The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 14, 2010

Official News page 11


WINDING DOWN

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

I was pleased to note that scientists are still investigating the important things in life. In this case Japanese scientists found that putting the fizz in drinks using oxygen rather than carbon dioxide, not only reduced hangovers, but allowed you to sober up faster as well. (I'm not sure the latter is, in fact, an advantage.) The only problem is, they didn't actually say what adding up to 20% oxygen does to the taste of the beverage. Perhaps I'll wait a while before trying this out on my case of 2004 Margaux...


Shorts:

GCHQ - the UK's electronic spy centre (the equivalent of the NSA in the US) - was in the news this week. Apparently it couldn't account for the whereabouts of some 35 laptops. This was discovered by the UK parliament's Commons Intelligence and Security Committee which accused them of having a 'cavalier' attitude to data security.

The same report noted that GCHQ was also not doing very well on the state sponsored and terrorist cyber attack front. It seems that the centre is having difficulty in attracting and hanging on to enough internet experts. That doesn't really surprise me, UK civil service pay for technical experts is only a fraction of what can be earned in the outside world, even in this country. In fact things are at such a low ebb that GCHQ has taken to advertising on the London tube (subway for my US readers).

And they are not the only ones. Travelling to work the other day, I spotted an advert from MI6 (the counter intelligence agency) for operations officers. Frankly, I wasn't inspired to apply, after reading the blurb about whether I could predict where the other passengers were going to get off the train. Everyone who travels in public transport in London knows that what matters is the people who are planning -not- to get off. They are the ones planning to blow themselves up instead!

And the missing laptops? Well that's easy for any aficionado of spy thrillers to explain. Obviously the laptops were eaten by their owners to avoid the information in them falling into the wrong hands. Alternatively they burst into flames after delivering a Skype message starting, "Your mission, should you choose to accept it..." The trouble with members of parliament is that they just don't have any contact with real life!
http://www.computerworlduk.com/management/government-law/public-sector/
news/index.cfm?newsid=19344

Still in the UK, there was an interesting legal ruling this week. A high court ruled that EMI records had no right to sell individual tracks off Pink Floyd albums digitally without the permission of the band. Pink Floyd had a provision in their contract, which dates back to pre-digital times, that EMI couldn't sell tracks off the albums, they had to sell the whole album. This makes sense, since after Sid Barret ('Arnold Lane' and the classic, 'See Emily Play') left them, they had no one who could write singles and concentrated on 'concept' albums.

EMI tried to weasel out of the contract by claiming that the word 'record' in the contract meant that it didn't apply to digital downloads. This was shot down by the court, and it will have implications for many other bands who want to preserve the integrity of their album work.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8561963.stm

And so to Toyota... How easy it is to destroy in a few weeks a reputation built up over decades. And even now they are in denial. Thinking about it, all the programmers I know firmly believe that Toyota's brake/accelerator problems are software related. Programs are complicated, and when you have dozens of them all interrelating, they become fiendishly complicated. More to the point, they become non-deterministic.

That means that you cannot predict exactly what the outcome of an action is because it also depends on what other programs are doing at the time. Even worse, as new models come out, the software from the previous one is patched and fixed to make it run on the new model. This sort of thing is a known cause of bugs, but it's often the only way to get stuff to the market on time. After a few iterations the programs start to suffer from what programmers graphically describe as 'code rot', in which it becomes progressively more difficult to track the torturous routes the program is taking.

The programmers at Toyota have my sympathy. They are faced with a really, really, difficult task, and I wish them all the best.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/06/
AR2010030602448_pf.html


Homework:

I found an interesting article in the February edition of First Monday magazine. It's about the dangers of large data sets produced by web crawlers ('The dangers of Webcrawled datasets' by Graeme Baxter Bell). For those of you who are not familiar with the concept let me explain. Two things have recently come together to produce these very large sets of data for use in social studies. The first is web crawlers. These are programs which search the web for material that fits the criteria you have given it and downloads the material for you. Web crawlers have been in use in one form or another almost since the start of the web, but their use to build large datasets was hampered by the cost of processing large volumes of data.

Recently, however, the development of open source programs like Hadoop, using map-reduce algorithms on networks of PCs has made it relatively cheap and quick to process data sets built by web crawlers. We are talking of sets in excess of a million items here. Such activities used to be the sole province of very large organisations like the state and multi-national businesses. Now, at least theoretically, they are easily within the budget of academic social science departments.

However, as the paper points out, there are a number of problems with this sort of activity.

The first is moral and legal. There is no way, given the size of the data, that you can tell whether all the material is legal. For example, how long do you think it would take for you to look at a million pictures to make sure none of them are child pornography, or copyright restricted, for instance. And even if you did, you (or your web crawler, which amounts to the same thing) have already downloaded them, which is illegal.

But even if you could program the crawler not to download the illegal stuff, there are other problems when you look at the use of such data from a scientific point of view. Let's say you have just downloaded 50 terabytes of data. Within minutes of finishing, seconds perhaps, probably even before you finish collecting it, it's out of date, given the nature of the net.

The fundamental tenet of a science is that experiments should be repeatable (that's why people are so furious about the destruction of the original data in the UK 'ClimateGate' affair). If the experiment/analysis is to be repeatable it means that the original data must be retained and backed-up over long periods of time so it can be reanalyzed, examined for bias and so on.

The paper isn't short, but it is readable and you don't need a degree in computer science or sociology to understand what it's talking about. I'd say it is well worth a read if you have a general interest in the topic. My congratulations to the author, Graeme Baxter Bell, for producing such a useful article.
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2739s

Coda: If you are a sociologist, then you might also like to take a look at another article in the same edition. It's called 'Sociological implications of scientific publishing: Open access, science, society, democracy, and the digital divide', by Ulrich Herb. In it the author agues convincingly that the reason why open on-line peer reviewed scientific journals are not more popular is related to the structure of academia. It's an excellent analysis, but it is an academic sociology paper and therefore, not as accessible as the one previously mentioned.
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2599


Geek Toys:

How about a James Bond style boat/plane to impress your significant other? This invention by a New Zealander behaves as a boat until it reaches 70mph at which stage the hovercraft stuff cuts in and it takes to the skies. Act now - it's a one off, the inventor is selling it to fund future projects.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/oddstuff/3389826/Homemade-flying-hovercraft-up-for-auction

Now this is definitely something for older geeks. Popular Science have just put their entire, 137 year archive on-line for free. And it's searchable. The searching is a bit crude at the moment, but I have little doubt that it will become more sophisticated over time.
http://www.popsci.com/archives


Scanner:

ACM Turing Award goes to creator of first modern personal computer, Charles P. Thacker
http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2010/turing-award-09

Scientists have discovered booze that won't give you a hangover
http://io9.com/5481058/scientists-have-discovered-booze-that-wont-give-
you-a-hangersover

Constant net connection required to play Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 2 on PC
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=235290&site=pcg

Ubisoft’s new DRM cracked in under 24 hours
http://www.infoaddict.com/ubisofts-new-drm-cracked-in-under-25-hours

The dark side of the web
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/356254/the-dark-side-of-the-web

Mobile masters of universe forget mobiles make phone calls
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/01/better_lte_than_never/

Old PS3s locked out of PlayStation Network
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2010/03/01/chubby_ps3_psn_lockout/


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
14 March, 2010

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