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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 30, 2013

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WINDING DOWN

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

by Alan Lenton

Erasing the G8 venue from the face of Google Earth, fining public bodies, Xbox One, ‘Cease and Desist’ orders, Apple v Samsung (yawn...), Windows 8.1, New York tunnels, vacuum tube computers, WarGames movie computer, the fastest electric car, and a musical hat with a difference, make up the main stories this week. URLs point you to Barnes & Noble, the right to be forgotten, patent-troll-nixing, a table top anti-matter gun, and the link between clean air and more hurricanes.

Mostly small stuff this week - small but perfectly formed...

Shorts:

Do you rely on Google Maps and Google Earth? Then you would have had a serious problem had you been going to the recent G8 conference in Northern Ireland - the venue, Lough Erne Resort, simply isn’t there! It’s there on Bing Maps, but on Google Maps, some industrious little scribe has rubbed it out, leaving what appears to be a muddy field. It’s difficult to know exactly what this was meant to achieve. I doubt if even the North Koreans use Google Maps for targeting information...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/google_erases_g8_venue_from_earth_microsoft_doesnt/

Earlier this month I was reading a story about how, over here in the UK, a local council was fined £150,000 (about US$230,000) by the Information Commissioner’s Office after losing two unencrypted laptops with more than 6,000 bank account details on it. This sort of story crops up reasonably often these days, and at first sight it appears that another blow is being struck in the ongoing struggle to force public bodies to look after the data they hold on their citizens.

But is it?

I’d argue not. Even leaving aside the fact that £150k is loose change to a public body the size of a local council, all it actually represents is moving money from one public body to another. In fact for the people whose bank account details were on the laptops it represents a double whammy - not only were their bank accounts compromised, but there is now even less money to provide the services that they as Council Tax payers paid for!

So what’s the solution then? I would suggest that the return of individual responsibility would be useful. An effective way of handling the issue would be the dismissal of the officers who lost the laptops and the chief executive, whose responsibility it ultimately is. The elected representative responsible for that department should also be called on to resign. The dismissal of a few chief executives as a result of such carelessness would go a long way towards ensuring that securing private information is taken seriously in future!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/07/glasgow_city_council_fined_ico/

Further to my story in the last issue about Microsoft’s Xbox One, I thought you might like to know that Microsoft is now in retreat on all fronts. Microsoft now says that you won’t have to be connected to the internet all the time, and you will be able to share and sell games second hand. I think you can thank Sony for this little U-Turn! Of course, it’s entirely possible that Microsoft’s definition of ‘not connected to the internet’, and such like, may be somewhat different from that of the rest of the world, but that’s something for the future...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/19/microsoft_uturn_drm_used_gaming_controls/

There are all to many ‘Cease and Desist’ orders being sent out by lawyers these days. Most people are intimidated by such official looking lawyers’ letters, but you don’t have to be. Jake Freivald from New Jersey has set out a brilliant way to deal with such annoyances when he received such a missive demanding that he shut down his website, westorange.info. Just take a look at the wonderful reply from his pro bono lawyer, Stephen B Kaplitt, and you will see what I mean.
http://gawker.com/this-is-how-you-respond-to-an-unjust-cease-and-desist-l-514155395

I see that Apple are threatening to launch yet another patent lawsuit against Samsung, who will, presumably respond with another counter suit. When are these children going to grow up and start behaving like adults?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/27/apple_threatens_another_samsung_lawsuit/

At its ‘Build’ conference in San Fransisco this week Microsoft showed a ‘Milestone Preview’ of Windows 8.1. Reading the reviews I was irresistibly reminded of a line in The Who song, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ - “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...” Yeah, it’s an improvement, but only if you happen to -like- Windows Metro (or whatever they call it these days). Too much corporate ego is bound up in Microsoft’s failed attempt to unify the tablet and desktop worlds, for them to let go yet.

Oh how the mighty are fallen.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/microsoft-windows/windows-81-blue-preview-it-beats-windows-8-221688

Homework:

Here’s a collection of pictures of tunnels being dug for New York City’s new subway. They’re pretty stunning. The main problem is that there is a lack of people in the pictures to give a sense of scale, but even so they are obviously massive.
http://jalopnik.com/these-photos-of-nycs-subway-project-are-astonishing-513446087

The Register has an interesting piece on the old vacuum tube based computers, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the British computing pioneer Sir Maurice Wilkes. Vacuum tubes replaced the original electromagnetic relay driven computers in the late 1940s, and were themselves replaced by solid state computers in the 1960s. Actually the changes were somewhat more spread out - when I went to college at the end of the 1960s the engineering department was still using a Mars vacuum tube based analog computer. Take a look - it’s a short but interesting piece about a chunk of computing history that’s now fading from memory.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/26/maurice_wilkes_centenery/

For Geeks:

Remember the WarGames movie? You do? Well here’s a little something to spend the last of your dot com boom money on. It’s the original kit that was used in the movie to hack NORAD’s machines. It’s all there (bar the dual floppy drive), right down to the acoustic coupler modem. It’s up for auction, and the estimated value is about US$25,000. Just don’t expect to be able to hack today’s NORAD computers with the 8080 based machine...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/27/wargames_imsai_machine_for_sale_again/

The UK aristocracy hasn’t really had a lot to do since they gave up butchering serfs a few hundred years ago. Since then they’ve diversified, although they still control most of the higher echelons of the Brit armed forces (what’s left of it). Now one of them, our former science minster, Lord Paul Drayson has shown that one of their more endearing traits, eccentricity, survives, by setting a new land speed record for electric cars of 204.185mph. That’s pretty impressive, and the Drayson Racing Lola B12 69/EV Le Mans Prototype car even looks like a cool racing car. I wouldn’t mind one - I’ll let you all know when it gets near to my birthday.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/27/lord_drayson_sets_electric_vehicle_speed_record/

Fed up of stuffing bits of plastic into your ears, or wearing unwieldy headphones that slip off as you groove to your mp3s on the subway? Take a look at the latest Cynaps bone conduction hat. To the unenlightened eye it look pretty much like a baseball cap, but it’s far from that simple.

How does bone conduction audio work? Well, the hat’s tiny transducers transmit vibrations into your skull, those vibrations make their way into your inner ear, and you interpret it as sound, in much the same way as the eardrum transmits vibrations that pass through the air. The main problem is that the sound isn’t brilliant. It’s interesting, and may have uses in situations where you want to be able to hear other things with your ears at the same time. But for the time being I suspect its use may be somewhat limited.
http://www.gizmag.com/review-cynaps-bone-conduction-hat/28068/

Scanner: Other stories

Barnes & Noble sheds Nook tablet albatross, will focus on ebooks
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/25/nook_tablets_discontinued/

EU Court rules that you have no ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ by Google
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/eu-court-google_n_3495450.html

US trade commission kicks off patent-troll-nixing plan
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/26/itc_patent_troll_pilot_scheme/

Boffins create tabletop anti-matter gun
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/26/boffins_create_tabletop_antimatter_gun/

Cleaner air linked to more hurricanes
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/10137953/Cleaner-air-linked-to-more-hurricanes.html

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi and Asti for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.

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 Thunderbird spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
30 June 30013

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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