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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 5, 2015

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton

Welcome back to a regular edition of Winding Down. This week we have for you an interesting take on self-driving cars, Samsung turning off Windows Update, a Google self-drive near miss, James Bond car controls, transporting the Statue of Liberty, a panorama of the US Pacific North West, a video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a binary typewriter, building your own fusion reactor, the origin of a pint of beer, London art work, and satire from the age of Napoleon. For those with a thirst for more, there are URLs pointing to a near meltdown by Reddit, digital citizenship in Estonia, a Volkswagen robot accident, a new kind of planetary state, US botnet servers, and an Apple Zero Day bug.

So, after the break, this week we return to our regular format...

Shorts:

A couple of months ago I wrote a piece on robot cars. Reading through the letters column of 'Engineering & Technology' magazine recently I realized that, in spite of being a sociologist living in a jaywalking society, I had entirely missed one of the key implications of a society given over to robot controlled cars. That was because I was looking at the implication for those who drive, not for those who interact with them.

Think about it. What is the most important category of accident that the robot driven cars are going to have to avoid? Collisions with pedestrians (especially in European cities, which were never designed for cars). This implies that an overriding requirement will be that cars need to avoid pedestrians, usually by stopping.

Of course it's already the case that cars are supposed to stop for pedestrians in their way ('I ran him over because he was in my lane, your honour'), but only the foolhardy would trust the reflexes of a human driver enough to step out at an arbitrary time.

But robot cars. Now -they- are different, their reflexes are such that they can, and must, stop for a pedestrian in the road (presumably no one is going to design drunk robots, or bloody minded ones). After a while pedestrians are going to start realizing that robot driven cars have to stop for humans in their path, and this will change the behaviour of pedestrians, who will just walk across that road whenever they like.

I predict that the resulting traffic jams in cities will be prodigious as the centres of towns and cities are effectively pedestrianized. And as for bicycles... Don't get me started!
[Engineering and Technology magazine, paper edition, July 2015]

And while we are on the subject of self-driving cars, I note that there was a near miss for a Google car when it switched lanes and cut up a self-driving Audi. I'm assured that this isn't part of an attempt to make Google's self-driving cars more human seeming!

Meanwhile, Rover are doing a James Bond style smart phone app that lets you control your car. Handy for parking, but what's to stop someone else with a hacked version of the app taking control of your car?
http://news.sky.com/story/1508773/near-miss-for-googles-self-driving-car
http://www.gizmag.com/remote-control-range-rover-smartphone/38031/

The crap that Samsung installs on its smart phones is annoying and is difficult to remove. I hear people complaining about it all the time. Now, though, they have truly stepped over the mark with their PCs. Included in the crapware installed on their machines is an app which runs on startup and disables Microsoft's Windows update. This insane action means that users will not be notified of new updates – including security updates – or have them installed automatically.

The news broke at the end of last month, and as a result of the ensuing outcry Samsung have said they will release a patch that fixes the problem. But why would anyone trust Samsung ever again?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/24/samsung_caught_disabling_windows_
update_to_run_its_own_bloatware/

http://www.techienews.co.uk/9735097/microsoft-employee-samsung-disabling-windows-security-update-feature/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/26/samsung_sorry_over_windows_update_
blocking_code_issuing_patch_shortly/

Homework:

I think everyone has probably seen the iconic pictures of the Statue of Liberty in New York, but have you ever stopped to think about how it got there? The Lady is 151 ft tall (305 ft, if you include her base) and weighs in at around 225 tons. In fact the engineering (a hi-tech science in the 19th century) involved was such that the sculptor and designer of the statue, Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, had to call in the engineer Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel to design the supports for the statue.

The statue was first built in France and paid for by public subscription in that country, disassembled into 350 pieces, packed into 214 crates and shipped over to the US. It came with a manual on how to re-assemble it – shades of IKEA wardrobe assembly – and the cost of the re-assembly was met by a public subscription in the US. I guess you could think of the funding as a very early 19th Century version of Kickstarter!

We all tend to take it for granted now, but at the time it must have been an amazing achievement, and the URLs show some pictures of it in its disassembled format. I especially liked the one of the arm on show in Madison Square Park!

Incidentally, Bartholdi built two scale models of the statue, and they are both still in Paris, should you ever visit. There's a 15 ft high one in the Luxembourg Gardens, and a larger one – 35 ft high – on the Alee des Cygnes in the river Seine, near the Grenelle Bridge. And, yes, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel was later to become famous as the designer and builder of the Eiffel Tower in Paris!
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/LM/LM002-STATUEOFLIBERTY.htm
http://gothamist.com/2015/07/03/a_look_back_at_the_statue_of_libert.php#photo-1

Live in the US Pacific Northwest? Then you might like to take a look at this excellent panorama of the area taken from the International Space Station.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=86041&src=eoa-iotd

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has produced some impressive pictures, but a video released recently of an expanding solar flare is one of the most stunning. One day the Earth is going to be in the direct line of fire of a big one of these mass ejections, and then we will really see just how stable the belt of satellites circling this planet is. Life without GPS perhaps?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/exploding-solar-flare-is-captured-by-nasa--video-10357383.html

Geek Stuff:

Now here is the ultimate gadget for a geek. OK, I admit it's manual, but an electronic version would probably be overkill. Hands up who wants a binary typewriter? Just take a look at this little baby – it's right up there on my wish list! Someone has to produce this – they would make a killing if they did.
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2015/06/08/pantograph-imagines-gadgets-from-a-parallel-world/

Fancy building your own fusion reactor? It is possible, you know, but it's really hard work, and you need to have a firm grasp of nuclear theory and precision engineering. Take a look at this story of a teenager who did just that!
http://www.popsci.com/lucky-donkey-theory

London:

Standards are a very important technical issue, so next time you are in London, drop into a pub for a pint of ale and raise your glass to one of the very first standards. 800 years ago, King John signed the Magna Carta. And what does article 35 of that document say?

“Let there be throughout our kingdom a single measure for wine and a single measure for ale and a single measure for corn, namely 'the London quarter'.”

So now you know!
http://www.cityam.com/217922/magna-carta-2015-raise-glass-creation-pint-beer-day-britain

London has some pretty unusual art work scattered around – a fountain made from coloured hoses, mechanical sculptures, murals, an artificial hill... Take a look at the URL if you plan to visit in the near future...
http://londonist.com/2015/07/londons-most-curious-public-art.php

On the other hand if historical satire is more you scene, take a look the British Museum's exhibition of prints and propaganda in the Age of Napoleon. It's free, and I plan to go and see it later this coming week.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/bonaparte_and_the_british.aspx

Scanner:

Reddit meltdown: Top chat boards hidden as rebellion breaks out
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/03/reddit_in_turmoil/

Estonia: Digital citizenship
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/06/estonia_digital_
citizenship_i_am_an_e_resident_of_a_country_i_ve_never_been.html

Worker killed in Volkswagen robot accident
http://www.ft.com/fastft/353721/worker-killed-volkswagen-robot-accident

We are forcing Earth in a new kind of planetary state, experts say
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9735672/we-are-forcing-earth-in-a-new-kind-of-planetary-state-experts-say/

US hosts the most botnet servers
http://www.darkreading.com/endpoint/us-hosts-the-most-botnet-servers/d/d-id/1320970

Apple CORED: Boffins reveal password-killer 0-days for iOS and OS X
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/17/apple_hosed_boffins_drop_0day_mac_
ios_research_blitzkrieg/

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
5 July 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.

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