I was really looking forward to attending the BT Vehicle for Change event this morning. After all the invite had said:

The interactive environment at the BT Centre showcase in London has proven to be an extremely successful tool in  helping different organisations and businesses to gear up for a changing world. But it is not always easy to get to London, so BT have developed the Vehicle for Change – an interactive road show that will bring the showcase to customers throughout the UK. 

I sent in my application promptly on the 14th of November and had an immediate confirmation, then nothing until I phoned Oxonline, then quick trip down the M40/A34 but BT weren’t expecting me at the lovely plot on Milton Park, not a good start.

The BT showcase truck looked the part in the damp pot holed car park

I have somehow managed to miss all the Oxonline events so far, for which I apologise to Councillor Roberts who opened the event.

The Councillor gave a brief overview of his BDUK campaign where Oxfordshire have been promised £3m+ providing they match fund it. He has put this forward into next years council budget and is “hopeful”, but this means nothing can be spent until next April at the earliest.

There is also some funding for the Oxfordshire Community Network. My broadband readers will remember the OCN, that great idea of a broadband network linking schools, libraries and public buildings running in a ring round Oxfordshire (but configured in an expensive point to point star configuration). Councillor Roberts mentioned Fire Stations which must be new. In 2002/4 I remember the OCN being trailed by most of the incumbent councillors as Oxfordshire’s way of bringing broadband to the local communities that BT had then chosen to ignore. They couldn’t because, if memory serves, the BT educational products they had used to provide it, at subsidised prices, had contractual clauses that prevented them being used for non educational uses, thus precluding the local business community from entering the broadband era. It looks like those contracts must still be in place as the OCN still cannot be used as back-haul for the rural communities it was intended to serve (though this morning Councillor Roberts blamed the EU).

As Councillor Roberts gave his presentation it brought back memories of 2002/4 when BT needed “broadband champions” to do their unpaid marketing for them and help their local communities have their exchanges enabled for ADSL. I have a certificate from BT Wholesale (before BT Openreach was created) thanking me for my efforts in enabling the Wroxton St Mary exchange (my campaign website is buried on here somewhere, see here.)

The Oxonline website could have been written in 2002/4 with all its statistics on the 80+ exchanges in Oxfordshire 25 of which (urban) BT has enabled for BT Infinity but has few customers. These 25 exchanges are also the ones that have been “unbundled” so other providers can compete -  the cherries in the network.

Then the presentation moved on to BT Next Generation Access:

For the next hour the Vehicle for Change Team will demonstrate some of the relevant cloud based services that can be enhanced by Next Generation Access methods. For example: BT Cloud Contact Centre, BT Compute (a hosted data centre offering), VPOD: The Government Pod which overcomes the communications gap, how it could deliver real benefits for government, by enabling staff to conduct face-to-face interviews without the need to be there in person. Agile working: how technology is an enabler to allow employees to feel empowered and to work flexibly.

It is no wonder that BT have so few BT Infinity customers, after receiving a lovely email from BT Business, yesterday, saying it had arrived in my area (a small rural exchange) well perhaps not

I was so looking forward to hearing where the advantages to NGA were, but the whole presentation could have been done much better on my home ADSL connection. First a static display of a corporate network while the presenter told us NGA saved us all the equipment needed to do Video conferencing that Skype has managed for several years and bits about the Cloud saving on hardware upgrades.

A video conferencing session using Microsoft Lync (the corporate version of Windows Live Messenger). This failed because it seemed the truck was only connected to a 3G signal. Even the local Wi-Fi signal was not used for the video display!

One would have thought that the all embracing BT would have parked the truck where they could just plug in to a BT Infinity connection, perhaps one of their exchange car parks – or are they owned by BT Openreach and not available to the BT department making the presentation.

Then a demonstration of BT Cloud Contact that again can be used on a standard ADSL connection.

So the whole event was a waste of time, I learnt nothing about hi speed internet, multiple concurrent connections, video streaming, HD video conferencing to multiple locations.

Oxonline needs our support but it looks like BT do as well, we have a technology that everyone wants but no one is buying because no one knows what to do with it. Until the “killer application” comes along we will be back in 2002 looking for high speed solutions to problems we didn’t know we had. The “killer application” in 2002 was simple it was “always on” giving rise to all the presence applications that abound today

ps.

From @BBCRoryCJ:

BT welcomes Osborne’s £100m for 10 superfast cities – "BT is already upgrading large parts of these cities…this could help us go further"

See the full story on the BBC website, why oh why do the powers that be give BT money to do things it would do anyway!!

Thanks to Graham Cluley (@gcluley) of Sophos and the Naked Security website for introducing me to Fiscal from the Queensland Police.

I love his little videos, the third in the series covers ATM fraud and skimming:

The first covered Identity theft where Doris Pennywhistle, receives a phone call supposedly from her bank, asking her to confirm her account details. Unaware the caller is an offender and of the risks involved in providing personal information over the phone, Mrs Pennywhistle soon realises when Fiscal steps in. This animation is primarily aimed at raising awareness amongst our senior population and how to avoid becoming a victim.

The second covers social networking safety (Sofie (aged 13) learns of the risks involved in online social networking. This animation is primarily aimed at children and teaching them about how to enjoy the internet in a safe way.)

In a week where we have seen the local police forces joining Twitter these videos from Queensland show some of the way forward. I also found  Thames Valley Police Channel but no UK Fiscal Ferrets.

The original article that made me look was http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/08/19/do-you-know-enough-about-atm-skimming/

I was browsing my twitter feed this morning and remembered one of my followers/followees (?) had just spent some time changing their website and thought I would have a look.

Their twitter profile had their website link in it and I duly clicked it and found the landing page for their hosting company – oops.

What had been forgotten was that “www.domain.com” is a different website to “domain.com” they had omitted to make a second entry in their DNS server for “domain.com” easily done in the rush to launch. Some companies actually use it for a second machine for redundancy or extra pages. I have found internal servers using this function and being presented with Microsoft Small Business Server login screens before now, giving access to the local network with some username and password social engineering, not really where you want customers to end up even by mistake.

borrowed this image from SBS Diva’s blog, thank you.

I recently had a big debate with the branding department of a major UK  organisation where they said that “domain.com” looks better in documents than “www.domain.com” they had no idea of the ramifications when they did it on sites that they had no control over.

This made me think of how lazy our web browsing has become, we now use the browser address bar as a search bar:

This means we stop typing http:// or www and just enter the company name. We could end up anywhere !! Mostly Google, Bing etc. show you the right sites (after having noted your search history) but there are a lot of phishing sites out there ready to grab your details and they have been known to sell to you and take your money before you know anything about it.

I am not the only one that thinks this, HMRC has a page on it, all about emails but note the web links lower down

As do Microsoft, note the misspelt links on the page

Google’s search shows over 7m examples when you search for “examples of phishing scams”

The answer is to be very careful about DNS and your use of the search bar when you are surfing somewhere which holds your personal information and when you shorten things for Twitter feeds etc.

Do I have to worry about mobile malware and virus apps?

I do according to this infographic from Bulldog via ReadWriteWeb 

Make your own mind up but I am always here if you need help and advice

At some point I will review my new phone a Samsung Galaxy S II Android one.

This is the Windows 7 version of how to find your local IP address, Vista is similar.

I keep talking people through the process of finding their local IP address, not their internet facing one, just the one issued by their router. This post shows one way of checking it on an XP computer the next one does Windows 7, Vista is somewhere in between.

From the Start Button go to Control Panel
Click Network and Internet Connections
Network Connections
Right Click the live connection, usually " Local Area Connection" or the Wi-Fi Connection and
click status
Click the Support Tab on the top
IP address is in the middle Internet router is the default gateway.

Ever found yourself searching for the way to safely remove the USB stick in Windows 7, it is lost in the status bar?

Getting to this is very picky at times
So the way is to create a desktop shortcut as follows:
Right click the desktop select New then Shortcut In Location "rundll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll" – it is case sensitive
Give it a nice name
You can give it a nice icon if you want, Right Click the icon and select Properties
Click Change Icon
Browse to shell32.dll and pick your icon
OK and OK
When you double click you get so you can select the device you want to remove.

This tip was inspired from the official Windows Magazine.

At a recent Banbury Tweetup (usually first Thursday of the month at the Inn at Farnborough, next one on the 9th June 2011) we discussed the security issues of broken computers and hard disks. You should always remove the hard disk or use a secure wipe tool to erase all the data otherwise it might turn up in some sort of identity theft scam later in your life.

Just because a drive cannot be read by your computer (USB drives dropped on floor or USB stick/camera SD drive broken in half ) or your mobile phone sims appears duff does not mean someone could not spend time and read your life story or business secrets from it.

Did you know that an awful lot of laser printers also have hard drives/writable flash media in them, saving your documents for possible reprinting later or just caching them.

So no matter what hardware you recycle remember that you need to be careful about any personal/business information still on the hard disk or flash memory installed in them.

Remember this BBC news item, it could still happen today.

There are services that can wipe and dispose of your drives safely.

I fell foul of HP’s part ordering and managed to buy a small server without a DVD drive, lovely box though, an HP Proliant Microserver.

It came with hard disk and various cd’s including Windows Server 2008R2 Foundation edition.

Not wanting to slow things down I tried numerous ways to boot the Windows Install from a USB pen, finally finding the web site below where the simple commands were posted.

Looks like this will work for Windows Vista, Windows 7 as well as Windows Server 2008.

I found that it was relatively easy to create such a tool!

1. Either mount the ISO or insert the DVD for Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 into your computer. Let’s say it’s at D:\
2. Format your USB stick to FAT32 (I used default settings for everything via the Windows format tool). Let’s say it’s at H:\
3. Run the following commands at a command prompt:

d:\boot\bootsect.exe /NT60 h:

xcopy d:\*.* /s /e /f h:\

At this point, you should be able to boot off of your USB stick (pending proper BIOS settings on the machine you’re booting up from) and it will install Windows off of the flash memory! Easy as that!

Thank you to Shane Milton’s Technology Update – Jaxidian Update

Whenever I come across a useful tip I like to share it, this one which came just at the right time as I am continually moving recurring appointments between days as clients feel the need to want me to visit for special events instead of the usual support days.

As many users have discovered over the years, when you need to change the end date of a recurring appointment to end it prematurely, the occurrence are recalculated and all exceptions are lost, including  those moved to other dates and notes in individual occurrences. For this reason we recommend always setting an end date for recurrences, preferably no more than a year in advance for most appointments, or ten to twelve occurrences for less frequent events.
If you have recurring appointments that need the end date changed and you need to keep a record of all exceptions and notes added to each occurrence of the appointment, you should export the recurring appointment to Excel or a CSV file then import. This will create individual appointments with the contents of each appointment intact. If the series is short and you use Outlook 2007 or older, you can copy and paste (use Ctrl+C,V) each occurrence. In Outlook 2010, you need to right click and drag (to a different time period) to create a copy.

1. Apply a list view, such as By category or All Appointments, to your calendar

2. Create a new calendar folder (File, New, Folder, and make sure Calendar type is selected in the dropdown)

3. Right-click the recurring appointment and drag it to the new calendar folder

4. Choose Copy when releasing the mouse button

5. Go to File, Import and Export, Export to a file and choose CSV or Excel as the output format

6. Select the new calendar folder as the folder to export

7. When asked to specify a date range, select a date prior to the start date of the recurring appointment. The end date can be ‘today’

8. Finish the export then import the newly exported file back into Outlook, choosing your default calendar.

The CSV file you created will contain the list of all the individual events generated from the original event, including the exceptions. You can now delete the original recurring appointment. Note that this method does not include attachments added to the appointment.

To avoid problems in the future, when you need to enter meeting notes in the appointment, we recommend using copy and paste (or dragging) to copy the occurrence , leaving you with both a single appointment and the recurring appointment in the same time slot. Along with allowing you to change or delete the recurring appointment when it ends, the will also avoid the message "The contents of this appointment have been updated. Open this appointment to see the updated text." displaying in the Calendar view when preview is enabled.

This came from the October 2010 monthly Outlook newsletter that Diane Poremsky, Outlook MVP, does called “Exchange Messaging Outlook” back issues are at Back issues are at http://www.slipstick.com/emo/index.htm