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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 30, 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

This week we look at the Amazon working conditions affair, DCMA idiocy from Columbia Pictures, Frank Lloyd Wright’s house ‘Taliesen’, a 1919 coast-to-coast drive with Dwight D Eisenhower, an underwater quadcopter, million dollar cars, brightening up London, and a free talk on volcanoes. In addition there are some URLs pointing to an interesting Australian court decision, Paul Vixie on DNS security, Levono and crapware, an NSA cyber-security tool, Microsoft software defined radio, and the FTC can now sue companies for poor security.

Winding Down – this magnificent piece of journalism – was brought to you by me working through our end of summer public holiday, and it has so exhausted me that I need to take the next two weeks off. Actually, this is the summer break and it would be nice to have a weekend or so off. All the other recent breaks in the production of Winding Down have been due to other work. This break is to have some time off. Winding Down will be back on Sunday 20 September.

Shorts:

And so to Amazon... I don’t doubt that most, if not all, of you, have heard about the attack on Amazon white collar working conditions in the New York Times. The original article is in the URLs for this piece, if you want to check it out. Over the following days a number of rebuttals came out from Amazon itself, and various individual who work for it.

I confess, I thought the article was a bit weird. When I first heard about it, I assumed the piece was about the blue collar warehouse workers. Frankly I have absolutely no doubt that working in Amazon warehouses is grim. Working in any warehouse is grim. I know, I’ve done it in my chequered past after I packed in my original degree course (physics, in case you are wondering). The three months I worked in a warehouse were the worst I’ve ever had, I was exhausted all the time and half crippled by the time I got home each night. All warehouse work is bad, and the experience was enough to give me the drive and desire not to have to do that for the rest of my life, and to work my way back to university and get a degree.

But the white collar jobs? That’s really weird. Top programmers and researchers can get jobs anywhere (that’s why governments discriminate against them). Jobs with good conditions, and good pay. And I know that Amazon has really good people. Its AWS division is absolutely the tops in public cloud services, and they wouldn’t be in that position if they weren’t recruiting the best, and the best weren’t staying there. And I just know the sort of people we are talking about wouldn’t stay there for any money in the world.

So what’s going on? Personally I’m inclined to put it down to sensational journalism. Obviously it worked, there was a large public sensation, but don’t you think it’s strange that hordes of ex-Amazon white collar workers haven’t come forward to tell us about all the people they saw crying at their desks? I wonder why that is...

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t regard Amazon through rose-tinted spectacles*, I spent three years managing a bookshop, and I hate the way bookshops, especially local independent ones, have become a vanishing breed. But that would have happened anyway with the rise of the internet, Amazon just hastened it.

Anyway, here are a selection of URLs if you want to pursue the matter further!
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=0
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/17/jeff_bezos_amazon_workplace_bullying_response/
http://fortune.com/2015/08/16/amazon-new-york-times-response/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu
http://fortune.com/2015/08/17/amazon-employees-work-culture/
http://www.geekwire.com/2015/full-memo-jeff-bezos-responds-to-cutting-nyt-expose-says-tolerance-for-lack-of-empathy-needs-to-be-zero/
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/08/amazon_abuse_of_
white_collar_workers_i_worked_at_microsoft_and_google_and.1.html

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/08/17/amazon_new_york_times_
article_lots_of_companies_are_probably_just_as_bad.html

And now for something really loony. Apparently agents working for Columbia Pictures are demanding, and getting, the removal from the likes of Vimeo, of any video with the word ‘pixels’ in its title. The excuse is that Columbia has just produced a movie called ‘Pixels’. I suspect it’s about time that people who demand DCMA takedowns of this sort should be forced to post a bond which is forfeit if they demand the take down of an innocent video...
https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-group-hits-indie-creators-for-using-the-word-pixels-150808/

Homework:

My last job involved working with 360 degree HD video, which is starting to become more common. So it was with some interest that I discovered that there is a 360 degree tour (though only stills) of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s house and studio ‘Taliesen’ at Spring Green, Wisconsin. The tour is on the net so anyone can look at it (there’s an SD version as well if your monitor/video card doesn’t support HD). Take a look – it’s what I would call an excellent use of up and coming consumer technology.
http://www.tourdeforce360.com/taliesin/

I would guess that most people know that Dwight D. Eisenhower was responsible for the federal highway system, but far fewer know that the origin of his interest was a trip he took across the county in 1919. At that time the military ran a convoy of 80 trucks, cars, and motorcycles from Washington DC to San Francisco. It took 62 days to complete! Take a look at the article at the URL – there are some great black and white pictures taken at the time, as well as description of the problems involved.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-1919-dwight-d-eisenhower-suffered-through-historys-worst-cross-country-road-trip

Geek Stuff:

How would you like to take a trip underwater in a quadcopter? You would? Then I’ve got just the thing for you – DeepFlight Dragon, an underwater quadcopter that, so it says, anyone can drive. Take a look – definitely something to consider, once it goes into production!
http://www.gizmag.com/deepflight-dragon-test-drive-personal-submarine-submersible-graham-hawkes/39054/

If that doesn’t appeal to you, how about looking over some very classy cars? Here’s a URL to a piece on the cars that fetched in excess of a million dollars at the recent Monterey Car Week Auctions. Just the sort of thing to spend the last of your dot-com boom cash on...
http://www.gizmag.com/monterey-car-week-auctions-initial-analysis/38974/

London:

If you are in London at the moment, you will probably have noticed that it’s raining. This is a normal state of affairs, especially on public holidays. That being the case, I thought I’d point you at a couple of things that might cheer you up...

It seems that there is an organisation called ‘Spark Your City’, which is dedicated to brightening up the rain soaked environment, and their first two efforts are now on show. The first is to paint the pavement (sidewalk to my US readers) of London Bridge in rainbow colours, and it really does look brilliant!

The second is a little more ambitious. They’ve turned one of the pedestrian tunnels between Waterloo Station and the Hungerford footbridge across the Thames into a giant kaleidoscope! And it works brilliantly from the look of the pictures. I know where that is, I use it sometimes when I go into central London, so, once there is a short break in the rain I plan to go and see both of them.
http://www.cityam.com/218521/commuters-mornings-brightened-after-london-bridge-was-transformed-glorious-rainbow-road
http://www.cityam.com/223184/tunnel-between-waterloo-and-southbank-has-been-turned-giant-kaleidoscope-sparkyourcity

One other thing, if you are in London towards the end of next month. The Royal Society have a talk by Professor Stephen Sparks about his career studying volcanoes. Prof Sparks has been involved in disaster response in Montserrat, aviation emergencies over Iceland, radioactive waste in Japan and mining for copper in the remnants of ancient volcanoes, among other things. The lectures are free on a first come first served basis. Details at the URL. Incidentally, if you can’t make it to the talk, the Society usually puts videos of talks on its website afterwards...
https://royalsociety.org/events/2015/09/volcanoes-and-us/

Scanner:

Australian court slaps down Hollywood’s speculative invoices
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/14/australian_court_slaps_down_hollywoods_speculative_invoices/

Paul Vixie on DNS security & botnet takedowns
http://www.darkreading.com/perimeter/paul-vixie-on-dns-security-and-botnet-takedowns/v/d-id/1321869

CAUGHT: Lenovo crams unremovable crapware into Windows laptops – by hiding it in the BIOS
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty/

NSA’s new open source project is a cyber security tool
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2947762/government/nsas-new-open-source-project-is-a-cybersecurity-tool.html

Microsoft open-sources Sora software-defined radio
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/22/microsoft_softwaredefined_radio_goes_open_source/

FTC can sue companies with poor information security, appeals court says
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/08/ftc-can-sue-companies-with-poor-information-security-appeals-court-says/


* I once went on a course where the instructor actually did wear (physical) rose-tinted spectacles. However, it was in Birmingham, England, so it was probably a survival requirement...

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
30 August 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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