Mois : mai 2020

Sametime Tech

What you ought to aware about Skype/Microsoft Teams

by Christophe Jost0 comments

Untold Notes

Privacy and Skype/Microsoft teams…what you should be aware of

I just read an interesting piece in the german press. Basically, the privacy/data protection officer of Berlin city advised schools, businesses and the city’s administration against using many public video-conferencing systems.
It based its decision on recent technical findings what were published in the german press and on analyzing the GDPR situation.
And Microsoft is now flexing its legal muscle. This story will unfold in the coming weeks, months, years I guess.
But what it is all about ? Among all the issues, I am looking at one in particular.

Microsofot’s privacy statement, it is considered by the Stiftung Warentest who compared 20 videoconferencing systems recently, I am quoting :

« The texts (…) show no serious concern with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). « 

Datenschutz bei Microsoft Teams?

Now, one could say that this is just paperwork…but there is much more.

Microsoft is sending User IDs to the Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo (an Adobe subsidiary), Google Ads and Scorecardresearch.
The data streams look like remarketing tags.
Naturally, cookies are used as well as other means to identify.

Now this means that when a web-conference is started, all members are identified, their web profiles are updated if their devices or identities are known.
Google reserves the right to use that data for other advertising clients.

This ought to get everyone thinking about using such software and is an argument for using Sametime whose functioning is based – and has always been – on confidentiality and security

Corruption FIFA International Legal

Another huge football scandal – and why the mass media in England won’t cover it

by Tony Attwood0 comments

Another huge football scandal – and why the mass media in England won’t cover it

Yesterday we reported on the Mail’s story Why the Mail’s “Everything that looked wrong at Arsenal WAS wrong” is arrant nonsense.

Now one argument that could be made for running that piece in the Mail was that there is no real football news around, so the paper has to make something up.  But one look at the European press shows this is not true.

And it is not just that there is a story – it is an absolute whopper.  So big that the question yet again arises, why is the media in the UK not touching this story which is erupting on an almost daily basis?

But you will have probably guessed what the story is: it is a story of wholesale Fifa corruption, and as we know, the UK media are very reluctant to talk about this.  Largely I suspect, at the behest of the FA who want to spend millions of pounds more of taxpayers money on another bid for England to host the world cup.  What the FA don’t want, and what they have persuaded the media not to provide, is any reminder that Fifa is corrupt, and that last time the FA bid for the WC it got two votes.

Infantino goes to Suriname

So here is the latest Fifa story: In April 2017, Gianni Infantino went to visit Suriname, the smallest country in South America.  He talked to the head of state, shook some hands, went to see the football ground.

Infantino accompanied by his usual entourage including his chief assistant Mattias Grafström, made his standard speech “Suriname needs a new stadium” but then, instead of talking up their first-class seats on the scheduled flights already booked, the party hired a private jet to fly to Switzerland.

On 11 April 2017 assistant Grafström reports to Tomaz Vessel, (who is head of Fifa’s Audit & Compliance Committee), that the KLM airline the party had booked into for the return to Switzerland was canceled “for technical reasons.”  He explained, “In order to meet the President’s appointments today in Suriname and tomorrow in Europe, we considered all the alternatives, but there is no alternative but to charter an airplane.”

Compliance man Vesel replied 43 minutes later. “Thank you for the information about flight details and the situation. The situation seems to me difficult and clearly requires immediate action.”   So that is the all-clear.  But for forms sake he adds,  “Be so good as to give me (in the near future) precise information about your already agreed appointments in the region and back tomorrow in Europe.”

Only with good reason

According to the rules of Fifa put in place after the last round of scandals and backhanders, the FIFA President must not, without good reason, engage in additional expenditure (especially of hundreds of thousands or more dollars) at the expense of Fifa (and thus at the expense of the global football community) without this being subject to scrutiny.  Vesel is the key man here.   He is formally independent.  His job to look closely at events and check on anyone who is running up bills of more than a million dollars in expenses within a four-year period.

But Vesel, without seeing the list of appointments, and on the say-so of Infantino, agrees to the private jet. Fifa compliance officer Ed Hanover also gets a copy of the details, sees Vesel has said “ok” and the all-clear is given.

However then it goes quiet. Fifa declines to give any further information or answer any questions, such as the exact cost of the private flight back to Switzerland.

Six days later, on April 18, Grafström reports to Vesel and Hanover with the requested details …. He lists seven scheduled events for the stop in Suriname, even including the “light dinner with the Minister of Sport, Defense and Finance”.

OK, if that has to be, it has to be, but much more to the point, what was the urgent date the following day, on April 12th, that justified this expensive return flight?    That event that made it impossible to wait for the postponed KLM flight?

Grafström writes: “The planned meetings on April 12 in Geneva were as follows: 2:00 pm meeting with the Uefa president in Nyon, followed by another meeting in Geneva.”

A meeting with the Uefa president – ok, pretty important. .Vesel was obviously convinced. “The flight took place in accordance with the rules and regulations of FIFA,” says the report. The rules allow special travel arrangements for important business appointments.

The appointment that never was

The only problem is: there was never an appointment for the day with the Uefa president. The alleged meeting did not take place and could not have taken place. The important appointment was an invention. A fantasy.  A make-believe.  A load of old codswallop (to use the grand old English phrase).  A fabrication.  One gigantic lie.

Uefa President Aleksander Ceferin was in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, on 12 April, four and a half hours flight from Nyon. This is revealed not by a bunch of undercover operators following a complex paper trail, but by the lavishly illustrated websites of Uefa and the Armenian Association. In Yerevan, Ceferin met with the head of state, laying the foundation stone for the new football academy, meeting the spiritual leader, visiting a brandy distillery (nice work if you can get it) and Echmiadzin Cathedral, one of the oldest in the world.  And we all know such state occasions are organised months in advance.

But, If there was no meeting in Nyon – what was the motive behind the fifa boss’ private jet trip? Did he just want to go home quickly?   Was Infantino’s mistress getting lonely (we make no allegation on this, it is given just by way of example of unacceptable reasons for private jet hire at football’s expense).   Was there anything else that would have been an acceptable reason for approval of a private jet from South America to Switzerland?

FIFA is silent on all these questions. Fifa does not and cannot deny the events took place and now simply insists that the trip was in line with the rules.

So why don’t we get this story in England?  Apart from pointing at criminal misuse of Fifa funds which we as taxpayers pay since we fund the FA, it also reveals the complete and utter arrogance of Infantino – a man already under scrutiny for many other alleged offenses.  The answer Infantino gave could have been seen to be a lie within minutes of anyone checking the schedule, but he appears that he was so utterly and completely arrogant that he said it anyway.

It is after all exactly the sort of story that you would expect the Sun, Mail, Express and the other tabloids to revel in just because it is scandal.  You would expect the Guardian to take it up because it reveals corruption.

And it is a piece of evidence that could lead to another explosion in Fifa.   For remember also that the Swiss state prosecutor (involved because of course Fifa is based in Switzerland) is now going on trial because he has had a number of secret meetings with Infantino (something completely against the rules of his office).

Silly little dolts

Plus after the English newspapers made themselves look like silly little dolts for having ignored the news that the Swiss had changed their laws and so were going to allow the US law enforcers into the Fifa meeting to arrest large numbers of Fifa officials (a story that Untold Arsenal ran and they didn’t), you might think that the media in England could have learned its lesson.

But no.  No news on Fifa.  No news on football corruption until it hits every media outlet in the world – and even then try and hide it under news about a decline in the number of starlings this year.

And why?  My guess, as I say above, is because the FA have asked the media not to touch these stories, so as not to harm their throwing another fortune donated by the tax payer in the UK, at a bid to host the world cup.

But there is more of course.  For meanwhile the Swiss federal prosecutor – the top legal man in Switzerland –  Michael Lauber, stumbled across a series of mysterious secret meetings to which he was lured by Infantino. On Wednesday, the parliamentary judicial commission in Bern decided to impeach the federal prosecutor; A criminal complaint has also been filed against the FIFA boss, which is currently being examined by the Bern judiciary. And now add to this, the Suriname lie.

And none of this is being reported in England.

Funny ol’ game.

And just for old times sake, our story from 22 January 2015 that the UK media ignored.

Switzerland take a greater interest in Fifa – at last

Tech Volt

Domino VOLT, trying to turn my light ON…. !

by Christophe Jost1 comments

After having tested, tried, read, watched all I could do, find about Domino VOLT, I was starting to feel frustrated.
I’m more a hands-on guide then a reader of instruction manuals. I prefer to reverse-engineer and learn from the example.

Today I realised that these last days I was kind of stuck, and I was convinced I was stuck the same way then when starting to use Notes 2 almost 30 years ago.

I was missing something. Or I was looking at Volt from the wrong angle.
30 years ago, my programming was done in an advanced Basic (Memsoft), with multikey files.
So the coding was sequential.

Starting to develop with Notes, I hit a plateau as I was just not getting the views, forms, etc.
One day, a colleague (thank you Patrick Günter) was able to shine a different light on Notes and that was it.
I had understood and was able so start serious developement.
Today I finally understood I was looking at Volt with my Notes radar and was not using the right wavelenght…
I think I can explain the major difference this way.

In Volt, you have forms and views. And in the application to develop, you may

– open a view
– compose a document

basically that’s it

If you compose a document, and save it, you get a blank screen. You actually don’t see the result in a view like in Notes.

To see that you have to program it. It is not there out of the box.

While you are developping you don’t see any view. You create forms and for each form, there will be a corresponding view to browse through the data, page by page.

From that view you can edit or create new records

Because I had not dataset available in Excel, this part was not visible to me, which explains my unease these days
Now once I had imported a simple table and then deployed my test database, I found out that from the application manager, the ‘Show data’ option opened something akin to the view manager in a notes database, and that the ‘Launch’ option enabled me to create a record – one menu option for each existing form, akin to the Create menu in a notes database.

Now, coming from Notes, the web environment is not at the center of our preocupations. In VOLT it is.

So for each form, you get an http://…. link that enables inputing the form, in fullscreen mode or inside an iframe (= compose a document).

You get a link to show the data (= open a view). Another link enables you to shwo graphs about the data.

And you get this for each form in the application.

Armed with this, you can integrate that data into whichever website you are working on to give it data handling capabilities.

Lego pieces if you prefer.

To me this is the xPages we ought to have had back in 2010. But then again, it was another decade, and now we are in our new time-space and not the old one.

Now, the other issue I had was that as I had create a form before importing data from a spreadsheet, once I wanted to do it, it did not work.
VOLT cannot match the columns to existing fields just like that. So what you have to do is input on the first line of each column the variable name of each field.

Makes sense, but when you’ve tested creating apps by importing spreadsheets and letting VOLT create the forms, it needs to be said.

And these imports onto an existing dataset or for the first time are possible from the ‘Show data’ function where for each form there is a tab in which the view is shown and from which you may import.

Well, as my grandfather used to say : if you explain things to me for a long time, I understand quickly….

Guess that now my VOLT light is turned ON !

Economy National PL

Premier League casino – who will pay for the losses

by Christophe Jost0 comments

An interesting comment from Mike T. this morning on Macquarie, the australian bank who financed PL clubs growth got me thinking about the economics of the PL.

Their chances (and those of the other lenders against upcoming revenue) to recover their money seems slim. And now even the governement says the games should be broadcast to all, which will dent the whole revenue model more.
Now broadcasters seem to be arguing that because games don’t ake place at set times days and times, they need not pay.
o they may move any game around whenever they wish, yet force majeure does not apply to them.
Just think about the underlying logic. All fans are starved for games. They won’t be able to go see the games. Do you expect they’ll tune in or not ?
So maybe advertising revenue may end up higher as more spectators are expected, so broadcasters may get some of their revenue after all ?
I can bet you the restart of the Bundesliga will be an event as watched as the kickoff to a World Cup.

So I guess they are just looking for a way out of paying. One wonders how come all the MBA’s and high priced lawyers of the Premier League, the richest in the world, did not include some force majeure clause….but this is another story. My opinion is that the Premier League is riddled with incompetence, within and around it : all of football in England is a play ground of incompetent people.

To me, some of these clubs or their owners have wanted to play poker or roulette. Or probably most of them
Some came to the table with a cartload of money and with wealth that guarantees they won’d have to leave the PL asino anytime soon.
Others wanted to join the club at all costs and set up a venture to do just that. Suffice to look at the owners of PL and Championship clubs to see that.
And most bet way above their means. So, now they’ll have to leave the table. And the clubs will tumble into lower leagues or go bankrupt.
I have no problem with a viable (and correctly run) company getting governement help. But these casino players, well, the taxpaying citizen does not have to be asked to finance their seat at the table.
Some billionnaire does not have the means or does not want to keep on spending on his club ? Tough luck them. He sells it, or goes bankrupt and faces all consequences.
And if the finances were not well managed, too much risk taken, well the guys who signed need to pay for their errors as any small business owner has to do.Laws ought to apply to all.
And the last time I checked, the Premier League is in no way systemic, is it ?

Sure, the players, employees will have a problem. But this happens when any company goes bankrupt and we don’t see much of a report in the press about them, do we ?
Personnaly, I’d be more worried about the staff, their wages are ‘normal’, they have the most to lose. Players ? Well, they took on the career, they chose the clubs they play for, they earned generally way more money then any of us, so in no way are they worse off.
In the end, it ought to be a survival of the fittest situation

And if the PL ends up with 10 teams ? Well they’ll play each other 4 times in a season and over the ensuing years, some Championship teams may come up based on finances and results. Would broadcasters be against showing Liverpool- United 4 times a year ? I don’t believe so.

As for broadcasters losses, well, tough luck guys. You are the ones who accepted to pay more, who took risks, who have the university degrees present on the management floor of your corporate buildings, who hire the expensive lawyers and consultants. Sue them and leave us alone. Why should we care at all, after all the examples of you not respecting the fan in the stadium and the paying subscriber ?

In a time when a recession is starting that looks like it will hurt many, when the health system of the country is in dire straits, any idea of the governement coming out to save casino players sounds obscene to me. Privatising profit and mutualising losses accross the country is not acceptable. Banks did get away with it, arguing they were ‘systemic relevant’. I can’t think how the Premier League or the FA would be classified in the systemic relevant category.

One solution out of this mess may be to transfer all clubs who go bust into some ‘Bad club fund’.
Said fund would pay the ‘little people’ owed by the club and look for buyers.
Anyone wanting to ‘buy’ the club would have, in return for use of the ground, the brand, the name, etc. to repay the fund for a number of years, covering what was owed and interest.
Who knows, maybe the clubs’ own fans may be interested in crowdsourcing a restart-
This way, there is no need to come up with hundreds of millions in one shot, but with a plan that makes sense, a competent management team and a vision.
The funds that would be invested would be vetted so as to avoid mafia or autocratic like takeovers.

But then again, such a scenario would need a will to solve the problem and competent people preparing for it and actually running it. Which I don’t think the PL nor the FA has shown as having available.

Just an idea, but why would it not be possible to apply to football recipes that worked for another casino like industry : the banking system ?

However, at some point, survival of the fittest still must apply, and frankly, I do hope it will.

Tech Volt

Switching Domino Volt ON

by Christophe Jost0 comments

VoltTrace

Switching Domino Volt ON

Coming out of Engage 2020 in Arnheim, I was all excited at the thought of getting started with Domino Volt. Yet the virus disruption we are under just wreaked havoc into all my plans. And when I wanted to get going, I discovered that the beta download was not possible anymore and the normal download not possible yet…. tough luck…yet so frustrating as the confinment was giving me at least 3 hours of extra time per day – no metro, bus, train, plane, car to take anymore.

So I contacted Begoña Sanchez, the HCL Client Advocate Manager and she got the issue solved in a few days with the help of her colleagues. I must say I had written off the possibility as large companies with their procedures often have no way to handle an outlier who was not even able to manage the March 31st deadline… And, again, HCL surprised me and the outlier I am was offered a no-fuss practical solution. Many thanks and bravo.

So, as I am often working off-line, I installed a V11 Domino server on my Thinkpad T590 with 64 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD, which is to say a nice workhorse. I then proceeded to install Domino Volt. Some configuration stuff later, I was in Volt working on my first application.

Except I could not save anything….so I started searching, told myself I ought have installed an https connexion on my server, did it, no change.

Anyways at some point logic thinking came back, I de-installed all and started from scratch. With a slight change…. going through the install procedure that came with the file step by step. 10 minutes later all was working.

Which just shows that we till can be arrogant and stupid enough after more then 30 years and not read the install instructions fully. And that the install documents HCL produced are detailed enough – and correct – to enable someone like me to et the job done….. let’s say it is a read-pushbutton installation…. ;=)

Working on my first application, I went back to the handbook I got at Engage 2020 and quickly got my first prototype up and running. I still like the concept, the product, the potential, the promise. So I’ll keep going with it and keep posting about it.

One thing I found out today – and search a solution for now – is an unpractical way it works. I found out that unless you do not save the application regularly, you risk overstepping the time-out if you answer a phone or read an email and it takes longer : you get locked out. And after re-logging in, all your work is lost since the last save. Now that is bad news. I mean, sure, I am used to saving, but then, sometimes stuff happens and your fingers are not on the keyboard and your concentration somewhere else. That something like that can happen ought to be avoided on Volt side. I’d expect at least an autosave or a parameter disabling a timeout.

So for now I’ll keep trying stuff out and will report at a later time on what I discover.