Random News Stories

[Harold Hallikainen]

It's interesting that they are not dropping DST in the northern border regions, though a significant portion of that northern border is Arizona, which does not use DST. A while back the US Senate passed the "Daylight Preservation Act" (I think that was the name) unanimously, as I recall. It would put everyone on DST year round. But, luckily, the House has not taken it up. If people want to get up earlier in the summer, that's their prerogative. No need to mess with the clock and "God's time."

[Leo Enticknap]

I'm a but confused by this story. It appears that fax machines are to disappear in the UK, yet from the detail, I don't see how this rule change makes that happen.

Telegraph[/URL]]Fax machines to finally disappear after proposed Ofcom rule change

BT will no longer be legally required to provide connections

Fax machines are finally set to disappear after the telecoms regulator agreed to drop a legal requirement for BT to provide connections.

Ofcom has proposed rule changes that mean BT and Hull telecoms operator KCOM will no longer be required to provide fax services under its universal service obligation (USO) rulebook.

The move comes amid diminishing use of fax machines, which were a common sight in offices in the 1980s and 90s, but are now rarely used after being replaced by email.

Fax machines now only tend to be used by some NHS Trusts for medical records and by law firms and football agents for sharing legal documents.

In August, it was reported that more than 800 fax machines were still being used by the NHS, nearly four years after the Government vowed to phase them out.

Ofcom said: “Currently, our telephone universal service obligation, which ensures that a minimum set of phone services are available at an affordable price to people across the UK, includes fax.

“However, the technology has become increasingly outdated and the phone network that is used to deliver messages is also being upgraded. Once this is completed, fax services can no longer be guaranteed to work in the same way.

“As a result, we’re proposing changes to the rules that will mean telecom providers will no longer be required to provide fax services under the universal service obligation. There is more information about the changes on our news centre.”

Ofcom’s USO rulebook requires two designated telecom providers – BT and KCOM – to provide universal service in the UK and was introduced to ensure phone services are available to people across Britain at an affordable price.

However, the current set of USO rules, which require BT and KCOM to provide fax services, were established in 2003 when fax machines were far more prevalent and the use of email and instant messaging was not widespread.

Ofcom added: “Almost 20 years later, and the telecoms landscape has changed. Not only are alternatives to fax machines now more widely available, migration of telephone networks to internet protocol (IP) technology means fax services can no longer be guaranteed to work in the same way.”

Ofcom has launched a consultation on implementing changes to its rules, which it expects to publish early next year.

My understanding is that a fax machine plugs into the same POTS landline as a regular landline phone; therefore, if British Telecom still has a universal obligation to provide landline service, then by extension it still has the obligation to provide the connection for a fax machine. And, as has been noted on the printers are crap thread, combined voice phone and fax devices are still widely available.

I suspect that this could be a precursor to a proposal to abandon the universal service obligation for POTS in its entirety, leaving VOIP as the only voice communication offering. I can see that this would make sense if BT intends to replace copper with fiber. Telegrams and Telex have gone the same way into the history books: it wouldn't surprise me if POTS is next.

[Jim Cassedy]

My understanding is that a fax machine plugs into the same POTS landline as a regular landline phone;.

For a while in the late 80's & early 90's, I worked as a network engineer for the the phone company when FAX & modems were very common. I don't know how the British phone system was provisioned, but here in the US, the electronic switching systems at the time 'listened" in to the first few seconds of a connection and one of the things that it did if it heard that "hand-shake' tone was to disable certain echo-cancelling devices in the transmission chain, and do a quick sort of 'line-eq" to optimize the line for data transmission. Of course, if you wanted to spend the extra money, you could buy a 2nd 'dedicated fax line' which was permanently provisioned & optimized within the network for modem transmission, at least from your originating end.
- - and as the article mentioned, there are still some business that require use of FAX rather than e-mail for certain types of communications. I ran into that a lot when having to send or receive legal and medical documents when I was dealing with my elderly mom when she was alive and later dealing with her estate trust . The funny part is, I still keep a dedicated "fax number" through an online fax service- - so while it does actually 'dial out' over the POTS network to the receiver, on my end, I'm sending & receiving all my documents via an e-mail interface to the FAX network provider . .

[Harold Hallikainen]

I think that more than having to support echo suppression, the telephone companies are moving to IP-based transport with audio compression. The audio compression is optimized for voice but creates havoc for modems such as those used in fax machines.

[Leo Enticknap]

I don't know if optimizing the line for fax/modem use was ever done in the UK or not. For a few years before I got ADSL in the late '90s and early '00s, I had a fax/modem card in my PC, which used the same POTS line in my apartment as the voice phone did. I used the fax function in it very rarely - maybe two or three times a year - but recall that the speed seemed reasonable to me. I certainly got 56K out of the modem with no issues. So if that optimization was happening, it was being done dynamically on detection of the carrier tone, as Jim describes.

I guess that must also be the way that combined fax/phone devices distinguished between an incoming voice call and an incoming fax call: it picked up, and then if it detected a modem carrier tone, activated the fax function, and if not, caused the voice phone to ring and continued to play a ringing tone to the caller until a human lifted the handset.

My father was a freelance journalist working out of a home office throughout the '80s and '90s. I remember him buying a fax machine in the mid '80s, when a postal workers' strike left him pretty much unable to do his job. This was at a time when almost no-one had one in their home, and it cost what would be thousands in today's money. He also had a separate line installed for it. I remember him telling me that he estimated that it paid for itself within a few months, through a combination of lower postal costs, time saved not having to mail stuff, and work he picked up that he would not have been able to without it.

If VOIP completely supersedes POTS (and in my household, it pretty much has - we ditched our international calling plan when my mother in the UK got an iPhone last year, and now do all our international voice communication with my relatives in the UK, and my wife's in Canada and Trinidad, using FaceTime), the traditional phone number will become nothing more than an addressing method, primarily for cellular.

[Leo Enticknap]

Probably not a good read if you're about to have dinner. From The Daily Telegraph:

The gruesome WWI treatment that’s making a comeback on the NHS

Data show the use of larval therapy to treat hard-to-heal wounds has been rising steadily, despite the ‘yuck factor’

Previous research has shown maggot therapy is effective in treating hard-to-heal skin wounds, while other studies have shown it is a cost-effective method.

Maggot therapy was accepted for use by the NHS in 2004 and one UK firm – BioMonde, based in Bridgend, south Wales – rears thousands of green bottle blowflies every year to sell to the NHS and across Europe.

The firm sells 9,000 tea-bag style “biobags” full of larvae to the NHS every year.

‘Natural aversion to creepy crawlies’

The NHS Digital data show the technique has been gradually increasing since 2007, when records began. The figures dipped in 2019/20 to 1,190 treatments and 776 in 2020/21, likely as a result of the pandemic.

To treat wounds that won’t heal with antibiotics, or as a “last resort” in a patient’s treatment, the “tea bag” full of larvae, which are no bigger than 1mm, is placed on top of the open tissue, covered with a dressing and left for up to four days.

The maggots then feed on the dead tissue and, as some research suggests, secrete antimicrobial molecules which disinfect the wound.

Yamni Nigam, professor of healthcare science at Swansea University, told BBC Radio 4 Today: “Then they drink all that slurry and soup back up, through the bag, and then you remove the bag full of all the process of the wound.”

A survey of nurses’ attitudes towards the treatment, carried out by Prof Nigam, found that specialist wound nurses are highly in favour of the therapy after seeing its benefits and effectiveness.

“Whereas non-specialist wound nurses, and general staff nurses, don’t really want to use maggots,” she said.

“Certainly everybody, I think, has a natural aversion to creepy crawlies and most people tend to have an inherent disgust as far as maggots are concerned,” she added.

A previous survey, cited in her study and published in the Journal of Wound Care, found that health professionals were more likely to be disgusted by the thought of using maggots than their patients.

There was a “lack of confidence” on the part of professionals, which could be alleviated by training and education, she said.

“The yuck factor can be overcome through the enthusiasm of the innovators and early adopters who, as influencers, are championing the use of maggots,” the study concluded.

Maggot therapy on the NHS has surged by almost 50 per cent as the treatment becomes a key tool in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Data from NHS Digital show the number of treatments given in England increased from 886 in 2008/9 to 1,305 a decade later in 2018/19.

Modern use of medical maggots dates back to the First World War, when a surgeon discovered soldiers’ wounds healed faster when they were “colonised” by maggots.

But use of the treatment dwindled in the 1940s with the rise of antibiotics.

However, because the rise of antibiotic resistance has made wounds harder to treat, medics are being forced to return to the out-of-fashion approach.

[Harold Hallikainen]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/s...smid=share-url

Time Is Running Out for the Leap Second


To the world’s timekeepers, the leap second is a kludge, a bane, a pain in the little hand. Now they’re proposing to ditch it. Will our days ever be the same?

Article too long to post, but link above should work.

I'm thinking UTC should not have leap second. Instead, local time zone offsets would be adjusted very infrequently to align noon within a half hour. UTC would not necessarily be a local time at a fixed location but would, instead, slightly change location as the earth's rotational speed varies. Perhaps even better would be the use of a 64 bit Unix time stamp that does not necessarily relate to the time at any location. Local time zones would be an offset from the UTC time stamp (by the way, this is the way I did time zones in some products - I took the UTC offset in hours, multiplied by 3600 and stored that value. When a local time was to be displayed, I added the offset to the UTC time stamp and ran it though the standard C functions to display date and time. More recently, products like the IRC-28C and LSS-200 do not care about local time or time zones. Everything is done as a UTC time stamp and javascript in the web UI converts to local time).

Harold
https://w6iwi.org

[Leo Enticknap]

From Ars Technica:

Thinking about taking your computer to the repair shop? Be very afraid

Not surprisingly, female customers bear the brunt of the privacy violations.

If you’ve ever worried about the privacy of your sensitive data when seeking a computer or phone repair, a new study suggests you have good reason. It found that privacy violations occurred at least 50 percent of the time, not surprisingly with female customers bearing the brunt.

Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations had accessed personal data and that two of those shops also copied data onto a personal device. Devices belonging to females were more likely to be snooped on, and that snooping tended to seek more sensitive data, including both sexually revealing and non-sexual pictures, documents, and financial information.
Blown away

“We were blown away by the results,” Hassan Khan, one of the researchers, said in an interview. Especially concerning, he said, was the copying of data, which happened during repairs for one from a male customer and the other from a female. “We thought they would just look at [the data] at most.”

The amount of snooping may actually have been higher than recorded in the study, which was conducted from October to December 2021. In all, the researchers took the laptops to 16 shops in the greater Ontario region. Logs on devices from two of those visits weren’t recoverable. Two of the repairs were performed on the spot and in the customer's presence, so the technician had no opportunity to surreptitiously view personal data.

In three cases, Windows Quick Access or Recently Accessed Files had been deleted in what the researchers suspect was an attempt by the snooping technician to cover their tracks. As noted earlier, two of the visits resulted in the logs the researchers relied on being unrecoverable. In one, the researcher explained they had installed antivirus software and performed a disk cleanup to “remove multiple viruses on the device.” The researchers received no explanation in the other case.

Here’s a breakdown of the six visits that resulted in snooping:

image.png

The laptops were freshly imaged Windows 10 laptops. All were free of malware and other defects and in perfect working condition with one exception: the audio driver was disabled. The researchers chose that glitch because it required only a simple and inexpensive repair, was easy to create, and didn’t require access to users’ personal files.

Half of the laptops were configured to appear as if they belonged to a male and the other half to a female. All of the laptops were set up with email and gaming accounts and populated with browser history across several weeks. The researchers added documents, both sexually revealing and non-sexual pictures, and a cryptocurrency wallet with credentials.

The researchers also configured the laptops to run a custom logging app that used the Windows Steps Recorder utility in the background. The utility captured the screen on every mouse click and recorded each key pressed by the user. The researchers also enabled Windows Audit Policy to log access to any file on the device.

The researchers then brought the laptops to two national outlets, two regional ones, and four local ones. Half the customers were male, and the other half were female.

Besides finding widespread snooping, the study uncovered other problems. Among them: The vast majority of repair shops provide no privacy policy and those that do have no means of enforcing them. Even worse, repair technicians required a customer to surrender their login password even when it wasn’t necessary for the repair needed.

These findings came from a separate part of the study, in which the researchers brought an Asus UX330U laptop into 11 shops for a battery replacement. This repair doesn’t require a technician to log in to the machine, since the removal of the back of the device and access to the device BIOS (for checking battery health) is all that’s needed. Despite this, all but one of the repair service providers asked for the credentials to the device OS anyway.

When the customer asked if they could get the repair without providing the password, three refused to take the device without it, four agreed to take it but warned they wouldn’t be able to verify their work or be responsible for it, one asked the customer to remove the password, and one said they would reset the device if it was required.

In all, the findings from the study were:

• Privacy policies and the practice of communicating protocols and controls to protect customers’ data do not exist across service providers of all sizes.
• Service providers largely (10/11) require “all access” to the device, even when it is unnecessary.
• Technicians often snoop on customers’ data (6/16) and sometimes copy those to external devices (2/16).
• Technicians who violate privacy often do so carefully to not generate evidence (1/6) or remove such evidence (3/6).
• A significant proportion of broken devices (26/79, 33 percent) are not repaired due to privacy concerns. For the devices that get repaired, device owners are concerned about threats to their privacy but do not use the proper controls to protect their data.

The results likely confirm what many more experienced computer users already know: that their data is vulnerable to snooping or copying any time they surrender their device to an untrusted or unknown individual, particularly when the individual has their login password. But for a much larger percentage of people wanting to recover crucial data on a broken device, the findings are likely a wake-up call with few, if any, good solutions.

“Our investigation shows an absence of policies and controls to safeguard customers’ data across all types of repair service providers,” the researchers concluded. “Our work calls to action device manufacturers, OS developers, repair service providers, and regulatory bodies to take appropriate measures to safeguard customers’ privacy in the repair industry.”

I'm in two minds about this. At first glance, it does seem worrying and gross that this sort of thing goes on. As against which, one of Britain's most notorious pedophiles was caught when PC repair techs fixing his laptop found kiddie porn. If they hadn't looked, he could have gone on molesting children for years, and might never have been caught. And then there's Hunter Biden's laptop, which of course I'm not going to discuss due to forum rules, but it does raise the question of other forms of criminal activity being discovered by this route. Finally, there is the question of liability if computers with this sort of evidence on them pass through a repair shop without being caught.

In any case, these techs were clearly of limited ability. If they'd removed (or even just disconnected the SATA cable) from the drives in these PCs, connected them to another computer and imaged them (e.g. using a Clonezilla live boot drive), they would have gotten all the files and nothing would show up in any logs.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I had the battery replaced in my phone. They also wanted the PIN to access the device. I really did not want to give it to them since that gives access to my banking info, passwords for pretty much everything, etc. It SEEMS that manufacturers should equip devices with a maintenance password that allows testing of the system without access to the customer's data.

[Frank Cox]

https://www.samsung.com/us/support/answer/ANS00091542/

The new One UI 5 update on your Galaxy phone comes with the convenient Maintenance mode feature! Maintenance mode will hide your personal data and other information, such as photos, videos, contacts, and messages, if you need to send it for a repair service. It’ll protect your privacy and prevent others from accessing your data, so you won’t need to worry about someone else handling your precious device.

[Harold Hallikainen]

That's great! It appears my Samsung S8 is too old for that feature, though.

[Bobby Henderson]

I have a Galaxy S22 Ultra smart phone, so I'll have to check out that maintenance mode feature.

Regarding personal computers, I'm adept enough to be able to do perform most repairs on a desktop tower or notebook. It's not difficult to change a bad hard disc and do a clean install of the operating system. This is probably easier to do than ever with some of the system restore utilities that have been developed. Some people don't have the spare time to do such work. Worse yet, many people are just flat out terrible at organizing and backing up their computer data as well as keeping supporting documentation, install discs, etc handy. I think that's what helps keep many PC repair shops in business, although there is only so much they can do to rescue precious data off a computer whose hard drive is shitting the bed.

With that being said, I don't keep a lot of valuable files on my computer's boot hard disc. I like keeping the system in a position that if a serious hardware problem occurs or the system gets hit with some sort of malware I can start over with a clean install without losing anything. Valuable data is backed up to more than one external hard disc drive. I use Dropbox and Adobe Creative Cloud storage to a limited extent. In the odd event that I would need to take my personal notebook or work desktop to a PC repair shop I wouldn't be too worried about them finding anything interesting or valuable.

[Frank Cox]

That's one of the nice things about Linux; unless you make special arrangements all of your data files are in your home directory and you don't have data scattered all over your hard drive.

[Leo Enticknap]

Telegraph:

The BBC could switch off terrestrial TV and radio by the end of the decade, Tim Davie, the corporation’s director general, has said.

In a speech about the long-term future of the BBC, Mr Davie said the 100-year-old organisation needed to consider a full switch-off of broadcast channels that would mean it would transform into an internet-only broadcaster.

Mr Davie said: “A switch off of broadcast will and should happen over time, and we should be active in planning for it.”

The director general said the BBC should “own a move to an internet future” by 2030 and prepare for “internet-only distribution”. Such a shift would see BBC broadcasts from TV towers switched off after more than a century and all programming moving to streaming.

Mr Davie said: “We must work together to ensure that everyone is connected, and can get their TV and radio via the internet. This isn’t something to resist.”

Freeview, a terrestrial joint venture between the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky that is used by 18 million people, has a guaranteed spectrum until 2034 but TV channels are ultimately expected to shift to internet-only broadcasting over time.

The BBC's iPlayer currently attracts 12 million log-ins per week and accounts for 16pc of all viewing of the corporation's programmes.

Despite early streaming success with the launch of BBC iPlayer in 2007, Broadcasting House is increasingly grappling for viewers' attention against US streaming giants, such as Netflix and Disney+, and rapidly growing social media companies such as China’s TikTok.

“TikTok is now bigger than the BBC in video for 16-24s in the UK,” Mr Davie said.

The move to a full terrestrial switch-off is likely to prompt a backlash from MPs amid concerns over digital exclusion, in particular of older TV viewers.

Mr Davie admitted that, by 2030, as many as 2 million homes in the UK would still not have a fixed-line broadband connection.

The rest of the article is not quoted, as it puts a political slant on the above.

Coming on the heels of the article I posted above, predicting the imminent end of POTS, speculation that terrestrial, wireless TV could go the same way. As with electric cars, infrastructure is going to be a significant part of it. However, Internet service, like terrestrial TV, can also be delivered wirelessly, with the added advantage that it is full duplex. I would speculate that existing TV transmitter infrastructure could be converted to cellular service provision relatively easily and cheaply.

We no longer have terrestrial TV capability in our home, thanks to one of our cats climbing up the coaxial cord to the wall and breaking the F-connector on the TV itself. That was three years ago, and we simply haven't bothered to fix it (which would likely require buying a new TV), nor missed not being able to receive over the air broadcasting since. We don't have cable, either (one of the major differences between America and Britain - cable TV never really caught on in the latter, though it does exist): everything we watch comes over IP. So I can definitely see this happening within a generation. If so, analog terrestrial TV (in the UK, 1937 to 2010 with a break during WWII, approx.) will have outlasted digital (started around 2000) by several decades.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I agree. I'm on several broadcast mailing lists. There I compared RF distribution to the truck delivering something from a retailer. They may own the truck or may hire UPS to deliver the product. Broadcast will become the same. They can use their own truck (the RF transmitter) or pay someone else to deliver (ISP). It has been argued that broadcast RF distribution is less expensive than streaming. This is probably true if everyone in the coverage area was watching (TV) or listening (radio). A top rated TV show has about 10% of the TVs tuned to it. Top radio stations also get about 10% of the audience. Streaming to 10% of the potential audience generally costs less than the cost of RF transmission, especially if there are fees for use of the spectrum.

Also, as pointed out, Internet streaming is interactive, so the user can select what to watch at any time instead of at a scheduled time. "Linear TV" as distributed by cable companies is losing favor. I believe the same is true of over the air broadcasting. 20 or 30 years ago, the FCC tried to make broadcast TV interactive by setting aside spectrum for the Interactive Video Data Service. At the time, promoters were saying "Imagine ordering a pizza from your TV set!" That didn't work out and the spectrum has been reallocated.

Speaking of RF spectrum allocation, I wrote an article quite a while back on this. See https://hallikainen.org/org/pub/6513196902.pdf .

Harold
https://w6iwi.org