The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 16, 2008

Official News page 11


WINDING DOWN

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

I see that Cubans are now to be allowed to buy such petit-bourgeois extravagancies as computers. Under Castro such items were classed as wasteful and were not allowed.

Wasteful... Hmm... You know, looking at the hundreds of billions wasted by governments on failed information technology projects, I wonder if Fidel might not have had a point!

And now for a shameless plug. I'm speaking at this year's ACCU 2008 Spring Conference in Oxford on 2-5 April 2008. I'm sure my loyal readers (yes there really is more than one!) will drop everything they have planned and fly over for the event :) Seriously, though, if you are a programmer, the ACCU Conference is one of the best anywhere in the world to extend your knowledge and understanding.

This, of course, means that I won't be producing an issue of Winding Down that week, or at Easter either. So, if you are into putting non-events into your diary, you might like to note that there will be no Winding Down on March 23rd (Good grief - that's next week. Easter is early this year) or April 6th. I do plan to produce an issue on March 30th, assuming there is any news, that is.


Shorts:

Oregon mother Tanya Andersen, who was hounded for three years by the Recording Industry Ass. of America (RIAA), has now re-filed against the RIAA alleging negligence, fraud and misrepresentation, racketeering and corruption, abuse of legal process, malicious prosecution, outrage and intention to inflict emotional distress, computer fraud and abuse, trespass, invasion of privacy, libel and slander, deceptive business practices, misuse of copyright laws, and civil conspiracy.

Pretty spectacular, and you know what? It doesn't sound particularly over the top, given the activities of the RIAA and its attack dog, MediaSentry, over the last few years. I suspect this case will bring details of the RIAA's unsavoury activities out into the light of day for the first time. As Ms Andersen's lawyer put it, 'They [the RIAA] can't run now!' Indeed they can't. Previously the RIAA could drop cases that started to prove embarrassing, since they were the ones prosecuting. No chance of that in this case. I'll definitely be covering this issue as it unfolds!

Oh, and just to add to the discomfort of the RIAA, it turns out that its agents, MediaSentry are probably acting illegally in many states, since they are not registered as private detectives!

http://p2pnet.net/story/15280
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080313-andersen-attorney-on-riaa-suit-they-
cant-run-now.html

http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/03/mediasentry-not-licensed-
in-michigan.html

http://www.ilrweb.com/viewILRPDF.asp?filename=michigan_mediasentry_080222

Bad news for those organisations using smart (aka 'idiot') cards fitted with NXP's Mifare chip. Researchers at Radbound University in Nijmegen have developed a method of easily cracking the chip's rather pathetic 48-bit key encryption. That may not sound earth shattering, until you realise that there are something like two billion cards around using this chip! They are used by a lot of public transport systems (London Transport's Oyster card, for instance), and in security swipe access cards used by governments and corporations.

It's going to be expensive to fix, since the encryption is in hardware in both the reader and the chip, both will have to be replaced. You can't just issue new cards. Rumour has it that some organisations are adding armed guards to their entry areas, though if the situation is that sensitive, one has to wonder why they were so stupid as to only rely on a card in the first place! I suspect this story may soon die, since all involved have an interest in hushing it up...

[Source: Risks Digest 25.08]

Bad news also for anyone who values their privacy online. The European regulators have given the go ahead for Google to buy DoubleClick. Given Google's nasty record on privacy - basically that only Google and its principles have any right to privacy - this means that a visit to Google will probably result in DoubleClick's crud tracking you all round the net and making the info available in an easily crackable 'anonymous' form to anyone with enough cash. :(

Fortunately, Google has now decided that I'm some sort of 'bot' and so refuses to allow me to do any searching, so I'm not likely to be tempted to use their facilities. Perhaps now would be a good time for Google to change their motto from 'Do no evil' to the more appropriate 'Do no evil to Google.'

http://ct.news.com/clicks?t=43495485-18a32f6148453f76b7d88f6b914d69a0-
bf&brand=NEWS&s=5


RoundUp: Copyright, DRM and Patents:

Publishers look set to phase out Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) on digital downloads of audio books. Looks like the books trade has learned from the mistakes of the music biz!

In the game biz, Activision, publisher of 'Guitar Hero', is being sued by guitar maker Gibson. Guess what? It turns out that Gibson has a 1999 patent on a system simulating participating in a virtual concert...

Meanwhile, a small company is busy extracting cash from the cell phone businesses, using its one patent - a 16 year old patent on important aspects of cell phone technology. These small patent-only firms are nightmares for the big companies, since the usual tactic of offering to trade patent licences doesn't work because the leech company doesn't produce anything!

And at one of the world's biggest electronics trade fairs - CeBit in Hanover, Germany - police raided 51 exhibitors' booths because of suspected patent violations. It seems that in Germany, unlike, say, the USA, patent violations are a criminal offence. The police carted off 68 boxes of gadgets, including cell phones, navigation devices, electronic picture frames and flat screen devices. I bet they had a lot of fun playing with them back at the police station!

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iVI9fVnxi-BBFYsT5sng1hnNlASQD8VC7K801
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/media/03audiobook.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/03/06/technology/EU-TEC-Germany-Tech-Fair-
Raid.php

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9887955-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=
2547-1_3-0-20

http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206903068


RoundUp: UK Government attitude to personal data:

The Ministry of Defence has just admitted the loss of 11,000 military ID cards over the last two years. One has to wonder exactly what it is that they are 'defending' , and against what? The news comes as an online ID firm, Garlik reported that, on the basis of its Freedom of Information requests, all 14 of the major government departments it has had dealings with lack the basic systems for proving that they are in compliance with the data protection laws!

And that's not all. Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights has just produced a report lambasting the government for persistently failing to take data protection 'sufficiently seriously'. The committee also noted that this is the 19th time it has raised these issues, and the chairman of the committee suggested that the loss of personal details of 25 million people was not a one off event. 'In fact', he said, 'it was symptomatic of lax standards in the public sector.'

While this was going on the government was claiming that its proposed new ID card database would be safe and 'unhackable' because they weren't going to connect it to the Internet! One day we will get politicians who understand today's technology. Unfortunately, it probably won't be until today's technology is it long since obsolete...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7295467.stm
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/10/uk_gov_data_protection_shambles/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/07/id_card_database_gaffe/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/12/mod_loses_id_cards/


Homework:

Ever wondered why western music - classical, heavy metal, and everything in between - draws on just a small fraction of the available chords? So did a lot of musical theorists, but now the answer is starting to be unravelled, with the help of the mathematics developed for physics' arcane string theory.

Princetown University composer Dmitri Tymoczko has found a way to represent the universe of all possible chords in graphic form. The chords 'live' in a multi-dimensional space that is related to the number of notes making up the chords. The interesting thing is that most of the chord patterns you find in a piece of music occupy a very small piece of the available real estate, although in different pieces of the estate for different compositions.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582330,00.html


Geek Toys:

I don't know how much they are going to cost, but Tag Heuer are about to come out with a rather nifty pair of night vision driving glasses. Having seen Tag Huer's other offerings I suspect they'll cost a bomb :( And that is truly unfortunate, because they are designed to cope with the twilight period when people have vision problems while driving. I just hope someone comes out with a cheap pair soon, they will probably save a lot of lives.

http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/03/10/tag_heuer_night_vision_glasses.html


Recent Reading: Buda's Wagon - A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis. Verso

MacArthur fellow Mike Davis has written an absorbing book about the development of what has been called 'the poor man's air force'. Starting with anarchist Mario Buda's horse and cart bombing of J.P. Morgan's building in Wall Street in 1920, Davis leads the reader through the development of increasingly powerful and sophisticated weapons until we get to the use of car bombs in Baghdad today.

But the author is not just interested in the technical time-line of car bombs, he also looks at the sociology of car bombs, in particular the way in which car bombs have been increasing used to inflict deliberate civilian casualties, rather than to target specific 'enemy' infrastructure. Davis also charts the rise in suicide car bombings and sets the whole story in a political framework which some people will find uncomfortable.

Just one caveat. Don't take this book to read on a plane. Government security personal are notorious for their inability to understand that people might want to study activities of which they disapprove in order to understand motivation!

Recommended.


Scanner: Other Stories

EU investigates DOJ Internet gambling tactics
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/11/eu_us_internet_gambling_probe/

Keeping up with Verizon's sneakwrap changes
http://weblog.infoworld.com/gripeline/archives/2008/03/keeping_up_with.html

Make vendors liable for exploits
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/10/security_economics/

GE announces OLED manufacturing breakthrough
http://www.grcblog.com/?p=247

Windows better off closed, says Microsoft
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/03/10/bill_hilf_open_source_windows/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue There was also some material from a reader, which I saved somewhere safe, so I wouldn't lose it, and now I can't find it...

Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Spamato spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
16 March 2008

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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