The Fox Report
Barry Fox’s technology column
Pingdemic blues
I
n the UK (and doubtless
elsewhere) the virus pandemic
was overtaken by a ‘pingdemic’,
with rafts of keyworkers forced to
self-isolate because they had been
‘pinged’ by the NHS Covid-19 Track
and Trace smartphone App. The App
works with Bluetooth, registering and
then messaging anyone who has come
close to someone who has later fallen
sick. When the App was criticised for
over-enthusiastic pinging, and people
started deleting it from their phones,
the powers that be talked vaguely
about tweaking the App’s sensitivity.
A simple DIY test shows how the App
design was fatally flawed. Take a trip on
public transport, a train or a tube/subway,
and go to the Bluetooth settings on your
smartphone. This will show all Bluetooth
devices available for pairing, because they
are within Bluetooth range – and thus
‘visible’ to the Covid App. Now watch
how the list of detected devices changes
as passengers join and leave the train.
Some will be way down the carriage far
beyond the 2-metre medically safe social
distancing limit.
Social vs Bluetooth distancing
Bluetooth has a range of around 10
metres or over 30 feet, so the App is
detecting people at five or more times
the 2-metre safe distance.
The official NHS explanation of how
the App works reads: ‘Close contact’ is
based on an algorithm, but generally
means you’ve been within 2 metres
of someone for 15 minutes or more.
Often, a tube or rail journey will be for
over 15 minutes. Phone users have no
options for controlling Bluetooth transmission strength or reception sensitivity.
Talking about tweaking the algorithm
to control electronic sensitivity is like
talking about Harry Potter magic.
I asked the NHS Press Office, ‘what
is to prevent smartphones detecting
devices at the Covid-safe distance of
10 metres or more, for 15 minutes or
more, and “pinging” the owners with
a false warning of dangerously close
contact?’ My questions were simply
ignored. I am not surprised.
Baroness Dido Harding was the executive chair of the £35bn+ coronavirus
Test and Trace programme. She was
previously head of telecoms giant
Talk Talk. It was on her watch that
the network was hacked by teenagers,
resulting in customers having their
personal details stolen.
I know because I was at the time (2015)
a Talk Talk Customer and received the
letter which TalkTalk sent to everyone
who was compromised. It’s never been
clear just what data was stolen and how
much of it was encrypted and how much
unencrypted. I’ll never how much of
the cyber-aggro I now suffer is thanks
to Talk Talk and Baroness Harding.
1552 hand-held plastic enclosures
If Baroness Harding was judged the
best person for the App job, who else
applied? What I do know for sure is
that when we recently learned that
Baroness Harding was applying for
the job of running the whole NHS, I
signed the petition to stop her.
Slow and steady wins the day…
A reader recently contacted me:
‘I escorted an elderly friend to buy
a mobile phone at an EE shop. The
buttons became illegible in a very
short time, so we went back to complain. The shop manager insisted
we were outside their 28-day money
back guarantee period, and we should
take it up with the manufacturer. He
refused to acknowledge our rights
under consumer legislation.
‘I then wrote to EE head office, complaining that their representative was
breaking the law, but they refused to
discuss the matter with me because
I was not the ‘account holder’ (what
does that have to do with it?).
‘Then I tried to take the matter up
with Trading Standards, who refused to
accept a complaint from an individual
consumer and directed me to Citizens
Advice. Citizens Advice consisted of
merely referring me to leaflets about
consumer rights legislation. Round and
round the mulberry bush.
‘It seems that no matter what one’s
legal rights might be, there is no means
to have them enforced unless it is
!
w
ne
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8
Practical Electronics | October | 2021
worth the expense of private prosecution. Also, organisations are misusing data protection laws to avoid asking
legitimate questions.’
I replied, ‘The trick to getting satisfaction on a genuine
(not vexatious) complaint is to find the right button to
press, often the relevant ombudsman. At worst, you have
the satisfaction of knowing that the target of the complaint
has had to do a lot of work defending themselves.
‘Unfortunately, Covid has provided a wonderful opportunity for some people and organisations not to do their job
properly. This includes bodies and people who are being
paid to handle complaints.
‘My way of working – learned the hard way – is to bide
time and make a clear detailed note of anything I may
want to come back to. Don’t get diverted by phone calls or
shopfloor conversations which can be denied.
‘Once the detailed note is written it can just sit waiting
until the time is right. The target of the complaint will then
have to dig into old files and memories to argue in defence.
Again, you will at least have this satisfaction.’
When is live music real?
We hear a lot about pop singers secretly benefitting from
pitch correction, to make recordings sound much better
than the real thing. But of course, we never get to compare
the real thing with the processed song.
Recently, a musician friend found this pair of gems on the
Internet. Apart from the entertainment value, like a movie
so bad it is good, the before and after comparison makes a
very useful technology demonstration. See: https://youtu.
be/5sN7kgEw954 and https://youtu.be/E6ERPeGkBt8
An amusing BBC report (https://bbc.in/2VUDWxX) noted
that one YouTube commenter wrote: ‘She is actually hitting
all the notes... only of other songs. And at random.’
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Data Discman
The Data Discman from Sony – a solution
looking for a problem that never appeared.
W
hen Sony announced
that, ‘Tomorrow’s mobile
library’ was on sale in Japan
in July 1990, it was an immediate hit
with the gadget-hungry Japanese.
Sony’s Data Discman (DD) was a
portable CD player with an LCD screen
and small qwerty keyboard. It played
8cm electronic books with 200MB
Practical Electronics | October | 2021
capacity. There was a choice of 35
reference textbooks and foreign language dictionaries.
DD hit the US and mainland Europe
the next year, with 85 titles including
such ‘un-missables’ as an information disc on US Presidents. By 1992,
100,000 players had been sold – but,
only 200,000 discs.
Unfortunately, there were problems.
Discman ROMs discs were incompatible with conventional PC ROM
drives. Compatibility with Philips’
CD-interactive players was promised
but never happened. The DD discs
stored only raw data, so the player had
search software built into its on-board
electronics. To prevent users from
downloading this raw data, the player
had no socket for connection to a PC.
The UK got the chance to buy DD
players in April 1992 for £350, with a
Dictionary of the Living World priced
at £60 and Harrap’s Multilingual Dictionary costing £40. However, the small
monochrome LCD screen was so hard
on the eyes that Sony always demonstrated it connected to a TV monitor.
26/07/2021 12:17
‘I tried reading the works of Mark
Twain,’ said one American user, ‘but
very soon gave up.’ Sony countered
that DD was ideal for finding out how
many times Sherlock Holmes said
‘elementary’ or how to say ‘gasket’ in
German if you break down on the Autobahn. A deal with BT to put telephone
directories on DD discs fell through.
Divided by incompatibility, and
trounced by PC ROMs, DD flopped.
A strange epilogue to this story is
that in 1997 a batch of brand-new,
boxed Data Discmen appeared in the
window of a Tottenham Court Road
shop in central London. They were
labelled as if the format were new and
the latest thing in portable computing!
More technology stories and images at:
https://tekkiepix.com/stories
Practical Electronics is delighted to be
able to help promote Barry Fox’s project
to preserve the visual history of preInternet electronics.
Visit www.tekkiepix.com for fascinating
stories and a chance to support this
unique online collection.
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