WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Transport security, personal info privacy, HTML links in text messages, out of print Sci-Fi books, cold winters and sunspots, failing to extend life, a 1927 Solvay photo, hover bikes, and iPad rivals, plus a host of URls on topics as diverse as ‘Who inherits your iTunes library?’, ‘How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards’ and iOS device IDs leaks in this week’s versatile edition!
And we start with a look at one of the looniest security ideas I’ve ever come across!
Are you sitting securely? Then we’ll begin...
Shorts:
If those of you in the USA think that that your TSA comes up with loony - and very expensive - schemes to ‘protect’ you from terrorism, you should see what our UK equivalent over here have come up with now. They want to introduce airport style security to screen rail and tube (subway to my US readers) passengers.
To give you an idea of what’s involved, official figures show that about four times as many rail passengers arrive in central London in the morning rush-hour period as pass through the security scanners at Heathrow and Gatwick airports in a full day, and, of course, all those people travel back in the evening!! But that is literally only half of it. Most of those passengers arriving by rail then get on a London Underground tube train to get to their place of work, so you can already double the figure.
To give you an example, when I lived in Isleworth (on the map draw a straight line between central London and Heathrow airport, Isleworth is at about the middle of that line) and used to work at Green Man Gaming in London’s Bloomsbury area, I had the following trip into work each day. Get on the regular train at Isleworth going into Waterloo Terminus. The train stopped at no less than ten intermediate stops, each of which would require its own security from 5am in the morning to roughly 1am the following morning! Waterloo, the only station trains from Isleworth go into, is on the wrong side of the river, so a trip on the tube is called for...
Right! Out of the overground train station, and down into the tube station (another security search) and on to a Northern Line tube train to Kings Cross ( six intermediate stations) and finally a five minute walk to work! And that’s just for one trip, and only in London. If you want to get some idea of the sheer scale and density of the rail/tube transport system in London, point your browser here and scroll down to near the bottom, where it has a box that says ‘Rail’ and click on the PDF link where it says ‘London Rail and Tube service map’.
Staying with the rail and tube services for a moment, let’s take a look at them as terrorist targets. There are two possible strategies for terrorists - maximize the casualties, or maximize the infrastructure damage. Unless you could get into the control rooms, which have very heavy security, it would be difficult to cause serious, lasting infrastructure damage to the system, so it’s likely that the aim would be to cause the maximum casualties. In which case the best option would be to set off an anti-personnel bomb in the concourse of one of the big termini in the middle of the evening rush hour. And security at the entrances to the platforms would not be able to stop that...
But why stop at the train/tube network? There are thousands of buses in London, and the last lot of terrorist attacks here included bombs on buses. To be logical (Ha!) we should also have screening at every bus stop. And then there was the car bombing campaign a few years back... Come to think of it, way way back in the dim distant past the IRA, who long predate the johnny-come-latelies of Al Queda, used to put their bombs in the panniers of push bikes! And incidentally, the first ‘car’ bomb was a horse and cart in Wall Street, aimed against the J P Morgan Bank, which killed 38 and seriously injured 143.*
Think of the number of people and infrastructure it would require to implement just the tube and train bit of the plan. Oh! I get it. It’s a secret government plan to end the recession by employing everyone who is unemployed as security checkers on the transport systems!
http://news.sky.com/story/977145/train-passengers-face-airport-style-security
It seems that consumers are finally starting to take their privacy into their own hands, and rejecting smartphone applications that demand too much private data. A study by the Pew Research Center found that American adults who use smart phone apps had, in half the cases, rejected an app because it demanded too much information. Furthermore, a third had uninstalled apps after figuring out that they were collecting personal information.
This is really interesting, because it shows a definite change in attitude to personal information. Previously protection of personal information has tended to be the province of a few loud (thank goodness) and influential people, like Lauren Weinstein, and various regulatory bodies. Unfortunately, without people taking a personal interest in their private information, it has been relatively easy to sideline those making waves on the issue. Hopefully the survey is indicative of major change in attitude.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/consumers-say-no-to-mobile-apps-that-grab-too-much-data/?hp
Ten house points and a gold star for the New York Times for having told a patent troll it’ll see them in court over an HTML links in text messages patent. A large number of companies have already settled with the owner of this ridiculous patent, Helferich Patent Licensing. At last there is someone with the guts to stand up against them. Well done! More on the court battle, which is likely to last well into next year, in future issues.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/28/nyt_versus_helferich/
Homework:
Now here’s a little something to cheer up science fiction fans. Singularity & Co, a Brooklyn based bookshop, is working to rescue out of print old Sci-Fi books and bring them back into circulation as e-books. The biggest problem they face is unraveling the copyright tangle that often surrounds such books, many of which had chunks originally published in assorted Sci-Fi magazines of the early days, as well as the linking sections written specially for the book version. And as for the copyright of the cover art...
With encouragement from the likes of Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow and Ken McLeod, and a massively successful, and over-subscribed, Kickstarter campaign, they have already managed to re-publish two books, with more on the way. I think I may well take out one of their subscriptions to support them. (And yes, I am a Sci-Fi freak!)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/the-brooklyn-bookshop-saving-out-of-print-sci-fi-one-e-book-at-a-time/
As the climate change aficionados struggle to explain some of the more recent very chilly European winters in terms of computer models that showed exactly the opposite happening, an interesting report has just come out from German researchers at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität (University) of Mainz. They wanted to look at the historical relationship between periods of low solar activity and cold weather. However, historically temperature measurements (even where they exist) have not always been reliable enough to provide comparable figures, so they hit on the brilliant idea of using the records of the Rhine river freezing over, so that commercial traffic ground to a halt, as a proxy measurement for cold winters. The Rhine is a big river, it doesn’t freeze over unless it’s very cold.
They were able to compare this to records of know sunspot activity (which are reasonably accurate) and establish a correlation between low sunspot activity, and extremely cold Central European winters for the period 1780 to 1963. The researchers calculate that there is a 99% chance that this is a valid measurement. This also throws some light on the medieval period little ice age which corresponds to the well-known “Maunder Minimum“ which is a subject of debate among climate scientists. A very clever and interesting piece of research.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/29/frozen_euro_winters_linked_to_low_solar_activity/
http://www.gizmag.com/rhine-freezing-solar-cycle-weather/23886/
Nature magazine has some bad news for the proponents of restricting calory intake to extend life. A 25 year long study of rhesus monkeys that were fed 30% less than control animals, shows that any differences in lifetime are due to genetic factors, not eating less food. I could go on at length about certain types who are opposed to people enjoying themselves, but instead I’ll let you read the article, reprinted in Scientific American.
Gourmets 1 - Killjoys 0
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=calorie-restriction-fails-lenghten-lifespan-primates&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_SP_20120903
Want to see an amazing picture of all of the top physicists and mathematicians of the first half of the 20th Century? The take a look at this photograph of the invitees to the 1927 Solvay Conference. Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Marie Curie, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac and Louis de Broglie are among those present. The period saw the foundations of quantum theory laid by the people in the photograph. A very exciting time for scientists, and many of the things we now take for granted use inventions whose theoretical underpinnings were laid down by the people in this picture.
http://io9.com/5940299/twenty+nine-of-historys-most-iconic-scientists-in-one-photograph-+-now-in-color
Geek Stuff:
Now here’s something cool. How would you like to be the first one on your block to own a Star Wars style hover bike? Californian manufacturer Aerofex Corp look like they’re well on the way to producing one. The footage they recently released shows a prototype skimming around a dry lake bed in the Mojave desert. It’s a bit clunky looking , but with some of reduction in size, and proper fairings it could look pretty nifty. Certainly they seem to have cracked most of the technical challenges involved.
I wonder how long it will take the powers that be to come up with a way to tax and require a license for it?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9494328/Aerofex-hover-bike-brings-Star-Wars-transport-closer-to-reality.html
If you don’t want to lock yourself into Apple’s ecology, then with the possible exception of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 10.1, there has been little available to geeks and other users. Now however the scene is changing with the Google Nexus 7, and the new Kindle Fire tablets. And what’s more, the price is right for these babies. This is not the place for a serious review, but I’d suggest that you take it upon yourselves to examine these new options carefully, but be aware that the Kindle is not without its own lock-in problems. Regardless, here’s a couple of URLs to get you started...
http://www.gizmag.com/nexus-7-review/23538/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19509626
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/08/samsung-galaxy-note-10-1-hands-on-a-solid-tablet-with-big-shoes-to-fill/
Scanner: Other stories
Who inherits your iTunes library?
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/who-inherits-your-itunes-library-2012-08-23
How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards
http://io9.com/5940036/how-copyright-enforcement-robots-killed-the-hugo-awards
The Algorithmic Copyright Cops: Streaming video’s robotic overlords
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/streaming-videos-robotic-overlords-algorithmic-copyright-cops/all/
1 million iOS device IDs leaked after alleged FBI laptop hack
http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/09/1-million-ios-device-ids-leaked-after-alleged-fbi-laptop-hack/
Sniffing open WiFi networks is not wiretapping, judge says
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/sniffing-open-wifi-networks-is-not-wiretapping-judge-says/
* If you want to read an amazing history of the car bomb from Buda’s wagon through to Baghdad I recommend Mike Davis’s book ‘Buda’s Wagon: A brief history of the car bomb’ (My review is on the same page. We don’t get a cut from Amazon, so there nothing financial to disclose about the recommendation!)
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, 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
2 September 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.
