Official News page 12

WINDING DOWN

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

There was much ado about Google's incipient gPhone, which I've rounded up in the Scanner section. One thing I did notice, though, in all this iPhone, uPhone, gPhone wePhone hype is that nowhere did it say anything about being able to make calls on these beasts...

But on to more interesting things.

Shorts:

Gotta hand it to Microsoft, they really do have a lot of nerve. Last week they decided to patent automatic goodbye messages! Yes really. If you put a 'G'night everyone' on a macro key of your fav IM or game application and use it to sign off, then, if the patent is granted, you will owe the Redmond dinosaur a cut of your hard earned cash. Now remind me, wasn't Microsoft one of the hi-tech companies recently whining to Congress about frivolous patents?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/07/microsoft_tries_to_patent_automatic_ goodbye_messages/

File sharing was in the news this week. A Canadian study found that file sharers buy more CDs. Yes, and they produced real figures to back up their study. It seems that the results of the study, analysing survey data on the Canadian population, shows that for every 12 Peer 2 Peer downloaded songs, music purchases increase by 0.44 of a CD.

This is particularly interesting because 12 songs is just about the number of tracks you get on a commercial music CD. In other words, what the study shows is that, roughly speaking, for every two CDs worth of music downloads, the downloader buys an extra CD.

You can read the whole study or the one page abstract, here:

http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/en/h_ip01456e.html

Meanwhile, Swedish P2P file sharing specialists, Pirate Bay, stopped thumbing their noses at the music biz for long enough to announce that they are working on a new P2P file sharing standard. It seems that they are worried that future versions of BitTorrent will start to make concessions to the music and movie biz and start to include DRM-ish stuff. Thus their move to design a new standard. I wonder if they will submit it to the International Standards Organisation (ISO) for ratification?

Arrrr, me hearties, even Pirates have standards!

http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBEsc0HiOOq0G4W0Fc7t0Ew

But BitTorrent users aren't waiting for the new standard with bated breath - they are using BitTorrent's built in RC4 encryption facility to hide the contents of their file transfers.

Figures obtained by 'The Register' indicate that in the last year BitTorrent encrypted traffic has risen from 4% to 40%.

This has two effects.

First it makes the music and movie biz's attempts to force ISPs to look into packets passing through their kit for music files a dead duck. If the packets are encrypted, then they can't be read without first cracking the encryption. RC4 may not be a very strong encryption, but it's more than enough to require serious work to decrypt.

My heart bleeds for the music biz.

Which leads us on to the second point. A lot more ordinary users of the net are going to be using encryption on a regular basis to protect their communications. This is a nightmare for the spooks. It's not that they can't crack it, it's that the sheer volume involved means that it's difficult to tell what is significant. To use cracked information the spooks must be able to crack it in a timely manner. While there is only a relatively small amount of encrypted traffic, that's not too much of a problem. If encryption is routinely used Mr Spook may well find that he's just spent a whole day of very expensive supercomputer time cracking the encryption on a copy of Millie's 'My Boy Lollipop' :)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/08/bittorrent_encryption_explosion/

Here's an object lesson in when to use people and not computers to check what's going on.

Those of you who have visited London in the last few years will have spotted that if you drive a car into central London at certain times, cameras photograph your number plate and you get charged for using the road. This is known as the Congestion Charge. The billing and the rest of the system are all handled by computer, and it works surprisingly well, especially considering it was built by Crapita.

Some vehicles - buses and cabs for instance - get in for free, as do mini-cabs (I think they are called Checker Cars in the US). Since the mini-cabs are basically ordinary cars plying as mini-cabs, they have to be registered with Transport for London (TfL) in order not to be charged. I think you can see what's coming - there are no manual checks so up-market residents have taken to registering their posh cars as mini-cabs. Currently the list of 'mini-cabs' includes the following:

17 Bentley Continentals
3 Maybach 62s
2 Mercedes-Benz SLs (those are two seater cars!)
1 Aston Martin DB7
2 Masserati Quattroportes
8 Rolls Royce Phantoms

Any human would have spotted the scam immediately, of course, but the computers just obediently registered the license plates. A TfL spokeswoman declared, "We are taking this very seriously." I bet they are!

Coda: Another unexpected outcome of the Congestion Charge is a massive increase in license plate theft, previously virtually non-existent. Nick someone's plates, put them onto your car and drive into the centre of London. The victim gets the bill and you are laughing all the way to the bank!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/05/congestion_charge_ruse/

More stuff on Apple's new Mac OS X 'Leopard' operating system. There is apparently a bug in the version of Finder which means that in certain circumstances if you try move (not copy) files you can end up with the file not put on the target disk, but deleted from the source disk - in other words you've lost it entirely. Not good.

The other problem that's emerged is that Leopard's firewall can cause problems for Skype and for the clients of online games like World of Warcraft. This is caused by over zealous security checks that won't allow an executable that's been altered to get through the firewall. Unfortunately, the executables for Skype and on-line games, to mention but two applications, often change as they run.

This isn't new - over 20 years ago I worked for an on-line company, Compunet, that used to change its Commodore 64 terminal software on the fly to switch from page orientated to line oriented material.

I wonder if the people at Apple ever use their own computers? I'm sure they would have spotted these sort of problems if they had.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/06/leopard_dataloss_bug_uncovered/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/06/leopard_firewall_skype_problems/

These was a massive outbreak of reality and common sense this week when a German appeal court overturned a lower court ruling banning Austrian on-line gambling operator Bwin from providing gambling services to German customers. The ruling was based on the practical impossibility of enforcing a ban on Internet gambling. Gasp! Shock! Horror!

I worked for a year in a company who developed a 3D poker client. I can tell you, if people want to gamble, they will find a way to do it, whatever the law says. I can also tell you that although it takes a while, lawmakers do eventually come to understand that what they make illegal, they can't then tax!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/06/bwin_germany_gambling_ruling/

And finally, in this section, a chilling tale of carnage to come. Our old friends in the Pentagon are currently perusing a report from an advisory board pointing out that the Pentagon's plans for developing robot gadgets armed with lethal weaponry at low cost rely on using a large amount of Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) operating systems with all the security problems that causes. I can just imagine it now, "Mr President, sir, a hacker has gained control of one of our nuclear armed robot stealth submarines. We have no idea where it is or what it's doing!" The phrase 'blue screen of death' suddenly acquires a whole set of new, deadly, connotations...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/06/open_source_malware_future_combat_
systems_robot_hack_war/

Homework:

Dark Reading has just produced an interesting piece on the world's three largest botnets - Storm, Rbot, and Bobax. Botnets are collections of compromised computers linked by the Internet and used by their controllers for anything from denial of service attacks to spam. Recently there has been a major escalation in the sophistication of these beasts and the article looks at how they work. A useful and non-technical explanation.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=138610&WT.svl=news1_1

Geek Toys:

Xmas is coming, and the goose is getting fat. Spy-cams, however, are getting smaller, and CScout have produced one small enough to fit into the corner of a packet of cigarettes. (All the best spies smoke, you don't need to worry about cancer when your remaining life expectancy is less than 20 years...) It even leaves space over for some cigarettes. You can use the thing for about two hours before the battery goes flat, and it charges up when you plug it into the computer's USB port. Neat, but make sure you don't accidentally try to smoke it!

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/11/07/worlds_smallest_spycam/

Scanner: Other stories

Microsoft fires its CIO after investigation
http://update.techweb.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/eBEsc0HiOOq0G4W0Fc7q0Et

BT and Virgin Media to report broadband slowdown
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/06/bt_vm_results_analysis/

Bug Labs lets consumers build their own gadgets
http://www.physorg.com/news113492055.html

Lost CD may put pension holders in peril
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/05/standard_life_lost_cd_security_flap/

Google Smart Phone roundup:

Pundits weigh in on Android and the gPhone
http://ct.enews.deviceforge.com/rd/cts?d=207-270-2-28-255-23533-0-0-0-1

The man behind the Google Phone
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/technology/04google.html?_r=2&ei=5088&en= f05a553214
35d1e9&ex=1351828800&oref=slogin&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Google gives the world (another) Linux phone OS
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/05/google_android_announcement/

Panic in smartphoneland
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/05/google_phone_analysis/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi 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
11 November 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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