The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: May 3, 2009

Official News page 9


WINDING DOWN

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

Welcome to another week's issue of Winding Down. It's a bit bitty this week, because I'm still recovering from ACCU conference. The conference was up to its usual excellent standard (declaration of interest: I'm a member of the organising committee), the only problem now is that I've got to make good on my promise to write up my security presentation and put it on my web site.

A lot of IT conferences are being cancelled at the moment because of lack of attendees (I don't think I have to tell you why that is). As such it was gratifying to be able to report that the number of attendees was less than ten down on last year. I think it goes to show that if you provide sessions with good speakers on topics that are not just sales pitches for new products, and keep the cost down, it is possible to attract an audience.

Anyway, I'll let you know when I have the presentation up on my site. I'm sure you would all like to read it :)


Shorts:

Bad news for all twits out there. Although Twitter's unique audience is up over 100% in March (the last month for which figures are available) , it seems that only 40% of those using the system continue to use it the following month.

This is known as 'churn' and it's a serious problem. AOL had a similar problem at the start of the dot com boom and they brought in games, including my own Federation game, in an effort to reduce it, after getting hammered by the financial analysts.

Twitter's problem is that while hype can drive eyeballs to the site, you need something more to keep people there, and an endless stream of banal offerings is not enough to keep most people returning.

Actually when you think about it, Twitter is very old technology - equivalent to text adventure games. Why would you bother in this day and age to type in details of what you are doing when you could stream the same information from a web-cam?

Privacy is not something that is going to be zapped by the government, it's something that many people are going to give away in return for their 15 minutes of fame.
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitter-quitters-post-roadblock-
to-long-term-growth/

Alas poor Sun Microsystems, I knew it well - the internet was originally built on Sun equipment, and every geek I knew, including me, lusted for a Sun workstation. With its acquisition by the Oracle juggernaut, Sun is no more, and only a few bits of its heritage will survive.

InfoWorld has a slide show that gives a pictorial history of Sun, and a salute to its achievements along the way.
http://www.infoworld.com/t/tech-industry-analysis/rise-and-fall-sun-
microsystems-914&current=1&last=14#slideshowTop

This week saw the annual InfoSec security jamboree at London's Earls Court exhibition centre. I went along on the last day, and I have to say it seemed pretty boring to me, and it looked as though both attendance and the number of booths was down.

However, I see from other reports that I missed the real excitement. It seems that the legendary Russian security company ElcomSoft (think Dmitry Sklyarov being arrested because he annoyed Adobe by exposing their crummy encryption) took out a small stall this year. The purpose? To advertise their products, including a new application that they claim can, in certain circumstances, let you recover passwords from PGP encrypted material.

PGP Corp, who also had a stall at the show, were definitely not happy and prevailed on the organisers, Reed Exhibitions, to send along an enforcer to remove the 'offending' poster. What a bunch of dorks - both PGP and Reed. In the case of PGP their action merely drew attention to a booth that would probably otherwise have been overlooked.

The biggest idiots, though are Reed. They passed up a golden opportunity to pack 'em in by organising a debate between the protagonists, getting extra positive publicity for the show and encouraging people who'd decided to give it a pass to think that maybe they should catch it on the last day after all.

The exhibition industry in the UK was in the doldrums even before the current slump. Now, of course, it's even worse, and imaginative action is going to be needed revitalise it. Don't expect anything like that from Reed.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/spies-damned-spies-and-
security-564?source=NLC-BLOGS

There's an interesting case just been filed against Apple, over its forcing the operator of a wiki web site to remove posts discussing how to get iPods and iPhones to work with software other than iTunes.

Apple has long been famous for reaching for the legal big stick the instant it feels its attempts to lock-in its users is being threatened. This time it used the notorious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), claiming that the discussion breached the act.

The lawsuit, filed by OdioWorks, owner of the affected BluWiki states that none of the pages targeted by Apple constitutes a "technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof", and seeks a judgment that the statements don't infringe Apple copyrights plus a judicial order that forbids Apple from claiming otherwise.

This is going to be interesting, and has all sorts of implications for First Amendment rights v DMCA. I'm going to be following this with interest.
http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4705
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/27/eff_sues_apple/

And while we are on the subject of legal thingies, I note that those in the know are expecting Intel to garner a stonkingly high fine from the EU anti-trust regulators for anti-competitive practices. Some are predicting that the fine could be as high as a billion euros (US$1.3 billion).

This isn't the first case that the world's largest chip maker has been embroiled in. In Japan it has signed an agreement to modify its business practices, in the US the federal trade Commission is investigating, and in Korea the fair trade commission fined it the equivalent of US$19.5 million for offering rebates to computer makers in a way that unfairly harmed rival AMD.

The EU charges are similar and the EU is likely to give details of specific activities that have been anti-competitive. The exact charges are confidential at the moment, but based on an AMD filing for a civil case in Delaware in 2005 are likely to include things like offering special discounts to Fujitsu-Siemens in Germany for burying references to AMD computers on its web site and in its retail catalog.

In the UK, AMD charges that DSG, the parent of Dixons and PC World, two of the country's biggest tech retailers, limits AMD's share of its business to less than 10% because of payments by Intel. If the allegations are true, these are not trivial matters, or explainable away with the traditional 'one rotten apple in the barrel' theory, and would explain why the EU are being so aggressive.

The details should be out later this month - more info when they are publicly available.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/technology/companies/30chip.html?_r=2

And talking of this side of the pond, I'm happy to report that our much maligned prime minister, Gordon Brown, has finally managed to come top in something. Yes! Top! Top in what, do I hear you ask? He is the subject of the top petition on the UK government online petitions web site. This was one of previous prime minister Tony Blair's bright ideas, and it has been haunting the government ever since.

And what does the top petition say? "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to resign."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/29/brown_petition/
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/please-go/

Back to the US and chip makers. Which brings us to the topic of multi-core chips. A month or so ago we had news from Intel that it expects to have its new 8-core Xeon server chip available in 2010 (that's next year). Now we have a report from AMD that it expects to have a 16-core version of its server chip, Opteron, by 2011.

So why should you care? Because it will probably only take a year or so for what were server class chips to find their way into the desktop market. Already it's not possible to buy a desktop, or a laptop that isn't dual core (netbooks excepted). By next year I expect that quad core will become common.

The question is if, as I suspect, you will be able to pack the equivalent in parallel processing of today's low end supercomputers into a laptop by 2015, what sort of applications are going to be available to ordinary users? And for programmers the question is, how are you going to write programs for a laptop that does 64 core parallel processing? Parallel Visual Basic, anybody?
http://www.physorg.com/news160045626.html

Now, here's a lesson for big media, though I doubt that they'll take any notice. This last week the game 'Demigod' from Gas Powered Games/Stardock hit the number three slot in the NPD charts of PC retail sales. So what you might say. Here's what. Demigod isn't copy protected, and was also massively pirated. And the decision not to copy protect was deliberate.

Last year the CEO of Stardock, Brad Wardell, explained his philosophy that pirates don't matter in Ars Technica. I'll just give you one quote that sums it up - and I'd recommend you go and read the rest at the URL.

"The reason why we don't put copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count," Wardell argues. "When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue."
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/03/pc-game-developer-has-radical-
message-ignore-the-pirates.ars

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23381\

You've got to hand it to Time Warner - the top presentation for stupidity, that is. To whom have they just issued a DMCA takedown notice for copyright violation? None other than Larry Lessig, who is probably the top US legal expert on copyright issues.

If anybody is going to check that their presentations don't violate copyright, it's likely to be Lessig, who, of course, has announced that he will be fighting this in court. I bet he's just been dying for a chance like this!

Incidentally, if anyone talks to you about 'piracy' of copyright material, you might like to suggest they take a boat trip along the Somali coast to find out what piracy is really about...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090428/1738424686.shtml

Finally, I've just got to point you to a fabulous story that has nothing whatsoever to do with tech news but it is too good not to cover. Two would be muggers in California were foolish enough to try mugging a baton twirling marching band girl. This about it - to do all those spectacular things with the baton you need the training and stamina of a ninja.

In this case the 17 year old girl punched one of her assailants in the nose, kicked the other in the groin, and then used her marching band baton to beat them both up! Definitely the way to go.

Last word on the issue came from Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff Michael Rust, "...don't mess with the marching band girls, or you might just get what you deserve..."
http://wcbstv.com/watercooler/marching.band.baton.2.998084.html
http://us.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/05/01/mxp.baton.defense.cnn


Homework:

And now for a device which may well revolutionise the literary world - the Espresso Book Machine. This is a machine that is claimed to print and bind books on demand while you wait - for just five minutes.

It prints at 100 pages a minute, and judging from reports, the resulting paperback has clear text, reasonable paper and a smart cover.

I think that it's going to be a race between this machine and e-books to see which one clicks with the public over the next few years. This could be the best thing that happened since sliced bread, or a dinosaur that arrived too late to save the traditional book industry. Only time will tell.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/24/espresso-book-machine-launches/print


Geek Toys:

Looking for a fast camera? Try this one then. It has a shutter speed of half a billionth of a second, and can capture over six million images a second! It uses a technique called 'steam' - Serial Time-Encoded Amplified imaging, using time stretch supercontinuum laser pulses. Definitely something to be casually dropped into the conversation at a dinner party*. If you want the technical details you can either look in 'Nature' journal, or, for a laydroid's explanation point your browser at this URL:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8025211.stm


Scanner: Other Stories

A cyber-attack on an american city
http://perens.com/works/articles/MorganHill/

Accenture unearths engineer ennui
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217200139&cid=NL_eet

Forget Conficker - focus on the real threats
http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/comment/0,1000002985,39642655,00.htm

UK government rules out central communications database
http://www.kable.co.uk/communicationsdatabase-homeoffice-jacquismith-27apr09

Irish reject e-voting, and go back to paper
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/irish-reject-e-voting-go-
back-to-paper.ars


* Note for serious geeks: Dinner parties are something you will meet as you grow older. They are invitations to a meal at a friend's house at which the host(ess) cooks a meal and half a dozen people sit round a dining table eating it while making social conversation. Experience indicates that serious geeks only ever get invited once, so make the most of it!


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb and Fi, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.

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
3 May 2009

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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