The Evil Devices In Our Midst
I recommend that my readers, if there are any out there, read this article on the BBC, which is entitled ‘Smart’ home devices used as weapons in website attack.
It would appear that last Friday, that a company called Dyn suffered a denial of service attack. The attack and its effects is described in on Wikipedia.
The reasons behind the attack are still not clear and it could be in support for Wikileaks or in my mind just to prove it can be done.
But I doubt it will have any repercussions for the average John and Jenny, unless they want to buy something on eBay say!
To me, as someone who believes that in his day, he was a world-class programmer, I think that we haven’t seen anything like the end of evil minds working their wicked spells on the Internet.
Suppose you use an App to access your bank account or pay for your taxi on your phone.
How long before you’re sitting in a coffee shop, library or railway station, happily surfing the Internet and a message comes up on your phone, asking you to download the latest Taxi App say? Except that it won’t be!
You innocently download it and within minutes your bank account has been emptied or your credit card has been maxed out.
For that reason, I and other programmers I’ve spoken to, will never load an App that needs any financial information to my phone.
Any web site with your financial information, should only be accessed from a totally private connection.
We cannot be too careful.
When I started to use my American Express card for contactless payments, I noticed some strange payments without any recognisable name on my statement.
So I challenged them with Amex and they refunded them.
But they kept coming, until I realised that they were for a branch of a well-known store that had setup its tills wrongly.
In all this, Amex had been puzzled too and one of their security experts had talked to me. He told me that the level of fraud on contactless cards was less than they had expected, something which seems to have been confirmed by the lack of hard stories of fraud on contactless cards.
A policeman told me, that the limit of thirty pounds is not enough for the average card criminal, who like to deal in thirty thousand pounds a hit.
He also felt that as many contactless transactions are on CCTV, that intelligent criminals think they could be a Get Into Jail Quickly card.
As other more reliable payment methods like face recognition become more common, I feel that in the future, there will be no need to store any financial details on your phone, that can be hacked.
But until that happens, there will be no obvious financial details on my phone.
Certain details like passport number are hidden in the phone, in case of loss abroard.
Do On-Line Advertisers Waste Their Money?
I monitor my INR using a Coagguchek device. And very good it is too!
But how many times a week do I get an on-line advert for the device? I’ve not counted, but it must be many.
Why does on-line advertising, preach to the converted?
Google needs a better algorithm!
Brexit – Signalling Implications For The UK
The title of this post is that of an article on Rail Engineer.
It looks at how rail signalling will be affected by Brexit.
It is an article worth reading.
Remember that signalling is the instructions that keeps a railway functioning, just like the operating system does on your computer.
The article starts like this.
With Britain on a course to leave the EU, how might the plans for signalling (control and communications) be affected? In short, nobody really knows, but a number of factors might now change the policy that had existed hitherto. Not having to comply with EU rules on interoperability, the non-inclusion of TEN routes and the advertising of large contracts in the European Journal might all lead to a different (or modified) approach.
So will it lead to different approach?
I don’t know either, but if you read the article we have gone a long way to creating a signalling system, that is some way along the path to meeting the ultimate EU aims.
ERTMS
The article says this about ERTMS or \European Rail Transport Management System.
ERTMS, and its constituent parts of ETCS and GSM-R, has been a corner stone of European signalling policy for over two decades. Both have taken far too long to come to maturity, with ETCS Level 2 just about at a stable level and GSM-R, whilst rolled out throughout the UK, facing an obsolescence crisis within the next ten years.
ETCS or European Train Control System is not fully deployed, but in the UK, we have made some progress.
- The Cambrian Line has been equipped as a learning exercise.
- Significant testing has been performed on the Hertford Loop Line
- ETCS is being installed and has been tested in the central core of Thameslink.
- Crossrail will be using ETCS.
- ETCS is being implemented on the Southern part of the East Coast Main Line.
GSM-R is the communication system from train to signallers.
Looking at this , shows that although the UK fully implemented a GSM-R network by January 2016, not many countries have got as far as the UK.
Surely, you need decent communications to run an efficient and safe railway.
I think it is true to say we’ve not been idle.
The article talks about alternatives and shows a few cases where an alternative approach has been taken.
- Norwich-Ely and Crewe-Shrewsbury have been resignalled using a modular system.
- Scotland has decided to go its own way in the Far North.
- The article talks about CBTC or Commuincations-Based Train Control, which is used on several systems around the world including London’s Jubilee and Northern Lines.
The article also says this about CBTC
The endless committees to discuss and agree how the standards will be implemented do not get in the way. Whilst not suitable for main line usage (at least in the foreseeable future), there could be suburban routes around cities (for example Merseyrail) that could benefit from CBTC deployment.
Could CBTC be a practical system without the bureaucracy?
But these alternatives all smell of pragmatism, where the best system is chosen for a particular line.
But we have one great advantage in that we have imnplemented a comprehensive digital network covering the whole network.
This is no Internet of Things, but an Internet of Trains.
Software
As a computer programmer, I couldn’t leave this out of the signalling recipe.
You can bet your house, that somewhere there are programmers devising solutions to get round our problems.
And they will!
Conclusion
I can’t believe that other industries are not giving the same opportunities to the disruptive innovators of the UK.
Brexit might be good for us, in a surprising way!
Nothing to do with politics or immigration and all to do with innovation!
Will Crossrail And Its Class 345 Trains Set Mobile Connection Standards For The UK?
Search for “Class 345 trains 4G” or “Class 345 trains wi-fi” and you find reports like this on London Reconnections about the Class 345 train.
This or something like it, is said in several of these reports.
According to the accompanying press notes both free wifi and 4G services will be delivered on board, as will multiple wheelchair and luggage spaces.
It would be very embarrassing for London’s flagship multi-billion pound project, if it wasn’t correct.
So it would appear that I could board a Class 345 train at Shenfield and watch a video all the way to Heathrow or Reading.
But where does this leave Thameslink?
Their Class 700 trains have been designed without wi-fi, 4G and power-sockets as I said in By Class 700 Train To Brighton And Back.
But at least Siemens felt that the Department for Transport, who ordered the trains, were out of step with reality and appear to have made provision to at least fit wi-fi.
This article on Rail Engineer is entitled Class 707 Breaks Cover and it describes the Class 707 train, which is a sister train to the Class 700. This is said about the two trains and wi-fi and toilets.
Thameslink (or the Department for Transport which ordered the trains) decided not to include Wi-Fi in the Class 700s, a questionable decision that has now apparently been reversed. Fortunately, Siemens had included the technology framework in the design so, hopefully, the upgrade will not require too much effort. Suffice it to say that South West Trains has included Wi-Fi in its specification for Class 707s.
Reversing the story, Thameslink Class 700s are all fitted with toilets. However, South West Trains has decided not to include toilets in its Class 707 specification given that the longest journey time is less than one hour and their inclusion would reduce the overall capacity of the trains.
So it appears that Siemens may have future-proofed the trains.
This article on the Railway Gazette describes the third fleet of the Siemens trains; the Class 717 trains for Moorgate services. This is said.
Plans for the installation of wi-fi are being discussed with the Department for Transport as part of a wider programme for the GTR fleet.
So at least something is happening.
But how close will mobile data services get to the ideal that customers want.
- 4G everywhere from the moment you enter a station until you leave the railway at your destination station.
- Seamless wi-fi, so you log in once and your login is valid until you leave the railway.
It will be tough ask to achieve, as it must be valid on the following services.
- Crossrail
- Thameslink
- London Overground
- London Underground
- All train services terminating in London.
And why not all buses, trams and taxis?
On a related topic, I believe that for safety and information reasons, all bus and tram stops and railway stations must have a quality mobile signal and if it is possible wi-fi.
One life saved would make it all worthwhile.
Mutual Blogging
A reader of this blog, who used to be an old Artemis professional, is currently working on a large project, where there are a large number of sub-contractors and a difficult public relations problem with those, who live locally to the project.
They asked me, if a blog could solve some of his problems.
So here goes!
I would suggest, he starts a simple blog, probably using WordPress, as it is generally easily managed by an individual with average computer skills.
- Only a tight group of individuals would be allowed to add posts to the blog.
- Posts would be limited to so many a week.
- Anybody would be allowed to comment, but under a set of behavioural rules and moderation, If the project is controversial, you don’t want the blog to become the focus of discontent.
- I believe that with a difficult project, it could be a place for constructive discussion.
- Hopefully, each post would generate comments and discussion, that improved the original post.
- The blog would also point on its home page to useful sites concerned with the subject of the blog.
- There would be a contact form.
If you were having a blog like this for say a public infrastructure project like Crossrail, it could be public, but a project like perhaps trialling a new treatment for a controversial-to-some illness like HIV-Aids, might be password-protected.
I think on balance most project blogs would be public.
If a system like WordPress is used, all of what I said is possible. And a lot more too!
North of me, they are electrifying the Gospel Oak to Barking Line and there has been a bit of controversy over noisy piling in the middle of the night.
A simple post apologising for the noise and giving locations may have eased the problems. You might even get comments to the blog from those overlooking the piling, which show the details of the engineering and the generated noise.
You can never be sure, the way that such a blog will develop.
But I’m sure it will work, to improve the smooth running of a project.
Illegal Football Watching Melted My Internet
I should say, that I swapped my Internet use from the Vista system that I liked with Office 2007 to the current Windows 7 and Office 2010, which I don’t like about eighteen months ago, when the older machine became unreliable.
I made one mistake in the transfer, in that I didn’t write down the passwords for my smtp and mail connections. They are stored on my old machine, which is totally dead.
It has worked successfully since then, but yesterday at four o’clock, when the vArsenal match started the Internet went into a curious meltdown.
So many people wanted to watch the Arsenal match on Sky, through broadband, that the connection seemed to melt down in a curious way.
Displaying a page on the Internet was extremely slow, but my e-mail program couldn’t get through the mess and kept asking me for a new smtp password, which I hadn’t written down.
So I just hit return. But it was doing it every ten seconds or so.
And so I must have typed in something, in all this chaos and now as I haven’t got the right password, I can’t connect.
As I was trying to send an e-mail, when this happened, Outlook won’t let me do anything without putting in the correct password first.
I can’t even shut Outlook without forcing it.
I’m pretty certain, there’s a high proportion of boxes, that watch football illegally in this area, which probably caused the problem.
Starting To Program Again!
I have had, this idea for a mobile phone app and as before my stroke, I was a more than capable hack programmer, I think I might program it myself.
I notice there are systems that allow the creation of apps, that work on all platforms, so feel that this would be the way to go, as if it’s one thing I hate it’s having anything to do with Apples and their alien money-grabbing ideas.
I don’t even like the fruit!
Any help would be appreciated!
I Can’t Display My Galleries
WordPress have done their usual and updated the software without testing it.
I can’t look at any galleries.
I’m using Windows 7. But it works fine on an old xP machine.
If you can see them properly or can’t please add a comment.
WordPress Is Total Crap At The Moment
My galleries don’t display and it is completely f**cked.
They must put the last version back and stop fiddling.
Apologies to all my readers!
The Anonymous Widower 