WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week we have a rant from me about Chrome’s new bookmarking system, location info in smart phone pictures, mobile phones and 3D, surgical robots hacked, using the same password since 1990, and a bug in Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. There’s also a little test of your search skills, a video of a discussion on the Ebola outbreak, the cost of a computer in 1976, and a little something on bridges in London. If that’s not enough, there are URLs on evolving software, Google and the EU, law enforcement’s hassles with congress over encryption, Audi creating diesel from air and water, and the news that at the current rate of expansion the UK chunk of the internet will grab all (yes, all) of the UK’s power supply by 2035.
Rant:
What is it about the likes of organizations such as Google that they feel compelled to tamper with basic, simple functions to make them more difficult to use efficiently? The latest thing they are messing with is the Chrome browser bookmarks system. It used to be dead simple to use. Every time I found something that might be useful for Winding Down I would bookmark it. Two clicks on a text menu – done. Every time I used a link in an issue, another two clicks would put it away in an ‘Old’ folder, in case there was a problem.
Now the whole process has been ‘prettified’ so that instead of a simple process I end up searching through a stack of pictures and trendy menus featuring ‘>‘ symbols that I have to click. One of the reasons I, like many other people came to Chrome was because unlike the then Firefox I had been using, Chrome was lean, mean and clean. At this rate it won’t be long before I have to start looking for a replacement browser.
And don’t get me started on the recent demise of Google Talk, a small discrete text chat program that took up only a tiny fraction of my desktop. That now been ‘replaced’ by Google Hangouts, a pretty good videoconferencing facility, but complete overkill for what I want. Google seem to have completely lost touch with the KISS principle – Keep It Simple, Stupid. What is needed is a set of simple applications that can do one thing each, but can be linked together to make more complex application, not lumbering great monsters that try to do everything. Grrrr!
Shorts:
You probably don’t realize it, but every time you upload a photograph to the internet, you also upload the details of where it was shot and when. I bet most of you didn’t know that! You don’t have to spread this sort of information around if you don’t want to, though. You can strip the information from the pictures first using a desktop computer. Both Windows and the Mac have facilities for doing so, and so I suspect does desktop Linux, with a suitable app. Take a look at the URL – it has all the information you need for stripping info using Windows and the Mac.
http://www.howtogeek.com/211427/how-to-see-exactly-where-a-photo-was-taken-and-keep-your-location-private/
So where do you think mobile phones are going next? They’ve already got big screens and cameras. I was hoping they might move to allowing both sides of the conversation to talk at once, rather than behaving like souped up walkie-talkies. I mean people do still use them for talking to one another, and landlines cracked this problem over a hundred years ago...
Alas, it looks like we will have to wait for that. However, I did spot an interesting little chip that may well be the next big thing for smart phones. It’s a chip that will allow you to get accurate 3D scans via the phone, and the resulting images could be used with a 3D printer. The catchily named ‘nanophotonic coherent imager’ developed by scientists at Caltec is currently still on the primitive side, but you can expect it to be improved fairly rapidly.
One day, there will be so many other hardware devices in a smart phone, that there won’t be room for the bit that lets you talk to other people – and then where would we be!
http://www.gizmag.com/nci-chip-3d-scanning-camera/36878/
Gulp! This doesn’t sound too good. Researchers have discovered ways of hacking medical robots during surgery. It reminds me of a Judge Dread comic episode I read years ago where a surgical robot got damaged and went berserk. It rapidly dissected a live perp before the judge was able to deal with it...
http://gizmodo.com/medical-robots-can-be-hacked-during-surgery-researcher-1700143736/+cherylvis
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/28/packet_of_death_how_to_crash_a_surgical_robot/
And talking of hacking, I see that one of the largest makers of cash registers and other Point of Sale (PoS) equipment has been using the same password – 166816, in case you were wondering – since 1990. This little gem was spotted by security researchers who reported it at the RSA 2015 security conference last month. What a classic.
Incidentally, have you noticed that in spite of all the exhortations to individuals to keep their passwords safe, don’t re-use them, etc, etc, most passwords are actually compromised by big firms being hacked?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/23/166816_the_pos_pin_for_win_since_1990/
Those of you with memories of the early days of Windows may recall that you had to reboot it at regular intervals, otherwise it would crash. That was caused by an overflow in one of the timers. The timer was counting time in milliseconds, and when the memory space allocated to it ran out, the time flipped to a large negative number, causing the operating system to crash.
Fortunately, Microsoft have long since fixed this involuntary attempt at time travel. However, I was appalled to discover that Boeing 787 Dreamliner suffers from the same problem! That’s why the US Federal Aviation Authority has ordered that all 787s must have their systems shut down every 248 days. Otherwise, the counter in the Generator Control Unit will go negative and go into failsafe mode, causing the plane to lose all electrical power...
http://i-programmer.info/news/149/8548.html
Homework:
Here is a question for you trivia fiends: where is there a pit of flaming petrochemicals, originally lit by geologists to burn off excess gas for a few day, which is still burning 40 years later? As a test of your search skills, see if you can find it online before trying out this URL:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/giant-hole-ground-has-been-fire-more-40-years-180951247/?no-ist
Those of you with a more than passing interest in the recent outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, may well be interested in this video of a discussion at the UK’s Royal Society. The 90 minute video covers what was learned from the outbreak and what is being done for the future.
https://royalsociety.org/events/2015/03/ebola-panel/
Geek Stuff:
I wrote the very first bit of my multi-player game in Fortran to run on a DEC10 computer in 1984. It was only a small sample, given the fact that it was in Fortran. The real thing had to wait another year and for another computer with a working ‘C’ compiler. I was only using a small time slice of the Dec10, but even that was expensive. So, it was with some interest that I discovered on the internet (where else!) an invoice for a working DEC20 dated for 1976.
A cool US$397,806 (and that’s in 1976 dollars – worth a lot more than they are now). And what did you get for your money? 128K words of memory – probably 36-bit memory, say 600K in modern terms, a 100 Meg disk drive, a line printer, and two video terminals! Oh and a FORTRAN and a COBOL compiler.
I guess thing have moved on a bit since then!
http://dec20.blogspot.co.uk/
London:
I like bridges (providing they are not too high up...). I mourned the demise of the old Hungerford Bridge over the Thames. It was a pedestrian walkway bolted onto a steel girder rail bridge. The trains ran slowly past, only a foot or two away from the pedestrians, on their way into Charing Cross Station . Generations of school children got a thrill from the rumble and close proximity of the iron monsters. It was the sort of scruffy, rather seedy, bridge you could imagine using to exchange spies over in the Cold War era. The walkway was removed about 15 years ago and replaced with a couple of rather nifty new bridges, but they are separate from the rail bridge. No rumble or vibration in the new bridges.
But I digress. I have for you a couple of wonderful modern London bridges that are also classic pieces of art. If you pass through London you must make an effort to see them. They are in the Paddington Canal Basic. One of them is called The Fan Bridge, the other is called the Rolling Bridge. I’m not going to tell you any more, go to the URL and watch the video of them in action!
http://londonist.com/2015/04/video-paddington-basins-incredible-bridges.php
Scanner:
DARPA aims to create software that can evolve over a period of 100 years
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2015/04/darpa-aims-to-create-software-that-can.html
Google faces European charge it abused search dominance
http://www.cnet.com/news/google-faces-european-charge-it-abused-search-dominance/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/14/oetti_fans_the_flames_of_google
_rumours_as_competition_chief_washington/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/16/technology/case-against-google-may-be-undercut-by-rapid-shifts-in-tech.html
Law enforcement finding few allies on encryption
http://www.darkreading.com/cloud/law-enforcement-finding-few-allies-on-encryption/d/d-id/1320115
Internet will eat up all of UK’s power supply by 2035, experts warn
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9729715/internet-will-eat-uks-power-supply-2035-experts-warn/
Audi just created diesel fuel from air and water
http://www.gizmag.com/audi-creates-e-diesel-from-co2/37130/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi 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
10 May 2015
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/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
