The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 25, 2009

Official News page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

I see that the CIA investment arm is dabbling in social media monitoring technology. I'm sure they'll pick up really useful information. ("Hi twits. I'm going to the bathroom, I may be gone for some time...").

There's a problem with all this stuff. In the run up to 9/11, the security services had no shortage of information about what was to happen, but they lacked the structure and facilities to put it all together. So what has been happening since (everywhere, not just in the US)? Steps have been taken, at considerable cost in personal privacy and civil liberties, to collect even more information.

A case in point is the UK police's DNA database, probably the world's largest, which is becoming bigger and bigger, and at the same time is solving less and less crimes (see article in the 'Shorts' section). And that's even though juries haven't yet realised that it is already possible to leave faked, or even genuine, samples of someone else's DNA at the scene of a crime.

Yes, technology can help make us all safer, but it needs to be applied intelligently, not treated as just a better way to trawl for data. The more untargetted data you have, the more likely your software is to find what looks like a pattern but which is, in fact, generated randomly. If the world's security services were drowning in data before 9/11, what sort of state are they in now?

The security forces need to stop reading techno-thrillers and start using some common sense.


Shorts:

For me, the big news of the week was the launch of Barnes & Noble's new e-book reader, the weirdly named 'Nook'. It is the same price as Amazon's Kindle (US$259), but, to my mind, while by no means perfect it represents a big step forward.

In particular, you can 'lend' e-books (publisher permitting, that is) to a friend with a similar reader. The book stays on their machine for 14 days before vanishing. As I said earlier it's not perfect, but it's a reasonable start.

Moreover, the Nook is based on Google's 'Android' operating system, which means that, at least theoretically, other developers could start writing applications for it. I would certainly be interested, if a software development kit was issued for it. Barnes & Noble are apparently thinking about that at the moment, and I for one am keeping my fingers crossed that they will opt to open the machine up in this way. The possibilities for a text based multi-player game like my Federation 2 are boundless!
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/index.asp?cm_mmc=Redirect-_-nook.
com-_-Storefront-_-nook

http://news.cnet.com/1606-2-50078498.html?tag=mncol;latest
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10378525-56.html?tag=nl.e703
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/21/barnes_and_noble_nook_open_hint/

Barnes & Noble's reader was not the only bookish thing in the news this last week or so. Google is rapidly approaching a deadline in the US to finalize a settlement over its plans to digitise out of print, but still in copyright, books. At the heart of the problem is a simple issue. The plan cut with the US authors and publishers representatives would give Google the right to digitise out of print/in copyright book, and force anyone else who wanted to do the same to pay Google for a license to do so.

At the same time Google is having serious problems in Europe. In the US it can at least argue that its planned copying is allowable under the US 'fair use' laws. Unfortunately for Google, most European countries don't have such laws, and copyright continues for 70-80 years after the death of the author. In addition, many European politicians - Angela Merkel, the German Prime Minister, is probably the best known - are extremely wary about the idea of one large company being in control.

Europe isn't the only place that could cause problems, either. Rumour has it that Chinese authors are starting to organise to oppose Google's digitisation plan.

Personally, I would love to see out of print books available as e-books, or as print on demand books, but not in a way that gives Google sole rights. Any deal should be a legal level playing field. Google, as the first, and undoubtedly the biggest, will have a massive advantage as it is, and, in my opinion, that's more than enough. Incidentally, I would argue that if the publisher lets a book go out of print, then the copyright should automatically revert back to the author!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10381693-265.html?tag=nl.e703

And one last book thing for this issue. The Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's biggest book publishing event, has just ended. While it was on, the EU used it to announce the launch of the world's biggest digital library, making 50 years of documents in 50 different languages available for free on the internet.

To set up the library two and a half miles of books - over a hundred thousand publications totaling 12 million pages were scanned. And they haven't finished yet! As well as new documents, the process of scanning old, pre-digital era documents will continue.

So... If you want to read, in the Lithuanian language, the European regulations on the size of cabbages, you know where to look!
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hsKT0HGi1TJkTetNa3RHqRjiuJXg
http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/languages-of-europe/doc135_en.htm

From the world of snooping busy-bodies comes news that Australian censors are seeking the power to ban iPhone applications. I find it difficult to express in a family missive like this one my contempt for these people who presume to judge what other people can or cannot see, read and play.

I've no idea why Australians, who I've always admired as being individualistic and prepared to stand up for their rights, are allowing themselves to be dictated to by what amounts to nothing better than a bunch of petty bullies and snoops, who, rumour has it, owe their jobs to being friends with leading politicos.

Fortunately, I suspect that on this occasion they have bitten off more than they can chew. There are thousands of iPhone developers, the vast bulk of them outside Australia, beyond the legal remit of the Aussie censors. Few things undermine authority more than making rules you are unable to enforce, and I suspect that this is going to be one of them.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/22/iphone_apps_ban/
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/censure-as-pms-pal-turns-censor/2007/04/13
/1175971353181.html

I'm sure that, like me, my readers will have all received scam messages from Nigeria. They are known in the trade as '419' messages, after the section of the Nigerian penal code that forbids them. Well, I'm sure people will be pleased to hear that the Nigerian government has now launched a campaign to clean up and stop the widespread 419 scams based in Nigeria.

So far, working with Microsoft, it claims to have shut down something in the region of 800 fraudster e-mail sites and to have arrested members of 18 high-profile 'cyber crime syndicates'. This may be the case. However, I must admit that the incidence of such scams doesn't seem to me to have dropped very much from the point of view of my mailbox. Also, while these people may have been arrested, it still remains to convict them. There is also the possibility, as happens all too often, that only the small fry have been picked up, leaving the real beneficiaries still at large.

Still, full marks for at least trying to clean the Augean stables. It's at least a start, and the important thing is to keep up the pressure, so that the rewards no longer justify the risks.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8322316.stm

Yahoo has been coming in for some stick this week, after photographs of one of its developer 'brain-storming' sessions appeared on Flickr. The photos show that a number of scantily clad young women wearing bras and miniskirts - a.k.a. lap dancers - were hired to attend.

The news soon spread and there were lots of comments, generally not exactly favourable to the event. At this stage it occurred to Yahoo, too late, that hiring lap dancers might not be the best way to move forward.

Best headline on the issue? "Honest, honey, she was just showing me her social networking APIs." My take? Judging from the bemused expressions on the faces, the geeks attending had never come across 'women' before, and had no idea what was going on!
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=16570

Here in the UK, one of the biggest issues of contention is the police DNA database which includes a million people who have not been convicted of any crime. The police and government have been told by the highest court in the EU that they must remove the records of innocent people. However, they claim that the database is essential to solving crimes. Indeed, it is undoubtedly the case that they would like to compel all UK citizens (and anyone else they can get their hands on) to register their DNA on the database.

Now an interesting report has just been issued, covering the years 2007-2009. It seems that in that time the database expanded by nearly 25%, its running cost doubled, and - wait for it - crimes cleared up as a result of a match -fell- 25%. And that's not saying anything about whether any of the crimes that were cleared up where a match was involved would have been cleared up anyway.

I wonder what the next justification for continuing to break the law by retaining innocent people's DNA is going to be?
http://www.kable.co.uk/dna-database-genetic-npia-police-neyroud-22oct09

Don't buy an 'X' license plate if you live in Birmingham, Alabama! That was the lesson to be drawn from the experience of Scottie Roberson, who bought a plate with seven Xs on it. Sounds pretty innocent, but so far the plate has racked up about US$19,000 in tickets so far. Why? Because parking officials in Birmingham usually put 'XXXXXXX' in place of the car number when they enter a ticket for a car with no license plates. You have been warned...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/10/16/national/
a072720D99.DTL&tsp=1

I'm happy to report that our old friends, SCO - purveyors of the finest dodgy lawsuits to the software community - have finally terminated their CEO, Darl McBride, whose bright idea it was to sue IBM, of all companies, for allegedly infringing SCO's copyright to Unix. The problem was that it turned out to be doubtful that the copyright belongs to SCO. According to Novell, it didn't actually sell the Unix copyrights to SCO, so... what did SCO do? Sued Novell for slander!

This was a pretty unique way of going about things. Normally, you would make sure that you owned the copyright before embarking on this sort of activity. Furthermore, the usual way to handle this is to first sue some small companies who can't afford the legal costs of fighting you, and offer them a relatively easy deal. Then you move on to the big boys, having established a precedent.

The net result is that SCO is now bankrupt, and an empty shell of its former self. Frankly, I doubt that even getting rid of McBride will help SCO at this stage, six years after declaring war on IBM.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/19/sco_mcbride_removed/

I see that one of the owners of the Hulu video site has indicated that it expects Hulu to start charging for access at some stage. The statement came from co-owner NewsCorp's COO, Chase Carey. At the moment the site is free/ad supported and losing money. I can't think of a better way to pull the plug on the service, than to start charging.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iFFLwGfPgLLhFDm6nAiZNT
zdp4RwD9BGCQLG0

San Francisco system administrator Terry Childs is still in jail - 15 months now - and still with a bail set at US$5 million for refusing to hand over administrative passwords. Three of the four charges have been thrown out, but a reduction in bail has been refused. Given that kidnapping for ransom or sexual abuse of a minor carries a bail of five times less one has to wonder what is going on. It could just be gross incompetence, but there seems to me to be some personal rancour involved on the part of those opposing the reduction in bail.

There is also the matter of why it's taking so long to come to trial. Could it be that those involved have figured out that although Terry Childs may be the defendant, their actions will also be on trial? They are going to look a lot worse than Childs, whose motivation seems to have been to defend the network against incompetent amateurs. A laudable ambition, even if one argues that it was misguided (and I'm not convinced that it was).

What ever way you look at it, jailing someone for 15 months without a trial for breaching the terms of his contract with his employer, seems like a pretty nasty miscarriage of justice.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/hardware/terry-childs-15-months-and-counting-150

Blogs - don'tchalove'em? Well if you do, then you might be a little surprised by an article in Wired about an industry devoted to churning out blogs. The profiled company is called Demand Media, and it publishes something in the region of 4,000 blog articles and videos a day.

A proprietary algorithm takes input from 100 sources of search terms (about 2 billion searches a day) combines that with information from the ad market about the most popular keywords, and finally adds in details of what's online already. After it runs through this lot it spits out details of what to produce. (Actually, it's more complicated than that, but the description gives you the bare bones).

The articles are then produced by freelancers at US$15 an article, US$20 a video clip, and Demand Media's income comes from the advertising. It's a classic Henry Ford assembly line system designed to keep the costs to a minimum so that a profit can be made. The material is pretty shoddy, but then again so is that of most 'traditional' blogs.

In the meantime, one can only wonder how many blog and twitter storms have been caused by a kind of recursive application of Demand Media's algorithm?
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/all/1

And while we are on the subject of Wired articles, they have just published a rather worrying one about the security of the routers provided by Time Warner Cable.

It seems that Time Warner's SMC8014 cable modem and WiFi router - deployed to some 65,000 customers - can allow a hacker remote administrative access. This is dangerous, to say the least, because it could allow the interception of internet traffic passing through the modem. It's very simple, you just log on to the modem with a browser that has Javascript disabled and look for the tool that dumps out the modems' configuration file.

Once you have that - Bingo! - the administration login and password are there in clear text! With the admin facilities available to you, the sky is the limit. The wireless router can be opened up for others to use, for instance. A whole host of other malicious changes can also be put in train, up to and including completely rewriting the operating system.

David Chen, who discovered the problem contacted time Warner about it in September, but was told that they "cannot do anything about it". However, now that Wired has published the details, Time Warner seem to have changed their line, “We were aware of the problem last week and have been working on it since," is the latest variant. Let's hope for everyone's sake that they do indeed fix it soon.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/time-warner-cable/


Homework:

It's the International Year of Astronomy this year. Most people have heard that it marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first astronomical telescope observations.

Less well known is the fact that it is also the 400th anniversary of the publication of Johannes Kepler's book 'Astronomia Nova' which introduced the first two of Kepler's laws of planetary motion. Kepler was the first person to come up with a set of laws that accurately, and simply, described the motion of the planets relative to earth.

He was also the person who coined the terms 'orbit' and 'satellite', and explained how the moon causes the tides, as well as laying the foundation of the science of optics.

Scientific American has an interesting piece on Kepler, which I'd recommend readers to take a look at. It'll probably make you want to know more - that was certainly the effect it had on me.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=galileo-kepler-iya&sc=
physics_20091023

World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners Lee was recently interviewed on the platform at the Web 2.0 Summit. He had some interesting points to make about the web, and a number of them were recorded by Cnet's Rafe Needleman.

The issues covered include large companies, laws and the web, trust, and separating design from the display device. Some pithy and useful ideas and suggestions. Well worth looking through, and all the semi-quotes are short and snappy - no fluff.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10381726-250.html?tag=nl.e703


Geek Toys:

Want to be the first one on your block to own a 3-D laptop? Then take a look at Acer's snappily named Aspire 5738DG-6165. (Off the top of my head I'd guess there must be about 10 billion numbers in the sequence running from zero to that number. Are Acer really trying to imply that they have that many different models?)

The 15.6" laptop comes in at a very reasonable US$780 and requires a pair of those silly glasses to see the 3-D, always assuming you can find a program that displays in 3-D. The machine runs Windows 7, although Microsoft's new baby doesn't specifically support 3-D. I couldn't find a full spec for the machine, so if you really want to be out ahead of the pack on this one, I'd check it's powerful enough to run any software you want to use before buying.

Oh! And if you want to show it off to your friends and enemies to make them aware of your ultra coolness, make sure you buy some extra pairs of the 3-D glasses. Nothing is less cool than having to pass a single pair of glasses around to a bunch of people so they can see your groovy 3-D images!
http://www.physorg.com/news175370805.html

Fancy a change of wallpaper on your 'puter? Then let me draw your attention to a couple of sites that I've found to be very good. The first is the HDRwalls site. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. HDR is created by taking multiple shots exposed for the highlights, mid-tones and shadows separately and then merging them into a single image. The results are stunning.

On the other hand, if you fancy some space based wallpaper, then the site for you is wallpaperweb's space section - 635 free space based wallpapers. Some good, some bad, some indifferent, and a few very good indeed. Take a look, I'm sure you'll like it...
http://www.hdrwalls.com/
http://www.wallpaperweb.org/wallpaper/Space/gallery_1.htm


Scanner: Other Stories

15 smartphone apps you shouldn't live without
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/15-smartphone-apps-you-shouldnt-live-
without-762&current=1&last=2#slideshowTop

CIA invests in Social Media monitoring technology
http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/info-management/
showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220900005&cid=nl_tw_ebiz_txt

Windows 95 to Windows 7: How Microsoft lost its vision
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/10/22/win_95_win_7_vision/

Budget cuts could increase server failures
http://www.infoworld.com/d/networking/budget-cuts-could-increase-server-
failures-502?source=IFWNLE_nlt_networking_2009-10-20

BBC gets grief for Humpty Dumpty rewrite
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/19/humpty_dumpty/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, 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
25 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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