The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 13, 2011

Official News page 13


WINDING DOWN

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

The terrible Japanese earthquakes and tsunamis this week, apart from being an appalling disaster and tragedy, are a salutary reminder that there are still things that are beyond our technical ability to deal with. As I write reports are still coming in of aftershocks, nuclear reactor problems, and increasing losses. Indeed, part of the problem is that in some coastal areas there is no one left to tell how many people were killed.

I sure all our best wishes and sympathy go out to the survivors, and, hopefully, lessons will be drawn about the things we can control - like not building nuclear power stations in earthquake zones.


Shorts:

Do you have any idea just how reliant modern society is on the extremely faint GPS satellite signals? I knew the signals were used for a much wider set of activities than just in-car navigational and cell phone location, but I had no idea just how widespread use is, and how vulnerable it is to just a US$30 jammer!

The problem is that the signals are used to provide accurate timings for many other things, including financial transactions. When parts of San Diego were recently hit by jamming it didn't just affect phones and navigation, ATMs stopped working because they couldn't time transactions, air traffic control was out, medical pagers stopped working, and the busy San Diego harbor lost the ability to guide in boats.

It's very easy to jam GPS signals over a large area. All you need is a US$30 jammer (made in China) which is encased in a box small enough to sit on the car dashboard. These devices are available, though illegal, to use now. But, inevitably, people do use them - truckers to foil in-cab tracking, criminals to disable trackers in stolen goods, for instance.

It's because the signals are so weak that they are easy to jam. One expert has described them as the equivalent of a car headlight 20,000 km (1,250 miles) away. That's a long way - no wonder they are faint! So, next time a piece of electronic equipment stops working, you have yet another thing to check out while trying to get it to start working...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20202-gps-chaos-how-a-30-box-can-jam-your-life.html?page=1

You know I'm beginning to wonder if Microsoft has simply lost it. While Windows 7, in spite of its deficiencies, is undoubtedly one of the better operating systems it has produced, its phone version of Windows 7 is not creating much in the way of demand among users.

Now we have news that it's not going to produce a tablet operating system until the autumn of 2012. How late can you get? Tablets are coming out NOW. NOW. NOW. I thought Google was being slow with its Honeycomb tablet system only just making an appearance, but compared to Microsoft they look positively speedy.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/04/microsoft_tablet_2012/
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-blackberry-for-first-time

And talking of Microsoft, the word on the street is that the Redmond behemoth paid Nokia no less than a billion US dollars to adopt Windows Phone 7 as its handset operating system. No wonder Nokia, who have been steadily losing out in the smartphone market, grabbed the opportunity. The question now is, 'do two losers make a winner'?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/08/nokia_microsoft_deal/

And while we are on the subject of mobile type things, take a look at HP's new EliteBook laptop. This snazzy brushed magnesium-aluminum cased baby claims a 72 hour battery life. Yes that's 72, not 7.2 hours! The first two models are due to hit the shops in the US next month. Keep your eyes peeled - especially if you travel a lot, you could fly round the world on that battery life...
http://dvice.com/archives/2011/02/hp-shows-everyo.php

Fox Films have been spewing out DMCA takedown notices for some time now. I was therefore saddened (honest, guv) to hear that they have managed to maneuver themselves into what we in the programming side of the business call a recursive situation.

But first let me tell you about the Chilling Effects web site. It's a web site about the effects, and scope, of DMCA removal notices. Every time someone gets a DMCA takedown notice they are encouraged to send in the notice to be published so everyone knows about it.

Your with me so far? OK. The notices that Chilling Effects publish, 12,000 of them last year, contain details of the links to the material to be removed. Right. Now, Google, which regularly sends in its takedown notices to Chilling Effects, has been sending in DMCA takedown notices from Fox Films (Remember Fox Films? This is a piece about Fox Films...), which, of course, includes details of the URLs to be removed from the search results.

OK. So the next thing that happens is that Chilling Effects publish the notice and Google index the Chilling Effects web site, so that the latest takedown notice, with all the URLs, appears in searches. Cue Fox Films issuing a new takedown notice, which, of course, Google then send in to Chilling Effects...

By my calculations, assuming that each cycle of Fox->Google->Chilling Effects->Google Index takes about a week, it should take only around five months to make over a million copies of these URLs available on the web!
http://torrentfreak.com/fox-dmca-takedowns-demand-google-to-remove-fox-dmca-takedowns-110307/
http://chillingeffects.org/


Homework:

Further to my intro about the Japanese earthquake, Scientific American has a useful explanation of how earthquakes create tsunami, and how they travel and do damage.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=japan-earthquake-tsunami-waves&WT
.mc_id=SA_CAT_physics_20110311

On a similar theme if you are thinking of visiting London this year, The National Maritime Museum has an exhibition called Impact: Collisions and Catastrophes, of which I hear good things. I haven't seen it myself yet, but I intend to make the time to do so. It's all about the objects from space with which our planet is being bombarded - from meteor showers to giant asteroids - using photographic imagery, film, and interaction. It's on until August 28th.
http://www.timeout.com/london/museums-attractions/event/217911/impact-collisions-and-catastrophes

On a less gloomy note engineers, at the US government Sandia lab have come up with an ingenious way of making traditional methods of generating electricity much more efficient, by using 'supercritical' carbon dioxide instead of steam to drive the turbines. The efficiency gains are not just a few percentage points, either. It's estimated that if you retro-fitted this system to an existing nuclear power plant it would increase the output by 50%. Similar figures would apply to coal, gas, and oil generating plants.

As you can imagine a lot of power utilities are definitely interested!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/07/supercritical_co2_thermally_efficient_gennies/


Geek Toys:

How would you like a car that travels faster than a bullet? There is one under development at the moment, designed to beat the world land speed record by travelling at over 1,000 miles per hour. It uses a Formula 1 Cosworth CA2010 racing engine - as a fuel pump! For low speed - up to 350 mph - it uses a Typhoon jet fighter engine.

Once it reaches 350 mph, the heavies kick in, in the form of an 18 inch diameter, 12 foot long Falcon rocket!

The job of the CA2010 racing engine is to inject a full ton of fuel into the rocket within 20 seconds, giving a top speed of 1,050 mph! The current land speed record is 763.035 mph, and the current low level air speed record is 994 mph...

I wonder what its brakes are like?
http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/03/07/the-car-faster-than-a-speeding-bullet/

Do you suffer from cold feet? Then I have just the thing for you - USB heated slippers! Yep, it's real. Take a look at this URL, which contains a selection of the more bizarre USB devices on the market today, including a grill, a massage ball, and a flower pot cum speaker!
http://gadgets.fosfor.se/the-top-10-weirdest-usb-devices-ever/


Scanner:

Whac-A-Mole: an outbreak of out of order Moles
http://www.todaysfacilitymanager.com/facilityblog/2011/02/friday-funny-an-outbreak-of-out-of-order-moles.html

iPad 2: faith and a See of good grass
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/mixed-signals-10000051/ipad-2-faith-and-a-see-of-good-grass-
10021880/?s_cid=42

Spooks' secret TEMPEST-busting tech reinvented by US student
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/10/through_metal_comms_n_power_reinvented/

Second US 'secret space warplane' now in orbit
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/07/2nd_x37b_in_orbit/

Tablets are the 'post-PC era'? I beg to differ
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20039190-264.html?tag=nl.e703


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
13 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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