WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Welcome back to Winding Down, produced here in England's green and traffic congested land! Deliberately so, I might add. We just found out that the last government had a policy of increasing the number of sets of traffic lights on roads. Not only that, but it increased the length of time that it stopped traffic in all directions so pedestrians could cross.
The result, here in olde London towne, was a return to the levels of congestion seen before the central charging zone was introduced, even though there was no increase of traffic back to the old levels. All done in the name of improving safety for pedestrians. Of course it takes no account of the damage to urban dwellers' health caused by vastly increasing the number of vehicles whose idling engines sat pumping out pollution!
In the mean time <cough, splutter> here is your weekly fix of Winding Down...
Analysis: On blogs and bloggers
Recently, Arianna Huffington, proprietor of the highly regarded Huffington Post news site, sold the Post to AOL, for US$315. Like many news sites the Post has paid journalists and is also home to unpaid bloggers. As a result of the sale, a number of the bloggers are demanding to be paid for their writing. Fail to do so, they threatened, and they would go on strike. Ms Huffington basically shrugged her shoulders and told them to go on strike and see if anyone noticed.
This raises interesting questions about the role of blogs and whether the bloggers should be paid for their work. I think part of the problem is that there are two different entities called 'blogs'. The first is a column produced by paid journalists - Robert X Cringely's column in Info World is one such example. Such blogs usually come out on a regular schedule.
The other type is produced by amateurs (in the strict sense of not being paid), and often, but not always, such offerings have no fixed timetable - they are produced when the author feels they have something to say. Such offerings reflect what the author's interests are, rather than the editorial line of wherever they are being published.
Of course the line is blurred, there are many highly quality blogs produced by amateurs, but the key divide remains payment. The truth is that unpaid bloggers can write what they want and they may, as in the case of the Huffington Post, offer their output to commercial sources in order to get their musings to a wider audience. Journalists write what they are paid to write, whether they want to or not.
I suspect a lot of bloggers aspire to become paid for their work. Be careful, you might get what you wish for - journalism is not all it's blogged up to be - it's hard work at all hours of the day and night, and mostly involves writing about things even when you have no inspiration at all. I can tell you this from personal experience - I was the production editor of a London listings magazine for several years. There were about sixty of us involved and I considered it an easy week if I didn't work 84 hours!
The web is brilliant in that it has allowed people's creativity to flower, especially in prose writing. A lot of it is dross, but that's not the point. The point is that a millions of people got to discover that they could do things that they would never have had a chance, or the inspiration, to try otherwise. Of course the net itself is not without its own version of peer pressure, and that produced blogs from people who did it because all their friends were doing it - there are probably more abandoned blogs than there are live ones!
But I digress. The question is, should bloggers be paid? Possibly. I think the defining issue is they should be paid if someone else controls the subject and the content of the blog. Otherwise it's a hobby, and people don't get paid for their hobbies. As a friend of mine whose antiques business had just gone bust once said to me, 'Never try to turn a hobby into a business - it doesn't work.'
http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/arianna-huffington-go-ahead-go-strike-no-one-will-notice-25230#
Shorts:
Apple may have just announced the iPad 2, dragging back Steve Jobs to do the presentation for it, but it must be feeling under siege these days. Much of it is a product of Apple's ego, paranoia, and maybe even greed.
- Publishers, themselves mostly in serious financial straits, are up in arms about Apple's proposals to skim off a large chunk of their subscription fees.
- Google's Android operating system is not merely breathing down Apple's neck - in some important markets Android phones have overtaken iPhones in sales.
- Steve Jobs, the personification of Apple, is on sick leave again, and there appears to shareholders to be no organized system to replace him.
- There are reports that there are production problems with the iPad 2.
- And to cap it all, according to The Wall Street Journal, several US regulators are starting look closely at the terms and conditions Apple imposes on iPad content providers. And, as a cherry on the top, word comes out of the east that the EU is monitoring the situation...
Apple has dragged itself out of worse holes in the past - but that was when Steve Jobs was in top form. The real question now is, can it do so again? To be honest I have no idea, but it's easy to see why shareholders are worried. I suspect that the key short term issue will be whether Apple can strike a deal with the publishers that both sides can live with. A critical part of the problem is that unlike the publishers, Apple is not short of cash, or losing money, which will enable it to hold out for longer than may be in its long term interest.
In the long term, whether Apple like it or not, the future of the company is inextricably bound up with the life and death of Steve Jobs. Companies built around the charisma and genius of one man have a habit of not surviving the demise of their founders. Will Apple go the same way? We shall see.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/25/apple_under_siege/
Microsoft and Google on the same side? Yep, it's true. They are working together to get a geo-tagging patent held by a Texan company invalidated. The patent has an interesting and checkered history, previous owners being based in such well known tax havens as Liechtenstein, the West Indies and the British Virgin Islands! A few years back it ended up in the hands of the Texas-based GeoTag Inc, which is trying to sue nearly 400 companies over their use of geo-tagging - many of whom are customers of Google Maps and Bing Maps.
Hence the collaboration which argues that the patent is invalid because the patent office failed to take into account prior art when it granted the patent. I'll be keeping an eye on what happens to this patent in the future.
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/03/microsoft-and-google-jointly-sue-geotag.html#
I see that a bunch of teenagers in the UK have been jailed for what is described as the "criminal equivalent of Facebook". The Gh0stMarket site had about 8,000 members, and was one of the largest English language Internet crime forums. The site dealt in the trading of stolen cards, database details, pins, and passwords. Police estimate the site cost credit card users as much as US$26 million. (Take this with a pinch of salt - police estimates of the costs of criminal activity are always notorious over-inflated. To be fair, they do try to balance this out by systematically underestimating the number of demonstrators at public demonstrations!)
Two of the teenagers involved got five years in the clink, while other received lesser sentences. That sounds pretty lenient to me given the enormous amount of trouble they caused the owners of the stolen cards. Still I guess it's a start.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/teenagers-jailed-for-running-8220criminal-equivalent-of-facebook-8221/472
Homework:
There is an interesting piece on Matt Blaze's blog about the way in which professional engineering and scientific bodies are fighting to stop papers from being circulated free on the Internet. This includes the computing professional bodies ACM and the IEEE. Pretty ironic, really, when you consider that their members were the ones that created the facilities for the free and open distribution of new discoveries!
http://www.crypto.com/blog/copywrongs/
Interested in gravity? We would be in trouble without it! Scientific American's web site is republishing an article on the topic by the legendary scientist George Gamow from its 1961 edition. It's well worth a read.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gamow-gravity&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_physics_20110304
Wow! Researchers in Taiwan have discovered that silk is usable in semi conductors - the silk acts as an insulator layer for thin film transistors. Imagine being able to take off your bandana, smooth it out and read the latest news on it. OK, it's not quite at that level yet, but perhaps eventually...
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/378741/taiwan_researchers_turn_silk_flexible_e-devices/
There's a fascinating piece in Techworld about how Solid State Drives (SSDs), which are becoming very popular in laptops, are making life difficult for forensic analysis.
The SSDs have their own logic, which automatically runs when they are powered up. They are always moving things around to ensure maximum efficiency, carrying out delayed deletions, and such like. Because of this it is no longer possible to reproduce the state of the drive when the police seized it - which is required for evidence.
The logic circuits are an integral part of the drive chip, so it's not possible to fire up just the 'drive' part - it's a single integrated circuit. I doubt, though, that this will be reflected in any CSI television series in the near future!
http://news.techworld.com/security/3263093/ssd-fimware-destroys-digital-evidence-researchers-find/
Geek Toys:
Most shooter game players know that in real life you can't just keep spraying the baddies with an endless stream of bullets. Apart from anything else the barrel would melt and droop as it overheated (gives the expression 'Shooting yourself in the foot' a new meaning!). But this may soon be an artifact of the past.
Enter the cobalt gun barrel. Engineers have recently figured out how to create the rifling in ultra-hard, high temperature cobalt alloys, and the way is open for longer bursts of fire. In a test 24,000 rounds were fired causing the barrel to reach 1,100 degrees. Now all they have to is to figure out how to pack 24,000 rounds into a squaddie's back pack! At least the firer won't need to take cover - just surround himself with the ammo...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/03/cobalt_gun_barrels/
Scanner:
A patrol for the web’s playgrounds
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/business/27meta.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25
Lauren Weinstein: Encryption Now!
https://profiles.google.com/lauren4321/posts/HJhp5PLhEao
Traffic-light plague sweeps UK
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/28/traffic_light_report/
Wheat disease a threat to global food security
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/01/3152288.htm
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
6 March, 2011
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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