Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 16, 2012

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WINDING DOWN

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

by Alan Lenton

A bumper crop this week: the iPhone 5, Facebook, Amazon and Kindle, the East German Stasi, bendy buses, NFC, Galaxy Zoo, Astral Monolith, Raspberry Pi, YouTube, Helium filled disk drives, wrongful convictions, and new cloning of chip-and-pin cards. Enjoy.

It’s also Winding Down’s eleventh birthday this month. Normally we would celebrate with massive fireworks displays, a la Macys 4th July efforts, but unfortunately, we are still in a recession and bread is hard enough to come by, let alone circuses... For the record, I’ve written 446 editions of this rag in that time - well over 70,000 words. Sometimes, I wonder if anyone reads it :)

Ah well, the show must go on...


Story: The new iPhone

In a walled garden somewhere, the ghost of Steve Jobs is gnashing its teeth over the catch up nature of the iPhone 5 and the forthcoming iPad Mini. Apple single handedly created the smartphone market (my spelling checker just suggested sousaphone for smartphone - fortunately I managed to resist the temptation). But those days seem to have passed, although it’s not yet at the ‘me too’ stage.

Looking through the reviews of the new iPhone, there seems to be little to excite. Indeed the most commented on thing seems to be the new ‘Lightning connector’. Big deal. OK, so it’s now got a four inch screen, but that’s still at the very bottom of the range for the current generation of smart phones. It’s thinner (as will be your wallet, after you’ve bought one) , it’s got upgraded chips, and a new camera, and it’s got a new maps app. But it still doesn’t have any facilities for upgrading the storage with a micro-SD card, which is par for the course on all other high end smartphones. And, of course everything is still locked in to the iTunes walled garden.

It’s not really in any sense ‘bad’. Far from it, it means that people who like iPhones will now have access to the same sort of experience as other people with expensive, high end smartphones have. It’s just that Apple used to set the pace and define what being high end means. Now you have to look to vendors like Samsung for that sort of innovation, for instance the Galaxy Note, which opened up a whole new market that no one knew was there. There is though one innovation introduced by Apple over the last year - the unprecedented use of legal actions worldwide to try to prevent other companies from selling competing phones.

When the iPhone first came out, I desperately wanted one, it was exciting, new and sexy, but there was no way I could have afforded it. The latest variant leaves me cold, and would represent a downgrade in features from my Galaxy Note. Sad really, but time moves on and yesterday’s leaders become today’s followers.

The reviews of the new iPhone were in general fairly neutral, but the analysts opinions were pretty divided, and I’ve collected a few URLs to give you a flavor of what views were out there. (I’ve included the headlines so you can pick and choose which ones you want to read.) My personal favorite is the excellent Lewis Page’s apocalyptic ‘The iPHONE 5 UNDERMINES western DEMOCRACY’, which includes a swipe at Stephen Fry...

The iPHONE 5 UNDERMINES western DEMOCRACY
Viewpoint: Apple’s iPhone launches no longer excite
Apple’s fundamental iPhone 5 problem
Another new iPhone? Beam me up, Scotty
iPhone 5 to restore Apple as smartphone leader, says analyst
The iPhone 5 plays catch-up with Android smartphones
Apple announces iPhone 5 - its thinnest, lightest and most powerful phone to date
iPhone 5 sales exhaust initial supply, trip up servers


Shorts:

And while we are on the subject of mobile phones, I was looking at a review of Nokia’s new Windows phone the other day. All I can say is that I wouldn’t be seen dead with a phone in that vile yellow color...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57505968-94/nokia-aims-to-dazzle-with-windows-phone-8-lumia-920/?tag=nl.e703&s_cid=e703

I see that Facebook are up to their privacy busting tricks again. TechCrunch has an interesting piece describing five design tricks that they use to get you to release your private information. I’m not going to go through them here, since I don’t use pictures in this newsletter, and the article illustrates its arguments with old and new versions of various Facebook features to show how it is becoming more and more difficult not to open up your private info. I’d recommend that any serious Facebook user spend a few minute going through this article to heighten their awareness of the problems with Facebook’s permissions, since most of them are fairly subtle and easy to overlook until it’s too late.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/25/5-design-tricks-facebook-uses-to-affect-your-privacy-decisions/

I see that Amazon has backed off in its attempts to have adverts on all of its new Kindle Fire slabs. Originally there was no option to pay extra and have no ads, but now thanks to the outcry, and, I suspect a boycott that seems to have seriously reduced advance orders, Amazon has backed off and announced that a no-adverts version will be available if you are prepared to pay a little extra. That seems to me to be an imminently sensible case of bowing to consumer pressure. Would that certain other companies (you know who you are) were as sensitive to their customers’ needs!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/10/amazon_kindle_fire_pay_more_to_rid_slab_of_ads/

The world’s biggest jigsaw - that’s how the files left behind by the East German Stasi secret police after the fall of the Berlin Wall have been described. After the fall of the wall the Stasi tried to destroy the files containing details of their activities. Unfortunately, their East German shredding machines weren’t up to the task and rapidly broke down, so the files were torn up by hand and stuffed into sacks, 600 million torn up pieces of paper, in 16,000 sacks. These were supposed to be sent for disposal, but before that could happen the Stasi HQ building was invaded by demonstrators and the secret police were turfed out.

Now an attempt is being made to piece together all the files, in an effort to uncover crimes, and re-unite people with their families. (Children of politically suspect parents were often seized by the Stasi and adopted by ‘reliable’ families.) It’s quite tall order, but with the help of shape recognition technology and painstaking work by a small team, some of the material is starting to be reconstructed. This is a project that will take many years, but those involved are adamant that it is worthwhile.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19344978

Ugh! Some manufacturers have no idea. Bendy buses. They really don’t work in European towns with their small twisty streets. We had them imposed on us here in Olde London Towne, and everyone hated them. Those were two units strung together with a concertina affair between them. In fact, getting rid of them was one of the things that Mayor Boris Johnson campaigned on when he beat Ken Livingstone, who had introduced and persisted in defending the beasts.

Undaunted, the brilliant minds at Fraunhofer IVI, the Technical University Dresden and Wittur Electric Drive GmbH has come with an even bigger and more unwieldy version that features no less that -three- units linked together. This monster is 100 ft long and can carry 256 passengers (that number suggests that it was designed by a computer) and is called the AutoTram Extra Grand. If you ask me it’s a bendy bus too far!
http://www.gizmag.com/autotram-extra-grand-worlds-largest-bus/24053/


Homework:

One of the new features that didn’t appear in the new iPhone 5 was a near field communications (NFC) chip. As Apple’s marketing VP Phil Schiller put it, “It’s not clear that NFC is the solution to any current problem”. That’s a good point, and taking that quote as a starting point, there is an excellent article by Dean Bubley on his blog about the problems with NFC. Dean focuses on three key problems that are stalling the increasing use of NFC: a focus on mobile payments, complexities caused by the security needed, and ergonomic deficiencies.

Ergonomic deficiencies are easy to explain - tapping an expensive chunk of glass and electronics against an unyielding lump of metal is not a wise move. The other two problems are interlinked. Technically, NFC in phones is too slow for many uses, for instance for a customer to go through a turnstile without having to break their step requires that the whole transaction take less than a third of a second. That’s a far shorter time than any existing phone NFC can handle.

Then there is the whole issue of security, which is, of course necessary if the phone is going to have access to your funds. Tell me honestly, would you trust the equivalent of all your credit cards to reside in your mobile phone, no matter how thrilled you are with it? I wouldn’t, and I really like my phone. This has had a bad knock on effect. The different groups involved in NFC payments all have different security requirements, and trying to draw up a decent application programming interface is stalled in red tape and bureaucracy, which means that app developers can’t start to write new, unusual, and imaginative apps that take advantage of the capabilities of NFC, which would in turn advance its use, and maybe, just maybe, help to overcome the security problems in using phones as wallets.

Dean’s material is always well thought out and reasoned, and this piece is no exception. I’d recommend taking a look at it if you have a general interest in what’s going on in this (near!) field.
http://disruptivewireless.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/how-to-save-nfc-kill-idea-of-mobile.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication

Now, here’s something a little different for those of you that like giant collective endeavors. How would you like to help the astronomers classifying galaxies? There are about a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. We haven’t got pictures of them all - yet, but what we have got is pictures of something in the region of 932 million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Classifying these galaxies is the first step in upgrading our understanding of how galaxies develop over their history, and that’s where you, dear reader, come in. Let me introduce you to the Galaxy Zoo, which is a collective experiment in classifying these galaxies, and thereby helping to advance science. No experience needed, the Zoo will teach you all you need. Go for it!
http://www.galaxyzoo.org/
http://www.sdss.org/


Geek Stuff:

The Supernovacondensate web site has a superb image taken from the cover of the new album by black metal* band Astral Monolith. I haven’t heard their music, but the album cover is magic. If anyone can find a big enough copy of the picture to use as wallpaper on my home computer, please do let me know!
http://supernovacondensate.net/2012/09/14/3904/

Here are a couple of snippets of Raspberry Pi computer news. The first is the fascinating case of a hacker who has hacked his Kindle to use it as a monitor for his Raspberry Pi. Quite amazing. You can even use the Kindle keyboard as input to the Pi, assuming you can type sideways, since the screen is in landscape mode. The article includes instructions for how to do this yourself, assuming you are brave enough. I may well have a crack at it with my current Kindle when I get round to upgrading to one of the new paper white versions.

The second snippet is news of a Raspberry Pi ‘super-computer’ made out of 64 Pi nodes and Lego. (What would you use!) It seems that the main problem encountered by the builders, a team from Southampton University, was getting their hands on 64 Raspberry Pi machines. Of course, as a super computer it’s not in the same league as Big Blue and its ilk, however, it’s a brilliant cheap teaching option. You can teach all the techniques used in supercomputing and parallel computing without your budget climbing into the stratosphere. Magic! At least I now know where all the Raspberry Pi boards that people on my QtOnPi email list have been complaining haven’t turned up yet, have gone!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/11/kindleberry_pi/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/12/raspberry_pi_supercomputer/


Scanner: Other stories

YouTube blocking the anti-islamic video: Censorship or responsible stewardship? (A useful discussion of a very important topic - AL)
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000987.html

Virus lab blogger collared by blundering copyright cop bot
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/10/malware_research_blog_robo_takedown/

HGST floats helium for low power, massive capacity hard drives
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/13/hgst_helium_filled_disks/

Red Flags: Early warnings of wrongful convictions
http://www.psmag.com/legal-affairs/red-flags-early-warnings-of-wrongful-convictions-45854/

Cambridge boffins: Chip-and-PIN cards can be cloned - here’s how
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/13/chip_and_pin_security_flaw_research/


* According to the Wikipedia, “Black metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal music. Common traits include fast tempos, shrieked vocals, highly distorted guitars played with tremolo picking, blast beat drumming, raw recording and unconventional song structures.” So now you know!

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
16 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.

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