Posts by Neal McQ

South Korea's biggest mobile telco says 5G has failed to deliver on its promise

"a 70 percent reduction in data cost per gigabyte compared to LTE. Customers on 5G therefore use 50 percent more data than those tied to the previous generation standard".

A classic case of the Jevon's paradox here: "...occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use increases its demand—increasing, rather than reducing, resource use". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Note though that, it's not an equal match so telcos are still more profitable on a 5G network - once the network is built out of course.

5G network slicing comes to the iPhone next month (as part of the next iOS release) - tiwll be interesting to see if any new offerings become available off the back of that also. https://support.apple.com/en-ie/guide/deployment/depac6747317/web

An aside, some comments above say 3G was a good thing. Rose-tinted classes in my eyes here: it was poor technology then, and hasn't changed. For anyone working in industry at the time, it probably looked great. However, I was leaving universities where I was seeing what 'real' broadband was like (it was wired, but that's not the point - 3G was being sold as broadband) and 3G was rubbish, unless you were standing right beside a tower. Any medium to poor signal and it's bad - as anyone can experience when using it today still.

Veilid: A secure peer-to-peer network for apps that flips off the surveillance economy

Re: Count Me In

On the flipside, did we not end up here BECAUSE SMS was standardised and didn't move quickly enough, allowing these new service providers get in ahead of them. The telcos built the networks so knew what was coming. RCS initiative was started in 2007 and took until 2016 (!) to release Universal Profile. A decade is a lifetime in this industry and opened the doors for the great new services to be released. They could have easily been started before that, but instead GSMA/Telcos were milking their SMS cash cow. So classic Disruption Theory occurred and they couldn't pivot to the new services.

On the flipside, I also believe we're still in the early days of the messaging world: Snap didn't exist 11 years ago and it's disappearing messages, or any possible new messaging formats that come from VR/AR devices. Sure, lets standardise - but not until we've found out the range of possible messaging options that can be done. Personally, it's an annoyance that some people message me on one service where I'd prefer to live on Service XYZ. But I also know, they all bring unique tricks/benefits/ideas and am happy to experiment and see the various solutions on offer.

Our AI habit is making us less environmentally friendly, Google admits

"Some 5.6 billion gallons of water were consumed by the business in 2022, the equivalent of what would be spent to irrigate 37 golf courses in the southwestern US over the course of a year."

When you put it like that, it's really not a lot of water in use by tech companies. There's 17,000 golf courses in the USA as of 2023 (and 38,000 globally) - if even 10% are in the south-west, that's still 1700 which is a TON of water being dumped into the grass...... so, Google would need to increase its water usage for its ENTIRE global business 630-fold to match just USA golf courses, let alone all globally. I'd rather we got rid of golf in the regions where it doesn't suit the the local environment with their crazy usage of water.......

TETRA radio comms used by emergency heroes easily cracked, say experts

Re: Spectacularly irresponsible.

Worth noting this much better Wired article (never thought I'd say that...) is the commentary

"Carlo Meijer, Wouter Bokslag, and Jos Wetzels of Midnight Blue in the Netherlands discovered the TETRA vulnerabilities—which they’re calling TETRA:Burst—in 2021 but agreed not to disclose them publicly until radio manufacturers could create patches and mitigations. Not all of the issues can be fixed with a patch, however, and it’s not clear which manufacturers have prepared them for customers. Motorola—one of the largest radio vendors—didn’t respond to repeated inquiries from WIRED.

The Dutch National Cyber Security Centre assumed the responsibility of notifying radio vendors and computer emergency response teams around the world about the problems, and of coordinating a timeframe for when the researchers should publicly disclose the issues."

So, discovered in 2021 and vendors - at least those motivated - spent time prepping fixes before publication now.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/07/researchers-find-deliberate-backdoor-in-police-radio-encryption-algorithm/

So, 'someone' introduced a backdoor into the systems so that presumably only government entity could monitor the traffic. This sounds very similar to the proposals to introduce 'government-only' backdoors into modern messaging systems? A good example that a backdoor will always be released publicly and the idea to have e2e encryption but a backdoor for security entities is magical thinking.

Lovely website you got there. Would be a shame if we, er, someone were to sink it: Google warns EU link tax will magnify media monetary misery

Worth adding that Amazon becoming a third advertiser is a good thing - more competition is a win. right now, with Facebook and Google owning the market, there's on incentive/pressure on them. A third player is only a good thing.

Watch Series 4: What price 'freedom'? About as much as you'd expect from an Apple product

Random, semi-related observation: the Nokia 5110 (released in 1998, 20 years ago) as THE phone of the era had 1-3 hours of talk-time, and 40 hours standby. Roughly the same as what the Apple Watch cellular gets right now: except this one will take your heart rate, gps track, and countless other functions. Not a bad start for the device.

(Most people who have an Apple Watch will tell you they easily can get 30-40 hours out of the battery - which does mean charging every night to guarantee that 2nd day. that 18-hours usage is low-balled)

It's been 5 years already, let's gawp at Microsoft and Nokia's bloodbath

Re: Only 5 years??

The book recommended at the end of the article does exactly that. It hightlights everything Nokia (and Symbian) did right for years, alongside highlighting all their issues. It's an excellent book.

At last: Magic Leap reveals its revolutionary techno-goggles – but wait, there's a catch

While I'm hugely skeptical of how close they are to actually releasing a working unit, saying that only people to try them out are "celebreties, etc." is hugely inaccurate.

In the words of well known analyst, Benedict Evans (now at a16z the VC company): "More

Magic Leap is one of only a handful of genuine 'holy shit I can't believe I'm seeing this' moments I've had as an adult. Previous was iPhone". https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/807013260721426434?lang=en

This guy doesn't mince his words so if he's saying this, I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing the end-game. After hearing that Apple is also at least 2-3 years away from any release, and they've some of the best hardware designers in the business, I'm not surprised they're struggling to get even a Developer Unit out the door at present.

IBM bans all removable storage, for all staff, everywhere

Can someone explain if there is truly 'reputational' or material loss after data loss? Taking the extreme example of Sony after they essentially had everything released, they reported a loss of 400million the following quarter (from memory). However, at the previous quarter, they're previously reported they were going to make a loss anyway......

in short, a lot of knowledge only works in the dynamics of a business and wouldn't work elsewhere anyway. Or is this simplistic thinking?

Trying to get a point that feel like some security is becoming ridiculous to function in the everything-connected world.

Audiophiles have really taken to the warm digital tone of streaming music

For anyone interested, "The Defiant Ones" on Netflix (episode 3) gives a great insight into those who understood what was happening with digital music and streaming, and those who hadn't a clue.

I.e. Apple, and the Beats Founders got it straight away. Jimmy Iovine: "we are so f&%ked" upon the first time he saw Napster.

And Sony Music and Warner: "nah, it's fine, nothing to see here".........

Of course, they've turned the corner now and shown there's money to be made with online sales. I presume 'digital' print will do the same in time, and TV is the next one to implode (although it would appear slightly different dynamics to this one with the arrival of Netflix and Amazon Prime creating their own content, etc.).

I wonder what amount of bandwidth music streaming is taking up now? and as it continues to take off, will the accumulation of users make a dent? (at present, Spotify/AppleMusic still only around 50-100 million users).

Planning on forking out for the new iPad? Better take darn good care of it

I think I should keep this post ready in a template for 'copy and paste' every time an article comes up on this topic with iPads and schools.

"Frasier Speirs, is a teacher at a school in Scotland where he "designed and deployed the world's first whole-school 1:1 iPad deployment in 2010" - and has been running the program ever since. Their breakage rate is between 1-4% since the outset: I'd argue it's hard to get much better than that considering human nature, etc.

(he discusses it in the final third of this podcast following the recent Apple Education event: https://www.relay.fm/canvas/57)"

Sure, the repairability of iPads isn't great, but the amount of times they need to be repaired is also very low.....

The many-faced god of operational excellence, DevOps and now 'site reliability engineering'

I cannot recommend the Google SRE book (https://landing.google.com/sre/ - available to read online for free) enough. There'll be pieces you'll likely dismiss from your own routines/processes - however there's also bound to be a few insights in there that may give you some inspiration, fresh ideas.

[Note: I've no affiliation with Google!]

Google sinks cash into more submarine cables, plans more data centres

Does anyone know how much capacity Google/Facebooks/Amazons/Microsofts now own? and what is capacity in comparison to an ISP?

How fast is a piece of string? Boffin shoots ADSL signal down twine

There's a more detailed, excellent, write-up on the used of barbed wire for telephony and "How the West was Wired" here: https://www.inc.com/magazine/19970615/1416.html

Guess who's now automating small-biz IT jobs? Yes, it's Microsoft

Eh, should this statement

"When they looked at the solutions of the past, they were outsized in complexity or cost."

not be

"When they looked at OUR solutions of the past, they were outsized in complexity or cost."

Judge: You're getting an Apple data centre and you're going to like it

It's worth adding that the final appeal turned into a farce after the one of the appeals turned out to:

a) not be living in the same county (the proposed data centre is south-west Ireland), and living on the east coast of Ireland

b) trying to 'motivate' Apple to build on the easy coast - on land they owned that had planning permission for a data centre.......

Note that Apple interestingly wasn't interested based on proximity to Nuclear power plant in UK......

Full thread from Irish reporter here: https://twitter.com/gavinsblog/status/920947791832154112

And full judge report here: http://courts.ie/Judgments.nsf/09859e7a3f34669680256ef3004a27de/f3046f6206ca631b802581bd0053532e?OpenDocument

China: Cute Hyperloop Elon, now watch how it's really done

Taking first-hand experience of the current Maglev train Shanghai runs to the airport, that accelerates to 217mph (350km/hr) in around 2 minutes, so keeping that linear level of acceleration means 6 minutes to ~660mph, 11 minutes to over 1000mph. Note also, that train didn't require fancy leaning seats, suits and it was still comfortable to move around.

The other flipside that has to be accounted for in China - it's a seriously big country (5200km/3200miles east to west, and similar north to south). So even if you started at top speed and ended at same, that's still 3 HOURS east to west. So anything that gives solutions to move people big distances at high speed is fair game over there.

'Other' may yet become the biggest and most useful cloud

This reminds me of this good post on 'How Many Data Centers Needed World-Wide':

"It may be the case that there will be many regional cloud providers rather than a small group of international providers. I can see arguments and factors supporting both outcomes but, whatever the outcome, the number of world-wide cloud data centers will far exceed O(10^5) and these will be medium to large data centers. When a competitor argues that fast computers or databases will save them from this outcome, don’t believe it."

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/how-many-data-centers-needed-world-wide/

Most importantly, this was written by one James Hamilton, 'VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services'.....

I always come back to this excellent post on 'How Many Data Centers Needed World-Wide':

"It may be the case that there will be many regional cloud providers rather than a small group of international providers. I can see arguments and factors supporting both outcomes but, whatever the outcome, the number of world-wide cloud data centers will far exceed O(10^5) and these will be medium to large data centers. When a competitor argues that fast computers or databases will save them from this outcome, don’t believe it."

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/how-many-data-centers-needed-world-wide/

Most importantly, this was written by one James Hamilton, 'VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services'..........

Hackers can turn web-connected car washes into horrible death traps

"PDQ spokesman Todd Klitzke said the car wash maker alerted its customers yesterday, coinciding with the conference presentation"

This is a key failure: the manufacturer being told in 2015 and waiting until the day before the conference to notify customers.......

Ten tweaks for a new Acer Aspire One

any version of this for the eee901

great write-up! any chance of a copy for the eee 901 :)