Oaksys Tech Update

I’ve been working in the computer industry for over forty years. It is not often that I see an implementation of technology where I think “Wow!” At a recent exhibition I came across GID-Quantor’s Silent Cube technology. These devices use WORM (Write Once Read Many) optical disks to store vast amounts of data. You can store Peta byte (1000 Gigabytes) of data, on-line, in a three rack configuration.

The devices have been carefully engineered with a high level of redundant resilience and active error monitoring. They will also support remote site mirroring as part of the package. They are also engineered to be very low power usage, so the running cost is low; just two Watts for 8 Tera bytes. They are also highly modular.

If you have high volumes are static archival data that needs to be retained long term, but with rapid accessibility requirements, this may be the technology for you.  GID-Quantor have a history of providing archival microfiche solutions, their experience shows in the design of these Silent Cube’s. I can see many uses for this technology in the financial markets; for example, voice recording, archive of price feeds/trades for compliance purposes.

Alaric

The Greek Government has agreed big public budget cuts to reassure international investors.

It won’t be long before that happens in the UK. The Bank of England (UK Government) may have forced the interest rate down to an unnaturally low rate so that Mr Brown can afford to borrow so much money, but before long that interest rate will creep up to attract investors to UK Gov’t sovereign debt. The consequence will be that the interest payments on Gov’t Debt will spiral causing  even greater cuts to public spending. Savers and pensioners on fixed incomes will suffer as inflation follows.

Guru

The Credit Card Economics of the current government are leading the country towards a cycle of inflation caused by further devaluation of the Pound. With interest rates close to zero the government is spending close to £30 Billion on interest for the national debt. The Chancellor’s solution is to borrow more money. Before long international lenders will demand and get a higher interest rate on their loans. A higher interest rate will mean that the government has to borrow more money to service the loans, unless of course higher rates of taxation are imposed – a fat chance of that before the next election.

I can see that that the “solution” will be to allow inflation to rise so that there is more “money” to pay back debts. It is a bit like “Quantative Easing” really.

It is people on fixed incomes, such as private pensions, who will pay for this negligent fiscal attitude. There is no magic bullet, like North Sea Oil, to rescue our economy.

Guru

The bonus tax will be a blow to many of the middle ranking front office/back office staff working in Investment Banking in the UK and they have my sympathy. They will have worked hard and will be innocent of the excesses of the senior traders. The senior directors of those banks affected have brought this problem onto the employees by their insensitivity to the public mood. They have given the Chancellor the opportunity to impose a publicly “popular” tax on the bank employees. It is a measure of of the senior directors’ collective incompetence in handling their banks’ affairs.

The bottom line is that without the Government intervention many of these moaning directors would now be out on the street looking for a new job. Show some common sense guys! Weather some austerity for a couple of years and you can get your snouts back to the trough.

As currently configured it is the Bank of England’s attempt to “print money” by buying UK debt back from investors, including foreign investors. Buying debt from the foreign investor does not inject value into our economy, it merely devalues the pound.

A far more effective way of injecting the money into the UK economy would be to send every man women and child in the UK a cheque for the amount of £2080 each to let them spend/save it. It would be the same cost as the Bank’s current plan.

Guru

I recently had to deal with a situation where a friend was trying to maintain his on-line shop, or what is now called e-commerce. He was using a service supplier to provide these facilities (SaaS software as a service). His problem was that when he tried to maintain the records for the shop, such as products or product stock levels he was finding that he had to constantly re-enter his login authentication details. The timing of this was not predictable it was in effect erratic. It could be mid-transaction or when swapping between screens.

A more alarming symptom of this problem was that when he logged into his shop as a test client he encountered the same problem. Shoppers who had to repeatedly log in to enter an order would soon lose faith and go find another supplier. It would be unlikely that the shop owner would know the cause.

The technical support team for the on-line shop were baffled. So far as they were concerned the system was working fine. I put my detective’s hat on and set to work. When I tried the system from my office and from my home there were no problems. When I tried it from my friend’s computer the problems returned. It was not browser linked; nor was it the firewall on the PC. After a while inspiration struck and I checked out his external firewall/router. I found that his firewall was set to load balance across two internet connection lines. If I turned off one external line the problem disappeared, in a repeatable fashion. My deduction was that the host software of the e-commerce system must be tracking the IP address of the remote user. When the IP address changed, under load balancing across two ports, the system considered that the remote user was not properly authenticated.

Small business users and consumers don’t often use dual internet line load balancing, but this is likely to become increasingly common as businesses increasingly depend on their network connection.

The service provider should have tested for this type of user configuration and made sure that their logic allowed for that to happen. The problem appears to be handled by the on-line banking and other large e-commerce systems without too much effort. After all the whole point about the Internet protocol is that data paths can be diversely routed. Clearly the testing environment of the supplier needs some enhancement.

Guru

Finextra reports that criminals are using a piece of Trojan software to hijack private information for home and business pc’s about financial transactions. Once the software is resident on your PC it quietly sits until you access one of 1400 different sites. It then records your login id, password, pin, credit card number, etc which is then relayed to criminals.

One of my bank accounts is with PayPal. For a princely sum of $3 they have provided me with an authentication dongle which generates a 6 digit random number that I append to my password when I log on to PayPal. It is a cheap effective way of defeat 99% of the trojan attempts to gain login details to my PayPal account.

If PaylPal can do this, why can’t the other major banks? The answer is corporate inertia. “It is not in my budget, so I’m not paying for dongle/keyfob technology.” Clearly legislation is needed to force the banks to introduce a secure login process for their clients.

Guru

My 25 year old daughter has flown the nest of the family home. She has her own career and her own home some 15 miles away from Lewisham in South East London. When vandals struck at the local power supply sub-station they took out the power to 60,000 people. My daughter was without power in her home for 4 solid days. She was able to come and stay back in her old bedroom, so the power outage did not affect her too much. She had a standby arrangement.

I wondered how well the local businesses fared with the power outage? Network connectivity dubious, no power for servers for 4 days, even charging mobile phones was a problem if you were stuck in the  the location of the outage.

I wonder did any of the businesses what they would do in the event of a regional power outage. Rehearsal and problem analysis is an essential part of the BCP process for those businesses. It is bad for customer relations if you don’t have effective BCP, but conversely your company will stand out if it continues its operations in the face of a regional outage.

Whilst I was writing the second book of the Adam Cranford series - “Company Mole” I needed to research how much space and weight £1 Million (Sterling) would take if someone had to move it by hand. After some internet research I couldn’t find the weight of a £20 note so I weighed £1000 using sensitive weighing scales.

It turns out that £1 Million in £20 notes would weigh around 53 Kgs and take a space of 0.7M x 0.5M x 0.3M depending on how tightly it was packed, age of notes, humidity etc.

So £1 Billion pounds would weigh about 53 tons. That is two large lorry loads full of cash.

If the UK Government has spent £50 rescuing the banks, that is 100 large truck loads of cash.

Alaric

Recently published Teen Valour

The Blog by Alistair Kelman describes some of the new rules that will apply to electronic evidence in court cases. In essence the organisation will have to be able to produce a snapshot of their system including transient messages such as IM’s, email and twitter.

Nightmare stuff!

Guru