JON HONEYBALL
Jon reflects on the most interesting products from this year’s CES, including a security-focused router from Symantec that might just live up to its promise
Jon reflects on the most interesting products from this year’s CES, including a security-focused router from Symantec that might just live up to its promise.
While trying to recover from the inevitable post-CES flu, and catching up on the work backlog, I’ve been going over several items that raised their heads at CES.
One that really piqued my interest is the new security router/Wi-Fi unit from Norton, a Symantec-owned brand. Now it’s probably best to put my cards on the table, and this may shock you, but I’m a naturally cynical person. And most of the AV companies make my cynicism-o-meter hit the end stop and bend around a few times.
If you want to see examples of just how cynical these firms can be, browse their websites and try to work out which features are included in the various OS versions of their products. If you can do so, you’re a better person than me. Especially when it comes to nitty-gritty issues such as, “does this feature work on Android 6 or 7?” Or explaining why almost nothing works on iOS – because, as we know, iOS is locked down hard and needs none of that stuff.
Anyway, I digress. Symantec creating some hardware is an interesting move, for a number of reasons. First, the home Wi-Fi router market is populated by products that would put a psychopathic chicken molester to shame. Let’s just drop double NAT into your network; that sounds like a whole bundle of fun. Want some configuration screens? Come over and play with this web interface, which is written in unreadable-speak using terms that require sandals, a ponytail and poor personal hygiene.
As a parent you want to set up parental controls, time-filtering and content-monitoring. Excuse me, because I need a good five minutes to recover from this laughing fit. Do you have any faith that the settings you’ve engaged actually work? I accept that you’ve done your best, but do you have any confidence?
Want to ensure that the firmware is up to date, to try to ensure that some remote script kiddy in Moscow isn’t hacking into your router and injecting poison into your DNS? Ah, that requires you go to the manufacturer’s website, find the product buried deep in what laughably passes for a support section, only to realise that there are seven different hardware versions of your beloved box.
Having groped around the back of the box to see if it’s the B or C revision hardware, you must then choose which firmware version to download. Now I don’t know about you, but
3.45.16-AB_QWAK- 14- AJ.ZIP sounds less like a firmware version and more like someone having a sneezing fit when hitting Save As. Even better is when it isn’t a ZIP but some other compression format that you’ve never heard of, and requires the download of an uncompress tool from a website that also appears to offer Spanking Grandmothers.
Hey, we now have the BIN file! Time to install it, so you fire up the incomprehensible website within the router, struggle to the relevant bit, hit the “Choose file” button, then the BIN file; then sit back and wait. Once it’s rebooted or, even better, has crashed on the shutdown routine so needs a hard reset, your router is back up and running. Except that it isn’t, because it has managed to lose all the configuration information. So it has no idea where its ISP is, or what login information is required, or even what IP addressing it’s supposed to use.
The Wi-Fi configuration has gone, too, so your laptop now needs an Ethernet cable to connect to it – and this is one of those modern laptops that doesn’t have an Ethernet port. So you go looking for the USB-to-
Ethernet adapter, and a cable too. Now it’s in the loft somewhere…
Does any of this sound familiar? Is it any surprise that grown-ups are turning to solutions such as Cisco Meraki for their home networking, on the grounds that everything described above is the very definition of untrustworthy?
Not surprising, then, that Symantec thinks it can do better. I had a meeting with the lead developers behind the firm’s box – and I’m impressed. I threw every “I hope you aren’t doing this?” question at them, and they responded with sensible answers. They have an app under development that looks like it wasn’t written by Martians, and that will hopefully be usable by the man in the street.
They’re not using the 192.168 address range, instead trundling down to the mostly forgotten 172.16.x.x to 172.31.x.x range. Why? Because it’s then totally obvious whether an IP address has come from the DHCP in the Norton box.
It’s likely that the upstream feed to it will have been NAT’ed already by the ADSL/fibre/cable box, and it’s almost certain that this is presenting on the usual 192.168.x.x range. So it makes it obvious if you’re in 192.168 land (and, hence, upstream of the Norton firewall/Wi-Fi/router) or in 172 land, in which case you’re downstream of it. Most other vendors simply like to play footsie in the 192.168 space, so is it any wonder that confusion reigns?
Impressed, I dug deeper. The aerial design is interesting and I had a long chat with the lead hardware designer. It’s capable of full mesh mode, so it can handle full-speed re-routing between a number of Norton boxes, but this may not be available in the first release of the firmware. The iOS software – as it stands today – is a little flaky, but is functionally nearly complete. Plus it shows a clear understanding of what’s required to get such a product up and running, and properly configured in the home environment by normal human beings who aren’t Cisco professionals. Or ones with sandals, a ponytail and poor personal hygiene.
So yes, I’m intrigued by this box. I like the clear thinking that’s going into it. Symantec has genuinely started with a clean sheet of paper and is working towards a product solution that fits the home needs for 2017. The reason it isn’t shipping until the summer is because it isn’t quite ready, but it was ballsy of the company to sit its team down with me and go into full “politeness as an offensive weapon” mode with its key players. They survived the two hours with good grace and solid, interesting answers. Without doubt, this is a product move worth keeping an eye on. I sincerely hope Symantec doesn’t mess it up between now and the summer.
VR headsets and data rates
There was lots of VR on show at CES 2017. Lots and lots of VR. If you weren’t strapping something on to your body, it wasn’t a real tech (that’s quite enough of that – Ed).
But here’s the problem. Want to make VR work properly? It requires high-resolution images; let’s say 4K as a good starting point. It needs two, one for each eye. Now let’s just ignore the issues of strapping such a thing onto your head and hoping it doesn’t bring on a major bout of head droop as your neck muscles give up the battle to keep your head level.
Instead, think about the sort of processing required to generate an immersive 3D space that’s then rendered onto two 4K screens. This isn’t the stuff of cellphones plonked into cardboard cut-out headbands. I’ve tried that on my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, and it’s horribly low resolution. This is the stuff of a seriously high-end gaming rig, the sort of object that makes a teenage lad come out in even more spots.
No, VR isn’t going to be serious for a long time. However, enhanced reality – where you drop artificially created things into your field of view – is an entirely different bag of frogs. Often one eye only, with potentially a lower-resolution display space, simply because the projection space isn’t the full field of view. I know Google tried this, but it screwed its own project right from the start by insisting that the utterly irrelevant camera was built in, thus rightfully opening up a huge and wholly distracting argument about privacy. I’m much more interested in this enhanced-reality solution than VR. I know it doesn’t have the “whizz bang” wow factor of VR, but it’s genuinely useful to a far wider range of users. And you can walk around
“It can be configured by normal human beings who aren’t Cisco professionals; or who have sandals and a ponytail”
with it too. Whether it needs to be a full quasi VR headset in the way of the Microsoft effort is something that only time will tell. I suspect not, but let’s wait and see.
Stuttering Grand Tour
I have a love/hate relationship with Top Gear. I loved the huge cinematic films that the show created, and I loved the pub-style banter among friends. It told me nothing about the cars, but that wasn’t the point. As it went stale, and then fell off a cliff with the truly execrable 2016 reboot version, I was worried that the good bits were gone forever.
With the Grand Tour, Clarkson and crew are making a valiant effort to bring back the original magic. I’ll not mince my words: much of the new series has been enough to make me wince. But the large cinematic pieces have been glorious. Why? Because they’ve taken the bold and brave decision to film everything in 4K. That means four times the data rate/storage of HD. And when you watch it via an Amazon Fire TV HD box on a big 4K HDR TV, the results are stunning.
That’s until the picture stuttering kicks in. I have super-fast internet at home (two FTTC lines giving me 80Mbits/sec downloads) and even faster in our IEC-specification listening/viewing room at the lab. But even on that, the picture can take on a jerkiness that’s deeply annoying, of the type that I haven’t seen using Netflix in 4K. I think I need to dig out the network analyser tools to see what’s going on. I suspect it’s an upstream bottleneck issue that needs nailing.
On the subject of internet speeds, I’ve just upgraded the primary interconnect speed at the lab to 1Gbit/sec in/out on fibre. Cue the jokes about being able to download truly eye-watering amounts of porn in an unfeasibly short time period. The connection is between us, building number two in our office complex, and number five – which is our ISP ( merula.net).
So I now have 1Gbit/sec between us and its data centre, which means I can move our boundary firewall into its data centre, and thus put storage and archive boxes in there that can be addressed at full LAN speed. This provides a level of additional security and resilience, because it’s unlikely that a building fire at number two would spread across to number five.
Of course, this is all in addition to the other archiving and off-siting that goes on. But the useful upside is that we now have access to Merula’s core network at full gigabit speed.
What’s that – you’d be interested to know what sort of speeds we can get on a Speedtest.net check? Well, it runs to about 175Mbits/sec in/out. Merula doesn’t have a spare gigabit of capacity for me to the London data centres, but I’m sure it would be happy to quote for the upgrade. More importantly, though, our expensive Cisco Meraki firewall tops out at about 250Mbits/sec when doing full packet inspection. Given that the whole point of a firewall is to firewall, doing full inspection with all the knobs turned to 11 seemed to be a good idea. At that point, it can cope with about 250Mbits/sec of throughput, which isn’t unreasonable. I could get a faster one, but it would cost far more.
Aha, you say, my WankyWoo Firewall Plus costing 120 notes can do faster than that. Maybe it can if the firewall isn’t actually doing any work. But check the specs to see how well it can handle full firewalling on multiple devices. A few years back, when we had a mere 100Mbit line, I bought a well-regarded firewall that claimed it could cope with this throughput easily. No, not when you demand it does some real work. It might be worth looking at your firewall and working out just how well it can do real work in a meaningful way. Having increased our line speed, it’s easy now to update 20 Windows laptops to current builds at full speeds. Yes, I could use a local update server for this, but it wouldn’t work in this case for reasons that are too boring to
explain.
Final thoughts
First, I’m incredibly excited by the acquisition of Soundfield Solutions by Rode. Soundfield is a UK company that makes the Soundfield microphone. This is an incredibly clever device that records left/right, front/back, up/down and all-around, and it comes out with something called B-format, which you record on four channels of a digital recorder such as the Sound Devices 788T. I’ve used Soundfield kit for more than 30 years since the earliest prototypes; and we have an ST350 portable rig in the lab. Setting up eight speakers in a cube to do full
height of playback of Spitfire planes going overhead is truly astonishing to hear.
Rode is a top-flight microphone manufacturer based in Australia. Its products are high-quality at affordable prices. That’s why you’ll see its VideoMics on just about any sort of camera rig at shows such as CES. It’s the go-to manufacturer in this space.
So why the acquisition? Well Soundfield has been going nowhere fast for far too long. It kept going by selling small numbers of mics to loonies such as me at prices that even I find embarrassing, and by getting into the surround marketplace for large stadium TV work – where it’s done well.
Just the sheer mention of B-format, and what it can do, should make you think of VR, and all the platforms that support that (including YouTube). So I’m thrilled to see that Rode has already announced its VideoMic Soundfield, which is under development now. This allows you to pop one of these devices onto your serious camera of choice, and to be able to record B-format audio for post production. I can’t wait to try it.
Speaking of B-format, the lovely software plugin called Harpex ( harpex.net) has just been upgraded to version 1.4. And I see from the release notes that it now has default configurations to support Dolby Atmos.
We have a full calibrated Atmos setup in the listening/viewing room at the lab, using a large system from Pioneer with 5.1.4 or 7.1.6 output. Height information from Atmosencoded Blu-ray or 4KBD (Ultra HD Blu-ray) is stunning. Being able to take my B-format recordings and output them onto the Atmos setup will be a fun project to try over the coming months. And it also allows videographers using the VideoMic Soundfield to do the same.
Second final thought. I don’t like politicians, and I don’t trust any of them. But given the actions in the first week of President Trump, one wonders how happy you might be with your data held by a US corporation now. Just a little thought to make you pucker up.