Posts by Slx 745 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jun 2010
I know several people who've either switched to Linux or Macs as a direct result of this campaign.
While I know Apple is now as cool as Mom Corp, they must be falling around laughing as Microsoft basically sends a % of its user base straight into the arms of an awaiting Apple Store "genius" waiting with his or her credit card terminal.
It's fantastic news for Linux though if it's going to drive up mainstream desktop use and make it a much more viable platform.
I'm actually confused as to why banks endlessly prattle on about their IT systems. They're just processing high volumes of relatively simple transactions. They're not even in the same planet, let alone ballpark as Google or any of the big internet companies that deal with everything from AI searches to hosting, processing and serving vast amounts of data.
I see bank networks as similar to old switching systems in a telco. They need to so a simple, high volume, repetitive job very reliable.
They so some financial modelling, some fairly unsophisticated online services and that's about it.
I have concerns about banks jumping into buzz words and technology platforms that aren't at all relevant to them.
Maybe I'm just biased having been a customer of RBS Ulster Bank during their mulitweek It collapse a few years ago...
Talking to businesses today, the big problem is that there is no roadmap.
Boris, Nigel and the chaps are going to go over and jolly well give Brussels a good talking to and it will all be fine apparently.
I have no idea: how long this will take, what kind of trade agreements will emerge, what the situation is with freedom of movement of EU nations in / out, if there are restrictions how will they work, what kind of work permit system will be in place.
Add to that that Sterling has gone into a period of unprecedented volatility which means that companies will avoid contracting in GBP, opting for predictable currency or waiting for stability instead.
The UK is presenting the world is something like : "Hey, we're leaving the EU but we can't really be quite sure when and we're working on some trade agreements, except oh actually we're not as nobody's started that yet.. But, tally-ho, this is Great Britain and everything will be fine!"
Unfortunately, that's not a climate I can do business in.
I just traded in a couple of iThings that I had lying around as I want to upgrade to a new iPhone. I gave Apple's official Reuse / Recycle programme a try.
It seemed very slow. The devices were signed for by their recycling company and seemed to sit in a warehouse for more than 10 days before it was assessed as being in perfect condition. They finally sent confirmation that they were paying the agreed price, but so far no sign of any Apple Store credit coming through. So, I'm guessing that's probably going to take another day or more.
The whole process has so far taken since 7 June and it's now 22 June.
I had been hoping to have ordered a new iPhone by now!
Anyone else used it ?
I'm just wondering if this is just a glitch or if 14+ days is normal enough for these kinds of services?
It just seems a bit impractical if you're actually trading in your main phone.
Given how quickly Apple tend to ship iThings, I thought I would have my new device days ago.
I think I'll just sell privately next time.
They're professional judges the that are appointed to assist US District Court judges and would hear a lot of the first instance type cases. Its still a pretty low level of court by any standards though.
England, Wales and Scotland are actually highly unusual in having non-professional judges, at least for developed world countries. Magistrates were scrapped as a concept in what is now the Republic of Ireland in 1924 as the idea of non-professional judges was considered unacceptably risky for the administration of justice. There had been a history of the original 'Petty Sessions' lay judges being members of the aristocracy / the local big noise and some really questionable rulings were made that had inflamed the political situation in the 19th / early 20th centuries.
In Northern Ireland it was reformed in 1935 where you had to be a solicitor / barrister of at least six-years standing and then again in 2008 where it moved to professional judges in parallel with the republic.
I'm actually fairly amazed that the old magistrate system continues in the England and Wales and in Scotland as Justice of the Peace.
Being tried by some non-professional judge always struck me as very odd in the modern era.
I know this is the wrong kind of geekery for this site, but just thought I'd clear it up :P
I don't really understand the logic of some of the comments on this thread that are implying that Dublin's some kind of remote backwater.
1.) It's very well connected by air, far better than most cities its size and that can quite easily be scaled up as needed either with expansion of Dublin Airport (planned) or possibly even a second airport to the West of the City. At present it's handling more than 25 million passengers, making it the 3rd busiest airport in Britain and Ireland (placing it after LHR and Gatwick) and significantly busier than Stansted, Manchester etc.
Ireland also has huge amounts of connectivity for its size to North America and full pre-clearance arrangements with the US, meaning you effectively land as a domestic flight. Again, that's scalable up without much fuss.
2) Many of you may not realise but, software is no longer shipped in trucks on punchcards. Banking services also don't send cash in trucks or post cheques. So the shipping issues are largely irrelevant. A bunch of diverse fibre routes and excellent air connectivity, both of which Ireland has and can easily expand, is all you need.
3) Culturally, it's almost indistinguishable from England/Wales in terms of business and legal structures. The systems are incredibly similar and the business environment is very similar. On top of that, you've got the fact that the general culture is almost identical too. Moving Dublin to London isn't all that much different from moving from London to Manchester. (Yes, I know I'll have offended a few Irish nationalists with that, but it's fact).
4) It's quite a business friendly environment and the bureaucracy is easy to deal with.
5) There is no language barrier at all for English speakers.
6) It has its own visa system and can prioritise immigration for anyone it likes. This can make recruiting non-EU high end staff very straight forward if we want it to be.
7) It isn't some tiny village with a few sheep. It's a metropolitan area of 1.8 million people and growing extremely rapidly. So, in terms of scale, it's only going to get bigger over the coming years and decades. I don't really see Dublin as all that much different from Amsterdam, Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam or any of the Nordic capitals and even the majority of the German cities are all mid sized.
8) If needs be, Ireland can fairly easily scale up ferry connectivity directly to France. It's only about 10-12hours in a faster ferry. At present they're mostly used for holiday makers going each way, but there's no particular reason if we had to improve connections avoiding British 'land bridge' routes that it would be particularly difficult to achieve.
The only huge megapolis type cities in the EU are London, Paris and arguably Madrid. The rest are all clusters of cities in the 1 to 2 million kind of scale and the vast majority of EU cities are actually <1 million.
10) Irish-US political and cultural links are absolutely enormous and deep. It exerts huge soft power in the US, but doesn't go on endlessly about unlike a certain other country in the southeastern med. US presidential candidates still feel the need to embrace their Irish great, great, great granny who happened to visit Killarney in 1747 and Irish political figures have enormous access in the USA because of the scale of Irish-American links.
I wouldn't really underestimate Ireland in any of those areas, it bats enormously above its weight and it has a lot of attractive features for location of businesses and particularly transferring business out of the UK. You're still looking at a huge legal, cultural and language jump to go to the Benelux. Second language English speakers, civil law legal system, significantly heavier and different approach to bureaucracy (Ireland and the UK are much more similar), different media, different culture ... list is endless.
Where Ireland will suffer badly though is more in the areas of non-tech, non-financial, SMEs who have a lot of connectivity to the UK due to physical proximity e.g. small / medium food businesses, small services companies etc. Also it will cause total chaos for Irish and UK companies in Northern Ireland who have been treating the Irish market as a single entity for the last few decades. A lot of intra-juristicaonal business in Ireland will be damaged very badly. That's going to hurt the likes of retail groups, logistics companies, food/drink companies, locally-focused service companies etc etc.
So it's kind of swings and roundabouts, but I think Ireland's at a huge advantage for taking businesses that want to exit the UK post Brexit.
No, I haven't missed anything.
That case would be equally applicable had the US government gone after the data in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Finland, etc etc.
What exactly has that got to do with Ireland? Ireland's pretty annoyed with the fact that the US is not pursuing that through normal diplomatic, police cooperation and legal channels.
The court case is about the US trying to exert universal jurisdiction over US multinationals regardless of where they are. It has literally nothing whatsoever to do with the location of the data, it's about Uncle Sam trying to prove a legal point in US courts.
Also the UK isn't exactly much less prone to snooping on data than the US is and has committed itself to some highly intrusive legislation allowing all sorts of access to data and interference with data centre operations. I don't really see a hell of a lot of difference between the two countries' stances. Also with the advent of major terrorism threats, France has jointed that club with rather draconian snooping powers.
I fully understand the need to deal with terrorism and so on, but some of the powers being sought in many countries are really getting into just universal data trawls.
What do you mean 'over Ireland'?
Have at suddenly done something odd?
Other than the headline the article is mostly about Brexit which hasn't anything to do with Ireland other than it might create a customs border between the Republic and the UK but Ireland is committed to remaining in the EU.
This is why I'm sticking to Nexus devices and iOS. At least you get the security patches hot of the press and not after a phone maker tweaks them.
The mobile networks even get inexplicably in the middle of it in some cases. I remember having to wait a long time for updates on 3 Ireland HTC phones. It doesn't even make sense. What exactly do 3 Ireland have customised on those phones? A boot logo and useless bloatware nobody uses?!
That's hardly surprising Apple essentially make four products.
1) Various renditions of the iPhone / iPad / iPod which are all essentially the same iOS device in different sizes with slightly different things omitted / added.
2) MacBooks - a small number of variations and I would argue the iMac now is part of that range too as it shares most of the same components and architecture
3) The Apple Watch.
They do some software : OS X / iOS, various apps.
...
Huawei on the other hand are actually now competing in fundamental telecommunications technology, so I would expect them to be trying to compete with Ericsson, the new Nokia (which now contains Alcatel-Lucent (which absorbed Bell Labs etc) and Siemens Networks), Genband, Cisco, Qualcomm, etc etc..
The bigger players in that sector have always been huge spenders on R&D and have been the places that have churned out a lot of the core technologies that we take for granted.
Without those boring infrastructure and fundamental tech makers, there would be no iPhone.
At the end of the day, Apple's basically an IT based consumer products company, and a very successful one. However, that's all it is and that's where all it's R&D seems to focus.
That's not at all to be critical of Apple, but they're not Huawei and they're not Ericsson any more than they're Ford or Toyota.
I go in looking for Euro 46 / UK 11.
Invariably I get looked at like as if I have two heads and they come out with some hideous pair of brogues.
The result: I shop on line.
Size 11 / 46 isn't unusual and I have been in shops where 4 guys in a row will all ask for shoes that they don't have in stock and walk off disappointed.
Do these stores operate on the basis that everyone should simply adjust their feet to a statistical survey that was last done in the 1950s or something?
They whine and moan about online retailers taking market share, but they continue to operate like Mrs Slocombe on Are You Being Served is still in charge.
Now there's a challenge... A vacuum cleaner in a total vacuum.
It's actually a bigger problem than you'd think as it's very hard to pick up small pieces of anything in space as they're not in any fluid/gas, so moving them isn't easy unless you were able to create an artificial gravity well.
You could pick up magnetisable metal but, how much of a satellite is likely to be made out of cast iron?
The "content" (not a fan of that word) has to be paid for somehow though. Otherwise it wouldn't be produced anymore as there would be no business model to fund it.
If it's not ad backed, it's going to have to be a subscription model and time and time again it's been shown that consumers are only willing to subscribe to a few key services. When you start throwing up paywalls, nobody will cough up unless it's a really massive content provider like Netflix, Spotify etc.
As much as I hate ads, is this even legal?
They're interfering with other people's content. If the end user decides to do that on a mobile device or a computer themselves, that's one thing, but for a whole network to just strip out certain content from webpages sounds like it's going to cause major problems.
I could also see certain websites just blocking traffic to Three IP addresses as there's no point in them serving content to Three customers without ads as it's basically just getting things FOC.
I mean, can you imagine a cable company stripping ads from TV channels, they wouldn't have much content left before long.
It sounds to me like Three want a piece of the advertising pie and this is an end to net neutrality.
I have to say though things are changing rapidly when it comes to cheques in Ireland.
I work freelance and at least 95% of my invoices are paid by e-banking with the IBAN (BIC is gone)
Recently I was having work done on my house and I paid the builder, sparks, plumber and tiler the same way. All zapped through by electronic banking using IBANs
What would make even more sense though would to link a "paying in" address to your verified mobile number. That way you could send payment without giving away banking account details.
Transactions are free of charge and processed within 24h to any Eurozone bank account.
You can include long messages and my online banking is secured with three factor authentication.
(Log in ID, a security question, selected digits from a secret code and to actually transact anything you need to generate an authentication code using my debit card inserted into a little card reader. That also needs my chip and pin PIN)
So pretty rock solid.
This is like a discussion from the late 1980s!
France has been a successfully using chip and pin credit cards since 1992 with trials having been completed in tennis to late 1980s
I don't know why US banks are being so slow about rolling them out. It's really starting to look like some kind of weird technological backwardness at this stage.
That being said, banks are hardly shining examples of forward thinking and technologically savvy!
My sense is that there's a major opportunity for someone to just tie up with Google, Apple and the telcos and completely bypass the old payment card duopoly.
The whole concept of paying for things using largely trust based systems that mostly rely on a 16 digit card number and expiry and a few bits of fixed information crudely hacked on for security is beyond stupid.
We should be in complete control and pushing payments to retailers in realtime. They've absolutely no need to store people's payment card details and we've no need to be using 1960s tech in 2016 either !
I've had this issue with UK online stuff and Irish cards.
Enter your address
1 Fake Streer
Ballyfake
Co Fake
Ireland
Postcode : X11 1A1A (not my real code as they actually link to individual addresses in Ireland).
Your postcode is invalid
I try 00000
Your postcode is invalid
In the end I just end up putting in the code for Buckingham palace which works fine!
The one that drives me mad is that certain massive retailers routinely just point blank refuses to ship electronics to Ireland due to some misinterpretation of the Irish implementation of the WEEE directive.
I also had a German website tell me that they couldn't ship to Ireland as we have different plugs and it would be illegal to sell a product here. Since when? I checked the law there's absolutely nothing to prevent me buying a product with a CEE 7 (Schuko/Europlug). The only requirement is that local retailers fit BS1363 plugs to anything being sold for 'normal home/office' use as they're supposed to be 'ready to plug in'.
Schuko is actually perfectly legal and recognised by Irish legislation as an alternative fitting and was used in the past (You'll still find it some very old wiring).
Also, it's worth remembering that some of the Northern Ireland peace agreements were predicated on EU membership as are many of the cross-border bodies and just practical cooperation measures that go on across a whole range of services and infrastructure at this stage.
I'm not sure how that's going to work...
To be fair to both countries, they're both massive tax and regulatory havens. I find it more than a little hypocritical when British commentators get all high and mighty about Ireland's low corporate tax rates while benefiting from the light touch regulation no questions asked centre of the world known as the City of London.
The consequences for Ireland are likely to be unpredictable, as they will be for the UK.
Bear in mind UK exports TO Ireland are enormous. We are your 5th biggest export market.
It will also have a disproportionate impact on SMEs in both jurisdictions as they're the kinds of companies that might have limited expert trade and find it difficult to skirt new customs barriers.
We basically have no idea how this might pan out. It's likely to be a very mixed bag.
What's confusing though is that often "Brussels proposes that X,Y,Z.." comes down to a single MEP or commissioner shooting their mouth off or flying a kite about a particular issue.
As far as I'm aware this isn't EU policy, it hasn't been debated, it hasn't been formally proposed.
The Commission doesn't really have collective responsibility and secrecy like the British cabinets and individual commissioners can shoot their mouths off about their pet topics at times, without those issues ever getting beyond that.
I find sometimes the media (especially in Britain) has a habit of just not doing any analysis of European politics at all or even understanding how the system works. I know it's dull, tedious, boring and makes people glaze over but it is a massive disservice to the public to just treat the whole thing with contempt / sneering and not provide facts.
I agree, it's a similar setup up in the Republic of Ireland where there is also no official form of compulsory ID card and no requirement to carry ID. You will have various organisations demanding your driving licence, passport and at least one (if not several) utility bills in your name. Often its impossible to open a bank account without a utility bill and it's impossible to get a utility bill without a bank account.
That being said, it's not like the state doesn't attempt to track things. We have the infamous PPSN (Personalised Public Service Number) which originally started life as a tax and social welfare ID number. It has now managed, through function creep, to become the de facto ID number for pretty much all interactions with the state and public services. You need it for tax, social welfare, healthcare, university registration, primary / secondary school registration, even applying for a public body job on their recruitment system requires it!
Then in 2012 they introduced a Public Service Card (PSC) which replaced a bunch of other cards and transit cards. It contains facial scan biometrics, a photograph, electronic signature and an RFID chip. Registration has to be done in person using SAFE (Standard Authentication Framework Environment). Basically you have to bring evidence of address, passport or birth/adoption certs (if Irish or British), Passport or ID card (if EU non UK/IE) or passport if non-EU a long with verifiable proof of address (one of : utility bills, lease agreement, deeds, etc etc) and "any other documents or cards that might help to establish your identity" e.g. student ID, medical card, drugs payment card etc.
It's been rolled out to pensioners, social welfare recipients and gradually to everyone else on a kind of 'as needed' basis.
Literally it operates as ID for everything from collection your pension, dole payments etc etc pensioners with free-travel paying on the bus (by tapping it).
On top of that the Irish Passport Office introduced a Passport Card. This is an optional extra which you register for using their mobile phone app (take a selfie) and input your passport details. They then send you a secure card with passport style RFID and various other security features (holographic photo etc) which can be used within the EU / EEA in place of an Irish passport.
The logic of it was that so many Irish passports get lost/stolen on holidays due to other EU states' requirements to carry ID that we would just have to issue optional card-type ID anyway.
---
There's absolutely no question of ID being required for internet access, mobile phones or anything like that though. You can still buy a mobile phone / SIM without ID and you aren't required to provide anything to setup an ISP account and hopefully, long may it continue that way!
A few of the mobile providers will try and encourage you to give them ID, largely for their own marketing purposes though.
We also have one MVNO network reportedly cutting people off for 'unusual activity' (such as going on holidays to more than one country) and demanding copies of passports to reactivate service due to some bizarre internal policy.
....
So, all in all, I think we are just implementing sort of 'opt in' ID cards via the backdoor.
Same in Britain? I'm not sure as I haven't lived there.
I'm based in Ireland in the Eurozone and I have never seen a €500. A bank once gave me a €200 and I had serious difficulty using it as nobody would accept it. Even another bank was iffy about it.
You rarely see €100s never mind €200 or €500 the highest denomination in normal circulation is the €50.
The 1 and 2 cent coins are gone here now too. They're accepted, but your change is rounded to the nearest round number multiple of 5 cent (in your favour according to the guidelines and in reality too).
These populist, reactionary mandatory sentencing regimes in the US are taking power away from courts to make subtle and sensible decisions based on the facts and they're massively increasing the US prison population.
The United States prison population is something they should be ashamed of not trying to increase.
A whopping 689 / 100,000 people is in prison in the United States
445 in Russia
301 in Brazil
199 in Poland
148 in England/Wales
145 in Scotland
140 in Spain and Portugal.
132 in Jersey
100 in France
82 in Ireland
78 in Germany
71 in Norway
45 in Iceland.
This is not a table you want to be shouting "We're number 1" on...
This is why I don't fear Skynet.
It'll be some big arrogant highly intellectual AI system then one of its data centres will be taken out by a birds nesting and taking dumps in its cooling systems or wasps will move into its air vents.
Or some kind of extremophile organism will figure out how to munch circuits.
Biology is ruthless and loves warm, nutrient rich places to hang out.
Bacteria, fungus and moss could probably take out any AI once they got the hang of it.
Think of it like a fluffy, feathery, cute 3.7 billion year old version of the Borg ;)
Just to add to that UK exports to Ireland are worth £27.6 billion / year annually (based on 2014 figures so, due Irish rapid economic recover those have likely increased).
We are your 5th largest destination for UK goods and services and very deeply connected.
That is a MASSIVE amount of trade and it will disproportionately impact SMEs, food and drink companies, retailers, services companies, telcos etc and those kinds of non financial service, real businesses on both sides of the Irish Sea that actually sell consumer and business to business products.
The two economies do a hell of a lot of actual goods and service trading.
I'd just point out one major inaccuracy. There was and is freedom of movement of citizens of Ireland between the UK and Republic of Ireland under the Common Travel Area. In fact, we treat each other's citizens as if they're locals in almost every respect. That goes far beyond EU rights.
However, there was never any free movement of goods and services. We had full customs borders and even an aggressive trade conflict after Irish independence.
Freedom of movement of goods and services between the two jurisdictions came about as part of the EU.
There were still people getting charged with smuggling in the 1980s.
If the uk leaves, Ireland also can't unilaterally negotiate outside of the EU as its a customs union. Any negotiations between the UK and any EU member can only be done with the EU as a single bloc.
This could be absolutely disastrous for the Irish and northern Irish economy.
Also it will have a significant impact on British businesses as, like it or not, we are your 5th largest export market and as tightly integrated into many supply chains as a British region.
You'll also find that Irish disruption channels will likely have to disconnect from the uk and plug into the continent to remain in the single market to access goods and services.
So, for many uk multiples, retailers, service providers etc this could be as nasty as a significant and wealthy mid sized English region suddenly being unplugged from their network.
Trade is trade and it's not all one way and pulling the rug from under an established system will inevitably have consequences.
It's very likely that EU deals will be focused on German needs, not Irish ones so, it's very possible that Ireland may end up disproportionately impacted by this.
It's also very likely that if that happens we would find constitutional reasons to have a referendum and vote down every EU treaty.
Whole thing is a complete disaster from what I can see. I'm actually contemplating moving to a less unstable continent! Too many fundamentals in Europe are being called into question all time. I'm fed up with it and may vote with my feet.
Sadly the stock market is responsible for ever increasing short-term thinking.
Everything comes down to quarterly results. Apple is still an absolutely cash rich behemoth and you've got people fanning the flames of its impending doom simply because of a really minor fluctuation in sales over a short time in a massive economic mess.
China's economy is generally rocky at the moment and I suspect a lot of the bad news is being creatively covered up by its absolutely unfree media / PR arm of the state.
The global economy general is also not really back in rude health either. There are massive problems still ongoing almost everywhere, even if there are a few bight spots.
But, in general this idea that if a company isn't producing quarter-on-quarter growth that it needs to have its shares panicked upon just shows the absolute stupidity of modern stock trading. This is why we have bubbles and busts all the time. There's little / no analysis.
It's all number goes up YAY number goes down BOOO!
Cork links to all the major London airports (Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and City) - All multiple times per day. It has a pretty hefty schedule to LHR and Stansted in particular.
Also to Paris CDG, Amsterdam Schiphol and several other big hubs are connected and it has a lot of smaller UK airports and a fairly broad range of connections to other European destinations, given that it's a city of about 300,000 max it's pretty decent connectivity.
You can also be at Cork airport from the city centre in about 15 minutes, which is a hell of a lot better than most cities.
It's actually very easy to get to and most people flying in/out on business from the states will tend to approach it via LHR or sometimes CDG or AMS.
Direct transatlantic flights are fairly meaningless if you just want to get somewhere relatively flexibly.
The choice of destinations out of Shannon is actually very limited and those TA flights tend to suit non-business travellers much more - i.e. focus on economy class, hard discounting etc and not flexibility.
Overall, I think Cork's pretty well connected - you've also got stuff like tier 1 transatlantic fibre connectivity with the lowest ping times in Europe.
Of course there's room for expansion.
The density of housing in Dublin is way way too low. There's absolutely no high quality high rise at all and it's all little rows of boring suburban housing (much like the UK too).
Dublin needs to bring in serious investors with cash - pension funds etc to develop serious housing and go up a lot higher in the docklands and parts of the central area that aren't of any architectural significance.
I find all this talk about protection of Dublin's Skyline crazy.
What Skyline?!?! It doesn't have one.
The 'celtic tiger bubble' housing glut was inappropriate development in rural areas mostly.
It would be a bit like saying that the London housing bubble would be solved by a glut of housing estates built for non-existent people in Cumbria and Norfolk.
There was an insane notion amongst the banks that you could build housing developments in what were quite remote rural areas and that somehow these would be populated under the "if you build it they will come" system. Most of them were built as a purely speculative tool with a notion that they could be sold on and in a period of absolute hype.
Quite a lot of Irish (and major British) banks all jumped on the bandwagon and burnt through massive amounts of money.
The issue was that when the banks discovered their mistakes and the credit crunch happened, all development stopped, even sensible development. Ireland went from building 100,000 houses a year to about 20. The result of that was you'd a massive demand put on the rental sector which (like England) tends to be quite small as most people prefer to buy.
The economy didn't collapse. It most certainly was not similar to Greece or Spain. It probably has more in common with the US housing bubble and credit crunch and the Icelandic bank madness than anything else.
There was quite a strong underlying demand and once you striped away the excesses of the speculative bubble, there was a strong core economy buried in there i.e. the original Celtic Tiger.
Normal levels of development of property still haven't really quite returned to Dublin and the other cities. It's starting to ramp up again, but cautiously. The demand is massively outstripping supply and there's a full blown housing crisis now in Dublin as a result.
Basically, banks are like bipolar gamblers. They went absolutely manic on lashing money on investments that made no sense then flipped to the other extreme and wouldn't lend anything to anyone, even sensible and profitable developments were getting refused until quite recently.
They always release this kind of information on a 'need to know' basis and it's likely that even the local management isn't aware of the details.
Unfortunately, it's very unlikely that Kildare County Council, the Irish Government, the workers or much of the management structure of Intel itself will know anything about it until the company sends a press release or holds a conference.
I actually saw some statistics for death by electric shock recently. The US low voltage being safer is an absolute myth.
2.1 / 1 million inhabitants in the USA
Scandinavia 0.2 using Schuko plugs and Danish variant.
Ireland 0.2 using UK style plugs.
UK 0.437
Seems the common dominator is universal usage of RCDs on socket outlets. The UK was later to the game on that than the other countries mentioned and the USA's notion that 120V is safer, is clearly not achieving much as the rate of shock is 10X higher than Scandinavia and Ireland.
That being said, you're VERY VERY VERY unlikely to be killed by electric shock in the developed world.
I'm not saying old = bad.
It's a system that comes from a very different development background to IP counterparts. It was top down developed by big telco equipment makers and telcos and standardised by committee.
It's not designed for exposure to the hostile world of open networks - old and inappropriate system for anything that's open to the outside world.
*ALL* of the voice switches used around the world have "lawful interception" capabilities that allow this kind of "hack".
Unlike SIP or most of the VoIP protocols, SS7 is a signalling system that was developed for primarily state owned or equivalent monopoly telcos. It's an evolution of older systems and it was designed from the outset to be open to being tapped. They've inbuilt, crude backdoors.
A state can literally purchase interception software for any of the common voice switches out there and they most definitely have been used politically in some countries in the past and are openly used as tools of control in places with extreme censorship regimes.
You'd be far safer as a journalist or politician using Facetime and WhatsApp than a mobile or landline service if you suspected someone wanted to listen to your calls.
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