My Aunt worked at Bletchley Park. She was a Bombe Operator. In her case - "Bitter" is certainly the wrong word.

At the time she knew a fair bit about what she, personally, was doing. She didn't understand all the details, but she knew she was cracking messages relating to the Battle of the Atlantic - and that it was damned important. As an intelligent woman she also knew and accepted why the secrecy was important - both at the time and afterwards. She never discussed it at the time with anyone.

My Grandfather was bright enough to work out that my Aunt had done "something a bit special" in the war - and was very frustrated that he had no idea at all what it was and that she refused to discuss it. He died in 1969. IIRC "The Ultra Secret" was published about 5 years later. That was the moment when the restrictions were relaxed - and she could tell the rest of the family where she had been during the war.

My Aunt is bitter about what happened to Alan Turing. It was wrong "of itself" and it was also wrong that this country seemed to forget exactly how much was owed Dr Turing. She regards it as a tragedy and a waste. I agree.

My late Father was one of those who fought in "The Forgotten War" in Burma. One of many horrible parts to WW2. He gained "The Burma Star". Something he wore with great pride and which recorded what he had been a part of. My Aunt will be pleased to finally have something similar.

I think that it is just to recognise the achievements of those who worked at Bletchley Park in the same way - and that it probably could and should have happened sooner - perhaps during the 1970s.

Within the UK the phone system allows the caller to set the CLI arbitrarily.

Because the outgoing Telco cannot know which CLIs are valid and which are not (because it handled by someone else, and is constantly changing) they have no means of imposing any useful rules.

Yes. The Telco can tell the Police which CLIs were used for outgoing calls - but how does that help ?

Are you seriously suggesting that the Police are going to contact all of the many hundreds of Telcos in the UK and say "did any of your customers send calls using this CLI ?"

Even if they did, what happens when the CLI is something totally meaningless - and used by several different senders?

I.E. What happens when the many tens of Telcos all say "yes" to the same same CLI ?

As a Telco, we regularly get requests from the Police and other bodies regarding (incoming) numbers that we "own". (Using what is often known as the "RIP procedure). Thus far > 95% of these requests have been a dead end for the Police - because the CLI they are tracing is utterly fake.

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It is actually possible to trace individual calls by means of some of the other logs in SS7 independent of CLI. It is very slow and very laborious. AFAIK This method is only used in the most extreme of circumstances. Even then, there are still various ways it can fail.

I don't know about the USA, but can say that this would be completely impractical in the UK.

For various complex reasons, major users in the UK (like call centres) frequently buy their incoming telephony and outgoing telephony from completely different companies. It's not uncommon to have several companies providing each. The incoming numbers used may not even belong to the call centre. It is increasingly common for these to be allocated and routed dynamically in real time.

(This is exactly the service my company provides - to known, legitimate customers).

There's no way that the outgoing Telco is going to be able to unscramble or keep up with this.

If you go back to WW2, the UK had a research lab which produced many curious inventions worthy of "Q". It was part of the SOE and known as "Station IX". It was based in an old Mansion just South of Welwyn in Herts.

You can now buy a catalogue of their weird and wonderful creations - which included such things as:

Explosive Rats (designed to destroy boilers)

Motor Bikes which folded into a small case and could be dropped by parachute. ("Welbike")

Silenced Single shot guns ("Welrod")

Explosive Pens.

Land Mines disguised as faeces from a wide range of Animals. These had a double effect - not only could they knock out enemy vehicles, but they slowed progress and sapped morale by forcing the occupants of enemy vehicles to get out and probe carefully every last turd they came across.

In total, we had two out-of-hours call outs last year. In Telco land this is exactly how it is supposed to be.

We have very little hardware tech. work to be done. - even including the routine stuff. When we do, like most Telcos, we tend to use contractors.

You can now get > 300 x E1 (10,000 channels of voice) in a single rack, including switching, SS7, VoIP Gateways, Transcoding, IVR, recording, CDRs, Database and control. Install it right and it will just run and run and run and run.

Spread your stuff over 3 or 4 Colos - and nothing is ever a dire emergency - but there are still a few things worth getting out of bed for.

In 2008 the total number of times we needed to send someone to one of our CoLos at short notice was 2!

The total number of times we had to go to our CoLos (including all planned stuff) was slightly more than once a month.

Like most UK Telcos, we have very limited requirement for work on hardware. So for most of the routine stuff, you hire contractors when you need them.

The urgent stuff is shared between myself and the only other hardware-aware Techie in the company who drives and has a car!

How many people do you see hanging around Telecomms CoLos ? By day ? By night ?

Hmmmm.

I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs - Server and Desktop.

On the Desktop, the Maxtor Story has been simply appalling. Fortunately we backup data properly and keep spares in the server room - so when a HDD dies, it's nothing more than a PITA. I don't even bother checking whether there's any kind of warranty. I don't want a replacement from Maxtor even if it is free.

On the Server - well I was persuaded to buy some Seagate/Maxtor drives specifically intended for RAID. Everything cross checked for compatibility.

Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason. "Hot Spare" prevented serious consequences, but the situation was not sustainable. A firmware flash improved things - but not enough. We've still got those drives lying around in boxes somewhere and give them to employees who want a HDD.

So we went with WD and their (very) top end stuff.
Result : Not hugely different.

Current policy here is Raptors on the Desktop. They seem to be performing well.

Top-end SAS only on the Servers and Raid. Even then only with every component fully cross-checked for specific support. If we are anything less than mega-fussy, it bites us!

A.