this Fargo thing's only getting bigger

I watched the first episode of Fargo Season 2 a few days ago.

The opening sequence, even before the Waffle Hut section was so dense that I had to rewind and watch it again to overcome a kind of sensory overload.

There's a live version of 'Oh Well' playing across the credits. A made-up mono Reagan movie about a real battle. Or was it?

The modern take on 1970's cinematography. Detailed lighting as snow gently falls.

A confession, I've actually now watched the first episode twice and am really looking forward to episode 2.

I won't divulge any plot here, suffice to say that it is dark, clever and funny in a warped way. Plenty of potential. If you like this sort of thing.

dandy highwaymen need not apply

They say that George Osborne is a great tactician, but I'm starting to wonder how that can be a possible? Unless 'tactic' is another word for something else?

Before the election Osborne and Co gave a very strong impression that there would not be big cuts to the less well-off. Indeed this could be seen as exploiting a gap. The £10bn of extra savings required would come from elsewhere, although the actual source was never described. So the tactic was to not explain this before the election and to then quickly implement something after reaching power. A kind of 'stand and deliver' tactic?

Then there was the matter of the Treasury Select Committee, which urged that the proposed changes be reconsidered. This wasn't a quick aside, but a lengthy meeting with Osborne in a hot seat across the table from the Committee urging a different approach. Osborne's tactic was to hold his ground with his right eye on the £4.5bn. After the Lords rebuttal, his subsequent tactic has been to say he is listening.

Then the tactic of using a statutory instrument to speed through the change, instead of a new Act of Parliament. This means it is regarded as a change to something already in place, rather than something fundamentally new. More for tweaks than for fundamental changes.

Maybe the tactic to rename the tagline of the party as being the workers' party. No Orwellian doublespeak here, of course.

Then when it all went wrong in the House of Lords, a couple of new tactics emerged. First was one to accuse the Lords of wrecking things contained in the Conservative manifesto. This doesn't seem quite right to me, Osborne and the Conservatives did their best to not discuss their plans for changes to benefits before the election.

The second new tactic is to challenge the Lords power of veto. Divert the discussion to a constitutional one about power. This isn't the bigger debate about the second chamber, more one avoiding any further trip-ups for Osborne.

And today's new tactics, to say that the changes to the Lords will need to be careful considered, but then as Chris Grayling has already remarked, to draw up some proposals to change them in 'the next few hours'. And finally, to rotate a range of ministers through the TV and radio studios, fully on message with all of Osborne's agenda.

So let's review those tactics:

• avoid mentioning the tax credit reform before the election
• have a plan ready for fast implementation after reaching power
• avoid listening to the major concerns expressed by Treasury Select Committee
• adopting a workers' party moniker, playing on a particular use of the wording
• using a statutory instrument to downplay the change through Parliament
• after Lords rejection claim to have been listening all along
• misrepresenting the manifests as part of the Lords rejection
• diverting attention to the Lords powers
• pressure selling the point of view through any media that will listen

I realise I'm using the word tactic in a particular way in this description. Some would choose to use another word.

kitchen LEDs run interference on DAB radio shock

One of the kitchen refit changes was to replace the previous halogen ceiling lights with LED downlighters.

There was an unexpected side effect. The DAB radio stopped working. Switch on the LEDs and immediately the DAB radio reception fades.

Initially I thought it could be a specific wiring or transformer problem but then I dialled it up on a couple of consumer forums and yes, it is a common problem.

It's yet another thing they don't tell you about the so-called progressive technology of DAB. The switched power supplies required to run the 12 volt LEDs can create large amounts of interference in the same radio frequency spectrum that DAB uses to broadcast.

Curiously, it seems to be mainly kitchen refits that feature in the questions about this. I guess it is because of the number of people that use stand-alone kitchen radios with very basic aerials.

Caption: The kitchen lights are making the radio fuzzy

Next I stumbled upon the the CE test called EN55022, Class B (domestic usage) which is supposed to test that lights won't create more than a set level of interference in the 30MHz-1GHz range. That's across plenty of radio spectrum, including the 210MHz-300MHz range used in DAB broadcasting.

Guess what?

Halogen lights attain good results well below the interference levels. Swap in low-voltage LEDs and both generic and famous name brand LEDs coupled to their transformers can operate above the interference threshold at certain frequencies, particularly in the DAB range.

To figure out our situation I'd tried three different DAB radios from an inexpensive Goodmans, a mid-range Pure and an expensive Roberts. All turned into clucking chickens when the lights were switched on.

Some of the forum folk had been using trial and error to swap out (expensive) LED bulbs or (even more expensive) transformers, often without fixing the situation. In our case I'll plug in an external aerial, but it's not the solution for everyone because sometimes they don't have a nearby aerial socket for their radio.

It also defeats the object of a simple, portable radio that can operate digitally.

Another yellow card for DAB because it is so sensitive to this type of interference. Add that to the low bit-rate often used in DAB broadcasts and we have a technology that is only borderline fit-for-purpose.

Except when The Archers comes on.

bike yikes

I thought I'd better check progress against plan on the year's bicycling. I set the three targets as 2000,3000 and 4000 miles. Bronze, Silver, Gold.

I've hit the first two and still have a couple of months to do the last 545 miles. Some people would think that fairly easy, but I suspect it will be close to the wire by year end.

That's partly because we hit the choppy part of the year in terms of interruptions and sundry reasons for not cycling.

Excuses, I know, but I'm being pragmatic. I'll probably go out later today and get the remaining miles closer to 500, but I may need to plan it out if I'm to be sure of hitting my personal gold.

don't talktalk about it

CBBC star Hacker T Dog.
The current hack into TalkTalk's website creates an interesting taste of living in the cloud. The perpetrators are now claiming to have 4 million customer records and apparently have even issued a ransom note like something from a TV plot.

We've all got far more data than we care to think about lodged away in systems which increasingly work in the cloud. Part of that is because we all also want to be able to access these systems from smartphones and browsers, rather than sit on interminably long calls to so-called help desks.

Another reason is because industry is all being persuaded that it is economically sound to put their systems into cloud computing environments.

Systems like Google also progressively tie all our data together, so that even if you want to have a separate personal and professional appearance in the internet, the G+ robots will eventually catch up.

I use one of those automatic password generators for my own access to systems. It comes up with passwords along the lines of:

ryeX-Uc-bEv-jaw-oD-fIn-inG

And nope, I'm not actually using that one and I've selected randomised lengths too, so the syntax of my actual passwords will differ.

Of course I can't remember them all, and have to use 1Password to wrangle them.

The problem comes when people use passwords like -er- qwerty12345 or asdfg-0987 or password1992 or CFC4evva. It's because there's a high social engineering probability that this type of user will be using the same password elsewhere. So browsing through an unencrypted list of users, there'll be some that are probably easier to target, simply based upon the type of password they use.

Back to TalkTalk. The story goes that the hackers used a denial of service attack first as a diversionary tactic, whilst the slurping of data was taking place. The thieves even put up an extract of the data they stole onto a website to illustrate what they've done.

The data (if genuine) was still being displayed today, Saturday, some four days after the attack.

If I was John who drives taxis, Hadyn, Norma, Fraser, Catherine, Dolph or Amanda, amongst many others, I'd be pretty annoyed that my record was still on public display. If I was Ben or Rahmet, I'd be even more annoyed that my entire TalkTalk order was listed (update it's all still there on 26 Oct)

I'm not buying it though. Getting into a website is one thing. Like that opening sequence in Homeland the other day when the dodgy internet club managed to hack into the CIA. Then they immediately started downloading files that were at the core of the CIA's best secrets in Germany.

Yeah, right. It's sometimes hard enough finding files on one's own systems, let alone on a secret CIA station in Berlin.

But that seems to be what these hackers claim to have done as well.

Not only did they flood the TalkTalk system to make it run slowly, they then claim to have used this same period to get inside, and somehow find the exact files where the cellphone and SIM orders were kept, in clear (i.e. not encrypted format), and all comma delimited.

The method of intrusion as described is all a bit too tidy.

This smacks to me more of something purposeful conducted from inside TalkTalk's walls. It could be a whole lot simpler too. The conditions: Someone with access to the right files runs/introduces a pre-formed SQL query generating an Excel CSV (comma separated values) file and then downloads it to a memory stick, or via bluetooth to a phone.

This could be in a central location (operations or development), or possibly even from a helpdesk if there's local copies of the customer file. No wonder the class of tools to do these kind of dubious things are called Mole, Pangolin (scaly burrowing anteater) and Injector.

I guess it will all play out over the forthcoming days and weeks. It might also explain why the note accompanying the upload of the stolen data contains a message which says things like:

"We Have Made Our Tracks Untraceable Through Onion Routing, Encrypted Chat Messages, Private Key Emails, Hacked Servers."

Why bother to say These Things And With So Many Capital Letters? It's a bit like the villain's speech to explain the next logic jump to James Bond.

There's more, but it starts getting into a more lurid and fundamentalist area which I won't document here. The slightly juvenile style looks quite different from the increasingly common attacks on casino sites with distributed denial of service and BitCoin as ransom.

The eventual after-effect of this TalkTalk attack will probably be to create even more layers of security for not just TalkTalk's site, but everyone else.

Coincidentally, a few days ago I described a situation where a big commercial site had mis-transcribed my address in a way that meant they would only send things to a (wrong) address to Plot (wrong Number) in (wrong town) Shellsea in order to identify me.

A few days later I saw a different example on television, where (wrong name) Dr.Occupier was being incorrectly billed for electricity but could not change it because the security questions needed his/her name "Dr.Occupier" to be specified.

I suppose we can't have all this smartphone cloud access without the attendant security, so cue those sayings about the indolent falling prey to the active or about freedom, liberty and vigilance - I'm sure we'll be hearing them all over the next few days.

shake it off

I wonder what will happen now that all the freebie subscriptions to Apple Music have run out?

For many, they actually ran out a month ago, but I expect there's a lot of people like me who don't remember until the money is quietly extracted from the credit card.

When the Apple system started, I thought I'd give it a go, but in honesty, I can't say that it has worked for me.

In iTunes I still mainly play my own choices of music, based upon my CD and download collection and playlists, but I've seldom used the Apple suggestions. I deliberately downgraded my Spotify back to freebie when I started, as a way to remind myself to use the Apple alternative.

So why didn't it work?
For me the Apple recommendations have always been so crass that I wondered what else I needed to do. Maybe there was another part of the system that didn't just assume I wanted to listen to recent pop, MoR and dad rock? My Apple Music recommendations regularly feature One Direction, Jean Michell-Jarre(?), Justin Bieber, Wally Murs, Pure Rave. If this was last.fm, it would be screaming musical compatibility - low.

Maybe it is because I haven't used it enough and I just get generic suggestions?

I've been using iTunes for many years and Apple have slurped in around 2.5k albums and 22k tracks that I have loaded. My stretchy taste in albums have been through their Genius process and Match, yet they come up with commercial 'top of the pops' suggestions. Perhaps it's their "don't know what to do" default.

I think the last couple of albums I bought were towards the popular end of the spectrum - Wolf Alice and Tame Impala, both of which are probably at least 'indie' in their iTunes genre classification?

To illustrate, that's Ellie Rowsell and the rest of Wolf Alice in Haringey early this year.

What next?
Today, after cancelling the Apple Music subscription, I restarted Spotify Premium, logged on and hit play.

It was an instantly better experience for discovering new music. Sure, I like listening to tracks I know, but sometimes to let Spotify wander off and find 20 or more tracks in a row without any need to hit skip. Far better.

So I'll stick with Spotify as the discovery mechanism, use iTunes as a player and continue to buy via a combination of artist web-sites, an occasional browse in Rough Trade or Fopp and online Amazon CDs with Autorip.

fire up the flux capacitor

I don't care if they got a few things wrong, I shall still watch these movies again sometime over the next couple of days. There's so many references still used today; who ever sees a Delorean car without thinking about Back To The Future?

And what about the idea of a flux capacitor? Or a hoverboard? They guessed a few things which are now commonplace like VR goggles, wearable technology, tablet computers, even if they missed the smartphone.

1.21 Gigawatts (Jigowatts?) might be more than 10% of the UK's nuclear power capacity, but it's still the amount needed to take an 88mph car through time.

Fortunately there are still people trying, like this car I spotted in a field. I'm wondering whether Doctor Who has ever met The Deloreans? If he hasn't then there's a quick line for a script sometime.

And by the time I write this, I see America will be waking up to a special issue of USA Today...The Hill Valley edition, delivered by Compu Fax Satellite.

I'm sure there will be a box-set DVD and some special content, but I can't help thinking this is one of the few movies that it would be fun to see with advert breaks. From 1985, of course.

And don't tell anyone, but an original-market Delorean speedometer only goes up to 85 mph ;-)

not in the right club?

Today's inertia rip-off was trickier to fix than I'd expected.

Nowadays many big organisations use inertia selling to increase fees and jack-up prices, in a kind of anti customer relationship management approach.

Our last household insurance policy was an example. They'd progressively wind the annual price up until a consumer pain threshold was passed, when we'd bail and go to someone else. Same with the car breakdown service. Better to let the last one lapse and start a new one. Kind of anti-loyalty rewards.

Today's example was a regular payment that I queried to one of the big well-known British financial service providers. First their currently published website phone numbers had all changed. You call he numbers and a recorded message reads out the new ones.

When I eventually got through to someone (maybe after 20 minutes), they couldn't find any record of me, even when I quoted a reference number.

Of course they'd acquired various companies and rebadged them, but behind it were all the creaky old systems, each with their own unhelp desks.

I went through all the questions, listened to all the messages and eventually got to speak to a human. We talked but the human had a script to follow and was unable to help. I dictated all of my details and asked them to call me back when they had more news.

Maybe this is all carefully engineered, like making the 'cancel subscription' buttons in web systems hard to find or not putting a phone number onto telecoms provider sites?

Anyway, a day later they did call me back, showing an Italian phone number. Maybe they have done a deal with Telecom Italia for their network?

The person dialling me (apparently from Ireland) was still not able to assist.

Instead, they transferred me to another number, which ominously said it was premium. It added that I could redial another number to get a cheaper rate. I'm still not sure who was paying for that call because they had originally called me.

I decided to wait on the line, listening to badly compressed pop music and then again went through the whole who I was, date of birth blah blah thing again (6th time by now).

Amazingly they found a record of me, although they had wrongly transcribed the address into their system. It was a plot number instead of an apartment address. They'd actually got the plot number wrong too, as well as the area, which they had as Shellsea. Yes, that well-known Royal Borough next to Kensington.

This is where it all got very silly because they now would not give me any information based upon their security guidelines. If I couldn't match their incorrect address, they wouldn't identify me. I asked them if they could, instead, send me a copy of their information, so that I could work out what to do/cancel etc.

Yes, they could, but they would have to send it to the address on file. But that's no good. It's not a proper address. And so it went on.

I have resolved it now, but the whole situation was another example of anti-customer relationship. That's another relationship club I'm better away from, but perhaps that's all part of the marketing plan too?

中国在你的手 - China in your hand

The UK visit of the president of China, Xi Jinping, will have its controversial moments although some topics have been deemed not suitable for open forum discussion.

With his wife, he'll be staying in the Belgian (aka Honeymoon) Suite in Buckingham Palace, getting a 103 gun salute and white-tie banqueting with the Queen's and many of her family as well as a variety of senior politicians.

On the heels of Osborne's China trip, the agenda is to secure trade linkages, notably so that UK becomes the global offshore finance centre for China. The construction work on the new Asian Business Port area in east London's Albert Dock has started, although it's all looking somewhat flat at the moment.

Osborne has already announced the Hinckley deal for the new Chinese-built nuclear power station, along with the UK tax-payers' £2bn subsidy to get things started. The Chinese also get to build a second power station over in Essex.

The whole nuclear power thing is awash with subsidies and weird pricing, so it is quite difficult to really fathom out what is happening. Even the fella at DECC who oversaw what was happening was previously at KPMG (the financial advisors to the deal) and returned there after the outline agreements had been struck.

China has been canny at spotting the areas for negotiation with Britain, whilst casting an eye across Germany and France. Much easier to negotiate when there's other options lingering in the background.

So we'll probably get both a lumpy red carpet and some twisty and labyrinthine agreements from this visit.

الوطن lemons or melons?

I watched the first episode of the new series of Homeland some time last week and will probably continue, to see how much more unreliable Carrie can become. She's been started off in that great place for spies, Berlin.

Somehow she seems to be working for a dodgy corporate organisation on the wrong side of what America considers to be good.

Almost immediately we get a sleazy club's computer hackers electronically stumbling into a CIA outpost's website where, with almost no trickery, they download the crown jewels of the entire covert operations in Germany. Oops.

Carrie then co-incidentally runs into her old boss Saul (the one who who speaks in pompous meeting cliches). There's a hat tip to le Carre when Saul later deploys old-school tradecraft using a handkerchief in his top pocket as a signal. This is to Quinn, another of Carrie's ex buddies coincidentally in Berlin, who is sent to blow up a pipe bomber.

I gather that the next episode recreates a Syrian/Lebanese refugee camp, with arabic graffiti on the walls saying 'Al watan (Homeland) is a Watermelon' and similar phases. Clearly no-one on the set knew the arabic for Homeland (الوطن) so when it appears scrawled in half a dozen locations no-one was expecting it to say anything awkward.

There's a short scene in episode one where Quinn co-incidentally appears for a debrief and talks about the lack of empathy for middle east of the people he is briefing. Along the lines of 'none of you have seen active service in the middle east'. I can't tell yet with this series if it is really having a pop or just being cartoony.

I have my suspicions.

a taxing calculation

I finally got around to looking at those Facebook annual accounts for the UK.

I say UK, although I notice from their Companies House Annual Return that they are set up with an Irish Director based in Dublin, which presumably helps give some taxation efficiencies.

The rest of the Directors are all based in California, so the 362 person UK business comprising 34 admin, 195 technical and 133 sales is directed remotely, at least according to the AR01.

Ernst and Young prepared the accounts in line with UK GAAP, and say that everything is tickety-boo. Facebook turned over about £105m in the UK in 2014, compared with £49m in the previous year.

With double the turnover of the prior year, they managed to make slightly more than double the loss of the previous year, 'worsening' the loss from £11m to last year's £28m. That also shows as a lower performance, making 126% loss this year vs 122% loss the prior year.

Of course, to the untrained eye, this could all look like some sort of fiddle of the books to dodge tax. But the big accountancy firms say not. This is all legitimate and above board. It's mainly the staff costs where the potential profit went. In addition to the £40.8m salaries, there's another share based payment charge of £35.4m. This apparent worsening of ultimate performance appears to be richly rewarded.

A few quick sums to get a sense of proportion. The average salary cost of one of the 362 UK Facebook employees works out at £112k, plus their payment of £24k National Insurance. That's £137k. Now add on the 2014 bonus averaged at £97.7k and the salary drifts towards £235k averaged across all employees.

I know, it's not that simple. Some people get paid less, and others get paid more. There is probably a distribution curve for performance too (XESIL), so that some people can get double bonuses and others get none. My quick bell-curve calculation shows a total reward range from £115k (mainly admin) to £336k for the bulk of the staff.

So do the staff actually get their hands on the bonus shares money? I can't be certain, but it looks as if they can't for four years.

What everyone appears to get are paper shares (RSUs) with a minimum 4 year vesting period.

So Facebook kind of wins twice, it has written its profits away, removed the Corporation Tax charge and only has to give the RSU certificates to its staff, until the end of another four years.

Oh well, I suppose it did have to pay £4,327 of Corporation Tax (usually rated at 20%-21% of profit) on its turnover of £104m. I wonder if it still has that Cayman Islands account where it was squirrelling advertising revenues?

the fridge bear

My favourite pictogram from the new kitchen equipment is probably this one. As well as the wide range of instruction booklets in Arabic, Russian, French, German, Spanish and all points in between, many of the instructions were also available as little diagrams.

I'm not entirely sure what this one actually means though:

- Klaxon sound indicates bear in vicinity?
- If you hear a bear, hide in fridge?
- Don't leave fridge door open, because it may attract bears?
- Possible bear hazard in fridge?
- Do not pet the fridge bear?
- Bare right at fridge?
- If fridge door left open it will growl like a bear?

...or maybe its a jelly baby?