Following on from the BBC’s Watchdog report last night about Wifi security, we’ve been receiving a number of calls from concerned customers worried that their wireless router is not secure.

Here’s some basic advice and we’ll show you where to get some guidance on how to protect your wireless network.

We take your security seriously and, provided you take simple steps to make sure protection is enabled, you shouldn’t be overly anxious about your home network.

Wifi-networks are protected using a passkey system, generally using WPA or the even more secure WPA2-PSK system. The Thomson gateway 585v7 we supply is configured to use WPA security by default. This will work with most Wifi devices and if you’ve got one of these your network should be protected.

If you want to make sure your home Wifi network is secure then we have a guide on securing your wireless on our support pages.

Don’t forget though. If you do change your SSID or your passkey, remember to make the same changes on your Wifi-enabled computer or laptop too, otherwise you won’t connect to your home network.

Public Hotspots

Last night’s watchdog report focused on Wifi hotspots. You’ll find these at airports, cafe etc and are designed for anyone to be able to connect to them, often free-of-charge. This is very different to your home network where you can restrict who has access to it by choosing to use WPA or WPA2 security and setting the passkey.

If you do use Wifi hotspots when you take your laptop out and about, make sure that the security software on your computer is up to date and you have an anti-virus and firewall installed.

If you have any important emails which contain confidential information, try and avoid sending these from unsecure public Wifi hotspots as this increase the risk of the contents being intercepted and read by hackers.

Remember:
When you’re not using the wireless signal on the router you should turn this off.

If you’ve got any questions about wireless security please pop over to our discussion forums.

Chris

We’re proud of our blogs and hope you find them both interesting and informative. And we’re very pleased now to have been included in Online IT Degrees’ Top 100 Blogs for the industry.

You can find us in the “Top IT Industry Company Blogs” category with the likes of Digg, DELL and the Windows 7 team – which is very nice indeed.

Our blogs are important to the way we work as a company. They allow you to see what we’re interested in, and through them we can give you our take on what’s happening in the world of ISPs and the wider Internet.

http://onlineitdegrees.org/top-100-it-industry-blogs/

It will be the first time in recent history that an England qualifying match hasn’t been shown live on a ‘normal’ TV channel.

This event and the potential number of people streaming this are going to put pressure across the UK broadband networks. This could cause slower than expected speeds for everybody using the internet, including our customers.

If you want to watch you can see the game via the official stream here.

Before streaming this there are a few things you need to know prior to kick-off:

• The match will be broadcast in 2 different quality streams, make sure you pick the most appropriate for your connection. The lower quality stream will need around 550kbps whilst the higher one will need over 800kbps.
• You can check the speed of your connection using our speedtest here to see which stream you should choose.
• We’d advise you to close other programs on your computer and try to limit the amount of other web activities going on at the same time.
• Try the test video available here to ensure you are able to view this stream before kick-off.
• Make sure you have the latest version of Flashplayer.
• Check you have JavaScript enabled for Click to Play streaming.

Now all that’s left is to watch England win (hopefully).

~~~~~

How to enable JavaScript for Click to Play streaming

How to do this depends on your operating system, and which web browser you’re using.

Instructions if you have Windows XP or Vista

Browser: Internet Explorer

• 1. Go to Tools, then Internet Options
• 2. Click on the Security tab
• 3. Click on Custom Level
• 4. Scroll down until you see a section labeled “Scripting”
• 5. Under “Active Scripting”, select Enable and click OK

Browser: Mozilla Firefox

• 1. Go to Tools, then Options
• 2. Click on the Content tab
• 3. Make sure there’s a tick in the box next to “Enable JavaScript”
• 4. Click OK

Instructions if you have Apple Macintosh

Browser: Safari

• 1. Go to Safari
• 2. Click on Preferences
• 3. Click on the Security tab
• 4. Make sure there’s a tick in the box next to “Enable JavaScript”
• 5. Close Preferences

Browser: Mozilla Firefox

• 1. Go to Firefox
• 2. Click on Preferences
• 3. Click on the Content tab
• 4. Make sure there’s a tick in the box next to “Enable JavaScript”
• 5. Close Preferences

Zen took the honours, with O2 being highly commended, each with 6 stars.

More than 14,000 readers voted in this year’s survey, providing in-depth feedback on the products they’ve bought and the level of customer service they received.

 PC Pro Awards 2009

The Top10 judges examined the monthly costs associated with each of the nominated broadband providers and paid close attention to the extras included in the packages. 

On awarding the prize for Best Value Home Broadband, the Top10 judges said: “At just £5.99 a month, Plusnet Value offers the best value home broadband on the market”.

“Good value is not just about the price on the box and Plusnet’s Value Broadband package includes all the trimmings with a free wireless router, 24/7 support, free set up and broadband firewall and spam protection Plusnet show that there’s more to value than upfront costs.”

The survey, now in its fifth year, asked people to provide feedback on the reliability of their connections, the download speeds they achieve and the customer service they receive. 

More than 6,500 PC Advisor readers responded this year, the results providing  insight into broadband customer satisfaction levels in the UK.

O2 took first place with the ‘Best Buy’ award, with Plusnet, BE and Zen being recommended buys.

The PC Advisor 2009 Advisor Broadband Survey is sponsored by http://broadbandgenie.co.uk

If you’re not sure about what wifi security is or how to set it up we’ve a tech support guide here (we’ll update it just as soon as we can). The more technically minded among you may feel you could go one better over at the Support Library?

Using customer ratings and speed tests over the last 12 months, from around 1.5 million people, makes it one of the most authoritative customer awards for the broadband industry.

Plusnet is shortlisted in two awards:

Best Value Broadband
Best-rated Home Broadband

The awards will be held on September 15th.

Having used PHP for a number of years to build a career and pay the bills, it feels particularly satisfying to contribute something back to the project. Also, those people making significant contribution may apply for a $username@php.net email address which looks cool on a business card!

With the recent release of PHP5.3RC2, the main focus is on improving code coverage for the 5.3 branch.  PHP core developer Scott MacVicar started the day with an introduction on how-to compile from source as well as run the existing tests. After pizza, we got down to the business of writing tests, starting with a simple example which I’ll run through…

First, download the latest 5.3 snapshot from snaps.php.net and extract it.  NorthWestUG were only focusing on testing the Standard PHP Library (SPL) so we disabled all the extensions to speed up the compilation time. If you’re interested in other extensions, use the appropriate switch to enable it – see ‘./configure –help | less’ for details. Note: you may need to install ‘build-essentials’, ‘ltp’ and ‘gcov’ packages before performing the following step.

tar zxvf php5.3*
cd php5.3*
./configure --disable-all --enable-gcov && make

Once complete, you should now have your compiled PHP CLI binary in sapi/cli/php. Lets test it,

$ sapi/cli/php -v
PHP 5.3.0RC2 (cli) (built: May  9 2009 19:48:19) (GCOV)
Copyright (c) 1997-2009 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.3.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Zend Technologies

To run all the existing tests, approximately 5700, run ‘make test’.  To generate a code coverage report run ‘make lcov’ and open lcov_html/index.html to see the results.  Both these commands also accept a ‘TESTS=’ argument which is useful for testing individual directories and files when writing new tests.  For example, to only run the SPL tests, use ‘make test TESTS=ext/spl/tests/’. Now lets create our own test.  For this example, we’ll check that PHP can do basic addition.  PHP test files have a .phpt extension and consist of several sections.  Every test must contain TEST, FILE and EXPECT sections.

• TEST – a meaning description of the test
• FILE – your test code
• EXPECT – what the expected outcome of FILE is

There are many other sections however, CREDITS is common and completing this will get your name/email address into CVS.  Refer to the reference manual and QA PHP site for guidance. Here is the example test that Scott used (the new line at the bottom of the test is important!),

--TEST--
Check that PHP can count
--CREDITS--
Your name/email address
--FILE--
<?php
echo 10 + 10;
?>
--EXPECT--
20

Save the file using the .phpt extension and run the test, ‘make test TESTS=/path/to/test/filename.phpt’.  If for some reason the test fails a number of output files are created in the same directory as the test.  The most useful is the .diff file, this records the test’s actual output against what was expected. Assuming the test works as expected you get something like,

=====================================================================
PHP         : /path/php-5.3.0RC2/sapi/cli/php
PHP_SAPI    : cli
PHP_VERSION : 5.3.0RC2
ZEND_VERSION: 2.3.0
PHP_OS      : Linux - Linux work-laptop 2.6.28-11-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 17 01:57:59 UTC 2009 i686
INI actual  : /path/php-5.3.0RC2/tmp-php.ini
More .INIs  :
CWD         : /path/php-5.3.0RC2
Extra dirs  :
VALGRIND    : Not used
=====================================================================
Running selected tests.
PASS Check that PHP can count [/path/to/test/filename.phpt]
=====================================================================
Number of tests :    1                 1
Tests skipped   :    0 (  0.0%) --------
Tests warned    :    0 (  0.0%) (  0.0%)
Tests failed    :    0 (  0.0%) (  0.0%)
Expected fail   :    0 (  0.0%) (  0.0%)
Tests passed    :    1 (100.0%) (100.0%)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Time taken      :    0 seconds
=====================================================================

Now we know how-to write basic tests, we need to find some real code to test.  PHP’s gcov site reports all untested code in red, so just pick a section and write a test for it. Once the test passed, re-run the code coverage report to ensure the expect line(s) is now green. When you’re happy with the test follow the what to do next instructions and submit it to the QA mailing list for review. It’s preferable to submit tests in batches rather then by drip-feeding them as the tests will be reviewed by the QA team, run on multiple OSes, hardware as well as committing to the 5.2, 5.3 and HEAD.

Thanks to iBuildings for sponsoring the event, Salford University for use of their facilitiess, Lorna Mitchell for organising the event, Scott for his mentoring and patience and to everyone that turned up and wrote some tests.  Currently NorthWestUG is in the lead with 95 tests!  All the tests created by the NorthWestUG can be found here.

Credit to Lorna Mitchell for the photos.  The full set is available here.

After reading Matt’s Twitter blog that he published a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write a follow-up piece about my own experiences with the increasingly popular micro-blogging cum social networking service of the moment.

What I found particularly interesting about Matt’s blog were some of the comments that readers had left. Whilst there aren’t many, what is evident from these comments is something that I’ve noticed on a much larger scale when chatting to friends, family and work associates about the new social networking phenomena – You either love it, or you hate it!

It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve seen this love/hate separation either. I remember there being a similar apprehension and reluctance to get involved when Facebook was still in it’s early days. Nowadays though, with more than 200 million users worldwide, it’s unusual to come across a person who *hasn’t* got a profile on the social networking behemoth. Will we see the same take up and general acceptance of Twitter as a social networking medium? A market research company called Nielsen Online have already published figures showing that Twitter take up in the UK grew by a massive 1,689% from February 2008 to February 2009 alone – That’s an estimated 1.78 million UK adopters!

I have to admit that I’m one of Twitter’s admirers. I’ve been well and truly sucked in and find it an extremely useful tool as both a source of news and as a real-time search engine. Let me provide you with an example of the latter:

Back in January, Google experienced a problem that caused all search results to be flagged as malware. I happened to be online when this happened and wondered whether or not it was a problem at my end or something that was affecting other users too. The problem was only evident for a short period of time, but whilst it was happening there was no acknowledgement of the problem’s existence on Google’s blog, neither did a Google search return any similar reports of problems. It was at this point that I turned to Twitter’s search API. By entering the search term ‘google’ I knew immediately that it wasn’t just me experiencing problems as there were countless other reports on the ‘Twittersphere’ from users having exactly the same problem as.

That’s one of the things I like about Twitter, there’s no ‘proper’ way to use it and different people use it in different ways. I use my personal account to keep in touch with my friends, keep up to date with the latest news and discover new and entertaining stuff on the web. On the other hand, I use Plusnet’s Twitter account to offer support to our customers, post service announcements and promote the company brand.

Whether you love it or hate it Twitter seems to be eveywhere you look. It’s in the papers, it’s getting parodied, celebrities are getting in on the act and there’s even a fan club to show appreciation for the loveable (if not slightly frustrating) ‘fail whale’ that appears when Twitter’s servers are under load!

YouTube have recently added a Twitter button to their video clips and Vodafone have recently announced that they’ve started offering a free SMS service for Twitter users in the UK (something that has been available in the states since the social networking site’s inception, but was withdrawn for users this side of the pond last year due to the ‘high costs of mobile text messaging in the UK’ ).

Whichever way you look at it, it seems like Twitter’s here to stay. One thing that does remain unclear though is what the future holds for the micro-blogging phenomena. After all, it costs money to run a service like Twitter and one has to question what revenue, if any, the site brings in. Last month there were claims that Twitter may soon start charging for corporate use and there was even speculation at one point that Google were looking to buy the company (which some might argue isn’t a great idea). In a recent blog post, Twitter founder Biz Stone posted that “…we hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year.” In the same piece however, he also goes onto say “…whatever we come up with, Twitter will remain free to use by everyone—individuals, companies, celebrities etc.” – I’ll leave it to you the reader to make of that what you will.

So there you have it, love it or loathe it I don’t think we’ve heard the last of Twitter and I can only see it increasing in popularity as the year progresses. If you’re already using Twitter then make sure you visit our page and follow Plusnet. If you’re not using Twitter then what are you waiting for? You never know, you might actually like it!

.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Comms Team