The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 20, 2011

Official News page 9


WINDING DOWN

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

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the internet
All mimsy were the routers,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
(with apologies to Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky')

Yep, the week before last chunks of the internet went down, as network provider Level 3's links between the US, the UK and the rest of the world stopped working. We noticed it where I work almost immediately - the three of us with SMS links to our monitoring services got messages saying that the monitor couldn't find our site, even though we could get it on screen. The outage was caused by firmware problems in Juniper Network routers. Most stuff was back up within two hours, but the experience just goes to show exactly how vulnerable the system is to problems in key components. See the item in the Scanner section for more details.

And now for this week's news...


Shorts:

At the start of this week Wired drew attention to a series of weird looking grids that had appeared in sparsely populated areas of China. The grids, easily visible on Google Maps have given rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories ranging from communicating with aliens to frightening new weapons. People are still guessing, but the most likely explanation I've heard so far is that they are targeting/orientation/calibration grids for military satellites. Feel free to come up with your own, more exciting, ideas, though!
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/china-gigantic/

A new law (known as SOPA - Stop Online Piracy Act) is being proposed in the US to use the internet DNS system to 'cut off' web sites accused of infringing copyright. They were given an airing in Congress and have been in the news all this week. I'm not going to regurgitate all the issues raised, but I do note that the hearing was heavily stacked against those who opposed the bill.

In the mean time for those of you who want to follow the debate in more details here are the URLs for some of the reports and explanations, mostly from people who oppose the bill. That's because, whatever their views on copyright are, most observers in the technical press consider the measures proposed to be extremely damaging to the working of the internet.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57325134-281/google-facebook-zynga-oppose-new-sopa-copyright-bill/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/15/sopa_versus_everybody/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57325905-281/sopa-bill-wont-make-u.s-a-repressive-regime-democrat-says/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&tag=nl.e703
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000911.html
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000912.html
http://torrentfreak.com/eu-adopts-resolution-against-us-domains-seziures-111117/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57326956-281/sandia-labs-sopa-will-negatively-impact-u.s-cybersecurity/
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57327341-281/opendns-sopa-will-be-extremely-disruptive-to-the-internet/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20&tag=nl.e703
http://www.itworld.com/it-managementstrategy/225265/american-censorship-day-sees-old-media-ads-about-new-media-restrictions

Last March news leaked out to the effect that the internet security and encryption specialist firm RSA had been badly hit by a cyber attack. Details were slow to emerge, but one of the issues raised was that RSA was not the only company to be hit by this sort of attack. Now for the first time, thanks to a congressional briefing, we have some indication of the true scale of the attack, with no less than 760 major organizations and companies being hit.

Most of the names will be familiar - almost 20% of the Fortune 100 companies are on the list of those hit. Instantly recognizable names include IBM, the IRS, Cisco, eBay, Google, Motorola, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, RIM, European Space Agency, VMWare, and Wells Fargo. The series of attacks used 338 command and control networks, and 299 of those networks were located in the China, a fact which is leading to a lot of speculation about just who is behind these attacks!
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/10/who-else-was-hit-by-the-rsa-attackers/


Homework:

Have you ever wondered what it would take to build a small self sustaining community with a reasonable level of comfort? The people who set up hippy communes in the 1960s and 70s rapidly discovered that it wasn't quite as easy as they had imagined (especially in winter). However, things have moved on in the intervening fifty years, and technological help is at hand - should you choose to accept it. Open Source Ecology have produced a Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), which is claimed to have in it all the tools you might need to set up a small community.

It's an interesting idea, and well worth a look to get some idea of just how varied the skills needed for such a 'village' are. However, I remain as skeptical now about the possibilities as I did about hippy communes all those years ago, even though at the time I read the Whole Earth Catalog from end to end. Why am I so skeptical? Because we live in a connected world and even if you make everything yourself, you still need the raw materials. If you have arable land you can grow your own food (possibly), but you have to buy in other raw materials like metals and plastic, and for that you need to generate money.

Power you could probably generate yourself, but whether you could generate enough to power all the machinery is doubtful. and what about fuel for things like prime movers? Then, of course, there are such little items as telephones and, of course, taxes, and all the other burdens that result from the fact that we all live in nation states. You may want nothing to do with the government, but the government certainly wants you!

The GVCS is definitely worth a look though, and it is a fascinating look at how things have progressed in the last 50 years. You never know, you might get some useful ideas from it!
http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs.php

If you read the news, you may have noticed that there is a big problem with the finances of the southern European countries. All sorts of 'solutions' seem to be being applied, and none of them seem to be working. Sounds complicated, but it's not really. It's about countries owing more money that they can repay, and not being able to afford the interest on the debts that they already have. The register has an interesting - and short - explanation for the lay person, which explains clearly what the problem is, and why none of the measure tried so far haven't, and can't work. A neat little intro to the world of sovereign finance, the fallout from which will have global effects in the not too distant future.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/10/were_all_doomed/

Gizmag are currently running an occasional series about inventions that changed the world, and their most recent one is about Mikhail Kalashnikov's AK-47 assault rifle. Not exactly the sort of subject you would expect to find in such a series, but the author, Loz Blain, makes out a good case for this ubiquitous weapon. Its secret lies in its robustness and ease of maintenance. As its designation implies, it first went into production in 1947 - over fifty years ago - and there are now something in the region of 175 million AK-47 or similar rifles in existence. Partly that's because looked after they can easily last forty years, and partly it's because they are so cheap and easy to manufacture.

And it did change the world, because it gave every small guerrilla group and militia access to the sort of small arms firepower that previously only nation state armies had. Not only that but the weapons were cheap and easily available, and ideal for jungle and urban fighting. Every army commander's nightmare.

The last word, as the article says, belongs to Mikhail Kalashnikov himself, "I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work - for example a lawnmower."
http://www.gizmag.com/kalashnikov-ak-47/12306/


Geek Topics:

Calling all bicycling geeks. Fancy owning a sculpture made from bicycle parts? Well now's your chance! The SRAM pART PROJECT took 46 established artists from across the US and gave them each a box of 100 brand new bike components. The results are now on display in Chicago, and start being auctioned online today. There are some pretty amazing sculptures on show, a cut above your bike chain bracelet, to say the least. My favorite is the fish, although the sprinter is pretty stunning too. Take a look for yourself.
http://www.gizmag.com/sram-part-project/20410/

Super-luxury Swiss Watch firm Hublot have produced a wristwatch based on the Antikythera mechanism. There is only one of these watches, and it goes on show at the Baselworld Watch Show in 2012. I'm really tempted to go for a visit to Basel just for the chance to see the device, but I suspect the show is trade only. Sigh.

OK - for those of you who've never heard of the Antikythera mechanism, it is a piece of Greek engineering that pre-dates anything else of a similar complexity. It was discovered in a shipwreck in 1900 off the coast of the Mediterranean island of Antikythera, hence its name. it was part of a large find of items nearly 2,000 years old. At first it was ignored, but in 1951 research on it revealed that it was a device dating back to the 100-300 BC period.

It took nearly another fifty years to figure our how the 82 fragments fitted together and what they did. And it turned out that it allowed the user to select a date, and the machine would predict - accurately - the position of the sun, moon, and the five planets known to Greek astronomers. That wasn't all. It also predicted the lunar phase, solar eclipses and was able to account for leap years! In other words it was the world's first known analog computer...

Wow!

And now the boys at Hublot have painstakingly fashioned a miniature mechanical version of it that is a wristwatch. Totally stunning.
http://www.gizmag.com/hublot-antikythera-mechanism-first-computer-watch/20517/


Scanner:

Global outage takes down sites and services across the internet
http://www.silicon.com/technology/networks/2011/11/07/global-outage-takes-down-sites-and-services-across-the-internet-39748193/

Biologically inspired adhesive tape can be reused thousands of times
http://www.gizmag.com/bioinspired-adhesive-tape-kiel/20406/

The assault on Los Alamos National Laboratory: A drama in three acts
http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/6/9.full

Oracle coughs up $35m owed in unpaid overtime pay
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/11/14/oracle_settles_dispute/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Alison, 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
20 November, 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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