The idea that desktops might change forever is enough to send geeks into a spin.

Something of a shockwave rippled through the hardware geek world as things began winding down for the Christmas and New Year’s break.

Rumours flew around claiming that Intel’s upcoming ‘Broadwell’ processor would only come in ball grid array (BGA) packaging. In BGA packaging, tiny balls of solder are used to surface mount processors, rather than the more usual desktop land grid array (LGA) arrangement of having processors with pins that fit into motherboard sockets.

Processors with BGAs have plenty of electrical, physical and manufacturing advantages over other forms of chip packaging but once they’re soldered onto a motherboard, that’s it. They don’t come off without a huge amount of effort involving heat guns and hacked toaster ovens.

Desktop processors without sockets is heresy of the worst kind to geeks who have become used to the open architecture of personal computing that lets anyone (well, almost) swap many of the crucial electronics out for repair, upgrade, better performance - or just for the fun of it.
It’s also not really what businesses built around open PC architecture want to hear either, as the BGA move would close down most smaller operators.

As Broadwell is due out in 2014, I asked Intel if it was true that it’d be BGA-only and whether next-year’s ‘Haswell’ range would be the last in land grid array or LGA format. I got what amounted to a non-response, but in the meantime panic had apparently set in with Intel’s large customers: they had to be assuaged with official messages.

A spokesperson for ‘Big I’ told American media that the company will continue to offer socketed parts in LGA packages, ”for the foreseeable future„, whatever that means.

Leaked Intel processor roadmaps show that in 2014, Broadwell will go into mobile devices and use BGA, but there appears to be a Haswell part in LGA format over the same time period.
Fellow chip maker AMD got in on the act to say it will offer socketed chips for 2013 and 2014. Fingers crossed, AMD will still be around to honour its promise.

Reassurances aside, the industry would have to be blind not to see this train coming. Controllers, chipsets and processors are already being perma-soldered to motherboards, and the same is starting to happen with memory.

What’s more, increased integration and shrinking components mean separate processors will be replaced by ‘systems on a chip’ at the consumer level at least. Already, Intel is seeking to move graphics and I/O controllers onto the main processor die and that movement of key parts onto the die is likely to continue.

That evolution is driven by economics and a desire to control the market. Apple and Android vendors have shown the way with devices that are cheap, reasonably powerful and have the hardware closed off to user customisation or upgrades, thanks to the high level of integration.
However, I’m not convinced that offering fewer choices will help slumping PC sales and I think vendors need to start thinking what it was about that particular architecture that had people buy computers in droves. Hint: extensibility and flexibility were some of the reasons.

And while I’m talking about hardware that shuts you out, I’ve had a few issues with the new Extendible Firmware Interface (EFI), the new standard to start up and control your computer that replaces ye olde BIOS.

EFI has some really useful features, improved security and no more text-mode VGA configuration screens, but it can also be incredibly inflexible, especially with Windows.

I discovered that with EFI-based computers, you can’t just shift a bootable hard drive from one SATA port on the motherboard to another as you could in the past. The computer sees the hard disk, but it won’t start up.

It turns out that EFI ties the Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) in the partition table with a particular SATA port, and Windows Boot Manager isn’t smart enough to work out it should look elsewhere on the system if the drive isn’t where expected.

This behaviour causes further headaches when you clone disks - say when you move from a small SSD to a larger one - and dual-booting becomes dependent on the main bootable disk.
Luckily, it is possible to sort it out and there’s no need to start digging in with the spudgers, but it’s a manual process that seems like a heap of work just to move a drive from one SATA port to another.

Maybe there is a point to the pain, but I fail to see it myself - beyond, of course, making it more difficult for people to control the hardware they’ve paid for.

Time to start hoarding old gear…

Juha Saarinen

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 1:21 PM | Comments ( 0 )

This month's column is brought to you by the letter C, which is the first letter of many powerful terms that I come across every day.

Take ‘content’ for instance. This can refer to anything filling an empty space. My writing is content, but you can also use the word to describe whatever goes into a toilet bowl. Despite being empty of specific qualities, Content is King.

Content is hugely important. It’s the basis of network business cases and infrastructure projects: without content, nobody will buy snappy Ultra-Fast Broadband connections, apparently.

Sky TV has first dibs - and sometimes exclusive rights - on most content that’s expected to go directly to consumers on the UFB network. Sky TV has signed deals with some ISPs to unmeter its TV data: tough luck on competitors such as Quickflix that aren’t allowed such zero-rating deals.

Content also requires fast delivery, with no buffering. People advocate local content delivery networks (CDNs) because they’ve heard that the standard internet protocol TCP doesn’t work well over a long distance internet.

That’s only true if you try to download something from an overseas CDN that doesn’t enable the built-in features of TCP which deal with large latency and packet loss. Many CDN operators don’t enable those TCP features for commercial reasons: they want ISPs in distant destinations to buy their expensive CDNs.

The bad news is that CDNs break the end-to-end principle of the internet, do nothing for upstream traffic and - as shown above - can slow it down.

The irony is that we don’t need a UFB network to deliver content. We already have the excellent digital Freeview service which pumps out gigabits of high-definition video and audio to homes in New Zealand every day.

Giving Freeview a few hundred million dollars to buy content rights and to subsidise set-top boxes would’ve been a far better content delivery deal than the UFB. Add a bit more money to let Freeview set up a 3G - or even LTE - mobile virtual network operator service for interactivity and New Zealand would’ve been competitively covered in content by now.

Where is the UFB anyway? The UFB is a year old now but there doesn’t appear to be a single retail connection sold as yet.

In Australia, the National Broadband Network has been truck-rolling along since 2009. There have been a few controversies and lots of opposition MPs saying that DSL should be good enough for anyone, but overall everything is in the open.

There is coruscating clarity at the NBN compared to New Zealand UFB. Here, the c-level executives believe in commercial confidentiality and don’t communicate a great deal as to what we can expect and when.

Being impatient, I asked the freshly demerged Chorus in November last year to clarify when residential customers could expect UFB connections. I didn’t get a clear answer to that. Chorus told me it’s still developing the long term deployment plan for a phased roll-out across all twenty-four regions awarded to it by the government.

Now, I was surprised to hear that Chorus was awarded the vast majority of the UFB contract without a deployment plan agreed upon with Crown Fibre Holdings - the government agency that’s in charge of the whole project - but again, I received no explanation to that.

However, progress is being made on the CFH’s UFB contracts, which are different for Chorus, Ultrafast Fibre, Enable and Northpower, the network builders for the project. Why are they different? We’re not told that - but Chorus got the best deal in the contract negotiations by a country mile.

The three Local Fibre Companies will provide a double-span aerial drop lead, and up to thirty metres of buried lead-in for the cables connecting premises, whereas Chorus has to do only half that work: a single-span aerial drop lead and fifteen metres worth of buried lead-in cable. That short length would put many properties on sub-divided sections in Auckland out of reach of the UFB, unless the owners paid extra for installation.

Why would CFH provide Chorus with a better deal than the LFCs? I can’t tell, and it appears neither can the government. Minister Adams’ office tells me that the government is aware of the issue and is working through things with Chorus and the LFCs.

Either way, Chorus updated coverage maps show that most of Auckland, my area included, won’t get UFB until 2019 at the earliest so it doesn’t really matter.

Move to Australia if you want broadband. That’s pretty much official. Chur.

Juha Saarinen, juha@pcworld.co.nz

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 11:13 AM | Comments ( 0 )

Vietnam is a fantastic place: mostly tropical with cooler parts up North, very good food that’s an excellent mix of Vietnam, China, SE Asia and Europe and a drive towards developing through technology.

You notice that last aspect early on in any visit to the country. An exporter of labourers, Vietnam is very much on the internet. Considering that the country is still poor, with a GDP per capita thought to hit US$1,500 this year and inflation running at 20% annually, the fact that some thirty million Vietnamese are on the internet is remarkable.

That’s a third of the population of 91 million, and goes to show the importance of the technology-borne freedom of taking part of and sharing information.

The practical aspect of this is I was able to find Wi-Fi everywhere - usually free in cafés and hotels to lure customers - and also fast 3G at 21/5.76Mbit/sec nominal speeds.

What’s more, the 3G is cheap and performs very well. To start with, I ended up with a Viettel SIM. That’s a bit like going with Telecom, as Viettel is the telco incumbent in Vietnam. You buy a prepay SIM for 65,000 Vietnamese dong, which equals about NZ$4 (based on an exchange rate of NZ$1 = VND 16,357).

Calling rates nationally are about 10c a minute, with overseas calls costing 22c per phut. Top ups are easy with 25,000, 50,000 and 100,000 dong scratch cards and I went through three of those in two weeks, with lots of data usage courtesy of a 3G smartphone that also acted as a Wi-Fi hotspot for a laptop and a tablet.

Viettel isn’t the only 3G game in town, and probably not the best value either. You can get thirty day deals from other providers such as Mobifone, Vinaphone and Vietnamobile that give you 1.5 to 5GB prepay data for 120,000 to 150,000 dong. If you’re careful with data usage, you can stay below NZ$10 a month for fast 3G in other words.

All things considered, including the use of the same technology as here, I wish a Vietnamese telco would come to New Zealand to shake up the market. Provided of course said telco would leave local policies at home or even lobby Vietnam’s government to relax them.

Without putting too fine a point on it, Vietnam is considered ”an enemy of the internet„ by Reporters without Frontiers. This may seem surprising, considering the low pricing and widespread adoption of the internet, but Vietnam tries to censor the internet.

None of the sites I accessed were blocked, most likely because they are not in Vietnamese, nor was I apprehended for tweeting about a Sukhoi SU-22M4 attack aircraft taking off from what I thought was the purely civilian Noi Bai airport in Ha Noi. I did encrypt as much of my data traffic as I could, but can’t say if any of it was intercepted.

The censorship drive is serious though: the country jails bloggers and internet dissidents, being the third most enthusiastic regime to do so after Iran and China. Over 120 people are currently behind bars for disagreeing with the government, or for advocating human rights.

The idea behind the policies in Vietnam is to encourage self-censorship by the populace and while the authorities are tightening the screw, I hope it won’t work - or, for that matter, that our nation’s politicians aren’t reading this column and getting ideas for how to enforce other types of internet legislation.

Speaking to people in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City is the official name, but it’s often not used by locals), there’s plenty of awareness of social media. Facebook has taken Vietnam by storm, whereas Twitter isn’t as popular.

Facebook is, however, now firmly in the sights of Vietnamese authorities, as is Google. The government there wants both internet giants to locate data centres in the country for easier access to, and suppression of, material deemed objectionable.

Even with the spectre of harsh government intervention hanging over their heads, the Vietnamese people flock to the internet. Restaurants and other small businesses are very aware of how powerful the internet is, and you see URLs painted graffiti style everywhere. For the tourism trade, mentions on the TripAdvisor website are requested at places visited by foreigners, sometimes on bills and restaurant menus.

I doubt Vietnam’s communist government can have it both ways though with the internet, just as it couldn’t with the economy. The Doi Moi socialist-oriented market economy introduced in 1986 has considerably reduced poverty after twenty years of war; now Vietnam needs to relax and stop fighting the internet economy, to reap the benefits of that.

Chúc may mắn, Việt Nam và di dễ dàng.

Juha Saarinen, juha@pcworld.co.nz

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 12:30 PM | Comments ( 0 )

This column was originally published in the April issue of PC World.

I've been to more demos of Long Term Evolution - the nonsensical name for the next generation of cellular broadband - than I can recall. The one I recall best was with Huawei in Shanghai: I got to go on the Maglev train to the airport and punt packets at 30Mbit/s while we zipped along at 430kph.

That was in 2010 and as far as I can tell, Chinese telcos have yet to launch LTE. The technology is cropping up elsewhere though, like the US and Canada. LTE is also tantalisingly close to New Zealand since last September’s launch of Telstra’s Australian 4G service. I got a chance to test drive it in February this year.

Telstra’s 4G isn’t a trial network, in other words. I wondered whether 4G would be able to deliver the high speeds I’d seen in my trials, once the real, live network was being used by an estimated 100,000 customers.

The first few tests in busy areas in Brisbane CBD showed 20Mbit/s downloads and just over 10Mbit/s uploads; nice, but I expected more. I found a good spot at Brisbane Airport and ran some tests using speedtest.net.

While the downstream speed (39-44Mbit/s) is impressive, it’s nice to see that Telstra has paid attention to the upstream which at 22Mbit/s is faster than my artificially-limited VDSL2 connection. I was watching Task Manager’s graph of the network throughput, and it was smooth without the peaks and troughs that indicate packet loss and ensuing TCP slowing. What’s more, the latency of the LTE connection is nice and low too.

In fact, the speeds I saw exceeded Telstra’s claimed ”typical speeds„ of 2-40Mbit/s down and 1-10Mbit/s up. They’re a long way off the theoretical maximum for this variety of LTE (100/50 Mbit/s) but even the ‘real life’ figures exceed what you get from most fixed broadband connections nevertheless.

Currently, there’s only a single device for the 4G service, the Sierra Wireless U320 USB modem. It costs A$299 on its own, or is bundled for free with Telstra’s two-year contract plans. The U320 is a chunky number, 50mm wide, 64mm long and 11mm thick. It’s equipped with two external aerial connectors, as well as a GPS and a MicroSD slot nobody will use.

The U320 is as big as it is because it supports not just 1.8GHz LTE, which Telstra uses for its service, but also 2.6GHz LTE and 850MHz/2.1GHz dual-channel and single-channel HSPA+ and HSPA. There’s a fair bit of electronics inside the modem, as well as aerials for the different frequency bands.

I was very happy with how tenaciously the U320 locked onto data signals. Roughly five kilometres away from CBDs and airports, the LTE signal disappears and you’re on Telstra’s NextG 3G service; where I was, the U320 ran in dual-channel mode, and gave me 15-20Mbit/s downloads, and 1.5-2.5Mbit/s uploads with 45-60ms latency. Again, very good considering this is a cellular service.

The LTE network itself was put in place by Ericsson for Telstra and the service uses 10 or 15MHz blocks configured as frequency-division duplexing (FDD), with separate bands for upstream and downstream data. LTE can also be configured as time-division duplexing. This sends and receives data in the same frequency band, which uses less spectrum. However, if you want the best performance and lowest latency, FDD is the way to go.

Telstra’s pricing is pretty good if you can tolerate the two-year contracts, starting at A$20 a month for 1GB of data going to $80 for 15GB. The data caps are about the only fault I can find with the service: based on my experience on speedy 4G, Telstra should multiply them all by ten. One gigabyte of data is ridiculously low and won’t last a day.

It would be great to get LTE, Telstra-style, in New Zealand too. However, our competition-loathing telcos aren’t likely to do anything until 700MHz spectrum is allocated to them with maybe some further subsidies on top.

LTE should also have been mandated for the Rural Broadband Initiative to ensure a service with a modicum of future-proofing. Sadly, despite clear evidence to the contrary, the government pretends LTE isn’t ready yet. For that reason, Vodafone built the RBI offering as a bung 5Mbit/s ”peak speed„ service with low 5GB data caps, using 3G gear.

To think what could’ve been, if the RBI had been designed with vision and foresight…

Juha Saarinen, juha@pcworld.co.nz

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 12:09 PM | Comments ( 0 )

Why thirteen is lucky for broadband speed tweaking

Net nostalgia: One of my early columns for PC World explained how you could speed up your internet connection by tweaking some low-level network settings within the operating system. This was thirteen years ago (gulp), just as DSL arrived in New Zealand.

Few people could afford "D$L" back then, thanks to Telecom’s outrageously high pricing and internet connectivity was primarily via 56k modem.

There was quite a bit of mileage to be had from tweaking, providing you were willing to dig through obscure Control Panel and Registry settings. Kiwis were keen tweakers mainly because much of the internet is such a long way from New Zealand. Internet data packets take a while to reach their destination here and this inevitably affects performance.

DSL made things easier, and we no longer worry about modem UART buffers and similar tech-arcana. In fact, today’s broadband is dead simple to operate in comparison.

The big difference between now and then is that line speeds have increased for most people. I was rapt at seeing speeds of 1.8Mbit/sec in November 1999 from local servers even though the first-generation Nokia M10 ADSL modem actually connected at 5.3Mbit/sec.

Fast forward to 2012, and ADSL2+ means 15 to 20Mbit/sec downloads for many people (but only 1Mbit/sec up). My VDSL2 connection is set to 70Mbit/sec down and 10Mbit/sec up.
Thank goodness, New Zealand ISPs have built their networks and improved quality and performance hugely to match the higher speeds - I don’t think anyone uses high-latency satellite links for DSL traffic backhaul as they did back then.

We still have that distance problem to deal with in New Zealand however. Ping tells me that the US West Coast is 140ms away and data packet round trip times to Europe are over 300ms.
The internet protocol used for the vast majority of data, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), requires confirmation messages before itsends packets to be received. While it waits for those messages, TCP simply stops. This isn’t much of a problem on a low-latency local network, but once round trip times hit 50-150ms, TCP just can’t keep the data pipe full without compensating for the big latency somehow. For optimum performance to deal with packet latency of 200ms, I would have to set a receive window buffer for my connection well over a megabyte - much more than TCP’s original 65,536-byte maximum.

Making sure TCP worked well on high-latency networks used to be a manual process that involved poking around in the Registry on Windows or setting sysctls in *BSD. Such ju-ju is, I’m pleased to report, no longer necessary. Windows 7 has an auto-tuning TCP/IP stack that identifies high-latency connections and enables the right settings, ditto Apple OS X.

Testing is easier too, thanks to local and overseas Measurementlab.net nodes. These are a joint effort by Google, Skype, Amazon, Bittorrent and others and provide some very handy open source tools with which to diagnose your internet connection.

The good news: with a new TCP stack, you’ll get good performance despite high latency.
I tested with DiffProbe and other tools against servers in Sweden (305ms) and elsewhere overseas and hit 56 to 60Mbit/sec down, and 9.5Mbit/sec up. Pipe full, in other words.

Modern TCP seems to work and won’t - as I’ve heard a surprising number of people state - limit your throughput from the US to around 9Mbit/s. The fact that you don’t get full speed from your broadband connection is more likely due to other choke points than TCP. ISPs rate-limit certain traffic, webservers often can’t dish stuff up fast enough and older routers can’t handle new TCP features and ignore them, putting everything into go-slow mode.

This means that we should fix broken stuff on our internet so we’re not disappointed when the UltraFast Broadband connections become available. This could mean anything from a router upgrade to a new version of your operating system. Don’t expect superfast broadband through Windows XP and early-generation Wi-Fi for instance.

To some extent, you can work around the above issues with caches and content delivery networks (CDNs) that shorten paths and reduce latency. That way your box won’t be talking to the actual server overseas, but instead fetches stuff locally.

However, these break the end-to-end principle of the internet and create their own set of headaches. For example, Vodafone and TelstraClear’s transparent caches prevent their customers from using anti-geoblocking services such as unblock-us.com.

Telco and ISP gear vendors will take out a contract on me for saying this, but to blithely spend hundreds of millions of dollars on caches and content delivery networks around the country to deal with what’s essentially a maintenance issue doesn’t make as much sense as getting to the root of the performance problem. UFB providers may wish to think about this.

Juha Saarinen

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 1:04 PM | Comments ( 0 )

Your smartphone is probably not so smart - telling tales out of school, whispering your secrets and being a big blabbermouth.

Years ago, I wrote about the security of the first batch of Windows Mobile phones because I noticed that unlike the desktop operating system, the portable variant never seemed to receive any updates.

Microsoft’s response at the time was that it worked with device vendors who worked with carriers, and updates were released through the latter. It really didn’t happen very often, yet the devices were small, hand-held computers connected to high-speed 3G networks that cost a small fortune at the time to use. If someone had hijacked the Internet connection to send out spam for instance, it could’ve cost thousands of dollars in network charges.

What’s more, the devices also contained the usual slew of personal information that you didn’t want to end up in the wrong hands.

I recall it was possible to set PINs and encrypt the storage areas to protect against physical access in case you lost the phone. However, the internet entrance was left pretty much wide open for the bad guys with little or no thought given to security.

Fast forward to the iPhone Era, and we now use mobiles even more. We buy stuff with them, do our banking on them, use them for business applications and share our social lives with the world.

Smartphones can now do so much, so quickly and so conveniently. So many people have one, but that capability and convenience can make smartphones hazardous to your finances, reputation and freedom.

In fact, the smart bits such as banking apps are just one worry. Because mobile phones do double duty as authentication devices - that is, keys - getting access to non-smart features such as voice and SMS is worthwhile for criminals too.

In Australia, criminals have ported postpaid mobile phone accounts to new, prepaid SIMs. This lets them bypass standard two-factor authentication used for online banking (a combination of texts and/or calls). When that bypass is used in conjunction with a malware-infested browser or computer that logs keystrokes, your money could be gone in an instant.

On top of robbery, smartphones can be tremendously useful as surveillance tools. Not for you, the mobile phone owner, but for anyone who can track you either via the GPS, or through cellsite triangulation. This can allow access to your contacts, emails, voice messages and texts. It’s a subtle panopticon that provides for easy, automated intelligence gathering for any purpose, political or otherwise. If you’re going to an Occupy Movement demo or if you’re a celebrity sneaking off for a secret tryst, don’t bring your phone. It may rat on you.

In light of the various privacy holes already present on phones, it was curious to see the furore around the Carrier IQ ”rootkit„ that’s installed on some 130 million devices around the world. CIQ’s software invisibly monitors the ”mobile user experience„, logging a large number of parameters that show exactly what happens when people use their devices.

Now, CIQ promises that while they can see if an SMS was sent successfully and from where, they don’t peek into the contents of the message. Also, they anonymise the data and say it’s transmitted and stored securely. As of writing, everything points to CIQ not having nefarious or malicious intentions. The software appears to be what CIQ says it is: a telemetry gathering set up to monitor service quality for operators. The company says it has given a fair bit of thought to security and privacy around how the information gathered by the ”rootkit„ is used.

Which is not to say the CIQ ”rootkit„ couldn’t be abused, and this makes it all the more stunning that cellular operators thought it would be a good idea to install it without informing customers.
If you add it all together, an alarming picture appears. Over the years, we’ve seen voice mail systems being implemented with no security, causing messages to be intercepted with ease; insecure devices being sold; app markets with malware; faulty procedures that let allow others to ”slam„ or hijack your account; and now, a probably well-intentioned but ill-advised rootkit that logs everything you do.

As an end-user, there isn’t an awful lot you can do beyond sleeping with one eye open and trusting device vendors and operators to do the right thing when it comes to security and privacy.

The problem is, there aren’t enough incentives for device vendors and operators to do more to stem security and privacy breaches. For instance, US carriers don’t use International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) numbers like our telcos do. These make it easy to remotely disable phones, even when a new SIM with a different number is installed, as the IMEI is unique to each device.

US carriers don’t use IMEIs because it’d cost more to implement and a stolen phone means a new customer on another network.

What needs to happen is for security and privacy breaches were to hurt device vendors and operators as well end-users, with mandatory disclosure requirements.

If that happens, we can start trusting that wonderfully convenient and powerful thing in our pockets again.

Juha Saarinen

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 11:03 AM | Comments ( 0 )

What a year: 2011 was full of huge natural disasters, widespread political turmoil, civil war, terrorism and rioting.

The financial failures of previous years ago haven’t really gone away despite billions of dollars being thrown at them. They are now threatening to explode: at the time of writing, world financial markets are nervously taking bets on which huge economy will fail first.

People occupy public spaces to protest against the rich getting richer while everyone else must work like dogs to pay for the increased inequality. The most notable response to protests so far has been police violence.

Add global warming to the mix, and it’s a scary line-up for 2012. In the past, so many problems at once would’ve lead to a global meltdown and suffering on a terrible scale.

There’s no doubt we’re screwed in a variety of ways, but it won’t be as bad as it might have been for previous generations, thanks to technology and, in particular, the internet.

The Internet is transforming the worldwide economy at an accelerating pace, and it is already hugely valuable. McKinsey Global Institute reckons the size of the Internet economy is around eight trillion US dollars. What’s more, the Internet is responsible for a fifth of GDP growth in in developed economies and the expansion shows no sign of stopping.

There are some concerns that this kind of economic growth is ”jobless„ in that automation eliminates jobs. It is true that automation and greater efficiencies lead to job losses. However, recent reports from McKinsey and Deloitte believe the technology creates something like 2.6 jobs for each one lost.

We really do need to be part of the Internet economy in other words. Does it mean that we should all geek out and become techies to take advantage of the booming Internet economy? No: this is where it gets complicated. Something like three quarters of the economic value of the Internet actually goes to traditional industries, and not the tech sector as you’d imagine.

Tech by itself doesn’t create many jobs. A recent study from Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that hi-tech accounted for a mere 2.8 per cent of jobs in the US.

That small workforce manages nevertheless to produce some impressive results. Apple for instance rakes in almost half a million US dollars per employee in profit each year; Google worker bees bring home $300,000, and Microsoft a quarter of a million dollars each.

If we could have an AppleNZ or GoogleNZ, great; but perhaps we don’t actually need one? See, the US captures a third of Internet revenues globally, and two-fifths of the worldwide income. That’s a huge amount of money and remember, something like 75 per cent goes to non-tech companies.

That’s the ”techno-economical„ backdrop for next year and it’s been developing over the last decade and a half. Even so, our politicians just don’t seem to get how important it is that we have fast and affordable network connections. That’s understandable though. Many don’t even do their own emailing.

The messy Ultra-Fast Broadband project that’s rolled out at a leisurely pace is evidence that the Internet economic transformation hasn’t hit home with our elected representatives yet.

What should be the most important infrastructure project for generations is at risk of creating a second communications network monopoly, with 75 per cent of the UFB going to Chorus. All subsidised by taxpayers, unregulated for over a decade, and nothing to show for it afterwards.
Another one is the Rural ”Broadband„ Initiative that kicked off this year (good) but promises ”5Mbps peak speeds„ over wireless 3G with 5/10GB data caps which is risible in 2011.
Rural New Zealand happens to be a huge part of our economy. I can definitely leverage technology and benefit from it, so it should be at least as well served with broadband as the cities.

That vision and ensuring New Zealand gets first-rate Internet infrastructure sooner rather than later are both sorely lacking from our political parties this election year however.
Ensuring that from 2012, we get our fingers into that eight trillion dollar Internet economy pie is an investment in the future, and it’s not even a particularly large one. Contrast the UFB money, $1.35 billion over ten years, with roading budget for the same period which is $11 billion.
That funding isn’t going to make the country any money either. For the Puhoi to Wellsford motorway, every dollar spent will return 40c which includes every possible economic benefit such as lower greenhouse gas emissions. In comparison, Chorus is eyeing up a return on investment for the UFB in the 20 to 24 per cent range. That’s just for the network build and deployment, and not counting incidental benefits to the greater economy.

My hope for 2012 is that the Government will see sense and spend our money where it will do everyone a heap of good, namely technology.

Juha Saarinen

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 2:30 PM | Comments ( 0 )

Over the years, it’s been fascinating to watch Apple mainly due to Steve Jobs, its charismatic CEO who died as of writing this column.

Jobs was fantastic and flawed at the same time. He refused to take part in the industry-wide race to the bottom and instead relentlessly focused on excellence and insisted on being different. I for one appreciate Jobs dragging an entire industry out of the boring beige box mind set and in fact, changed the world a number of times.

Thanks to Jobs, Apple didn’t have to be first with technology, but yet managed to own entire markets. Take the LaserWriter printer for instance: Hewlett-Packard launched its LaserJet a year before Apple got its variant of the door.

Both printers used the same Canon engine, but the LaserWriter could be used with Macintosh computers that had a graphical user interface so you almost saw what you got.

What’s more, the LaserWriter had Postscript that made curves smooth and output sharp and legible. As a result, Apple ended up being the first port of call for desktop publishers, a market that didn’t exist before the eighties.

Thirty years later, creative people still worship Apple products but now, the ranks of Mac Marines have swelled considerably. Business executives strut around with iPhones, iPads and Macbook Airs; Microsofties love Mac hardware and dual-boot into Windows, something you didn’t see before.

It’s a remarkable story of perfection, one that Jobs pulled out of the ashes of many abject failures, but there’s a darker side to it as well.

Maybe due to his chaotic life in general, Jobs loved being in total control. That control extended to eliminating what many saw as potential revenue raisers, such as Apple-clones. On returning to Apple, he killed off the operating system licensing deals with clone makers. Later on, lawsuits against cloner Psystar were launched.

The culture of control and secrecy at Apple manifests itself beyond the products. There’s a general refusal to deal with media, and Apple goes beyond that, using legal action to silence outlets and blogs. Despite those ”1984„ ads and Macs being the darlings of creative people, Apple and freedom of expression didn’t sit well with each other under Jobs’ direction.

Nowhere is that more clear than in the way in which Apple controls features, functions, imagery and text of everything that goes into the hugely successful iTunes and App Store.

With this desire to control every step of the way, it’s curious that Jobs and Apple didn’t take full charge of how its devices are made, an area where it could be the leader and earn a huge amount of kudos simply by ensuring decent labour standards.

Owning an Apple device is a great experience, but you don’t want to be the poor sod in an Apple OEM sweatshop making one. Child labour, workers falling sick from poisonous chemicals and low wages are a shame to the IT industry as a whole, but it jars harshly with Apple’s otherwise slick image and should be new CEO Tim Cook’s first priority to sort out.

However, Cook has some pretty big shoes to fill and his first steps have been wobbly.

Take the launch of the iPhone 4S. It’s not a bad piece of kit. Dual-core processor, hardware accelerated graphics, much improved camera, and new services like Siri voice recognition and iCloud storage.

It also has the same, excellent Retina screen and impeccable design as the earlier version and should sell as well as its predecessors have.

The reaction to the iPhone 4S said was surprising though: while Cook unveiled the iPhone 4S, Apple’s share price dropped.

People were disappointed. It wasn’t an iPhone 5, and the improvements were evolutionary, not revolutionary this time. I felt disappointed too but I wasn’t quite sure why.

Then I realised what was wrong: the iPhone 4S was pretty much what everyone expected. This time around, we didn’t get the surprise new design, feature, product or service from Apple, ”just„ an improved iPhone.

It’s ”better sameness, not revolutionary change„, which is the innovation stifling stuff ex-Apple employee Guy Kawasaki says comes out of customer market research, and the very thing Steve Jobs tried to go beyond.

Apple isn’t about safe plays and gradual improvement, but drastic, eccentric strokes of genius combined with ruthless business ability. That’s a very difficult equation, but Jobs solved it. All eyes will be on Cook to see if he too can do it.

Juha Saarinen

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 11:52 AM | Comments ( 1 )

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to not only do some research around our new Internet addressing protocol but also become fully IPv6 enabled. Not me personally - I’ve yet to get that Ethernet implant sorted out - but my internet connection and the devices that hang off it are now IPv6.

Yes, it’s 2011, and I’m finally using IPv6 natively and not via a tunnel over IPv4. The new protocol comes courtesy of my ISP, Snap, alongside a rare beast: a Fritz!Box VDSL2 router that understands IPv6.

You might think that IPv6 is very slow in coming and you’d be right. Shifting to the new protocol has become an enormous task, one that grows every year as the older IPv4-based internet expands at a huge rate.

Right now, the IPv4 network is larger than the four billion or so addresses it contains. That’s because of Network Address Translation or NAT. This was a hack devised in the 1990s to deal with address exhaustion - yes, that uncomfortable problem has been known for a very long time.

NAT ”hides„ a huge number of networks behind one or more internet-routable addresses. If you have multiple gadgets running on a LAN managed by a single router in your home using DHCP, that includes your network. This saves precious IPv4 addresses, but it also breaks the end-to-end principle of the internet and leads to undesirable effects such as port exhaustion: each TCP and UDP address is limited to a maximum of 65,536 ”ports„ over which the actual bytes flow, so if you have a single, routable IP address that serves thousands of NAT’ed ones, performance on sites like Google Maps that open hundreds of connections will suck.

NAT also adds complexity, can be difficult to scale, and it has arguably slowed down the uptake of IPv6.

Due to the big address space in IPv6, there’s no need for NAT. Until all the billions and billions of devices behind a NAT gateway become IPv6-enabled - and some won’t ever, as they’re too old - that address saver isn’t going away however, and nor is IPv4.

This is one of the big challenges with rolling out IPv6: not only do you build a new internet and give existing devices a new address; you also have to make it coexist with the old IPv4 internet which is still growing, thanks to NAT.

In practice, the dual IPv4-IPv6 stack internet leads to some annoying problems. Software and operating systems are normally designed to use one address type or the other. If a connection over IPv6 is slow to establish or fails completely, falling back to IPv4 can take many seconds. There’s no indication to users what’s going on, either. So, for example, in your web browser, you may just experience blank pages and sometimes, time-outs.

A new algorithm called Happy Eyeballs is at the IETF Internet Draft stage, and it attempts to fix the dual-stack failover problem by switching over faster to, say, IPv4 as well as remembering which connections don’t work.

Another issue that I noticed is that IPv6 network paths aren’t as optimised as IPv4 ones. Google over IPv4 is served to me via a local cache, a mere 6ms away. Over IPv6, it the latency is anywhere from 60 to 330ms. Not a show-stopper and it will be sorted out eventually, but there are many similar cases featuring large content delivery networks and caches.

In simple terms, people aren’t going to want IPv6 if time-outs occur when they browse popular sites like Facebook, or if the performance is really slow due to high latency and constricted pipes.

Even if your ISP does provide IPv6 connectivity, getting it up and running isn’t easy. The vast majority of new operating systems know about native, tunnelled and 6to4 IPv6. Your smartphones and tablets most likely do too. However, the DSL modem that connects you to the internet probably doesn’t, or only badly. Finding residential and small business network gear that supports IPv6 can be difficult, unfortunately.

On the security side, it’s worth noting that dual-stacks can lead to end-to-end connectivity being established over IPv6 to vulnerable devices. IPv4 firewalls are a dime a dozen on consumer gear but IPv6 ones are an unknown quantity.

The Fritz!Box I have comes with an IPv6 firewall, but it’s difficult to configure. What’s more, while the admin GUI on the Fritz!Box provides ample info about what’s going on with the NAT’ed IPv4 network, it only shows the IPv6 address on the router’s internet-facing interface. More work needed there, I’d say.

Even with all the problems mentioned above, IPv6 is worthwhile and yes, you should nag your ISP about having it turned on. The only way we’ll get more choice of residential routers, improved network paths and performance and more is through more IPv6-enabled customers. It will be something of a slog though, so be patient.

- Juha Saarinen

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 10:58 AM | Comments ( 0 )

Much as I find Apple people annoying, I like Cupertino hardware a great deal. With the move to Intel hardware the UNIX-like Mac OS X finally has room to stretch its legs too.

If Macs are essentially PCs, which in turn is a standardised platform that runs Windows, Linux and BSDs happily, could you not run Mac OS X on anything? If you really want to know, head down the ”Hackintosh„ route - running Mac OS X on hardware that isn't Apple-made. Make sure before you begin that you're armed with a good amount of technical nous and even more patience.

A word of warning right from the start though: getting a Hackintosh up and running can be seriously Deep Geek. I’ve tried Hackintoshes before and while I admire the community effort going into working around Apple’s quirks and foibles, I came away realising they’re not for average users.

For starters, OS X uses the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) rather than the BIOS used by most PCs. This means you have to use a boot loader such as Chameleon to emulate EFI, and also make sure that your BIOS settings are correct with Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) for storage and the 64-bit High Precision Event Timer (HPET) enabled. If they’re not, you get a kernel panic when you boot up OS X. What’s more, under certain conditions OS X resets your BIOS by clearing the CMOS.

That’s not the end of the FLAs though. OS X uses ACPI - the Advanced Control and Power Interface - like PCs to set up devices. The important part of ACPI is the Differentiated System Description Table, or DSDT, that tells OS X what the base system is. The DSDT is stored in the BIOS of the computer, and you can grab it, disassemble and recompile it with freely available tools to make sure your hardware is recognised by OS X.

Some hardware can be animated by using drivers, which are called Kernel Extensions or Kexts. Many Hackintosh installations load the operating system, and then you head over to aites such as kexts.com or tonymacx86.com, or even insanelymac.com and snag some drivers. I did say you need to be intimately acquainted with your hardware, didn’t I? Not just that, but you also need a large amount of reading and Googling detailed information and potential problems before you install anything.

Install the wrong Kext or DSDT, and boom, kernel panic strikes. In previous Hackintosh setups, this used to happen each time you fired up Software Update, unless you took precautions and manually upgraded stuff.

However, this time around there is an easy way. The excellent Kakewalk [kakewalk.se] set of scripts will do all the heavy lifting for you, provided you make sure to use a compatible motherboard. Gigabyte boards seem to be popular with Hackintoshers, and I happened to have a spare EX58-UD4 model handy, with a 3.2GHz Core i7.

Cutting a huge saga short, Kakewalk 4.0.1 extracted the necessary disk image from the copy of OS X 10.7 Lion that I plonked down $39 for, added a boot loader, hardware drivers and installed everything to a bootable, 8GB USB stick.

Installing Lion on the Hackintosh machine took maybe an hour all in all and afterwards everything worked aside from the audio and the ability to put the computer to sleep. The first problem was easily solved with a VoodooHDA driver, but the second was trickier as Apple’s CPU power management driver doesn’t like PC ACPI implementations and has to be disabled. Getting this to work requires DSDT work.

It’s not impossible however, and after a bit of trial and error plus the obligatory kernel panics, I had a Mac Pro-like Hackintosh. Fast and stable, I can almost pretend I’ve got a Mac Pro if I don’t look too closely at the fairly ugly tower case and the PC keyboard that’s awkward to use with OS X. Because Apple’s OS X code is left alone, you can now run Software Update without too many worries.

Provided you’re willing to put in the huge effort, are Hackintoshes legal? I can’t tell for sure: the underlying operating system is Darwin which is free and open software, and the same goes for the XNU kernel, which incorporates Mach, FreeBSD and NetBSD code.

But, despite being FOSS-based, Apple’s end-user licence says you can’t install, use or run OS X on non-Apple-labelled hardware. Any commercial use is an absolute no-no: Apple has cracked down on commercial Hackintosh operations like PsyStar in the past, and will do so again.

That said, word amongst the OS X x86 crowd is that Apple doesn’t care that much about amateur Hackintosh-ery. I imagine this is because it’s hard to imagine anyone bar myself and a small band of techies with a masochistic bent actually putting together a Hackintosh and getting it up and running.

Everybody else will happily continue to sell both their kidneys for that lovely, tested and stable hardware that just works, and I totally understand why.

Posted by Siobhan Keogh at 1:11 PM | Comments ( 2 )