's in the neighbourhood have taken their slice.

Or, I as tried in vain to explain to my employer about 10 years ago when they started rolling out WiFi as some kind of utopia, you cannot guaranete thin air, and without very expensive tools you can't troubleshoot it either.

To be fair...

I've seen at least two iPhone's where it's actually the glass like rear cover that has shattered like glass, not the screen itself. Which has yelled out to me "bad design", because that decision has increased the probability of leaving the consumer with a smashed phone by 100%.

Of course I'm not saying that's sufficient to make a court case from. Ultimately the judge is right. If you drop fragile things, they break, durrrrrrrh. But it does beg the questions -

Why intentonally make a product which is twice as likely to "smash" on an impact

Why buy something so expensive that is easier to damage than alternatives that have rubberised backs or easily replaceable rear battery covers. Though I guess if you haven't it with your own eyes, you're unlikely to know.

And with a bit of luck....

They may even go bankrupt, taking their service and all their customer's data with them.

Whilst I take no pleasure in wishing that on their loyal employees, a long, hard lesson about the rank stupidy of cloud services needs to be learned.

I wish I could be bothered....

But I'm not. Await feedback. Await SP1. Deploy.

YouView vs Windows Media Centre + TunerfreeMCE

.................................................................................................................. YV.....MCE/TF

A common front end user interface for ALL UK TV catch up services...... 1......... 1

The ability to do the above since 2008...................................................... 0......... 1

The ability to take your chances with WiFi connection............................. 0......... 1

Not have viewing habits data-mined for behavioural advertising............. 0......... 1

Choice of Freeview HD or Freesat HD for primary broadcast content..... 0......... 1

Freeview and Freesat carry on working if broadband is down................... ?......... 1

The ability to access US IPTV services over VPN................................... 0........ 1

The ability to purchase VOD content....................................................... 1......... 0

Ease of use for the technically challenged............................................... 1......... 0

So in short, I've already been enjoying the majority benefits of the YouView service for 4+ years thanks to a mini-PC under the telly. The question now is price. If YV STP's stick to the rumoured £300 ballpark, the challenge is to build a legit Win7 PC to go under the telly for a similar cost and I'm quietly confident that is achieveable. Sure I'll lose out of the premium subscription content, but I'm a freetard and wouldn't be buying any anyway. If I did fancy a Lovefilm or Netflix subscription, my TV has support for both integrated anyway.

The only thing I can see YV succeeding on is if they carry BT's new Premier League channel and it isn't wholesaled to other platforms - a killer app. But that's about it. How's the YV business model work anyway? Ok, there'll be a comission on any PayTV content, but the take up on the pay-for-extras remains to be proven, as BT already found out to their cost having first launched BT Vision as a subscription-free service, hoping that people would buy some premium VOD. Presumably they didn't given BT Vision changed to a monthly subscription model. A one off STB purchase isn't going to perpetually fund the infrastructure behind the service, so I have a running theory that YV will attempt to inject personalised advertising into your otherwise free and unfettered UK TV catchup viewing for a recurring profit, and charge the user £300 for the priviledge! No thanks!

Wow. Their deception and contempt for their users really has no bounds does it?

I also had a carrier locked install of Facebook on my mobile. This was the sole reason that drove me to root my handset and destroy this work of evil. And my phone is running twice as good on a Custom ROM :-)

I wonder what line in their T&C's permit them to make changes to personal data on a personal mobile device that is completely unrelated to the FB App or FB service? Sounds like an offence under the Computer Misuse Act (or the US version) - unauthorised access to and modification of data. Even if this is allowed through their T&C's my next thought would be - unfair contract terms. What about damages for loss of this data, and who's going to re-populate the original email addresses?

OK we're not exactly short on examples, but yet again FB prove they treat their users with utter contempt. I'll give it a couple of weeks until FB say sorry, didn't mean to, and won’t happen again. Only so they can do something equally insidious 3 months later. And so the cycle repeats, as we have seen time and time again. It's time for FB to die. But even if millions of their users close their accounts to protest, welcome to problem number two. That deactivating an FB account doesn't delete any the data they have on you, so they can still carrry on profiting from selling your data (albeit perhaps anonymised).

FB is nothing but one of the biggest data scams in modern history. The thought process must have gone like this... "Hmmmm personal data is valuable. We can profit from this. But how do we get people to handover their sex, age, interests etc? I know, let's call it social networking, where under the rouse of staying in touch with friends, we'll get people to hand this stuff over to us freely"!

AND IT WORKED! 900 MILLION PEOPLE FELL FOR IT!

VP Of Hardware Engineering?

He should be so proud. Like that "really cool" engineering that gave us the grip of death antenna.

!=Outsourcing best practice

No better example of failing to consider the golden rule "do not outsource a function that is critical to your core business". Like a banks mainframe perhaps...

Deja Vu?

Haven't we heard all this before in the hyping of previous OS releases?

I'm sure they tried telling us previously that Vista was more secure, then Win7...

Yawn.

ooooh shock

The ICO lands another hefty fine on a public service organisation, presumably taking money away from front line service and back to the treasury.

Yet all the while, if a private company whom commits a data offense, the ICO's stance is softly softly, work with them to help them follow the guidlines and a token pocket change fine if we're lucky.

It's about time the NHS learned to deploy the "actions of a single rogue employee" defence which get's you completely off the hook, or at least it does for a private company.

So I implore all El Reg readers here, follow the pattern of how the ICO exercises it's powers against public sector vs private and you'll see this is true.

All the while the ICO is still considering its position of Google's national WiFi slurp data rape. They failed to investigate, took Google's word for it at every stage, and then only thanks to the US FCC actually knowing how to investigate something, the ICO are left looking more weak and incompetent than words can justify.

Respect

Massive Kudos to IBM for being one of the first in this hyperbole rich industry for seeing through this nonsense and appreciating that cloudy services, and consumerism I.T. are not things that a company with the first clue about information security should be buying into.

BYOD isn’t about saving money, or being employee friendly. Never has been, never will be. The whole thing obviously started when the VIP’s, who bought their shiny iPad’s on expenses, then went bitching to their IT dept’s like spoilt children as they realised they can’t do anything useful with it in terms of corporate productivity. Could have told them that before they bought it one to be honest. Idiots.

Is it just me who thinks 100% IP TV is scarey?

My largest concern is availability.

Is there anyone on here who can claim knowledge of a DTT transmission fault that caused loss of reception for days and days? I certainly haven't.

But I, as I suspect many others, can identify with long periods of flakey broadband or length outages due to cable theft incidents etc. 5 days on my last one, and to think they that may one day be my primary source of TV too - this is in some way progress?

Jury still out != Denier

This is why the debate has become so rotten. You have to either be a believer or a denier.

I am neither, I'm just waiting for irrefutable evidence that demonstrates climate science has been able to successfully model the chaos theory of our ecosystem. I am yet to see any report that fits that criteria and doubt we will for many years.

I would suggest it is those who have already made their made up based on incomplete evidence that need therapy... well no, not therapy actually, just an education in the concept of critical reasoning and a grounding that all you are told to believe is not always true, , especially when it's coming from vested interests.

Re: BUZZ Word

Agreed!

public cloud: If you do not necessarilly know what data centre in what country your data is currently stored, it is surely negligent for any business to use such a "fuzzy" service for the processing of any kind of PII data.

private cloud: Nothing but an updated term for managed hosting

Had to laugh...

"Our retail stores are all about customer service, and John shares that commitment like no one else we've met."

Yep, Dixons and PC World, those two pinnacles of high street customer service excellence.

Yawn...

Listening to Apple's empty words of concern on this issue is starting to grow seriously tiring.

They can quote audit's and inspections all they want, because like every type of audit, a complete fraud of best behaviour will be put on for show. I know it, you know it, they know it.

Apple can tell us they care until the world ends, they obviously don't, or else they wouldn't be doing business with these factories in the first place. How about Apple pull back the manufacturing to the west, and make only say $350 profit per handset instead of $400. With a $100bn in the bank, I imagine they could afford to.

(those figures were from a recent news item suggesting a $650 iphone 4s costs $196 to make)

Didnt bother to watch the video

.... it's already common sense.

Do I

1] Keep my data in a small in house data centre

or

Hand over my data to a company who might not even tell me which data centre it's living in

2] Ensure it's kept in a UK facility

or

Hand it over to some random country in a totally different legal jurisdiction with implications around local law enforcement rights over my data that I don't even understand.

3] Keep my data in a small private facility with a relatively small Internet presence and attack footprint

or

Keep my data with a cloud provider who have a HUGE internet footprint and therefore a significantly wider attack vector. Which is a more tempting, appealing target? My crummy web server farm, or (for examples sake) Amazon's EC2 admin control panel?

Bye the way, if you do know where your data is being kept in a cloud facility, then it isn't cloud anyway really - that would be called managed hosting.

But who did it....

Quite a few press items on this seem to gently imply this being Iran spying on Iran.

As much as I'd like to believe that, given tensions between the West and Iran, and the hypothesis that Stuxnet originated in the US, I can't help but wonder if there is some clever mis-direction going on!

Hmmmmm

I really enjoy the reg projects.

But I'm not quite feeling the amazement of this event. I mean come on, look at the photo's, at least half are your stereotype beardies and geeks. Some of those rockets look no bigger than a top end firework, and theres something cringey about folk holding their small dingers with such pride.

I am myself a geek and I want so much to get turned on by this article and run to the nearest model shop, but fact you can just tape a rocket motor into a pringles tube just kind of shows an almost childish level of skill required to play with off the shelf stuff.

Cloud !=Security

lol

Personally I just don't think the two things go together.

Ask yourself:

1] Will my cloud provider tell me where my data is being held (amazon allegedly won't?)

2] Does the location of data in the cloud comply with data protection/data export regulations?

3] If you’re fortunate to know what country your data is in, what legal jurisdiction does that country have over your data?

4] What if a cloud service has been procured by the criminal element, you know, hosting a piracy site or extreme porn etc. What happens if your data happens to be on that same storage block, and the local law bust in and take those servers away?

5] Fundamentally, any business has a liablity for the security and safety of confidential information that they hold, especially PII.... if they hand that over to a cloud service - and data theft incident occurs - what happens then?

6] Surely, moving your data from say a small private UK data centre and out to the cloud will exponentially increase the potential attack vectors and footprint to aim at.

Finally, in my own view, a cloud service where you KNOW WHERE YOUR DATA LIVES isn't cloud anyway, that's just hype. That would then be called "managed hosting" so the point is moot. And if you DON'T, then I would suggest it is at best careless and unethical, at worst illegal, to have private, personal or commercial in confidence data held within "the clouds" – god knows where.

There is one thing I would use the cloud for - for app hosting of non-sensitive data. Or to buy in a quick burst of CPU for a specific task. That makes sense.

"But I had never had a problem"

Sure doesn't mean there isn't one.

I've seen the antenna issue with my own eyes on a guys phone at work.. 2-3 bars gone with the grip of death. It doesn't necessarily result in a dropped call, depends how strong the signal was to start with. Now he has that rubber monstronsity wrapped round his no longer sleek and stylish phone and can actually use it for the purpose intended.

I have a friend who constantly declares "it's rubbish, I've never had a problem no matter how I hold it". Yawn. He is fortunate to live in a strong signal area, so chances are he's a lucky one (like many others) who won't experience dropped calls because of it.

Open your eyes deniers. The antennagate issue has a 1:1 relationship with that the signal strength was like to begin with. Go drive out to some remote rural area with marginal signal coverage (say 1-2 bars) and try the grip of death, then come back and tell us about this non-existant issue.

Just because it hasn't been a problem for YOU in no way means it isn't a very real problem for others.