WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Yep. It's another issue of Winding Down, the newsletter you all hate to love, or something like that. No analysis this week, just quirky bits of news I thought you might be interested in.
It's not actually raining here in London at the moment - I think it must be saving it all up for the Olympics, not that I care, I plan to go as far away from London as I possibly can while the 'games' are on. Our former mayor lumbered us with paying for this turkey, on the assumption that we would all stop working for a month to allow our already massively overloaded public transport system to be used by tourists.
But enough of that - here's the last Winding Down of September 2011...
Shorts:
The US patent system now has a patent for building a snowman! I'm not absolutely sure this is not a hoax. However, I can find the original filing on the US Trademark and Patent Office (USTPO) web site - just not the actual patent itself. That, though, may be because I'm not familiar with the way the site works. If it's true one has to wonder how the owner plans to collect on it, given that every child who lives in an area where it snow has built one of these.
That the owner himself feels it necessary to include in the patent submission the statement, "The following is not a joke patent. Its completely serious and is a serious undertaking to obtain a patent.", makes one wonder at its purpose - especially with so much prior art around. I suspect this will join patents for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the crust, swinging on a swing sideways, and a method for exercising a cat using a laser pointer, as examples of just how broken the system is!
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110909/09222615881/new-way-to-build-snowman-patented.shtml
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/8011991.html
I see that the police have finally realized that undercover policing is going to be somewhat difficult with the rise of social media. The problem is that, given that almost all teenagers have pictures of themselves up on the net long before they are even thinking about a job, anyone who then joins the police force is then identifiable, and cannot be used for undercover policing. Of course, once you have posted a picture of yourself on, say, Facebook, there is no way of recalling it - even if you take it down, it will still exist somewhere on the net.
There's a similar problem for witness protection programs. How do you enable witnesses to start a new life with a new identity elsewhere, when their pictures and details of their current identity are plastered all over the net? A thorny problem that the police and security services are going to have to crack, or start working in radically new ways.
http://www.techworld.com.au/article/398599/social_media_could_render_covert_policing_impossible_/
Earlier this month ZDNet's Rupert Goodwin had a look at the latest survey from the Business Software Alliance (BSA). According to the BSA, half the world's computer users "acquire their software by illegal means most or all of the time". This, claim the BSA, amounts to a loss of a cool US$59 billion for their members (Microsoft, et al), a figure which assumes, of course, that everyone who pirates a copy would purchase it if they had to. The BSA suggests that most people agree that they shouldn't be naughty, and as such it blames the problem on lack of education.
Rupert takes this at its face value, and suggests that in truth the BSA has a hidden agenda - to firmly establish the use of free, open source software! It's obvious really, when you stop to think about it. If everyone agreed that they had to pay the prices set by the likes of Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle, they would rapidly come the conclusion that they couldn't afford it - Adobe's Creative Suite Master Collection is roughly the yearly median per-capita income for Indonesia, for instance.
In this situation, it wouldn't take them long to discover free, open source, software perfectly capable of doing the same job at no cost!
I think it's time that we demanded the BSA put its money and start funding an immediate education campaign...
http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/mixed-signals-10000051/bsa-secret-agenda-open-source-saves-the-world-10024295/?s_cid=43
Lotsa stuff in the tech press over the past few weeks about Windows 8. That's because preliminary copies have been shown at developers conferences by Microsoft. All sorts of new stuff in it to delight and annoy the developers - they may well have to learn yet another new set of skills. And, of course, the new Windows operating system will have to support yet another set of legacy libraries and application interfaces. Anyone for Silverlight? .NET? C#?
However, for those of you who don't actually write applications for Windows computers, and who struggle top make it behave in a fashion that works the way you think, there is one important new feature that I just have to draw your attention to. Microsoft have given the legendary 'Blue Screen of Death" - DSOD to the cognoscenti, and what Windows user isn't a DSOD cognoscenti - a make over.
Instead of wordy explanations and completely opaque hexadecimal numbers, the new Blue Screen (yes it's still the same blue we all know and love) just says, "Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn't handle, and now it needs to restart." What's the betting that that one change will probably cut calls to help desks by at least 50%?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/16/windows_8_bsod/
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=271674969519070&set=pu.184357191584182&type=1&theater
What would you do if you discovered that there was a bug in a risk management module of a program that you'd written to help investors manage their portfolios? A bug that caused the risks to be underestimated. This is what happened to a program written by Barr M Rosenberg, which has been on sale since 2007. In 2009 an employee of Rosenberg's company discovered the bug and reported it to Rosenberg and the board of directors. So what did Rosenberg do? He told everyone to keep their mouths shut.
And the penalty from the SEC when the details got out? US$2.5 million and an agreement by Mr Rosenberg never to work in the securities industry again. Considering that the bug is estimated to have cost more than 600 client portfolios something in the region of US$217 million in losses, that sounds pretty light to me. Still, Mr Rosenberg will have something to talk about at dinner parties - there can't be that many people around who've been banned from entire industries!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/22/software_bug_fine/
Thinking of buying a GM car fitted with their OnStar mobile phone, satellite navigation, and telemetry tracking kit? Perhaps you should read the small print, because even if you don't sign up for the service, OnStar will start tracking you, and they will not only happily hand this information over to the police, but also to anyone else they deem necessary for "the safety of you or others".
Big brother is coming soon, to a car near you...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/21/onstar_ecall/
I don't know about where you live, but here in London we are suffering from an outbreak of power cable thefts from rail lines. The price of copper is now so high, that it's worth the risk of nicking several miles of cable and selling it as scrap.
The Register, however, has recently pointed out that the thieves haven't done their sums. British Telecom, the original state monopoly phone provider, have more than 75 million miles of copper cable! This is estimated, by The Register to amount to 10 million tonnes of copper, which at current prices is around 20 billion UK pounds (US$32 billion). Buying up British Telecom would be cheap - it's current value is wildly negative. All you need is a bit of asset stripping, rather than wire stripping!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/22/bt_copper_cable_theft/
Homework:
Those of you who took a particular interest in the issues surrounding radioactive material releases at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan may be interested in the latest Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The current issue has a special on the topic, covering issues such as lessons for the future, the politics involved, the health consequences, safety and geoscience, and a comparative analysis of new and traditional media coverage of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
It's not light reading, but it's worth a peruse, and all the articles have abstracts, so you can check what's covered first.
http://bos.sagepub.com/content/current
Geek Toys:
Got a spare US$1,279? For that you can build yourself a 30,000 core cluster on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute - and run it for a full hour. That this is possible was demonstrated recently by Cycle Computing who used the cluster to run a job for a pharmaceutical company. They estimate that the job used the equivalent of 10.9 compute years of work, though they don't say what they are measuring it against. Regardless it's quite an achievement - and I can tell you that as someone whose work involves using Amazon's cloud services!
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/30000-core-cluster-built-on-amazon-ec2-cloud.ars
Steam Punks rejoice! It looks like it might be possible to build a steam powered version of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine in the near future. Now that the Difference Engine has been built, the knowledge gained seems likely to be applied to the more difficult task of building an Analytical Engine. The project has the backing of London's Science Museum, where the first Difference Engine ever built now resides, and the Museum have agreed to make Babbage's plans and notebooks available digitally. (Note: For my travel-ly challenged US readers, there is a second working copy of the Difference Engine in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/21/babbage_notes_digitised/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine
And while your Analytical Engine is puffing away in the background, maybe a little ambient music is called for. And I have just the set of speakers to provide it - Greensound Technology's Serac Series glass speakers. These blue lit glass speakers are so cool - I really, really, want a set. Pricing is not yet available, but they've just gone into production, so they should be coming onto the market very soon...
http://www.gizmag.com/greensound-technolog/16372/
Scanner:
Green energy and jobs will cripple the UK economy: You can't stay a top-ten manufacturer on expensive power
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/04/renewable_fail/
Court tosses out ridiculous antitrust lawsuit against Google
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110901/14553415771/court-tosses-out-ridiculous-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google.shtml
Federal Government pays IT contractors nearly twice as much as its own IT workers
http://www.cio.com/article/689861/Fed._Government_Pays_IT_Contractors_Nearly_Twice_As_Much_As_Its_Own_IT_Workers
Gang used 3D printers for ATM skimmers
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/gang-used-3d-printers-for-atm-skimmers/
EU dons kid gloves for Google competition probe
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/22/google_is_special/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, 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 September, 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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