WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Back to the regular format this week. Hmmm... Looks like it's Intel's turn to come under the spotlight, together will a couple of high profile crashes from other well known net businesses.
So, with no further ado, here are the usual suspects, and a few new ones.
Shorts:
Here in the UK we've just opened a massive wind farm, off Thanet, on the east coast near London. Sounds great - until you look at the numbers, that is. Theoretically its output is 300MW of electricity, but it only reaches its full capacity if the wind is blowing in the right direction, at the right speed. And in the UK, the wind, like the rest of the weather, is notoriously fickle. Based on figures available for other wind farms for last year, the average output will only be a quarter of the capacity - 75MW.
So why are investors so happy to plough money into these unsightly beasts? To find that out you have to look at the subsidies from taxpayers and the cost to end users. To take the new Thanet wind farm as an example, the cost of the electricity is three times that of 'regular' electricity, and the supply companies are obliged to buy it, on top of which the owners also get a 200% subsidy from the taxpayers.
Once it comes fully on line with the 341 wind turbines, the project will, over its 20 year lifetime, generate (so to speak) a cool 1.2 billion UK pounds (about US$1.9 billion) subsidy. That gives a return on capital of 13%. No wonder the investors are a rubbing their hands with glee. Oh, and yes it does apparently generate 'green' jobs - 21 permanent ones according to company figures!
This gives a new take on an old joke. Q. What's the difference between a dairy farm and a wind farm? A. A dairy farm milks cows and a wind farm milks taxpayers...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8025148
/The-Thanet-wind-farm-will-milk-us-of-billions.html
I see that the master key to Intel's High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) encryption system went walkies earlier this week. Very sad. They should be more careful since this is the Digital Restriction Management (DRM) system that is supposed to protect high definition video as it moves between TVs, cable boxes, satellite receivers, and even Blu-ray players. Ooops!
Intel is flexing its legal muscles and threatening to sue anyone who uses the key to provide a box that cracks the protection. Sounds to me like trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted!
The fascinating thing, though is that the key doesn't appear to have been leaked. The key concerned is the master key (why don't they have mistress keys?) which is used to generate individual keys for each device that's using HDCP. Intel seems to have taken a lot of trouble to provide the key with hardware protection, so no one could directly access it. However, what the geniuses at Intel seem to have missed is that you only need 50 or so of the individual device keys to be able to mathematically reconstruct the master key!
I understand that police are searching for a hacker with at least 50 high definition televisions in his/her house... In the mean time I wonder how long it will be until T-shirts with the key printed on them are available?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/no-pirate-bonanza/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/intel-threatens-consumers/
Ironically, news of the HDCP hack came out shortly after Intel revealed at its developer forum that it is integrating new anti-theft technology into its hardware to discourage laptop theft. It seems that in future, with this technology, you can render the laptop useless simply by sending a message via the Internet or via the hardware's built in GPS technology.
What are they thinking? I can just see the headlines now, "ONE MILLION LAPTOPS BRICKED BY THE PEEK_A_BOO ZOMBIE NETWORK." Nice try, but no cigar, Intel. I don't want a machine that someone can turn off, and I doubt if anyone else does either...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/21/intel_anti_theft/
And talking of Intel - it seems to be their week - they've also come up with a new wheeze to fleece customers. Actually, it's a very old wheeze first dreamed up by mainframe manufacturers (hi, IBM). The idea is that you produce a CPU, only part of which is actually accessible. Then, once the sucker has got this little monster at the heart of their computer you tell them that they can have more of their own CPU - for a price - US$50 in this case. For the US$50 you get to download software to unlock the extra goodies you already bought on your Pentium G6951 processor...
This scheme worked pretty well on mainframes, but that was with the very big companies who could afford to buy such machines, and who were pretty unlikely to install the needed links themselves. In this case I can see two possible outcomes to Intel's nice little earner. The first outcome is a hack, in which case everyone will get the full power (Vvvrrrrooom!) at no extra cost, or, alternatively a class action case based on the 'bait and switch' laws. Maybe they'll even get both of the alternatives at the same time!
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/intel-wants-to-charge-50-to-
unlock-stuff-your-cpu-can-already-d/
Some of you may have got tangled up in the crash of JP Morgan Chase's online banking services the other week. The whole system was off-line for some 36 hours (Monday night and all Tuesday), which is a long time in the banking business. Well, now it seems that the problem was down to Oracle. User profiles are stored in an Oracle database, and four files were corrupted.
Unfortunately, the corruption was replicated in the hot backup (cue video of techies frying eggs - easy over - on the hard drives), so they had to go back to the Saturday night back up. They then spent all Tuesday reapplying the 874,000 transactions that had taken place between the backup and the start of Monday night. What mess, but at least they don't seem to have lost anything. And now the finger pointing is undoubtedly about to start...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/20/chase_oracle/
This was obvious a week for outages, because Facebook suffered its longest outage for four years - two and a half hours of no access. What happened was that a change was made to a configuration file, and the change made was wrong. Not to worry though, there is an automated system for fixing these sort of programs.
However, readers, we know, don't we, that anyone can screw up, but to really screw up massively you need a computer. And so it was that the auto-anti-screw-up-program compounded the mess. I won't go into the details, suffice to say that even when they fixed the problem the auto system screwed it up again. If you really want the story in all its gory details, the URL has it - straight from the Facebook's mouth, so to speak!
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=431441338919&id=9445547199&ref=mf
To judge by the latest wheeze that they've come up with, the Airbus Consortium, makers of planes too heavy to land at most commercial airports, are getting more than a little desperate. They are now proposing to build transparent airplanes! Words fail me. Even if you like the idea of zooming around at 30,000ft with no visible means of support, just think of hurtling down toward the runway when landing. Some things are best left unseen.
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/63749/20100920/airbus-invisible-plane-
aviation-see-through.htm
Homework:
In this week's homework I have three fascinating TED videos for you to look at.
The first is a talk about how you can study and use social networks to make predictions about a wide range of things from the spread of viruses to risky behaviors. As a sociologist and a techie I found this really interesting. As a political analyst, I found the presenter's complete obliviousness to the darker implications of his work rather frightening. None the less, this is definitely the sort of work that will take sociology in the direction of being a real science, rather than a black art.
http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_how_social_networks
_predict_epidemics.html
I have no such reservations about the second video. It's a brilliant discussion about where good ideas come from. And contrary to popular belief, and instigators' later recollections, they come out of informal discussion with friends and colleagues, often over coffee, over a period of time, not eureka moments. The examples are fascinating, and I really enjoyed this video.
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html
The last video is just four minutes long and it's about sleep and our internal body clock. Have a look at it. It will completely change your view of what 'natural' sleep really is.
http://www.ted.com/talks/jessa_gamble_how_to_sleep.html
Geek Toys:
Well, not so much toys as geek nostalgia. Xerox PARC labs are 40 years old this month, and ComputerWorld has a set of interviews with some of the people who made it work. For those of you who don't know, PARC was where computer graphical interfaces were invented. PARC also invented ethernet networking and the laser printer, to mention only its most famous innovations. Take a look.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9186198/Xerox_PARC_turns_40_
Marking_four_decades_of_tech_innovations?taxonomyId=18&pageNumber=1
Scanner:
UK passes buck on Europe's cookie law with copy-paste proposal
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/17/eu_cookie_law/
Large Hadron Collider scientists spot potential new discovery
http://www.physorg.com/news204290256.html
Thieves jam key-fob lock signals in mystery car thefts
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/21/car_jammer_vehicle_theft_scam/
Apple and Google may end wage-capping case
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/20/apple_google_salary_probe/
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
26 September, 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.
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