Posts by Mockduncan

UK smart meter rollout years late and less than two thirds complete

With no smart meter you can make money ... or lose it

I tried to arrange a smart meter through my provider Eon Next. They sent me a bunch of stupid questions, the most stupid of which was "Do I have 3-phase?" Now I happened to study electrical engineering many years ago so I know what this means, but what percentage of their other customers know? I told them to shove it as it was too hard.

I am old enough to remember when a nice man would come and read my meters once a quarter then my provider would send me a bill. Then one day, with no warning, I started getting monthly estimated bills from Eon Next. No consultation. No contract. Eon just shifted me to Eon Next and monthly billing. They have the worst customer service since NTL and I got no-where. They kept asking me to read my meter. I kept telling them it is their meter so they can read it. They argued. I said "Can I take it with me when I move? Can I turn MY gas meter around so it runs backwards? "

Now here is how you lose money: Eighteen months of estimates later and apathy on my part to check the readings and it turned out I was quite significantly behind. They charged for all the uncharged units at today's price and I lost a fortune. I gave up arguing they should charge at the average unit cost over the 18 months.

Now here is how you can make money and note I absolutely have not done this: You could, over last winter, provide a reading that is lower than actual and then, now, when the prices are reducing, provide a real reading. This might raise suspicions of course and I haven't put it to the test. What I do know though is that they have over estimated my electric to the tune of £500 in the last 5 months. Coincidence or conspiracy. Luckily, realising that the units costs are about to reduce, I read my meters. If not, I would be using units paid on at a higher rate when the unit costs are about to reduce.

I've bitten the bullet and have a smart meter install scheduled but if this is an imperative, why are we not offered a carrot of some kind?

Google changes email authentication after spoof shows a bad delivery for UPS

Re: Bug/Vulnerability or just bad implementation?

The inbound email to 365 was spoofed and failed SPF but was not rejected because the account, presumably under the control of the bad actor, had allow listed the bad actor's sending IP. This overrode SPF as they had intended. The message was then relayed straight through MS, UPS had SPF configured with MS IP ranges as valid for that domain and the message was considered good by Google. The supposed bug with Google is that it should be looking deeper into the headers to see that the original inbound message from spoofed UPS to 365 had failed, and they should have enforced the DMARC reject based on that SPF at the previous hop. (I think).

Magna Carta mayhem: Protesters lay siege to Edinburgh Castle, citing obscure Latin text that has never applied in Scotland

It was a lovely day for a coup

I can't believe the world's media was focused on Afghanistan when this was going on in Edinburgh.

Adrift on a sea of data: Architecting for GDPR

Then marketing can't do its job, sales have no leads, your employer makes no money and your problem of driving GDPR compliance is over.

Maybe the better approach is to recognise that Marketing is the engine of the business and the data compliance officer is a business support function - educate and work with Marketing to ensure they understand the regs and can continue to ensure that the business is successful so you have a job.

PayPal freezes 400-job expansion in North Carolina over bonkers religious freedom law

How to make American bathrooms safer

Stop people taking guns into them.