The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 26, 2006

Official News - page 12

WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton

I hope everyone in the US had a nice Thanksgiving :)

Next in line is Christmas. As James Bond once famously commented, "I thought Christmas comes but once a year", but we won't go into that now. However often it comes, we in the UK have already been suffering from Christmas - vile, tinny, renditions (the music sort) of Jingle Bells and Silent Night in shopping malls and department stores.

Yesterday I was shopping in a department store and ran into a whole sackful of Father Christmases being briefed by a store manager. Each year I think the commercialisation of Christmas can go no further. Each year I am proved wrong...

Which leads me to the real point. I plan to take a few weeks off over the Christmas period, so you won't be able to get your regular fix of cynicism for three whole weeks. The issue on 10 December will be the last of this year, and no, it will not be a review of the year :) There will be no issues on 17, 24, and 31 December - the next issue after that will be on 7 January.

I realise you are all going to be heartbroken, but I'm sure you will all be brave and manage to struggle through!

In the meantime...


Story: Moving money SWIFTly

A major row is brewing between the EU and the US. So what's new (yawn). Not a lot actually, but this one is over the US Treasury demanding records of money moved using the SWIFT organisation (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications), which is actually based in the EU. It looks very much like the European Commission is going to declare supplying information in this way illegal.

Even leaving aside the legality issues, one has to ask why the US Treasury wants all this non-targeted information, given that:

1. Before 9/11 the relevant information was actually available to law enforcement authorities, it was just lost in the mass of general data available. This latest activity will just produce more data in which the important stuff can hide.

2. Legal and financial authorities have been lamenting for some time that most of the financial transfers in the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent don't go through the Western banking system at all. Instead, they go through a series of semi-informal networks, such as Hawala, many of which were originally set up in the middle ages to transfer money, gold, and diamonds across national borders. (If you want to read more about this, the second URL below points to an article on the subject.)

3. There have been more incidents caused by home grown terrorists than from external threats. Domestic terrorists don't transfer funds internationally, so there's no way you can detect them by monitoring international transfers!

So, from my vantage point the entire strategy looks incredibly self defeating. Unless, of course, it's nothing to do with anti-terrorism, and the Treasury is trying to figure out ways to stop its citizens moving money around the world?

But, I'm sure they wouldn't do that!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/23/ec_swift_ruling/
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HI19Df01.html


Shorts:

You've got to hand it to Borland for its ability to completely screw up both itself and its developer community. Last February it announced it was going to flog off its developer tools and IDE division. The result? Loyal and long suffering users, like me, came to the conclusion that Borland management's long standing hostility to its only successful product had final produced the obvious result - a dead product. We, the users, left in droves - well, as much as the miserable remnant of a once mighty user base can be described as a 'drove'.

Now Borland has reversed course yet again. It seems that potential buyers could recognise a dead parrot when they saw one, and steered well clear. Will I go back? Sorry guys, I've already invested time, and money, in moving my skills over to Trolltech's Qt. In many ways I find Borland C++ Builder easier to use, but I can live with that, given that Trolltech's senior management actually like, and are enthusiastic about, their product!

So goodbye from me to the company that produced the first compilers that didn't take 20 minutes to compile 'Hello world!', the first company to give its users a license that was sensible and in plain English, and the first company that was such a threat to Microsoft's hegemony in the field that they were compelled to push massive resources into producing a decent compiler and IDE (well a half decent IDE!).

I'll drink to the memory of the company you once were next time I go down to the pub.

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/11/17/borland_codegear_nosale/

A little something happened over on this side of the pond recently that made the police much more aware of laptop security.

A laptop was stolen.

"So what?," I hear you say, "Laptops are stolen every day!" This is true, but it's not every day that someone steals a laptop containing the payroll details of half of the Metropolitan Police Force! (The Metropolitan Police, for my non-UK readers, is the London police force, usually referred to as 'The Met'.)

Once the theft, from LogicaCMG, who handle The Met's payroll and pension services, was known, the lads sprang into action with rather more alacrity that usual, and within 24 hours a man was arrested on suspicion of burglary. A spokesperson hastily announced that there was 'minimal' risk of the staff involved suffering identity theft or fraud.

Now where have I heard that before?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6171468.stm

And while we are on the subject of UK police, I thought you might like to know that the UK government has recently blown no less than three billion pounds (about US$5bn) on setting them up a new national radio system. Unfortunately, although the radios work OK, the cheapskates specifying the systems forgot to add emergency generators for the base stations, which only have battery backup for national disasters.

So, five hours after the electricity goes out, the batteries are drained and voila, no police radios. Where do they get the people who specify these screw ups? In the old days you could blame the aristocracy (as one contemporary joke has it, the aristocracy are the cream of British society - rich, thick, and the clots rise to the top). Nowadays, though, we live in a democracy and the rest of us are allowed a look in, provided we are suitably obsequious. I can only assume you have to take a test to prove you are stupid enough to be allowed to specify billion pound public IT contracts...

http://Mail.computing.co.uk/cgi-bin1/DM/y/eyde0BsjfA0WXC0DYOS0Em

And one last item about UK crime... It seems that Microsoft Xbox 360 Consoles are even more popular over here than I realised - so popular, in fact, that some crooks hijacked a lorry containing half a million pounds worth of them (about US$800,000). This was the second attack on the distribution company's Xbox shipments in five days, and the company is reviewing its internal security procedures.

So if you are offered a cheap Xbox 360 that 'fell off the back of a lorry' this Xmas, I can tell you now that it fell off the lorry on the A38 road near Sutton Coldfield, in England :)

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/11/23/xbox_games_theft/

Everyone (even we backward Europeans) has heard about the electoral successes of the Democrats in the US mid-term elections. What isn't so well known is the serious effort made by the Democrats to drag their electoral organisation into the hi-tech world of the 21st Century.

InfoWorld has produced a fascinating analysis of what the Democrats did, and what they achieved (point your browser at the URL below to read it). Although the result can be ascribed to the issues on which the campaign was fought, there were a number of very close results. I can tell you, from my own experience campaigning in the UK, that when things are that close, the final result depends not on the political issues, but on the quality of the opposing party's national and grassroots electoral organisations.

And this time the Democrats came up trumps!

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&c=700298&l=
12142&ctl=14F82DF:215D3E184FC552DCDFCE54873DA1A905EFF29049075316B4

Ah! Our old friends Hewlett Packard - pre-texters to the hi-tech industry - have appointed a new, highly qualified, board member, Ken Thompson.

So, just what are his qualifications for this prestigious post?

Well, for a start Thompson is the CEO of Wachovia, specialists in personal and business financial services. And guess what? Wachovia are Global Information Group's biggest customer. I'm sure you remember Global Information Group, they were the people HP hired for their black ops work - in fact, recently Global coughed up a cool US$250,000 to settle a case brought by Florida's attorney general. Global didn't admit guilt, but they did agree to stop pre-texting.

We don't know what work Wachovia hired global to do, but we do know that a Global staff brought before Congress in June to testify about the practice of pre-texting took the Fifth Amendment.

So, who better to appoint to the board of the hi-tech industry's premier black ops company? Give that man the pre-texting portfolio!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/20/hp_wach_pretext/


Scanner: Other stories

Ofcom flicks switch on iPod FM
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/23/micropower_transmitters_legalised/

New litigation rules put IT on the front lines of data access
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?r=314&c=698805&l=
12141&ctl=14F4321:215D3E184FC552DC7D48324976E344D9EFF29049075316B4


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barbara and Fi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue. Please send suggestions for material to alan@ibgames.com.

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
26 November 2006

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist. His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.


Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page