WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Another Sunday, another Winding Down. This issue has material on Obama and encryption, digitally savvy pirates, Amazon and encryption, plastic eating bacteria, digitizing Fin de Siecle posters, International Women’s Day, Microsoft v. Oracle, Microsoft tries to slide Win 10 advertising into ‘security’ updates, London’s Hatton Garden, and pictures of London with no people or cars. The Scanner section has URLs pointing to stories about US banks and passwords, a possible breast cancer breakthrough, Easter Island, this year’s Turing Award, bugs in the F-35’s radar software, and finally the Pentagon’s $660 million FOIA fee.
Hope you like it...
Shorts:
Sometimes I despair when I hear politicians completely failing to understand anything that has to do with maths and science. Take the latest encryption shebang going on it the US. Earlier this week President Obama made some comments in passing, suggesting that people shouldn’t be taking an ‘absolutist’ view, and that people should be able to make a trade-off between security and privacy.
I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that politicians don’t grok the concept of binary. After all, the essence of their job is to broker compromises. And to broker compromises you need a continuum so that you can get an agreement somewhere in the middle, leaving everyone equally disgruntled. The problem is that encryption is binary. Either an encrypted message is secure, or it’s not. You can’t have a message that’s nearly encrypted, a tiny bit not encrypted, just a smidgen of non-encryption, or encrypted in such a way that other people can read it under certain circumstances.
The real irony, of course is that the government’s security services would never allow government departments to use the sort of ‘encryption’ they would like us to use! I note that no one has yet asked the president if he will be using encryption with a back door...
Of course, this isn’t the first time the US government has tried to go down this road. President Bill Clinton tried it with the ‘Clipper’ chip. A few companies tried it selling computers with the chip in it. In fact HP tried to sell me a workstation with a Clipper chip. Being in the UK, I asked them why they thought I would buy a computer which a foreign government could access when it wanted to. They had no answer. Let’s face it, if the US government goes ahead with mandating holding a copy of some sort of key for all US encryption products, then it would be professional suicide for anyone in the IT business to recommend using US computing products. The same goes, of course, for any other country that follows the same route – like, for instance, my own country, the UK!
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/03/11/president-obama-addresses-encryption-and-privacy/
This has got to be a first. Digitally savvy pirates broke into the records of a shipping company, via an insecure web site, and used the information gained to identify and hijack the ships with the most valuable cargoes. They were also able to identify which container held the valuable goods, so they didn’t need to physically go through all the carried containers to find the good stuff...
It doesn’t take much in the way of sloppy work to compromise a web site, and the results can be devastating. Not only that but insurance companies are starting to wise up. Maybe it will be the insurance companies that will finally be the ones that manage to force websites to use professional programmers, and who force programmers in general to become in some way certified.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/04/ireali_pirates_hack_shipping_company_in_targeted_cargo_raids/
Two items about Amazon caught my eye earlier this month. The first one, on the 3rd, announced that Amazon had quietly disabled the option to use encryption to protect data on its Android devices. Three days later reports came in that it had changed its mind, and would be restoring the ability to encrypt. That’s a pretty fast turnaround, to put it mildly, and, ironically, it will make people much more inclined to use the encryption feature once it’s available again!
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/amazon-removes-device-encryption-fire-os-kindle-phones-and-tablets
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/06/amazon_fire_os_encryption_u_turn/
Homework:
I do wish people would stop to think before they start enthusing about new discoveries. The current one is a bacterium that ‘eats’ PET plastics. As Gizmag gushes, “The hungry little bacterium that could hold the key to the world’s plastic waste problem.” OK. So, someone explain to me how it’s going to distinguish between PET waste and the PET containers on shop shelves holding goods for sale. If it comes to that, what about stuff in my kitchen storage? Or the insulation on electric cables? Actually, I don’t think electrical insulation is actually a PET plastic, but what’s to stop it mutating to munch other sorts of plastics as well?
http://www.gizmag.com/pet-enzyme-plastic-waste/42262/
http://gizmodo.com/scientists-have-discovered-a-bacteria-thats-evolved-to-1764242517
On a more cheerful note, do you, like me love those Fin de Siècle (Paris, end of the 19th Century) posters by the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec? Then have I got a treat for you – 1,800 of them have been digitised by the Van Gough Museum, and placed in its online French prints collection. What’s more the collection makes it easy to download them for your own collection. Go for it!
http://www.openculture.com/2016/03/download-1800-fin-de-siecle-french-posters-prints-in-high-resolution.html
http://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/prints/home
This last week included 2016’s International Women’s Day, and most tech, web based, publications included some material. So, here’s one of the pieces I considered to be among the best. It’s from cnet.com.
http://www.cnet.com/news/from-ada-to-brill-why-have-we-always-dissed-women-in-tech/
Geek Stuff:
Looks like Microsoft are taking aim at Oracle in the database market. It’s not just that they’re porting their SQL Server to Linux, they’re also offering a free lifetime of the product license if you migrate your database from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server 2016. This has got to be attractive, given the chiselling, weaselling methods of squeezing blood out of their customers that Oracle are famous for.
I’ll wait to see how many ‘extras’ you need to run Microsoft’s SQL Server, I’m sure there will be some, but since the 2016 edition isn’t actually yet available there aren’t any squeals on the net yet...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/10/sql_server_2016_linux_screenshot/
In the meantime, I’d just note that Microsoft are now trying to slide Windows 10 upgrades into Win7/8.1 cumulative security upgrades. The last batch of patches included a patch (KB3146449) to restart the nagging to upgrade to the (in my opinion) only partially completed and totally unwanted Windows 10. This is crazy. In fact it ought to be considered fraudulent for any software house, not just Microsoft, to put anything other than security fixes into a security patch.
This is probably the most dangerous thing Microsoft have ever done, and, if this carries on, people will simply stop applying Microsoft security patches!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/11/microsoft_adds_nonsecurity_updates_to_security_patches/
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/3139929
London:
Here’s a little something different, if you fancy a quiet stroll in London. Last year, the biggest burglary in English legal history took place in London’s Hatton Garden. The gang responsible broke into an underground vault and stole something in the region of £14 million (about US$20 million) in jewels and other valuables. Hatton Garden has been, since Victorian times, the centre of the UK’s jewellery trade, and has always had a cash economy. This, if you knew the right people, made for an easy way to dispose of ill-gotten gains.
It’s a small area and an easy stroll if you’re in London and have an hour or so to spare. Even if you aren’t in London, or don’t have spare time, take a look at the article; it gives some fascinating insight into the area, the people, and the history.
https://theconversation.com/the-garden-of-british-crime-how-londons-jewellery-district-became-a-nursery-for-villains-55660
In the meantime, perhaps you’d merely like to take a look online at the streets of London without cars or people in them! Photographer Genaro Bardy got the photographs not by sleight of Photoshop, but by wandering around this fair city in the early hours of Christmas morning.
Fantastic, absolutely stunning!
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/incredible-photos-capture-londons-empty-streets-without-a-car-or-pedestrian-in-sight-a3188171.html
Scanner:
Third of US banks OK with passwords that even social networks reject.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/03/us_bank_passwords/
Breast cancer study finds ‘astonishing’ drug combination that gives results
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/10/breast-cancer-study-finds-drug-combination-that-gives-astonishing-results
Easter Islanders didn’t commit ‘ecocide’ after all, says archaeologist
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/19/easter_island_ecocide_myth_debunked/
Diffie and Hellman receive Turing Award
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/99/9495.html
Flying blind: F-35’s radar software fails in the air
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/08/flying_blind_f35s_radar_software_fails_in_the_air/
The Pentagon’s $660 million FOIA fee
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2016/feb/26/biggest-foia-fee-all-time/
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
13 March 2016
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.
