WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Well it was a gloomy week this week; data outages, Sweden vanishes, biggest set of Microsoft security patches ever, giant snakes taking over the US, and the Wall Street Journal predicting the end of e-mail. Still, I managed to dig out the odd illuminating snippet.
The issue is slightly shorter than usual, because I was at an ACCU Conference organising committee all yesterday. (ACCU is a voluntary organisation of programmers.) We have a conference coming up in Bletchley Park (of Enigma fame) next month entitled 'Security, yesterday, today and tomorrow'. The speakers are Tony Sale, who lead the team recreating the Colossus war time code breaking computer, Simon Singh, author of 'The Code Book', and Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of PGP. Take a look at the web page for more details.
We also have a big programmers conference coming up in the spring. We had to go through 150+ submission for talks, but only had 60 slots for them. Reading through all the proposals, and deciding which to accept was grueling, and many good talks had to be shelved because there wasn't time available. That's probably the worst aspect of the whole thing.
Anyway, here is what I did manage to get together for your edification.
Shorts:
I was recently looking at a video from an outfit called 10/GUI, which was explaining their new system to replace the mouse and the traditional windowing system. While I'm not sure about their system, which makes use of all 10 fingers, and organises the on-screen windows in a very rigid fashion, I was reminded of how difficult it has been to find a replacement for the mouse in a desktop environment.
The mouse has been in popular use for a long time, and there have been many attempts to replace it, most notably with various forms of touch screen. None of them have taken off, quite simply because these alternatives are either mentally more difficult to use, or they fail the test physically. 10/GUI have some nice ideas, especially the fundamental concept that you should be able to operate on-screen with all your fingers, rather than the mouse equivalent of a single finger.
However, I have my doubts. The mouse is widely used and very, very, popular. If you want an analogy of the problems people like 10/GUI face, consider the standard keyboard. Its layout of letters is a massively inefficient design from the point of view of human engineering - for instance the letter 'a', one of the most used letters in the western alphabet, it is operated by the smallest and weakest finger of the left hand - but all attempts to get people to move to more efficiently designed keyboards have failed.
Take a look at the video, though, it has some nice ideas, and will probably make you think a bit about the ideas behind the display on your computer.
http://10gui.com/video/
With the debate on Digital Restriction Management (DRM) continuing, and the US government (among others) busy negotiating a secret trade agreement, that includes Internet enforcement procedures against alleged 'infringers', Ars Technica has an interesting article on how copyright holders have attempted to halt new technology in its tracks over the last 100 years.
Featured in the article are people like John Philip Sousa denouncing the pianola (my spelling checker suggested replacing this with payola) and the gramophone for destroying society, not to mention musical taste. Then there is the furore over the introduction of photocopies after the First World War. And, of course no piece would be complete without big Media's Jack Valenti who famously described the effect that the VCR would have on the film industry with the immortal words, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
The article is fascinating, it comes right up to the present via the 'home taping' campaign, digital audio tape, the attempt to halt the sale of MP3 players, and the legal assault on downloading music from the internet.
As copyright expert William Patry put it in his new book, 'Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars', "I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/100-years-of-big-content-
fearing-technologyin-its-own-words.ars
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/these-42-people-are-shaping-
us-internet-enforcement-policy.ars
One of the big items of news this week has been the loss of users' data in the T-Mobile Sidekick disaster, caused by Microsoft data subsidiary, Danger. But as InfoWorld pundit, Robert X. Cringely points out, this is only the last in a series of not so high profile data losses. Earlier we had the Apple 'Snow Leopard' upgrade, which wiped out guest login personal data for Mac users (Apple is working on a fix for this).
Then there is the case of Facebook. It took them ten days of complaints by users make them to realise that they had lost the data belonging to about 150,000 of their users. They are still trying to fix this one, and rumours of hacking abound.
Then there is the case of Sweden. They didn't actually lose massive quantities of data. In the immortal words of Lewis Carroll, they "softly and suddenly vanished away". Somebody, it seems, left out a dot in a software script updating the DNS for the '.se' country domain (that country being Sweden), and Sweden was no more, at least from the point of view of the internet.
It's a worrying example of just how fragile the internet really can be - someone misses out a dot, and a whole country disappears from the internet. It goes to show that in spite of the official line that the internet is designed to cope with and 'go around' problems, the introduction of the domain name system introduced a single point of failure - exactly the problem the internet was supposed to deal with.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/missing-dot-drops-sweden-internet-632
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/2009-year-your-data-died-897?
page=0,0&source=IFWNLE_nlt_blogs_2009-10-14
http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/the-hunting-of-the-snark/chapter-08.html
And talking of missing data and the like, Microsoft issued software patches plugging no less than 34 holes in its products this week. A large number of different products were patched, including Vista, XP, Windows 2000, Windows 7 (yes really!), Internet Explorer, Microsoft Media Player, and Outlook. You can get these updates either by turning on 'Automatic Updates' in Windows, or by visiting http://www.microsoft.com/security. Note that with typical Microsoft arrogance, it will tell you to change your browser if you don't use a Microsoft browser, or alternatively jump through a whole bunch of hoops. Clearly they don't want Firefox users to patch Microsoft software - maybe it's time to switch to Linux or the Mac!
http://www.physorg.com/news174670516.html
Next week Windows 7 will be available for you to buy, and promptly patch! The question is, should you immediately rush out, queue all night, and upgrade your computer? The word on the street is probably not. Most businesses won't as a matter of course, they always wait for the advent of the first service pack before doing upgrades of this nature. Most commentators seem to be of the view that Windows 7 is inordinately expensive for what it really is, a fix for the problems besetting Vista, and the proliferation of versions doesn't help, either.
More to the point, especially for those currently using XP, the chances are your computers won't be powerful enough to run Windows 7. It's not exactly a resounding 'No!', but it doesn't seem to be a ringing endorsement either. The consensus seems to be that if you want Windows 7, your best bet would be to wait until you buy a new computer, and get it ready installed.
So, no Windows 7 launch parties for you then, though the Microsoft video is a hoot (don't give up the day job, Microsoft)!
http://www.physorg.com/news174753047.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
I see that the Wall Street Journal has joined the ranks of those predicting that the likes of Twitter and Google Wave (which doesn't even display properly in my Firefox browser) are going to result in the demise of e-mail. Frankly, I think it's more likely that the USA will be taken over by giant snakes.
Truth to tell, if e-mail does die, it will have nothing to do with useless crud like twitter, and everything to do with the inability of ISPs to deal with spam, mainly because there is little financial incentive to do so. The way to deal with spam is to charge for mail. Conceptually dead simple, but difficult to implement.
Actually I'm surprised the governments of the world haven't cottoned on to this yet. One tenth of a penny per email tax, would cut spam at a stroke and help pay off some of the debts incurred during the current slump! And for a bonus, most people would actually welcome the tax. Hmm.... maybe I should patent the idea.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203803904574431151489408372.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/kit-eaton/technomix/email-phenomenon-its-last-
legs
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/14/snakes_on_the_brain/
Homework:
My US readers might like to take a look at an interesting piece in the October 2009 edition of Scientific American - an article suggesting that the management systems linking government, business, and civil society are in need of urgent repair.
Its analysis is that the underlying problem is each department in government is a walled empire with its own agenda for expansion. The situation has now reached the stage, it argues, where tinkering will no longer suffice, and a thorough going overhaul is needed - not just of policy, but also of systems.
I wish the Scientific American the best of luck, but I would point out that scientists have an even worse track record than the military when it comes to dabbling in politics! I suspect it has to do with the assumption that human beings are rational... It's still worth a look, though.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-failing-of-us-government
&sc=CAT_SP_20091013
Geek Toys:
I see that Sir James Dyson has invented a bladeless fan. It's really quite an interesting device - it took Dyson engineers four years to perfect, and not only does it work, it actually looks cool too. The URL has a video of Dyson explaining how it works. I plan to add it to my wish list for future purchase. It's neat, very neat.
http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/dyson-bladeless-fan-13-10-2009/
Scanner: Other Stories
Trojan plunders US$480,000 from online bank account
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/14/microsoft_windows_bank_thefts/
Obsolescence pending: rating the ESRB
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_223/6647-
Obsolescence-Pending-Rating-the-ESRB
AT&T savages Google Voice
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/15/at_t_google_voice/
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
18 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.
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