The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 7, 2009

Official News page 12

WINDING DOWN

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

A number of completely bemused Americans have asked me what on earth is going on with the UK's politicians at the moment. So, I will venture briefly into the murky realm of politics to explain. A few years back our politicians passed a Freedom of Information Act, which they unwisely assumed wouldn't apply to them.

In the event, it turned out that that the assumption was mistaken, and that ordinary citizens could ask for information about politicians. One of the first things people asked about was politicians' expenses claims. The politicians fought tooth and nail to avoid these being made public, thus causing even your average non-political geek to wonder what the politicians were hiding.

Quite a lot it turned out, some of it definitely fraudulent, some of it within 'the rules' (which in turn were set by the politicians). The 'fiddling' of expenses affected all parties, but because of tactical blunders by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, reflected most on the ruling Labour Party. Without going into details, the overall effect has been to seriously undermine the authority of Gordon Brown, and cause the resignation of a number of both senior and junior ministers.

The resulting bunker mentality has led Brown into all manner of political problems as he attempts to reconstitute his cabinet. This is particularly important since successive governments have moved power away from parliament and into the cabinet, which is now effectively the ruler of the country. The irony of the thing is that no one (except Brown) wants Brown as the leader of the party, but no one else wants to step forward and take the poison chalice. A general election has to be called within the next year, and it is widely believes that this will be an electoral disaster for the Labour Party. And no one wants to be the one to lead the party into that morass...

OK - on to the tech stories for this week. Microsoft featured in so many that I've collected them into a round up later in the newsletter. But first, a story from the Winding Down version of X-Files!


Shorts:

It appears that doing construction work around the Tyson's Corner suburb of Washington DC is not as easy as you might think, The big telecom companies all publish details of where their cables run, so you can avoid slicing them up with a backhoe. However, the area is rife with secret government offices and campuses - think CIA, NSA, DoD, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Counterterrorism Center, and other secretive organisations.

Now, there may be a perception out there that these organisations use the internet to communicate, just like the rest of us, leading to hacking and other such activities, but actually this is not so. These organisations have their own secure fibre optic networks that are entirely separate from the internet. And do you know what? The route taken by these cables (known in the trade as 'black fibre') are not marked on any maps... (Cue sound of sinister music, dum-da-dum-dum.)

So of course, at regular intervals, the construction crews chop their way through unmarked cables. Such activity results in the rapid arrival of a bevy of black unmarked SUVs, containing men in suits, who refuse to say where they are from. The real irony is that, when this happens, the organisations affected can't charge the cost of repair to the people who cut the lines. To do so they would have to say who they are!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/
AR2009053002114_pf.html

And while we are on the subject of X-file material, The X-File Journal has a really interesting interview with a guy called Nick Pope, who for several years worked on the UK's Ministry of Defence's UFO project, investigating sighting reports. The files compiled by him and his colleagues are now starting to be made available under the UK's Freedom of Information Act. I would guess that most of it makes boring reading, but some of it remains unexplained to this day. Take a look at what Mr Pope had to say, if you have an interest in this subject.
http://x-journals.com/2009/the-real-british-x-files/

There was an important piece of US legal news this week. The Supreme Court decided to review Business Method patents, a highly controversial subject. The whole issue first made it into the mainstream with the now notorious Amazon 'one-click' patent, a business method, rather than an 'invention' in the classic sense. Various challenges via both the patent office and the courts have been made, over the years, but nothing has ever got to the Supreme Court.

Until now.

Now the long running Bilski case will be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The outcome of the review is by no means obvious, but one thing is clear, whichever side the Court takes will set a major direction for US businesses over the next few decades. More on this when the case starts to be heard.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc2009061_905686.htm
?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_news+%2B+analysis

Talking about court cases reminds me that there is another important one in the offing. Remember the 2005 breach of CardSystems, a credit card payment processor that suffered a theft of more than 40 million credit card numbers? Well Merrick bank has now brought a legal action against Savvis, the people who hosted CardSystems' servers and certified that CardSystems were compliant with the then extant Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP).

In the event it turned out that CardSystems weren't compliant. The lawsuit alleges that Savvis was negligent in certifying CardSystems as secure and bears responsibility. This is a new tack for a lawsuit. Companies have for a long time been held responsible for breaches of security where their own data is involved, but no one has previously suggested that auditors who certify compliance should also be held liable. If this case goes against Savvis, few people will mourn Savvis, but it will cause a major re-evaluation of liabilities in the IT world.
http://blogs.channelinsider.com/secure_channel/content/data_security/breach_lawsuit
_could_reset_security_liabilities_to_service_providers.html


Round Up: Microsoft

Microsoft were in the news quite a lot this week, but perhaps the most interesting thing that they did was to threaten to leave the US for overseas, if a number of the president's tax proposals were implemented. Well, maybe it wasn't quite as drastic as that!

Let me explain. In the late 1990s the US changed its tax rules to help protect its companies operating overseas from paying excessive tax to other governments. A laudable enough aim, you might think.

However, over the years, the financial wizards who handle international taxation have developed ways of using the rules to substantially reduce such corporations' tax bills. To give you an idea of the scale of this, it has resulted in Microsoft paying tax at the overall rate of 26%, instead of the 35% they would otherwise be paying. As the last Microsoft Annual report noted, "Our effective tax rates are less than the statutory tax rate due to foreign earnings taxed at lower rates".

Now president Obama proposes to shut this US$190 billion tax hole, and the result is that Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer is suggesting that this would cause Microsoft to move more of its jobs out of the USA. (40% of Microsoft's workforce is already employed overseas.)

It used to be said that the only certainties in life are taxes and death. Clearly Microsoft are determined to disprove the first of those assertions. Maybe it's continued acquisitions of health software providers - this week it bought Merck & Co.'s Rosetta Biosoftware unit for an undisclosed sum - is an attempt to disprove the second part!

Incidentally, there was a short piece from Reuters India, stating that the Russian authorities had launched an anti-trust probe against Microsoft because it is restricting supplies of Windows XP. Sounds a bit Alice in Wonderland, given that Microsoft isn't really selling XP in the West, either. However, the really puzzling part is the implication that Russians actually -buy- Microsoft software!

Microsoft's Windows XP software was also in other news. It seems that quite a lot of ATMs use it as their operating system, and crooks have taken advantage of this to re-program a number of machines in Eastern Europe to collect card details which can then be printed out later on the machine's receipt dispenser! Those responsible are rumoured to be refining their software, ready for an assault on the ATMs of the Western World...

Incidentally, I have no idea why thieves operating in the IT world are given glamorous names like 'cybercriminals'. There is no difference between them and other criminals, except that their speciality is in the IT field, rather than, say, safe cracking. They are all crooks, thieves, swindlers and liars.

Meanwhile, Microsoft are trying to patent a 'magic wand' - their term, not mine. The newly revealed patent was actually filed in 2007, about a year after Nintendo launched the Wii with its distinctive controller. Where is J.K. Rowling when you actually need her litigiousness!

Actually, I suspect that the issue is probably moot given the device that Microsoft showed at the E3 games show this week. They gave an impressive demonstration of their Natal software that needed only a special camera device to allow you to control your computer via gestures. You didn't have to wear or hold anything at all. I've always maintained that this was the way forward for computer control, combined with decent voice recognition software (decent, in my case, means it can distinguish the pitch of my voice from background noise, eg Guns and Roses...). I'm going to watch this one with interest.

On a more mundane front, an organisation calling themselves 'internetsafety.com' complained that users could get access to porn through Microsoft's new 'Bing' search engine. The engine apparently provides thumbnails of pictures and videos retrieved. Rolling a mouse over the thumbnail plays the video without leaving a trace on the computer for snooping parents, wives, etc. When you look a little more closely, it turns out, though, that 'internetsafety.com' are a commercial organisation selling a product which will block this sort of behaviour. What a surprise!

How about this for sneakiness. Earlier this year, Microsoft shipped a 'security update' for it's .NET framework, a programming platform used by many applications. The update, installed on millions of computers, also installed an add-on into the Firefox browser if it was present on the computer. It didn't ask for permission, and it disabled Firefox's uninstall button, so you couldn't safely remove the component. The add-on - which appears in the add-ons popup as 'Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0' - is a serious security threat, since it allows web sites to quietly install software on your computer.

The fact that Microsoft's Internet Explorer allows this sort of thing is one of the main reasons why a large number of people moved over to Firefox, which, sans the add-on, doesn't allow it. People were definitely Not At All Happy, especially when they discovered that the only way to remove the offending component was to manually edit the computer's registry. This resulted in a hasty back-down by Microsoft who have now issued a fix for their 'fix'. If you are one of the unlucky people that Microsoft dumped on, their fix is at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cecc62dc-96a7-4657-af91-6383ba034eab. Sheesh - no wonder many people are so reluctant to install Microsoft 'security' updates!

Finally, it seems that a combination of the current financial climate and the less than stellar sales of Windows Vista has resulted in a cull of some of Microsoft's, how shall I put it, less successful, products. The company has zapped no less than 13 products in the last eight months including such relatively high visibility products as Encarta, the Digital Image Suite, and Autoroute. I guess that's where the 5,000 layoffs Microsoft announced in in January are coming from.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aAKluP7yIwJY
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217701084&
cid=nl_tw_software

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/060409-cybercriminals-refine-data-sniffing-
software-for.html

http://www.techflash.com/microsoft/J_Allard_Microsoft_researchers_seek_patent_on_
a_magic_wand.html

http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3823191/Microsofts+Bing+Dinged
+for+Porn+Access.htm

http://in.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idINIndia-40095420090604?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/02/microsoft_products_firing_line/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/05/microsoft_update_quietly_insta.html


Scanner: Other Stories

Perils of DRM: What happens to your digital content if the provider goes out of business ?
http://www.cepro.com/article/what_happens_to_your_digital_content_if_the_provider_
goes_out_of_business/

Cancer drug erases fingerprints
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8064332.stm

Boffins: Ordinary light bulbs can be made efficient, cheaply
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/01/light_bulb_laser_blast_enhancement/

Analysis: Intel eyes embedded apps with Wind River deal
http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217701869&cid=NL_eet

EFF Launches TOSBack - A 'Terms of Service' tracker for Facebook, Google, eBay, and more
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2009/06/03-0


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi and Lois, 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
7 June 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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