A five minute, one-liner challenge featuring: Milton Jones, Tim Vine and 25 other comedians. Brilliant!

The primary source of income for every comedian in the UK has been stripped away due to the impact of the Coronavirus - shutting down venues and cancelling live events. If you value live comedy as much as we do at NextUp and respect the performers who dedicate their lives to bringing us laughter - let’s band together and #hecklethevirus. If you enjoyed the video, and can afford to please donate here: HeckleTheVirus

Thanks to every who took part, in order of appearance: Mark Simmons, Milton Jones, Tony Cowards, Adam Bloom, Joe Bor, Adam Bloom, Masai Graham, Adele Cliffe, Dan Evans, Josh Pugh, Olaf Falafel, Luvdev Barpaga, Bec Hill, Paul F Taylor, El Baldinhio, Noel James, Jack Gleadow, Peter Brush, Robert White, Darren Walsh, Julian Deane, Jenny Collier, Chris Turner, Alf, Gareth Richards, Stephen Grant, Tim Vine & Danny Ward.

www.youtube.com

New material that cannot be cut would make the ultimate bike lock

A new artificial material effectively cannot be cut, holding out the promise of lightweight but cut-proof bike locks, security doors and protective clothing.

Its inventors embedded ceramic spheres in aluminium foam to create a material that couldn’t be cut with angle grinders, power drills or water jet cutters. They dubbed it Proteus after the shape-shifting Greek god, for the way the material metamorphosised in different ways to defend against attacks.

“It’s pretty amazing,” says Miranda Anderson at the University of Stirling, who worked on the project. Rather than just being a hard surface that resists external pressure, the material turns the force of the drill or cutting mechanism back on itself, as the ceramic spheres create vibrations that disrupt the external force. “It actually destroys the cutting blade through the sideways jerky vibrations that it creates, or it widens the water jet’s spray,” says Anderson.

www.newscientist.com

Reading for today: Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice!

The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express that same delight in God which made David dance. I am not saying that this is so pure or profound a thing as the love of God reached by the greatest Christian saints and mystics. But I am not comparing it with that, I am comparing it with the merely dutiful ‘church-going’ and laborious ‘saying our prayers’ to which most of us are, thank God not always, but often, reduced. Against that it stands out as something astonishingly robust, virile, and spontaneous; something we may regard with an innocent envy and may hope to be infected by as we read.

By: C.S. Lewis

From: Reflections on the Psalms

Bitcoin = Greed. Loads of "marks" fall for obvious Twitter scam netting bad guys over $100k in minutes!

Twitter accounts, owned by politicians, celebrities, and large organisations suddenly started tweeting messages to their many millions of followers, at the behest of hackers. Here is a typical one which appeared on the account of rapper, songwriter, and optimistic Presidential candidate Kanye West and was distributed to his almost 30 million followers:

Similar messages appeared on the accounts of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Kim Kardashian, Mike Bloomberg, Uber, Apple, Coinbase, Binance, and many other verified accounts.

This, obviously, is a scam. We’ve seen cryptocurrency scams use a similar lure in the past, albeit never on this scale before. Potential victims are told that all they have to do is send X number of Bitcoin to a wallet in order to receive more Bitcoin in return. Sadly, some people fall for such confidence tricks.

At the moment the suspicion is that a hacker managed to gain access to Twitter’s administration panel - a section of Twitter’s infrastructure that is supposed to be restricted to a small number of Twitter staff, helping them to troubleshoot problems with users’ accounts. Twitter is investigating whether one of its employees was responsible for the hack or might have granted hackers access to the internal administration tool. From the administration panel, a malicious user could reset the email address associated with a Twitter account (thus granting someone else access to it), and disable two-factor authentication.

www.tripwire.com

Openreach Formally Launch “Naked Broadband” via SOGEA

Openreach (BT) has stated that the full commercial launch of their new “stand-alone broadband” product for UK ISPs - Single Order Generic Ethernet Access (SOGEA) - has officially started, which they said “marks the beginning of the end” for the old analogue telephone network (known to most as the “landline” phone service).

ISP Review been reporting on SOGEA for the past few years and so our regular readers should now be familiar with it, but for those who aren’t we’ll do a little recap. At present most consumers on Openreach’s national copper based network must buy their phone service alongside analogue line rental and then broadband is optionally added on top (most ISPs today will seamlessly bundle these two together by default).

By comparison SOGEA changes this approach by enabling internet providers to sell a physical line just for broadband (i.e. not everybody needs a fixed voice line today), with the voice service thus moving to a VoIP based solution as an optional product from your ISP.

The adoption of SOGEA is thus an important stepping stone toward the plan to switch-off the old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and adopt an “All IP” (Internet Protocol) network by 2025. Likewise this will help with the transition for FTTP “full fibre” networks, which have no choice but to use an IP based voice solution as optical fibre cannot carry analogue electrical signals (they carry laser light).

www.ispreview.co.uk

Is your business ready for the 2025 ISDN switch off?

Five years may seem like a long time, and while there’s no need to panic, it’s something businesses need to start thinking about sooner rather than later. Watch the webinar where Zen Internet's product experts talk about the switch off and what your business can do to prepare. 

How to prepare for the ISDN switch off: Careful consideration of your business communications strategy, your employees, customers, home workers and more will present a number of possibilities. And whether you ultimately choose to transition your ISDN lines over to SIP trunks or adopt a more holistic cloud communications solution, this webinar will set you on the journey to determining the right strategy for your business.

Join Zen senior product managers Lee Houston and Andy Sayle as they discuss:

* The key milestones you need to be aware of between now and 2025

* Why you need to start thinking about your strategy today

* The evolution of business communication

* The various options and opportunities available

* Why this change is happening

Covering the above and more, Lee and Andy will provide the insight you need to start planning for the future of your business communications.

Register to view this informative webinar here.

www.zen.co.uk

Missing church during these days of COVID isolation? Worship with All Saints Denmead - Online!

This Summer at All Saints Denmead there will be a whole range of services so you can worship either @Home or @Church. 

Please see this poster and then if you have any questions please do get in touch.

www.allsaintsdenmead.org.uk