The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 15, 2007

Official News - page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

I'm back (again). Apologies for the lack of a Winding Down last week - real life intervened and I was just too busy to do my usual scan through the newsletters for material.

I note with amusement that Sony are touting a $100 price cut for their PS3 machine, but I understand all is not quite what it seems with this little deal - check out the URL in the Scanner section for more details.

I've got a bunch of interesting material on copyright in the shorts section. In the past, a few people have queried my credentials to attack the current copyright and patent systems. Actually, I have every right to stick my oar in on this matter. Anyone who is affected, and given the amount of music and software I have legitimately bought over the years I am certainly affected by it, has a right to have their view heard. But in my case there is an extra reason. I lost several thousand pounds worth of sales for the Amiga version of my 'Frontline' game in the 80s when it was posted to a hacker BBS. A thousand pounds was worth a lot more money then than it is now, I can tell you.

So, having been on all three sides of this debate - consumer, beneficiary, and also ripped off - I reckon that I have something to say that is meaningful!

But putting that aside for now, we begin this week with another Microsoft screw up...


Shorts:

To patch, or not to patch, that is the question (apologies to Will Shakespeare). In the case of Microsoft's latest offering, the answer is definitely in the negative. It seems that one of last Tuesday's security patches for the Windows .NET platform is causing a number of computers to go 'haywire', to quote the SANS institute's Internet Storm Centre. The situation is so bad that even Microsoft is admitting that there may be some problems, and has listed some info under the 'known issues' section of its knowledge base. Fortunately, because I didn't produce an issue of Winding Down last week, I didn't urge you all to apply the then upcoming security patches. A narrow escape on my part!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/12/ms_patch_problems/

Internet radio is dead in the US - killed by greed, the US Copyright Royalty Board (USCRB) and toxic lobbying on the part of big media. Royalty payments have been set to be massively in excess of those payable by broadcast radio. Royalties are set by the USCRB, a big media patsy quango appointed by Congress, and are so high that most Internet radio stations will either have to go illegal, or close their doors. The ruling on royalties is being fought in court, but an attempt to have the new fees deferred till after the appeal is heard has been refused.

My Federation 2 game has had its own station, Fed Radio, for several years now, run by one of the players, an Internet Radio enthusiast. Sadly, as from this week, the station is no longer on the air. The only hope left is legislation currently being discussed in Congress, and whether that gets anywhere depends on how many real people (as opposed to media lobbyists) lobby their congress critters to support the Internet Radio Equality Act. So - go to it!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/12/court_denies_internet_radio_stay_petition/

While we are on the subject of copyright, An interesting paper has just been published discussing copyright from an economic perspective. Using widely accepted economic formulas, its author, Rufus Pollock, calculates that the optimum term for copyright is 14 years. This is the optimal value, it seems, for giving an incentive to create new work, but also making sure the work enters the public domain where it can become the basis for new creative work.

It's an interesting idea - especially at a time when there is a push for a massive increase in the already long copyright terms. I seriously doubt if any country would reduce existing copyright terms to 14 years, but it is a useful antidote to the inflated claims being bandied around by the big media companies.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070712-research-optimal-copyright-term-is-14-years.html

Now here's a story I'm happy to see - AOL is being forced to refund customers for unauthorized charges. They have just come to an agreement, worth about US$3 million, to refund customers who can prove unauthorized charges after they (the customer) attempted to cancel their account. Anyone who has ever tried to cancel an account with AOL will know that the customer 'service' reps (actually customer bullying reps would be a better name) are paid bounties for every call where they can dissuade the customer from canceling.

No longer will this be the case. AOL has agreed, in addition to the payback, to record cancellation calls and provide proper mailing addresses, fax numbers, and e-mail address for complaints. The next question, of course, will be how you can 'prove' that you tried to cancel your account - I guess that mandated retention of call data that various state and national governments are trying on might come in useful after all!

http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBAnd0HiOOq0G4T0FNfQ0Ec

Another nice bit of news for computer geeks is that over here in the UK, Bletchley Park, home of the 'Enigma' code breakers in the Second World War, is to become a museum of computing, and will feature a reconstruction of one of the Colossus computers used to break codes. Since Colossus was the world's very first programmable computer, I guess Bletchley Park probably also makes the record books as the first data centre!

Once the museum is fully set up, I expect it to be well worth a visit, since it will also feature restored mainframes, super computers and old personal computers restored by the British Computer Society's Computer Conservation Society. It will also display an air traffic control station from the West Drayton control centre, which controls most of the airspace over the southern half of the UK. I suspect the latter will only be on show for a short while before some idiot government bureaucrat decides it is a threat to security by giving terrorists information about how air traffic is controlled, and therefore must be removed!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/11/bletchley_park_computer_museum/

Those well known paragons of virtue and customer service, Sprint, are kicking 1,000 customers off their system for daring to ring the 'customer service' department too frequently. Judging from the stories I've heard the only way to get any customer service is to keep ringing until they finally get it right, so the only real surprise is that they are only booting out 1,000 customers!

I confess I'm a little ambivalent about the action by Sprint, since I have been in their position myself, years ago. Twenty years ago I was the administration manager of Compunet, an online service for Commodore 64s (remember them?). We had one customer who was always arguing about the last penny of each of his sessions (we charged by the minute at that time). He used to time his sessions with a stop watch, and always stop the session bang on the end of a minute. Of course, it then took enough time for the quit to reach us (this was in the days of 1200/75 - the commands were transmitted up to us at 75 baud) and be processed that it always took him into the next minute ('per minute or part thereof', as the agreement said).

Anyway, this guy was the bane of my life and accounted for over half of my work load. So... one day I received a letter from him saying that his modem had been struck by lightening, and that he wanted a new one (the service had a proprietary modem with the client software built in. We gave the modem away to subscribers). I confess that it gave me great pleasure to tell him that we had decided that we no longer wanted him as a customer! When he complained to my boss I put the guy's six inch thick file on my boss's desk - most customer files only contained a couple of sheets of paper - and after leafing through the top quarter inch my boss agreed with me. Yeeeeessss!

I don't know what the morality of the whole thing was, but it sure saved me a lot of work!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/11/sprint_boots_annoying_phone_customers/

There's an interesting report just come out from Evans Data Corporation (EDC). They've been surveying software developers in the US in all sizes of business and have come to the conclusion that less of them are developing for Windows. According to their figures Windows development stands at 65% in 2006, down from 74% in 2005. Interesting.

The survey also reveals that Javascript is the most widely used scripting language - three time more used than PHP, Python or Ruby. I assume this must be client side scripting, because otherwise I would expect Perl to figure heavily.

I wonder what next year's survey will show?

http://ct.enews.deviceforge.com/rd/cts?d=207-233-2-28-255-20476-0-0-0-1
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/07/07/02/mswindows-share_1.html

It seems that infected web pages are becoming the new top rated threat on the Internet. Spam may be on the increase again, but it's not having the malware impact it used to have as more and more people become cautious about opening attachments and e-mail clients tighten their security.

People who crack high profile web sites are no longer indulging in the childish defacement of yesteryear, they are now interested in adding unseen material that will give them access to computers that view the site. One estimate is that within the next two years compromised websites will have become the top threat. Lets just hope Microsoft gets its Internet Explorer security sorted out before then...

http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?t=39221039-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0


Homework:

Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, once said 'Privacy is dead. Get over it.' He was wrong. We all need privacy, and it is more and more under threat from technological advances. Once upon a time if you wanted to speak privately to someone, you went outside, found a place where no one was in hearing distance and held your private conversation. Now-a-days a basic parabolic microphone could easily pick the conversation and surveillance satellites can read your lips. A simple case, no doubt, but redolent of the problems created by the technology of the Internet, computing and databases.

Scientific American has just published a fascinating interview on the subject of privacy with Latanya Sweeney, head of the Data Privacy Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. It's well worth reading, no psycho-crud, just cool analysis and clear examples. Highly recommended.

And Mr McNealy? Ah, yes. I was just popping down to his pad to install a web cam in his bathroom...

http://sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=6A2EF194-E7F2-99DF-3323DA6BA4346B0B&sc=WR_20070710

I don't very often recommend material that I'm only part way through but an IEEE Spectrum article on the Greek cell phone tapping scandal is really fascinating. I covered the story at the time, but briefly, in 2005 it emerged that 'someone', and we still don't know who that 'someone' is for sure, had been tapping the cell phones of highly placed Greek politicians and officials - including the prime minister. This had been going on for at least six months and involved over a 100 highly placed victims.

A great read!

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/5280


Geek Toys

OK, you groovy dudes (or sad cases, depending on the observer's point of view) with your new snazzy iPhones, have you succeeded in persuading it to talk to AT&T's network yet? No? Well, do I have a service for you! A UK company, Uniquephones, is now on the verge of unlocking the phone so it can be used with any carrier. Their software will currently unlock about three quarters of the phones it has tested, and they expect to be able to increase that to 100% in the very near future. So get ready to dig out your pocket book and shell over 50 UK Pounds (about US$100) for the software and away you go.

After all, darlings, AT&T is so uncool...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/06/iphone_unlocking/


Scanner: Other stories

Getting lobbyists to come clean
http://ct.news.com.com/clicks?t=39221041-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-bf&s=5&fs=0

Google to buy e-mail security company for $625 million
http://ct.zdnet.com/clicks?t=39168167-c7c7501e315f199c0a0afb08de29c458-bf&s=5&fs=0

IT groups push for patent reform
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBApy0HiOOq0G4V0FNnf0EW

IEEE meeting advances broadband over powerline specs
http://newsletter.eetimes.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBApq0FypUC0FrX0FNm50Ae

Chameleon for opto-electronics
http://www.physorg.com/news103540306.html

New FCC rules may impact Linux based devices
http://ct.enews.deviceforge.com/rd/cts?d=207-233-2-28-255-20473-0-0-0-1

Playstation 3: Is Sony's $100 price cut a scam?
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/07/14/ps3_price/


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
15 July 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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