The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 17, 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 just realised that this is the 250th edition of Winding Down. This fact is probably of some significance, but I'm not sure exactly what. It is, after all, first thing on Sunday morning, and the sun is shining, suggesting that I should be out walking along the river, rather than slaving over a hot computer.

There were a few teensy snippets of news, which are reproduced below for your edification, but the real news this week was about my cheese on toast patent. I received a letter from an organisation calling itself 'The Free Cheese on Toast Foundation (incorporating the Society of Worshipful Welsh Rarebit Operatives)'. The first eight pages of the FCTFISWWRO letter were taken up with explaining that the 'Free' in the name was free as in 'free speech' rather than free as in 'free cheese'.

After this came the thinly veiled threats that if I persisted with my patent application for making cheese on toast then 'steps would be taken'. The exact steps were not specified, but I have little doubt they involve some extremely smelly, unpasteurised cheese...

Gad Sir! Don't they know that an Englishman's newsletter is his (digital) castle. We will never be intimidated by a bunch of lily-livered poltroons who threaten the foundations of society. Have they not heard of the Magna Carta, The Black Prince, The Old Contemptibles, Queen Boudicca (Off with their feet!), The... [That's enough, Ed]

Hummph!

Well anyway, here's a nice recipe for Welsh Rarebit: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_26813,00.html


Shorts:

Something of a world wide milestone was passed recently. The total numbers of broadband users in the world passed the 300 million mark. A report from market research group Point Topic revealed that in March there were 298 million subscribers, so it's a pretty safe bet that there are now over 300 million. That sounds pretty impressive until you look a little more closely at the figures.

According the CIA World Factbook (I decided to pass on the Wikipedia on this one!) the current world population is about 6.6 billion. For the pedants among you, the CIA think it will be 6,602,224,175 by the end of this month. When you put that number against the 300,000,000 broadband subscribers, it doesn't look quite so impressive. In fact it represents a broadband penetration of only four and a half percent! (All calculations courtesy of the solar driven, bright yellow, made in China, Microsoft Visual C++ .net, freebie pocket calculator I picked up at an ACCU Conference a few years back.)

There are a number of other things that don't come through in the survey, although to be fair they are not what the survey is about. For instance, while most of the Internet growth in the past years has been in Western and Asian Rim countries, there is a stubborn and persistent third of this population who are not connected, or who have previously been connected and dropped out. Investigation over the years indicates that, in general, it's not that these people can't afford to be on the net, it's that the net provides them with no compelling reason to partake.

Unsurprisingly, the likes of the US, China, Korea, Japan and Western Europe figure very high on the list of broadband connected countries, and most of the sub-Saharan African countries don't appear. I suspect the latter have more pressing issues to deal with than obtaining porn faster - civil war, shelter, clean water, food, minimal heath care, AIDS, and the depredations of the green mafia telling them they can't improve their economy because it will increase the 'carbon footprint', to mention but a few.

One day, the whole world will be connected. One day. In the meantime the bulk of the world's population continues with the daily grind of obtaining food and shelter for themselves and their families.

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e8rv0FypUC0FrX0FKEF0A5
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/xx.html

Focusing in to a slightly lower level, over here in Europe we had a classic case of politicians at work this last week or so. But first a little background. You may have heard of Galileo - the satellite navigation network project, not the inventor of the telescope. It's supposed to be Europe's answer to the GPS system, which is controlled by the US military. OK, so far so good (or not, depending on where you live).

When the project was first mooted, the politicians had the brainwave that it would be funded by private capital. Neat huh? Europe gets a flashy new status symbol without having to cough up the cash for it.

Unfortunately...

The local bean counters were unwilling to stump up the cash until someone told them how they were going to make a profit. This a good question.

There are only really two systems up there which bear any resemblance to what Galileo is trying to do. The first is, of course, GPS. Now in this context the most important thing about GPS is that it is a military project. Two of the most significant things about military projects are that they cost mega amounts of money, and that they definitely aren't profitable. Not what you would call a good omen.

The second project is Iridium (it should really be called Dysprosium, but that's another story). Iridium was a private satellite communications project headed by Motorola. Eventually, Motorola threw in the towel and sold the satellites at a loss which compares favourably with the GDP of most medium sized countries.

So, this is the market into which the politicians of the EU want their leading companies to plow all the profits for the foreseeable future. I'm sure you won't be surprised when I tell you that the cash was not forthcoming, and the project has been stalled for some time now, despite the setting of innumerable 'final' deadlines by the politicians.

So, this month the transport ministers of the EU countries got together to decide what to do. And...

Wow! They decided to make Galileo into a public project. However, these are politicians we are talking about, so having exhausted themselves with this difficult decision, they voted to put off the thorny question of where the taxpayer money needed was to come from until an unspecified later date! No doubt at this stage they then retired to one of the banquets that are so popular with EU politicians and bureaucrats.

There are days when the antics of politicians just make you want to bang your head on the wall!

http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/e8rv0FypUC0FrX0FKD50Am
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/satcomhistory.html

I see that another 640,000 people had their personal information stolen last weekend. This time it was the turn of all Ohio state employees. The information was stolen because of the bizarre backup system they use in Ohio. It seems that their idea of an off-site backup is to give the disks/tapes/whatever containing the backup to an employee (or in this case an intern) to take home with them.

Yes, I did a double take too, when I read that. In this case the intern managed to forget to take the backup out of his car, and it was stolen. I truly hope it isn't the intern that gets it in the neck over this one. He or she was just as much a victim of the incompetence of the state of Ohio senior IT management as the people whose details were stolen. The head of IT is the one who should be sacked. Taking the backup home may be alright for small Mom & Pop type businesses, but it's completely unacceptable for large enterprises and State administrations.

Ohio Governor Ted Strickland stated, "I don't mean to alarm people unnecessarily." Believe me, governor, you aren't alarming them unnecessarily, they really are perfectly justified in being alarmed.

http://www.physorg.com/news101131156.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061500779.html

Moving further west we come to fortress Microsoft, who over the last year have been sallying forth to bully developer Jamie Cansdale, who also holds one of Microsoft's 'Most Valuable Professional' awards. So what was Jamie's heinous crime? Writing a plug-in program which developers could use with Microsoft's free Visual Studio Express development environment to run test programs. In fairness to Microsoft I should point out that there is a considerable body of evidence that Microsoft don't know what a 'test' is...

Anyway, this, it appears, is verboten - in spite of the fact that Microsoft gave Jamie his MVP award for this piece of software! Late in 2005 Jamie received a threatening letter from Microsoft enforcer Jason Weber (you can find him on a Google search, if you are sufficiently motivated), who demanded that the offending product be withdrawn because it violated the Express licence agreement. Jamie refused and asked which provisions of the licence had been violated, and pointed out that his program only used APIs publicly published on Microsoft's MSDN website.

Since then Jamie has been subject to an increasing acrimonious succession of e-mails which all avoid setting out the provisions of the licence he is supposed to have violated. You can find Jamie's site - and the correspondence at http://weblogs.asp.net/nunitaddin/default.aspx - it makes pretty stunning reading.

I wonder if the higher-ups in Microsoft are aware of the damage their underling is causing them in the wider community? Perhaps someone should tell them all about it...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/05/microsoft_mvp_threats/

It may be that Microsoft would be better off spending Mr Weber's obviously valuable time by reallocating him to work on fixing the security holes recently revealed in Vista's System Recovery Program. It seems that System Recovery can be run from the Command Prompt program. Fine, except that the command prompt fails to ask for a user name or password before handing over control of the PC to whoever is running the program!

Interestingly enough, the discoverer of the problem, security researcher Kimmo Rousku , told Microsoft about the problem when he discovered it at a training workshop last February. Microsoft haven't got round to fixing it yet. Presumably, all their resources are tied up in hunting down and zapping their Most Valuable Professionals!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/12/vista_recovery_hack/

I'm happy to report on an excellent initiative by the FBI - Operation Bot Roast. (Someone has a nice sense of humour!) Bot Roast is an ongoing program to identify and fix 'zombie' computers. Zombie computers, also called 'bots', are computers which have been stealthily compromised and are used in their thousands to make distributed denial of service attacks and send out spam. It was this sort of use of computers that brought down the web sites of Estonian government agencies a few weeks ago.

So far the FBI have managed to identify no less than one million compromised computers and are in the process of contacting the owners so that the machines can be cleaned of the bot programs. This is good work, and the FBI statement gives details of three bot operators already charged with criminal activity.

Yes, I know, it seems like a drop in the ocean compared to the billions of spam e-mails going out each day, but you have to start somewhere, and this is a good start - the FBI have every right to blow their own trumpet over their activities on this front. Nice Work!

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel07/botnet061307.htm
http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=17C9456:215D3E184FC552DC0105C5E968200E14EFF29049075316B4


Scanner: Other stories

Apple criticized for embedding names, e-mails in songs
http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=38778584-c7c7501e315f199c0a0afb08de29c458-bf&s=5&fs=0

Amazon won't profit from 'Harry Potter'
http://www.physorg.com/news101104019.html

Google cancels anti-eBay bash
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/14/google_cancels_antiebay_party/

eBay in patent fight of 'Buy It Now'
http://www.physorg.com/news100921352.html

Google files anti-trust complaints against Microsoft
http://www.physorg.com/news100791987.html


Acknowledgements

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

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
17 June 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


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