The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 7, 2007

Official News - page 14

WINDING DOWN

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

I'm baaaack. I've no idea where the time went, but all too soon the time came to go back to work :(

So here I am with another issue, the first of 2007, and wishes for a prosperous new year. There isn't that much hard news in this issue, but I did make some small use of the break to catch up on the heavier chunks of reading, and the results are in the Homework section in the form of recommendations.

This year I'm only making one prediction - 2007 will have 365 days - it's a cert! Although knowing my luck the geezers in charge of times and dates will choose this year for an unscheduled increase or reduction of the number of days in the year.

So, on to the first Winding Down of the year...


Roundup: Microsoft, Vista, and Second Hand Licenses

Well who else would we start the year with, if not Microsoft?

Vista, Microsoft's shiny new version of Windows, managed to see out the old year with reports of a security vulnerability. Not a very good way to see in the new year! The exploit covers not only Vista, but also some versions of Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, and could allow a malicious user to take control of the whole machine.

One article about the problem headlined the suggestion that 'security researchers ... aren't too concerned'. I guess the researchers in question probably use Linux on their machines :)

While this was going on, an important study was published analysing the cost to computer users of Vista. In particular it details the effect on computer hardware, whether or not you actually use Vista, given Microsoft's certification requirements for protecting digital content. (See the Homework section for more about this issue.)

Probably the worst news, given its negligible record of success in previous campaigns, was an announcement from the Free Software Foundation that it was launching a campaign against Windows Vista. I suspect the high-ups at Microsoft heaved a sigh of relief at the news. With friends like these, who needs enemies...

I mentioned in an earlier edition that Microsoft and Novell had done a rather bizarre deal involving supporting one another's products (Novell owns SuSE Linux). Just before Xmas Microsoft released the names of three major customers for whom it will provide Linux support - two banks and an insurance company.

The three are Credit Suisse Group, Deutsche Bank AG, and AIG Technologies (part of the insurance group American International Group Inc). The strangest name is that of Credit Suisse, since they don't actually use SuSE Linux. Maybe they are planning to switch, or maybe they are just hedging their bets.

Finally, a snippet of news coming out of that hotbed of revolution, Munich, reported that the city was buying up used Windows 2000 licenses. I thought this was pretty weird, Microsoft doesn't even support Windows 2000 any more, but then I dug a little deeper and discovered that there is in fact a thriving market in second hand licenses.

Apparently the volume of second hand licenses being traded has doubled each month since the market started in November 2005. They are usually bought in bulk by license trading firms from companies downsizing or becoming insolvent and then sold on to end users. Cost savings can be up to 50%, depending on how old they are. I guess it makes sense, especially if you have access to cheap older hardware, and Windows 2000 was one of the best products Microsoft ever produced - a lot of companies still use it.

I doubt that Microsoft is happy about the emergence of a burgeoning second hand market, but I suspect few other people will lose sleep over it!

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=159C336:215D3E184FC552DC27841C05E35028EDEFF29049075316B4
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8M8J0S80.htm
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/16326622.htm
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39285271,00.htm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/28/ms_investigates_vista_attack/
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/01/02/munich_buys_windows_2000/
http://ct.techrepublic.com.com/clicks?t=22831795-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2006/04/12/secondhand_ms_licences/


Shorts:

A coda to the 2006 Sony rootkit story came with an announcement just before Xmas that settlements with various states in the USA had so far cost Sony a cool US$5.75 million. Apart from the money paid to a total of 42 states, the agreement provides for compensation of up to US$175 in refunds for damages caused to computers of residents of the states involved. The agreements also limit the way in which Sony can use copy protection for the next two years. The agreement isn't unalloyed joy for consumers, but it will at least make other greedy media companies tread a little more warily in the future.

http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=1598247:215D3E184FC552DC36DAD149447EA9D2EFF29049075316B4

The news on the personal privacy front isn't anything like as happy. Three announcements of the theft of data records in December took the number of thefts to over 100 million records in the USA alone. The announcements were from UCLA (800,000 records stolen), Aetna (130,000 records stolen), and Boeing (320,000 records stolen). Aetna and Boeing were caused by laptop thefts, but the killer was the UCLA announcement - a hacker had been accessing the database for over a year before the break in was discovered.

On the bright side, New York State Governor, Elliot Spitzer in one of his first executive orders has forbidden state employees to take home (among other things) laptop computers. That should help cut down personal - and other - data losses in New York state. Lets hope other states soon follow his excellent example. (Even from just glancing through the executive order I can tell you New York state residents are in for an 'interesting' four years!)

100 million records - it makes you wonder how many were stolen before the states made it illegal not to report these thefts, and how many there are in my own country, the UK, where there are no such disclosure laws...

[Info taken from Risks Digest 24.52]
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/01/nyregion/01cnd-
eliot.html?em&ex=1167800400&en=21cc03fad85d0a7d&ei=5087%0A

Note: the URL, which is about Spitzer, needs a free subscription setting up

The Ozarks tourist town of Branson doesn't believe in doing things by halves. It's suing no less than 15 Internet travel companies, including Travelocity and Expedia for unpaid back taxes on hotel room bookings.

The suite claims that the travel services either failed to collect, or failed to pay over, a four per cent hotel room tax. The services industry group, Interactive Travel Services Association, claim that all money collected, including taxes, but less a service fee, is paid over to the hotels who are responsible for remitting it to the Branson tax authorities.

You'd think that this had been sorted out by now - Internet travel booking has been around for years - but it appears not. Maybe the Branson tax authorities were using a computer and didn't notice the shortfall until now!

http://www.physorg.com/news87145820.html


Homework:

Probably the most important document to see the light of day over the Xmas period was an analysis by Peter Gutmann, looking at the hardware implications of Microsoft's content protection in Windows Vista. As the executive summary puts it:

'Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.'

The document is well worth reading - it's about ten pages long and you don't have to be a techie to understand it. Read it - it's talking about the future (or lack of it) for the computer as we know it today.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt

What if the experts are wrong? More to the point, what if the cost of them being wrong spans many generations? The latest edition of 'Ubiquity' online magazine contains an excerpt for Denise Caruso's book 'Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Plan'. Unlike most of these sort of books, if the excerpt is anything to go by, this is a cool look at the dangers posed by scientists being arrogant and working on the assumption that no one will make any mistakes.

The excerpt is wide ranging and looks at nuclear power (remember Chernobyl and Three Mile island?) as well of the importation of invasive predator species which got out of control. And it's not just scientists - a strain of green algae called Caulerpa taxifolia which was bred solely for use in aquariums has already spread over tens of thousands of acres of sea floor, choking out all competing life. It obviously didn't occur to anyone involved in the breeding project that people might empty their aquarium tanks down the toilet.

The excerpt's about ten pages, it's well worth a read, and I might well buy the book in the not too distant future.

http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v8i01_chapter.html

And finally in this section, I'd like to draw your attention to a document enticingly titled 'World Domination 201' by Eric Raymond (he of 'Cathedral and Bazaar' fame) and Rob Landley. Although Eric's fame is as an Open Source evangelist, the paper is not really so much about open source as about an important thing that is going to happen between now and 2008 - the move to 64-bit computing. The paper looks at what happened in the move from 8-bit to 16-bit computing and from 16-bit to 32-bit computing (CP-M/ROM Basic -> MS-DOS ->Windows 3.1).

Based on an analysis of this process it identifies the moment at which each switch occurred, and more importantly why, and it makes its prediction for the next switch being in 2008. I think it makes a good case for 2008.

Less convincingly, it makes a case that it is by no means certain that Microsoft will prevail, given that they are almost terminally unready for 64-computing. The authors believe that there are only three operating systems in the running to control the 64-bit desktop - Windows, Mac, and Linux. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, which are analysed. Given the known positions of the authors, they would like to see Linux win the desktop, and some of the latter part of the paper is taken up with pleas for the Open Source community to take its head out of the sand, code up the outstanding boring bits, and be pragmatic about proprietary licenses. I wish!

This is a fascinating historical look at computing at a number of crucial points in the past, and a calculated look at what might be in the future. It's a fairly long paper - about 30 pages - but very easy to read, and only minimally techie. I'd really advise anyone who cares about what computing is going to look like in the future to give it a whirl :)

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html


Scanner: Other stories

Disposable identities
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6234663.stm

Movement of content consumes CES
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e28n0FypUC0FrK0ExpO0EL

The free multimedia opportunity
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=1598266:215D3E184FC552DCD29CB6A488C704C6EFF29049075316B4

The real time reporting utopia?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/20/realtime_reporting_utopia/

RFID firewall
http://www.rfidguardian.org

Bribing Bloggers
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/28.html

Apple 'falsified' share documents
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/28/appel_share_fakes/

UK public login plan under fire
http://Mail.computing.co.uk/cgi-bin1/DM/y/e1dx0BsjfA0WXC0Dc3q0E6


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
7 January 2007

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