Posts by plunet 25 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2015
Have you been to China? Using facial recognition for payment authorisation is not uncommon in shops kitted out with the relevent point of sale equipment.
They might not have asked for it, but its there, and it does get used, although I think it hit considerable problems with the masks the mandate for which were not removed earlier this year.
QR codes are still the main way to pay, but biometrics are there and are being used for day to day payments.
It seems that it's not the actual pensions system/database that was compromised but some fileserver used by Crapita to do admin tasks on the pensions system. It appears this fileserver had various dump/export files from the pensions database for various clients probably used for massaging data and bulk updates, the problem is that they were left lying around and were not encrypted...
"The Skype for Business product – once used by such venerables as particle accelerator boffins at CERN, which swapped it with softphone client CERNphone in June – was replaced by Teams in 2019 and reached end-of-life last year."
Errr, the author has conflated SfB with SfB Online.
SfB Online was retired back in 2019 in favour of Teams. But SfB as an onprem or hosted solution is still very much a thing and supported by M$.
Unfortunately this article is fairly useless as it fails to specify whether to make content available in China with this new cloudflare agreement needs the usual ICP licence. There are plenty of CDN providers that have reach into China, including Cloudflare even before this 'announcement'. The main issue for most is whether it's worth the effort and hoop jumping to get and probably more importantly maintain an ICP licence.
It's my understanding that they would have had to maintain a registration / licence with the Chinese authorities to be able to operate that service with a .cn domain name presumably also hosted within China. The registration and licence needs a named individual in China to be legally responsible for the service and be answerable for its content. With the increasing scrutiny of online services in China perhaps there was no appetite for the paperwork and personal risk.
They do have CS courses and students. But I struggle to understand how getting the students to program up this requirement would make any sense? Assuming the students can pull it off, after they have graduated who would be keeping the product up to date to meet changing business and regulatory requirements, fix bugs, patch components they have used, and generally support the end to end solution. And you have also got the complication that you have student data subjects probably requiring admin access to the very backend systems that govern their fees, rent payments for halls, and all manner of other key business data. Yeh...
Biometrics for payments.... Amazon just trialing this?
Try going to China where Alipay has been doing facial recognition for payment for quite some time now. When you realise that between then Alipay and WeChat pay now account for something like 90% of payments for most retail transactions in China, and you realise just how far ahead payments tech is in China and how the rest of the world is in serious catch up mode. No one forces you to use it, but most retails over there now frown on needing to handle cash - even the subsistence farmer selling their goods by the side of the road have their AliPay and WeChatPay QR codes printed out to take payment.
The Hilton Metropole just a few hundred meters up the road already has Vodafone (well, it was Clueless and Witless back in the day) assets on the roof - I had a microwave link from there for many years. I would imagine that could target Vodafone HQ as well. So I also guess it's to provide more coverage for the station and Sussex Gardens.
And significant parts of central London would fail the new pledge. Openreach cabling from some of the older central london exchanges is directly cabled so no green cabinets. And no green cabinets = no FTTC. So a ADSL connection at Oxford Circus will be around 8-12M down and under 1M up. So it's pony up for a proper circuit, consider using 4G or a WISP, or wait around on a sub-optimal ADSL2+ service
The principle of using lamp posts for overlay networks is already well established in China, somewhere where the sheer density of devices and demand for bandwidth already outstrips the capacity of the spectrum.
In urban areas and some highways you can see that the two main networks - China Mobile and China Unicom have a box of tricks on alternate lamp posts that offer Wifi with 802.1x network auth or other picocell technology as an alternative backhaul for each networks subscribers.
All is not well in the metropolis either.
Swathes of Mayfair have the peril of "Exchange Only" lines. This is where cabling from the Exchange to the premise doesn't pass via Green cabinets. And of course this cabling as been around since the early days of PO Telephones and isn't the best. Result: around Oxford Circus and Oxford Street you can either get normal ADSL or a leased line unless there is VM in the street. A small business owner located 50m from Oxford Circus is "enjoying" 6mbps ADSL with no plans for infinity.
So although it's probably not as bad as it might be for those rural hill farmers, it's not exactly great in the places where the general population think it must be great.
I tend to agree that these OFCOM coverage maps don't bear any relation to what happens in reality.
If they want to do this it really seems that they need to tap into something like rootmetrics, or slap some equipment onto a fleet of delivery vans / Google Streetview cars to actually monitor what the reality is.
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