The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 4, 2009

Official News page 12


WINDING DOWN

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

Well, over here in the UK, we have just had a really nice 'Indian Summer' after a boring and dreary wet regular summer (rumour has it that the English created their 19th Century empire solely to give themselves an excuse to get away from English weather.)

Many pundits took the late sunshine as being a prime example of 'global warming', which was interesting, as it coincided with the emergence of information that some of the key evidence for the warming used by the IPCC had been cherry picked from a larger data set. A data set which in its entirety gave a somewhat different picture. (See 'Treemometers' in the Scanner section.)

The really worrying problem is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to get an detailed picture of just how accurate and repeatable the data is, and assuming there is global warming, to have any real discussion about what to do about it. Too many reputations are at stake here, but then so is the future of the world. The only advice I can give it to quote the UK Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba' which roughly translates as 'take nobody's word for it'.

But I digress. let's get back to Winding Down for this week...


Shorts:

Our UK advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has just zapped adverts from PC supplier Valatech which came up with the funky idea of advertising its multi-core PCs' speed by adding up the individual speeds of each core! In this case they were advertising 9.2GHz processors in their quad-core 2.3GHz PCs. Pity really, I quite like the idea of having a PC specced at over 9GHz :)
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/10/01/asa_slams_chip_speed_claim/

A New York iPhone owner recently took his iPhone into an Apple store and complained about the high level of dropped calls. The Applista behind the counter checked the phone's log and confirmed that there was a record of 22 per cent of calls dropped. The iPhone was then handed back to its owner with the information that he should be very pleased - the average drop out rate in the area was 30 per cent.

Thirty percent!

I don't think anyone living in an urban area in the UK (and unlike the US we mostly live in urban conurbations) would put up with anything like that. I could count the number of dropped calls in the last six month on the fingers of one hand, and I live in what's considered to be a difficult area, in a dip, near the river, and with lots of obstacles.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/30/iphone_dropping_calls/

Which leads me to another interesting fact. A customer satisfaction survey by the consulting group CFI has found that AT&T has the worst reputation of the big providers among smartphone users. When you think about it, that's not surprising. It used to be that if you didn't like your provider, you could often go with a different provider, keeping the number of disgruntled users down.

The iPhone changed that with its exclusive deal. AT&T now has a bunch of people who were forced to change from a service that they were in general happy with, to one which gives a significantly poorer service, and which they didn't want to use in the first place. The iPhone may be a cash cow for AT&T, but they are playing with fire when it comes to customer satisfaction. If I was the head of a company that had a bunch of my customers just itching for an opportunity to launch a class action I would definitely be nervous...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-10365952-266.html?tag=nl.e703

Sticking with Apple, I notice that the company revealed a serious security snafu when it made its last software update for the iPhone. Basically, a security fix in the update stopped business users from being able to sync their iPhones with Microsoft Exchange. Even worse, this wasn't a screw up by some programmer, it was a real fix for a dangerous bug.

It seems that the iPhone had been lying to Exchange about when Exchange asked it whether it supported on-device security. It happily told Exchange that yes, of course it supported on-device security. The iPhone was lying through its chips.

It did no such thing.

This is very serious. There are all sorts of legal regulations about the security of corporate e-mail and other data - the HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley legislation immediately springs to mind. This screw up immediately bars corporate customers from using the iPhone for business use, and, arguably leaves the field clear for every politician's favourite toy, the Blackberry.

So how did it happen? Articles on the issue suggest that Apple must have known about it all the time, since they fixed the problem in the update. I'm not convinced by the Machiavellian thesis that it was deliberate, even though I am by no means an Apple fan. I think that it's much more likely that a programmer added a couple of lines of code to lie to exchange so that he (almost certainly a he) could test some Exchange sync code for future use. And then he forgot to take it out! It's even entirely possible that no one realised, except perhaps the programmer concerned, who spotted the error after the iPhone shipped, and corrected it as a matter of course in this update, without considering the consequences.

I think he is probably aware of the consequences now!
http://www.infoworld.com/t/mobile/has-apple-ensured-blackberrys-reign-in-
business-mobile-953?page=0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-10-01

That's enough of Apple's shiny toys for one issue... I want to turn to the vexed issue of second hand software sales. What happens if you want to sell commercial programs that you legitimately bought, and no longer need? Most people assume that they are free to do so. Indeed in the UK there is a thriving trade in second hand games, much to the annoyance of the games publishers.

However, the issue is not so clear cut as it appears to be, because most commercially sold software is not actually sold outright, but licensed to the purchaser. And the makers claim that this means you can't sell it on.

Now an important dispute on just this issue between Autodesk and an eBay seller has made it to the courts in the USA. What the court decides is going to have implications for the future, and if it decides against Autodesk, then the implications for Autodesk's vastly overpriced software will be, how shall I put it, interesting. Definitely a case to follow, and one that promises to run and run, whatever the outcome of the initial decision.
http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/government-law/legislation
/news/index.cfm?newsid=16847

Tell me, if you were in charge of a prison, and one of the prisoners was there because they were convicted of a phishing scam that was estimated to have netted around US$100 million, would you let them reprogram the prison computer? No? Neither would I, or any other sane person, but that's exactly what the bosses at the UK's Ranby prison did.

The result were completely as expected. All the system passwords were changed so everyone else was locked out! What else the computer was used for isn't known - and probably never will be, given the incompetence of the powers that be. As far as I can tell, no one has been sacked over the fiasco...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/inmate_hacker/

When President Obama's economic stimulus program earmarked a cool US$7.2 billion for universal broadband deployment, it seemed like a lot of money. However a report prepared by a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) task force suggests that the costs could be as much as US$350 billion. That really is a lot of money, and I have to confess that my first thought on reading it was, "...and how much of that would be going to bureaucrats to 'supervise' the roll out?" The second was to wonder what benefit the third of the population who have no interest or use for the internet would get out of this project.
http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/mobile/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=220300595&cid=nl_tw_ebiz_txt

A gold star and ten house points to San Francisco, which is encouraging its developers to make use of published government information to build applications that improve the lives of residents. It's launched an App Showcase, indicating what can be achieved. Highlights of the Showcase include an iPhone app to allow mothers to find child friendly areas in SF, an app to provide real time information about public transit, and software that turns police activity information into an interactive map of crime in the city.

None of the applications mentioned are big 'killer' apps, but with enough of these sort of small useful, 'just do one thing well' applications around, then life in the city could definitely improve. Good work.
http://www.physorg.com/news173683903.html

Yuck! There is a plan to use computers for the automated marking of English essays in exams in the UK from next month. The plan is described by academics as a disaster waiting to happen! Considering that some of the most effective use of the English language is achieved by breaking the rules of grammar, I just hate to think what artificial intelligence programs (more realistically known as artificial stupidity) would make of a really good piece of writing.

Modest as I am, I reckon that I'm quite a reasonable writer. I once ran one of my pieces through the grammar/style check on Microsoft Word. The results - more style 'errors' than there were sentences - went a long way to explaining how those weird, unhelpful, Microsoft error message come into being.

I hope this crazy idea dies a death; training people to write in the boring stilted way that would enable a computer to assess it would be another nail in the coffin of education.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/sep/25/robots-to-mark-english-essays


Homework:

This looks interesting - I've put it on to my Amazon Wish List, for future purchase. It's a comic book by Logicomix about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. The New York Times review I read sounds very positive, and once I get my hands on it I'll put a review on my web site. If any one out there already has it, I would welcome comments on whether it's any good.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/books/review/Holt-t.html?_r=1&ref=books
http://www.amazon.com/Logicomix-Search-Truth-Apostolos-Doxiadis/dp/
1596914521/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254637072&sr=1-1

Security guru Bruce Schneier has a guest slot in the 'Punditry' blog which takes up an issue not usually discussed very much in security circles - the question of unauthentication of computer users. The security course I did a year ago was probably fairly typical. We spent quite a lot of time on how you could reliably authenticate a user, but none, as far as I can recall, discussing how you stopped giving then access when they have finished. This short piece is well worth a read, and is a reminder that authenticating a person and providing a secure link is not the end of the story.
http://threatpost.com/blogs/difficulty-un-authentication-128

Interested in astronomy? Then take a look at this site. It's the result of a project to produce a picture of the heavens as seen from earth. The images were collected with an ordinary digital camera in the Caldeira de Taburiente in the Canary island for the northern hemisphere, and in the Atacama Desert for the southern hemisphere. The image is an 'as you see can it' one, and you can zoom in. It's an amazing project that has come to fruition in this, the International Year of Astronomy.
http://www.sergebrunier.com/gallerie/pleinciel/index-eng.html


Geek Toys:

Hardware geeks may like to take a gander at this little video from You Tube. It's a couple of completely mad characters - one a reporter from Popular Mechanics magazine - testing out a jet propelled merry-go-round. How anyone could trust their safety to such a Heath Robinson contraption is beyond comprehension!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/01/merry_go_round/


Scanner: Other Stories

Treemometers: A new scientific scandal?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/

Apple’s shadow hangs over game console makers
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/26/technology/26games.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

Flying car & roboplane-worthy air traffic digi-net go for 2025
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/01/nextgen_on_track/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, 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
4 October 2709

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! 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.


Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page