WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Banks, Internet police, Nigerian scammers, Apple, Oracle, Google, Alan Turing, Lanai island and more. Yes, it’s another issue of Winding Down coming to you from a not so merrie England, where we are suffering from the wettest drought in recorded history.
Yes - it’s true. Thanks to the shenanigans of the water company we have a shortage of water, while simultaneously suffering from floods. Go figure. Only in England can you get this sort of event!
Anyway - onward to the first of our stories...
Shorts:
Pity the poor customers of the RBS and NatWest banks here in the UK. The banks apparently screwed up a software upgrade last weekend, causing millions of customers to be unable to access money in their accounts, and failing to credit incoming sums of money, such as wages. The problems surfaced on Monday, and they are still not fixed - indeed things are so bad that the banks even have branches open today (Sunday). That’s unheard of in the UK. The banks are murmuring that they with have the problems fixed tomorrow. No one believes them. As Lady Macbeth so aptly put it, “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time...” (William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1606) Act 5, Scene 5)
The banks are not giving out info on what’s going on, though information has leaked suggesting a botched software upgrade. My guess is that this is true, but that in itself wouldn’t have taken a week to fix. I suspect the problem wasn’t caught immediately, and by the time they realized there was a serious bug, it had royally screwed up a lot of customer accounts. In the meantime, there are a lot of unhappy customers...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/21/rbs_natwest_tech_glitch_banking_freeze/
Last month there was an interesting article in Foreign Policy magazine, which discussed the extent to which Europe’s Internet is moving towards having its own private police. This is of concern not only to my European readers - it hold pointers that are equally worrying for US readers. The underlying force for this is twofold. On the one hand the intellectual property owners are trying to insist that the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) police their customers uploads and downloads. On the other the ISPs are faced with demands from state authorities that they monitor the online activities of their customers on-line to search for various infractions, and make the results available on request to those authorities.
The key problem with these trends is the complete lack of judicial oversight of these activities. There is usually no means of challenging the activities of the ISPs, no means of redress, and no legal framework within which the ISPs actions are carried out. The ISPs are digital police, judge, jury, and executioner. Unfortunately the process is insidious, and difficult to oppose, if only because the resulting actions are not being carried out by publicly accountable bodies. After 20 years of consolidation in the ISP business, choice is fast becoming a vanishing commodity, so there is little chance of finding a more ethical ISP in your area.
The article deals with these issues in much more depth, so I’d recommend it for anyone who is worried about these trends.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/05/16/the_rise_of_europe_s_private_internet_police?page=0,0
Ever wondered why Nigerian scammers and their ilk are so crude and unsophisticated with their emails? Turns out that it isn’t an accident. It’s a way, conscious or not, of filtering out people who are not likely to be fooled even if the e-mails are more sophisticated. The scammers are looking for mugs, and only a mug would take an interest in a letter of the quality produced by the scammers. I don’t know about you, I never thought of it that way, but it does make a lot of sense, though!
http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/428151/why_nigerian_scammers_say_they_re_from_nigeria/
I think Apple must have it in for the remnants of the once proud British Empire (founded by Brits who wanted to get away from British weather, and get a little sunshine). Among the places you can’t enter addresses for on your iPhone are Gibraltar, the Cook Islands, and the British Virgin Islands - although the US Virgin Islands are available. Also not mentioned are the Turks and Caicos Islands - A British overseas territory with a population of around 3,000. Strange, I was under the impression that US schools took geography seriously. Maybe the powers that be in Apple dropped out of school even earlier than the other Silicon Valley prodigals...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/15/iphone_denies_existence_of_gibraltar/
Homework:
So, hands up anyone who knows who first came up with the idea of the Internet, and when? And no, it wasn’t Al Gore. It was a Belgian information scientist called Paul Otlet, who considered where the invention of the telephone and television might lead. He called his vision Radiated Library. In it people would ring through to a central library and request information. The librarian would look up the information and send the pages out as TV signals - which he called Televised Books. Sounds familiar? He also suggested dividing the screen into sections to display multiple books - a precursor to the modern multiple windows on your computer monitor.
And when was this? In 1934, nearly 80 years ago!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/paul-otlet-belgian-invent-internet-1934_n_1579417.html
This week was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, British computer scientist, math genius, and World War II code breaker. As every schoolboy (even Adrian Mole) knows, he committed suicide in 1954 by taking a bite out of a poisoned apple after suffering persecution for being a homosexual.
Or did he?
According to Turing expert Professor Jack Copeland, the inquest into Turing’s death was not exactly rigorous, to put it mildly. That Turing died from cyanide poisoning is indisputable, but no one bothered to check whether the half eaten apple which he was supposed to have taken the lethal bite from had cyanide on it. Copeland is advancing the idea - held by many of Turing’s friends at the time - that he wasn’t suicidal at the time.
Copeland’s theory is that Turning accidentally inhaled the poison while carrying out chemical experiments in the badly ventilated spare room of his house. Turing was experimenting with electroplating, a process which uses potassium cyanide, at the time of his death. And inhalation takes longer to cause death than ingestion, so it is consistent with him dying in his sleep some time later.
It’s not exactly as glamorous a death as being hounded into committing suicide by the unfeeling forces of the British state, but according to Prof Copeland, it is a much more likely scenario. Of course we will never know, since the evidence has been long since destroyed, and the investigation was unbelievably sloppy. This controversy will undoubtedly run and run...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18561092
There is a very interesting explanation of how Google organizes its research work in ‘Communications of the ACM’. Basically, it is fairly closely linked to perceived increasing the value of the business by improving the experience for its customers and users (not the same thing, incidentally). Google describe their research as ‘hybrid’, because it links those doing the research into the engineering team that their research will affect. In a way it is an attempt to move the ideas developed by the computing ‘agile’ movement into the realms of research.
It’s not that unusual an idea, and obviously it has worked for Google to a large extent, probably because a lot of scientific research is incremental. However, this sort of organization doesn’t lead to fundamental breakthroughs, as Google realize. They argue that they try to factorize long term research into shorter term measurable components. I’m not sure this works, but it’s an interesting idea.
The paper is well worth reading, it’s not heavily technical, because Google R&D is one of the most important components of research in the modern world - arguably comparable to Bell Labs in the last century. What Google does will affect everybody, everywhere.
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2012/7/151226-googles-hybrid-approach-to-research/fulltext
Geek Stuff:
Here’s a little treat for the Dr. Seuss fans among you all - ‘If Dr. Seuss wrote Star Wars’. Enjoy!
http://imgur.com/gallery/dfEFA
I see that following Oracle’s failure to obtain billions in damages from Google (they literally settled for USD$0.00 - that’s also zero Euros, even at the current exchange rates), CEO Larry Ellison consoled himself by buying up one of the Hawaiian islands. To be precise he bought 98 per cent of Lanai - sixth biggest of the islands, 141 square miles/365 square kilometers, population just over 3,000, two golf courses, and two resorts. No mention yet of a volcano with a sliding lid, secret submarine dock, etc...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/21/oracle_nothing_in_damages/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/21/ellison_buys_island/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanai
OK, here is a nifty little something to overawe your friends. I assume you already bought the world’s biggest TV - the 152-inch Plasma 4K2k 3D from Panasonic last January? No? Well there is a URL for it at the bottom of this snippet. With that mounted on the wall you can move on to the next step, which is to buy the world’s biggest LED TV - Sharp’s AQUOS LC-90LE745U (I wonder who thinks up these designations) 90-incher.
Now hang it on the wall next to the Panasonic (You do have a wall big enough, don’t you?). Then when your friends (and enemies ) visit, casually draw their attention to your set up by putting the same movie on both screens simultaneously, and casually ask which one they think is best. Then mention that you are planning to junk one of the screens when you decide which is best. Keep it ultra casual and you should get a lot of +1 supercoolness marks for this little charade. PS: it’s even more cool if you can get the screens on loan from the local retail TV shop...
http://www.gizmag.com/panasonic-hd-3d/13842/
http://www.gizmag.com/sharp-90-inch-led-tv/23006/
Scanner: Other stories
Low tech turtles defeat modern technology to bring JFK airport to a halt (again)
http://gothamist.com/2012/06/23/theyre_back_migrating_turtles_causi.php
http://au.news.yahoo.com/video/national/watch/25789983/turtles-cause-chaos-on-jfk-tarmac/
Trust Us, We’re Google! (An article about Google’s Data Liberation Front)
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428049/trust-us-were-google/
(Dis)United States of Sleep: U.S.-born Americans’ sleep patterns differ from those of immigrants
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-born-americans-sleep-patterns-dffer-from-immigrants&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120618
Microsoft overhauls certificate management in response to Flame PKI hack
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/06/microsoft-overhauls-certificate-management-in-response-to-flame-pki-hack/
Sixteen security problems bigger than Flame
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security/16-security-problems-bigger-flame-195341?source=IFWNLE_nlt_sec_2012-06-12
Nine year old’s school food blog under attack - but commonsense eventually prevails
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/15/council_ban_school_dinner_blog/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/15/nine_year_old_school_dinner_blog_inaccurate/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/15/council_overturns_school_dinner_photo_ban/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi 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
24 June 2012
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.
