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For the last ten years or so I have been coming across the name of Barrie Trower in connection with EM radiation scares. Without having met the gentleman personally I can only recount what the press have said about him – from his own statements, presumably – in descriptions of his former employment. It is said that he is a “British scientist and former naval weapons expert” and that he “specialized in microwave stealth warfare during the Cold War.” It is very easy to claim a past such as this. If the man has indeed worked behind the wall of silence that governments impose on so many, then any claim from him is going to be ignored by those powers: unless he goes beyond the remit of official secrets and, in his case, the dreaded Official Secrets Acts to which he would have been a signatory. Trower’s name had kind of left my consciousness again until last week when it was announced that he was giving a free lecture in Toronto on the dreads of using Wi-Fi in the public ...

There has been a lot of press and technology pundit noise recently about net neutrality. Most people mean by that that there is no difference in the way content from any one site is handled from that from any other site. That sounds very egalitarian and in the full spirit of what the Internet has always been about. But should it be real? Wow, people are saying, has McGoldrick lost his marbles? Is he on the side of the likes of Verizon? Maybe, and probably. When the Internet came into being it was a means of digital communication between places of academic learning: hard wired sites that allowed the exchange of information in fairly unsophisticated formats – but in quite large volumes. When Joe Public (the likes of me and you) came to the so-called World Wide Web it was in a form that allowed us initially to log on using dial-up facilities. We didn’t bother to go to any kind of sophisticated sites because we simply could not abide the download times that we would have had to endure; so we allowe...

Many people know, even if they don’t understand, my attitude towards electronic banking. I cannot be persuaded that any form of financial transaction over the Internet can ever be deemed totally safe and the Zeus virus, which targets – and empties – online bank accounts for those silly enough to continue using Internet Explorer first emerged three years ago and has now mutated to Zeus v3. I still, after many years, still even hesitate in passing credit card data across the web. I am still even more hesitant about the use of debit cards. When the players involved are all so confident that their systems are totally secure it becomes an open invitation to hackers and con artists, who will use every possible gray cell they have just to prove the bankers wrong. That would be of no account to you or me as a user except that the rules of liability that exist with credit cards are turned on their head with debit transactions. Because the systems are so safe, the players say, it must mean that any ...

Governments have been involved in spying on their own citizens probably since the beginning of organized leadership. Whether it was a Lord who wanted to find the crops his tenants had hidden that he wanted to tax; the King who sensed rebellion or foreign attacks; the Church that wanted to suppress alternate beliefs – or science. Those in authority have believed that they have the right to prevent facts from being widely known, or to trap the unwary that dared to question their God-given right to lead. Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, was perhaps the first thoroughly well-documented developer of the craft of spying and the use of agents provocateur. He died poor in 1590 because he spent all his efforts – and huge amounts of his own money – in protecting Elizabeth, the realm, and the Protestant faith. He cultivated a legion of intelligencers across both England and the Continent who were able to feed him commercial, military, and political secrets. The questionable downf...

My time teaching in college is long past although a lot of photographic reminders were sent to me recently by my senior technician from that time. The building in which I created my own personal television transmitter lab – going a whole lot further than my much earlier amateur TV license as G6AAC/T – has been threatened by demolition but that whole time period is probably the subject of other, future, Editorial musings. When I reached the level of Senior Lecturer I had a total of fifteen contact hours a week, contact time being lectures, tutorials, lab work, etc. With long vacations life in college is a great deal easier than, say, that of a high school teacher: with the added, major, bonus that your students - in my field, at least - actually want to be there! During my copious spare time I wrote a lot for audio and video magazines, polished off two books, designed things like vehicle electronic ignition systems, consulted on RF cavity design, and did a lot of review work for audio manufacture...

Sometimes you can write and speculate about something and be either incredibly right, or incredibly wrong. Other times you can just kick yourself for not following your own instincts properly. Case in point: when the iPhone 4 was formally announced about a month ago I wrote about the case designed antenna: “How that antenna’s propagation characteristics are not completely messed up by the human holding the phone may be explained by the breaks in the metal’s circumference, suggesting that the top part of the case metal is the real antenna.” Selling 1.7 million phones in the first three days of availability was a major coup for Apple – probably a retail landmark indeed. But it didn’t take long for the stories about poor reception and dropped calls to start building up. The first responses from the company were that the RSSI software was screwed up and that the indicated “bars” were optimistic, and had been from the iPhone’s inception. Then came the announc...

When Proposition 13 went to the voters of California in 1978, it was as a result of crooked county assessors who “bent” the rules in property valuations to assist their friends, wealthy donors (assessors in California are, stupidly, elected officials) and, to some extent, in sympathy to elderly homeowners. Once those assessors were caught in their trickery the resulting property re-evaluations (mostly upwards, of course) caused a massive amount of voter anger. The title of Proposition 13 was the People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation and its main tenor was to limit property taxes to 1% of a property’s value per year. A formula allowed that value to be increased by 2% per year for inflation. The only ways that a base valuation could change would be at the sale of the property or after major additions or renovations (which you avoided telling the County Assessor’s office about). After a sale the transaction price becomes the new valuation base and is, again, only increased by a ...

You remember those pre 9/11 days, right? At my local airport the station manager for Horizon Airlines would just wave me through security. He knew me and I knew him. In the days after 9/11 that all changed, with a uniformed policeman at the security checkpoint amid very serious-looking faces. That’s when my Leatherman tool stopped traveling with me. It, plus needles and anything else even remotely sharp suddenly became things that you simply didn’t travel with. I could have done with a Leatherman or Swiss Army Knife in the UK a couple of months ago. At a hotel in the north of England the shaver outlet in the bathroom (transformer powered for safety under British wiring regulations) didn’t work. I had the choice, at 7:30 in the morning, of going down to reception and getting a razor, changing rooms just to shave, or, as a nice technical challenge, of rigging up a 13 A ring main socket to the US twin bladed plug on my razor. It was not that easy on a live outlet with just my house key and fob...

Steve Jobs hailed the revised iPhone 4 at the Apple 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference as the best thing since the original phone was launched three years ago. Most analysts seem to have more moderate opinions but that may have been because of the earlier leaks created by Gizmodo when a prototype was carelessly left behind in a Redwood City beer house. The major hype of the new phone i  the additional camera that has been provided on the rear of the casing. This HD (720P) 5 Mpixel camera is backed up with an LED flash – which is permanently powered during video use. It opens up the world of video phone connections in a rather more novel, Skype-like, way than we have seen in the past, using the Wi-Fi connection for communications. Apple is calling the feature FaceTime, but my daughter, about as avid an iPhone user as you can get, thinks such enhancements are quite useless without zoom capability on the camera. The new display offers, apparently, a 326 pixel per square inch resolution to match the...

It has become a de rigueur aspect of the failing, elderly celebrity: television advertising. We have seen Johnny Carson’s sidekick Ed McMahon and stars from Little House On the Prairie, Mission Impossible, and the like, promoting everything from retrofitted bath units for the disabled to reverse mortgages. It is sad to see these stars – who should have been more financially comfortable in their later years – making a few dollars just to survive. Unfortunately, rather like many who receive their knighthoods in Britain, the very act of pitching products on the small screen seems to be a death sentence. One hopes that is not so for George Takei, the actor who played Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu in the original Star Trek, who has taken to the airwaves to promote Sharp’s most recent LCD TV products using their so-called Quattro Technology. The latest commercial, dubbed Seahorse by its producers, tries to sell the idea that a fourth color of phosphor (how old fashioned of me!) in the form of yel...